Rank 12 Zaishen Title - an Analysis

Rank 12 Zaishen Title - an Analysis

Despite the tsunami of QQing (which seems to accompany every update these days) I think Anet did a terrific job on the new Zaishen title. People have been asking for a non-HA-based emote for a long time (forever?) and they finally delivered. It's accessible to PvE, PvP, and PvX players. What's more, it doesn't restrict what you can do to earn it. PvPers can do any formant to accumulate faction. And PvEers can play any part of the game they enjoy and spend their excess gold on keys. Great Job IMO.

But what about maxing the Zaishen Title Track. 100,000 ZPoints is daunting to say the least. Is Rank 12 actually achievable? The answer is yes, but it won't be easy. Let's analyze the three methods of getting there.

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Balthazar Faction
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How much Balthazar Faction does it take?
A ZKey costs 5,000 BFaction gives you 5 ZRank points. Thus, you need 100 million BFaction (turned into 20,000 ZKeys). This is flat out not attainable.

Faction comes in extremely slowly in RA, TA, HB and AB. It would take decades. HA and GvG gain you faction much more quickly, but 5000 still takes several matches. And it's hard to continually farm matches over and over with the 8-man team requirement - there is serious downtime.

To put it into perspective, I will use myself as an example. In three years I have 5800 hours ingame ... more than half of which dedicated to PvP (11,000+ fame and various ranks in the other PvP tracks). My running BFaction total is 4.5 million (of course the counter didn't start until sometime after BFaction was introduced, but this total represents at least 2 years of PvP). Even the top PvP players are only in the 15-20 million range now. So it is unreasonable to think that starting now a person could attain much more than a few million BFaction before GW2. That would be a tiny fraction of the total necessary ZKeys.

What about existing stocks?
Due to the BFaction cap, no one is sitting on a large stash of BFaction. However, most PvPers have been turning their BFaction into ZKeys since that option became available a few months ago (alas there was nothing else to do with it). Personally, I have made several hundred keys this way, so I would guess that there are true hardcore players that have made 1-2 thousand keys from BFaction alone. If you assume there exists some small fraction of these players that haven't sold or used any of them, they would still only be 5-10% of the way toward ZRank 12.

Conclusion:
Balthazar Faction is unlikely to provide a meaningful percentage of the necessary keys for ZRank12

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Cash
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How much does a key cost?
Currently a key costs about 5 Plat. Some think this price will drop, but i don't think it will drop much. Right now alot of PvPers have stockpiles of ZKeys built up over months, and they are unloading them. Once that supply is gone the ZKey influx will slow considerably (as noted above, BFaction comes in at a pretty slow rate). Really the only large influxes of keys will be from the MAT winners, otherwise it will be hard to find large volumes of keys for sale. On the other hand, I don't really see demand decreasing - there are alot of cool things to get from the chest now, plus the ZRank. So economics dictates that the price will likely stay high. I will estimate long-term an average of 4.5K.

How much gold will it take to buy ZRank12?
At 4.5K per ZKey that is 90 million gold. However, there is some return on your money if you sell everything you get from the chest. Most drops are not worth much (300g or less) but in such high volume you will inevitably get someting really rare. Assuming over the long haul you get a 20% return (and I think that's generous) that puts the cash you need to invest at 75 million.

Does anyone have that kind of money?
I'm not part of the hardcore PvE scene, but I believe there are some hardcore players out there with 75 million+ in assets. Of course it's spread all over the place. Storage maxes out a 1 million, plus 100K per character. So after the first 2 million or so the rest has to be in the form of liquid assets such as stacks of 255 Ecto (~1.2 million each), Armbraces (~150K each), and rare minipets/weapons (up to several million each). Of course you need ALOT of ALL of those to reach 75 Million, but farmers tend to be pretty obsessive, so there are some people with that kind of wealth.

