The Best Sets article has been a long standing favorite among my visitors. While it was rather straightforward to come up with the lists when we had full sets of gear, the introduction of all the new unique Legendary gear I items made it more and more difficult, as the possible combinations of gear and their buffs and debuffs grew more and more as well…
One of the most popular articles on this site is the Best Sets article, describing which sets of gear are most useful for attacking, defending, and for campaign/CHS. At the moment, this article is still very useful, but pretty soon, it will be completely rendered useless. Why? The new Gems. In this article I will explain why this is the case and how gear will be chosen in the near future…and why this makes me think the new Gems stink….
Gem Embedding enables players to make their gear perform even better in war, enhancing attack, defense, and/or march sizes. But the higher level runes are difficult to acquire, as it takes to 1 year and 8 months to just farm one level 6 Gem from scratch with the picks regenerating for free. Although we are helped by Gem Shards and Gems in chests and tournaments, it’s still inefficient to just start combining them to level 6 Gems, so choices have to be made.
In this article, I will look at what the Gems do in each gear piece type, what gear should be Embedded first, and how to most efficiently upgrade Gems along the way.
Or, you CAN have too much of a good thing….Remember this old post about how each consecutive bonus to a certain process becomes less effective than the previous one? I’ll illustrate shortly with an example. Say you attack some goblins, and your attack value is 100, and you kill 100 goblins.
Now you have 2 items. One increases you attack by 100%, or 100 points, and one reduces the goblins life by 50%, or half their life. Which item do you use? Well, in the first round, it doesn’t matter. Applying the attack item doubles your attack, so you kill twice the amount (200) of Goblins, while the life reduce item also results in double the amount of kills.
We apply the attack item, so attack is now 200 and Goblin life still 1. Again the question, what item do you apply now? Now we see a difference. If we apply the attack item again, our attack becomes 300 and we kill 300 Goblins, not 100%, but 50% more then before. But if we apply the life item now, Goblin life is halved and we kill 400 Goblins, a 100% increase.
And that is diminishing returns for ya: each consecutive added bonus becomes less effective -in this case the attack bonus- , such that other bonuses become more and more effective when used…Now, up until now, this was never an issue with gear because the gear bonuses were not THAT high to make it really noticeable. However with the Replenishing and Necromantic sets, we get introduced to this effect very distinctly, because the bonuses they offer are so incredibly (in my view ridiculously) high.
And that is the reason why a full Replenishing set is LESS EFFECTIVE at defense compared to a mix with Void gear. Individually, the Replenish set is much better. Equip a Hero with Void sword and Replenish Sword alone, and you will see the Replenish sword do better at defending. Test a FULL Replenish set against a FULL Void set, and Replenish wins again. But, because the +life bonus of Replenish is so high, it’s diminishing returns is likewise really high, even so that it makes adding in Void gear work better with its -foe attack bonus. It is exactly like the Goblin example above. The more you use of one, the less effective it becomes and the more worthwhile it becomes to use the other…
And this will make finding the perfect gear set-up more difficult and experimental in nature then it used to be. Please take note of this. When newer, even better sets come out in the future, do NOT mindlessly equip the full set, but mix it with gear with different types of offensive and/or defensive buffs to see whether diminishing returns plays a role (and it will), to come to the best mix of items….Cheers!
Kingdoms of Middle Earth made easy 