F2P, math is your friend

so I wanted to know if I could be effective at farming materials and heroic nodes and such and still gain gems as an F2P...turns out it is quite easy.

for starters, the game gives out a whopping 6700(depending on number of days) gems per month, just for playing and doing dailies. 90 per day and a total of 4000 from the log in rewards.

what is generally considered to be best practices for most players to utilize gems on varies, but boils down to a few major keys: farming heroic nodes, farming materials for gear during dailies, and farming power rings from dailies. these are generally accepted statements from what I can tell. math time: so if you use gems to reset heroic nodes twice a day, ex. flash who has 1 node, reset twice will now be a 3 node hero essentially. this will cost you only 50 gems a day to do this, per node it is done to, 25 each for first two. the same basic concept is used for the daily timed events, at 50 per reset for the first 2100 gems for three additional plays, resetting the rings event stage 1 twice or the last stage of the materials events, equates to 100 gems per day. with the 1.9 update the essential abilities events now cost 500 gems to reset, but you also have 5 runs to use in these events. the current event drop rates seem very low and I no longer recommend reseting these events.

all that being said, on average you would spend around 50002900 gems monthly to do these things, the cost increases by 1500ish if you deiced to farm 2 nodes twice extra instead of 1(or 4 resets instead of 2). all said and done if you reset 1 node twice a day, and reset all the timed events for power rings and materials twice a day(including all 43 resets on sat/sun) you have a net gain of about 1700-18003700-3800 gems a month as a F2P.

I know not everyone will enjoy the content of the message, but I felt it should be consolidated somewhere. Thanks.

EDIT: After the 1.9 update, it is not recommended to use the refresh feature of the timed events for abilities materials, aka power rings

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OgreBarberian, math is your friend