Would anyone spend that kind of money on a title?
Well, first off, I would think that the person would have to have considerably more than 75 million to buy the title (I can't see someone near the 75 million mark spending it ALL on one title). So we are probably talking about only a handful of people (if that). It seems very unlikely that any of them would do it, for two reasons:
1. The logistics would be an absolute nightmare. First off, they would have to go through the process of selling 90 million in assets. Anyone who has stood around in Lions Arch knows how difficult it is to sell one item, much less 90 million worth. It would take months of tedium. Then, they would have to figure out how to buy 20,000 ZKeys. This could be easier (if they could somehow arrange to buy ZKeys in bulk from the MAT GvG winners) but it would still likely take a tremendous amount of time and effort.
2. Anyone with that kind of money has spent thousands and thousands of hours over three years accumulating it. That’s ALOT of work to blow on one single emote ... it doesn't seem worth it.

What about buying gold online?
Uh, no. One million online gold costs about $150 US. You need 75 million gold. Do the math.

What about duped Armbraces?
It's possible that there are people with a few stacks of duped Armbraces that survived the ban-fest. At ~150K per Armbrace that person would have to sell 500 Armbraces to get 75 million gold.
1. Again logistics would bite you. It's not easy to find a buyer for one Armbrace, 500 (one at a time) would be a nightmare. Then we come back to the buying 20,000 keys part.
2. Anyone selling that many Armbraces would likely be noticed by the community and that person again would be exposed to being caught.

Conclusion:
Buying the title (or a large chunk of it) is certainly possible, but IMO it's pretty unrealistic.

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Reward Points
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Accumulating Reward points is far and away the easiest way to advance this title. Unlike Cash or BFaction, which sport a 1000-1 ZRank ratio, RPs offer a 1-1 reward ratio. 5 RP gets you a key which gets you 5 ZPoints. So 100,000 RP are required to max the title. However, this person could sell the proceeds from opening the chest, and get some return (above I estimated 20%). That lowers the number of RP required to approximately 83,000.

For top GvG players, the RP come in fast and there is nothing else to do with them. Once you buy PvP FoW (2K RP) and a set of PvP Tormented weapons (2-3K RP) you are left with nothing but ZKeys. And many GvGers use PvE characters, so they don't even bother with the PvP skins.

What existing stocks of RP are out there?
Top GvGers have made many thousands of RP already (I have made 2K myself and I am far from a top player). Many of them had been converting/selling their keys before the update (doh!), but I do know of a few existing stashes in the 2-8K range. I do not know of anyone with more than 8K stockpiled but it is possible.

How fast will the RP start coming in?
Winners of the GvG MAT will get a whopping 4500 RP. Anet hasn't said, but I am guessing the second/third/etc place teams will get a proportionally high amount too. Plus dedicated players can get 100+ RP per day doing Daily ATs. It's entirely reasonable for a top GvG Guild to bring in 5000-6000+ in a month if they do well in the MAT. Of course, even at 6000 RP per month (plus BFaction) it would require many months of dedication to get there.

What about Hero battles?
The HB Monthly offers 1500 RP to the winner, which is nice but pales in comparison to GvG. In addition only one person gets that 1500 (as opposed to a full team of GvGers) cutting down the pool of possible title candidates. Hero Battle Daily Tournaments make it very easy to farm RP, but the payoff is only so-so. Finishing in the top few spots of a Daily HB can earn you 50+ RP, and it is easy to do two (or even three) tournaments per day. However, you have to be quite good at HB to consistently finish in the top couple of spots ... if you finish out of the top 10 or so you are looking at more like 10-15 RP. Not bad but it's not going to get you to 83,000.

I'm not a top PvPer, can I get RP?
Yes, but not many. Anyone can enter daily tournaments, and there are guaranteed RP payouts to all participants that play the full tourney. But they are small ... 15 or 5 plus a few points for winning a match. To get meaningful amounts you have to win dailies and do well in monthlies. For GvG this requires being in a top guild ... and they only accept the best players (who have all been practicing for 3 years). To be a top HB player you have to practice. ALOT. The format is very unique and the top players all have 2000-5000+ matches under their belt. They know every pixel of every map and all of the nuances of the AI. So unless you are already a very good PvP player, there is a somewhat steep learning curve to start getting good RP.

Conclusion:
RP is the best way of getting bulk ZKeys fast, but you must be a top PvP player to do this.

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So what's the deal, is anyone going to max this thing?

Probably. If something can be done, usually someone will set their mind to doing it. But the pool of potential candidates is very small, and honestly, if you aren't already in that pool, then you pretty much have no chance of getting there before GW2.

