Aardwolf Wealth Sinks

I was talking to a couple people sitting at superhero level in Aardwolf yesterday while they power leveled me up to 200. They talked a bit about some of the new things that have come into the game. In particular there are apparently three new ways to get even more powerful by sinking tons and tons of in game currency. Apparently they start off being a pretty bad return on investment as far as power goes and then get even worse since they suffer from two different kinds of diminishing returns. You have to pay increasingly more per point of improvement and each point gets worse as you get more of them.

I came back to what I thought was a lot of currency (65k quest points, 60 trivia points, 4M gold) so I thought I should look deeper into what these new sources of power are. It turns out I'm really not very rich at all...

The first, and most boring, of the three is potential. Potential costs just quest points to buy. It starts at 100 and increases by 25 more each point you get. What it does is increases your maximum stat cap by one per point of potential. It doesn't raise the individual cap for each stat at max level. Instead it just lets you max out more stats. This is certainly good, but it isn't terribly exciting. It also is of pretty much no use to me right now. Maybe I'll sit and max out at superhero again in the future and maybe it will be worth buying at that point in time but when you're leveling it doesn't seem like it has much impact on anything.

Next up is mastery which is a percentage increase to damage done. Mastery works for an individual damage type and there are therefore 20 different mastery levels you can buy. The first point costs 100 quest points and 2M gold and the cost goes up by 20 qp and 250k gold per point. Apparently to do 5% more damage you need to pay a total of 4420qp and 68M gold. To do 10% more damage will cost 17860qp and 251.75M gold. I don't have the cash to do that in a single damage type let alone all of them! It feels like figuring out what damage type you do most often and sinking a couple points into it would make a fair amount of sense. For a warrior that's probably bash damage since that's the damage type of hammering blow? I also have a lot of fire typed weapons... And only 21M gold. So it may be a good idea to sit at max level and grind cash for a while to at least buy a couple points in fire and bash?

Finally there's instinct which uses a type of currency I wasn't expecting: trains. Trains are typically used to increase your stats as you level. Instead of doing that you can spend 200 of them and 2M gold (increasing by 25 trains and 100k gold per point) to buy a point of instinct in a skill. Instinct lets you increase an individual skill up above the default 100% maximum. When a skill is over 100% it gets better. It isn't clear how much better. (I have 1% in enhanced damage and have no idea what that does for me... Maybe it procs more often? Maybe I hit harder when it does proc?) On the one hand trains spent on stats while leveling up are thrown away when you remort back to level 1. On the other hand the faster I hit level 200 the faster I can start back at level 1. Saving up for instinct is a definitely short term pain for long term gain kind of thing. You can save trains up in chunks smaller than 200 so it's possible to just bank 40 or so from the last few levels and eventually make gains. I didn't know this at the time so I didn't raise any stats for my last 40ish levels in order to get my 200 for a point in enhanced damage. Knowing how it works now I probably would have waited another 20 levels or so before starting to bank them. You do earn trains while at max level so presumably that's the real way to buy instinct anyway.

So one of the three new wealth sinks only really does anything at max level and the other two are really only earned at max level but help the whole time. It feels like I should probably sit at 7x max level when I get there and power some of these things up...