The person who does this must be one of two things:

1. An ultra-rich PvEer willing to liquidate a mountain of assets for the 'prestige' (such as it is) of being the only person with this title.

2. A top GvGer in a guild that plans on doing (and winning) Monthly GvG tourneys for the foreseeable future (at least 1-2 years or until GW2 comes out) and spend all RP + BFaction on ZKeys. It would help if this person already has a stockpile of RPs/ZKeys ... and it wouldn't be bad if he had a stockpile of cash too (many top GvGers are fairly rich in PvE too). Also an interesting note ... several top GvGers play HB very well too. Dual farming GvG and HB at a high level would greatly enhance the speed that which you could attain ZKeys.

IMO a top GvGer that is also a rich PvEer (and perhaps and a regular HBer) has the best shot at getting ZRank 12

Of course there is a third option … speculative but possible. Maybe there is a top GvG guild out there full of PvPers who don't care about PvE or money or keys or titles. This hypothetical guild could pool their RP together and (if they did well in the monthlies) achieve this title for one of their members fairly quickly.

Oh well, enough idle speculation. Thanks for reading my guide, I hope you enjoyed it. If I missed anything obvious or made some incorrect assumptions, feel free to correct me.

Now go out there and earn yourself some keys!

Very, very interesting...seriously. I would never have really thought of the big picture like that...

Is there however a rank 12? (Clearly I don't know much about this title at all...) OR is it one of those ranks that you just hit and that's it?

not to mention buying the gold would prolly cause a huuuge shock to the gold market demand, and i won't speculate on how much more than 15k USD it would cost.

Same goes for a player liquidating the armbraces to get zaishen keys. (unless they did it verry slowly over time)

So yea that pretty much leaves option 2

Definitely a nice post about this brand new title track. You have thought of various points, but I see one missing.

I'm pretty damn sure that whoever wins mAT, will exchange their rewards for irl-money. As it seems to me, those so-called top-gvgrs don't give a shit about pve money and will probably sell their gold they get from keys. Most of them don't bother to open the chest anyway because they simply don't care.

Excellent analysis, Im intrigued as to how this new title will change the dynamic of the game, Im certainly never going to max it. (Dont GvG, and from your analysis that means.. PHAIL!)

Im not fussed, but I will enjoy spending a little dough here and there, and spending a little Bfaction there and here and getting a few ranks.

Yeah nice post,
I just wrote a thread for our alliance forums that almost exactly looks like yours just more aimed at people that try to achieve first and mid ranks of the title track.

The Xunlai Tournament Predictions is also a fairly nice and free source of zkeys for those you just want to climb up without heading for the max. Even if you are quite clueless about top GvG / HB. However nothing worth mentioning in the race for rank 12.

Seems like z-keys are new hot thing to dupe.

thanks for this post. Some idiot on gameamp forums says that he has r12 zaishen within the first day and it only took him 3-4 hours lol. First time I saw that I knew it was bullshit cuz all he does is lie(says he's r13, r5 champ etc). This just reinforces it, and it gave me some good info ^^

Good post!

Good point about exchaning the rewards for irl-money .. that will slow the rate of Zkeys into he economy further, making it harder (and more expensive) to buy keys.

And yes, many top GvGers don't care about PvE or money. But many of them do (some of them play PvE quite alot though they don't like to admit it) and IMO it is one of these people that has the best shot at R12. Especially if they can convice some of their GvG-only teammates to donate their MAT rewards.

BTW .. I just saw a R9 Zaishen in GToB ... so maybe I am overestimating the difficulty of this title a little...

Logged in to see the fuss yesterday, and someone (Deity something-or-other) in Balth's Temple had r9 already, at least 1/5 of max. I shook my head and logged out.

someone spotted a r9 yesterday.

Yes. Who would've thought though, that they'd introduce an emote for one of the least skill based titles?


Great job? No, this is the problem. Someone could do alot of high-end PvP, have UAX and actually earn it. Whereas some pve scrub could've duped ambraces and bought the title.

The title is a joke.

which brings me back to my question: soooooo, HA earned Balthazar cannot be counted towards this title. yes?


PS: good post ~ keep forgetting to mention.

On the up side, eBay value of GW accounts is steadily going up.

No, not really. People right now have stockpiles of keys that they've accumulated since they were released. So the time it took to get r9 is the time since keys were added to game. Multiply that by 5 to get the time till max rank.

Saw him, dupe imo, I just can't believe he got that much keys in one day... even if he was aware of the upcoming of the title that's just too much keys to accumulate

Don't forget that if you get a rare everlasting thingy, it pays off for a crap load of keys...

what is a rare everlasting thingy? how do you get that?

Some-one With R9 already must have duped >__> There's just no way.

Nothing in PvE takes a great deal of skill ... and Anet wanted to make a Emote/Title accessible to PvE. Hence an emote that doesn't require alot of skill. Whats the problem with that?

The fact that it is also accessible via PvP is a bonus in my mind. I don't know why everyone has a problem with this.

Totally untrue. Prior to this update there wasn't much to do with Reward Points. So some top GvGers have had many thousands of these thing accumulating. Some of these guys are also very rich PvEers ... so I can see how cashing this in all at once could get you to 25K and R9 quickly.

The hard part now is getting the next 75K starting at nothing.

now you are going to start a fight with that bold text.

Not trying to start a fight ... or diminish PvE ... I know that vanquishing and some of the elite areas can be quite challenging.

But this is totally off-topic ... lets stick with R12 Zaishen :-)

You needed an awful lot of thought to come to the conclusion that it is almost impossible to max this title.

Some new food for thought, it is thought as a chewing bone for people to do something till GW2, even if it is really a bit pointless and rather primitive.

You and I know that .. but alot of casual gamers don't. I thought it would be fun to present the actual numbers (I had fun doing it anyway).

Besides, I think it WILL be maxed, probably by more than one person, and probably faster than we think. People can become pretty darned complulsive about things like this ...

And this is different from any other video game how?

HM would've been the only viable title to link an emote to.

The problem occurs when said rich pve'ers buy something and think they are better than everyone else. Bragging rights should be earnt.

That made me LoL. Show me a title in this game that isn't Grind > Skill. There isn't one. (maybe Champ at one point, but not anymore).

The new title is fun ... because there are lots of ways to work on it. I think its great.

Here the list of people able to make this title:

- Good and constant PvPer.
- Gold buyer (for real money, and with 15.000$?)
- Exploiter (for example the old monk UW farming getting hundreds of ectos per day, and many other farming and bug exploits)

There aren't too much people in that 3 categories.

That was only in April because their were double rewards in April. Now the max is between 30-35 rps an AT.

nice forum though pretty interesting. I have a few ideas of ppl who could get r12 like eke

Well the good news is this isn't another easily bought(maxed) title that gives +1 to KoaBD. Only a few people will ever get max rank(or near it) imo.

The amount of gold/faction this would take is truly astonishing.

I don't remember telling you there is such a title. At one point, all PvP titles required skill. Now, they can be button mashed or bought off Ebay via buying accounts.

Today, no title does really require alot of skill. That is why the title system in GW outright fails. You simply outlined in your own post that GW is now grind > skill. What a lovely game!

Surely there has to be leet PVE'ers out there with 60+mill gold, it's just a matter of time, buying the keys, and opening the chest...

An interesting read but you fail to mention the cash return the keys bring in. Since you need 100m to max the title you'd easily get a 33% return on the keys maybe even a 50% return meaning you only need 50m gold or 50k rep points and with the new items being available for 1 month at a time the return might be higher.

Even considering that RP and Balth are gained hand in hand, this title is still unachievable before gw2.

10 Keys a day will still take 2.7 years to max. Wow.

nice break down, not a title of interest for myself.

Yeay more title grind?

Anyways, did it ever occur to some of you that Anet might have put in the title specifically to make it very difficult or impossible to max out? This looks like it is meant for either a very rich PvEer or an extremely dedicated PvPer. Frankly it's fine they put in a few titles like this.

because anet went to every single pve'er gave them about 100mil and said 'shushh dont tell the pvp'ers?' thought so, making money in pve isnt the simplest thing on the planet. before ursan (no im not going to whine about it) alot of people had ALOT of money anyways and to get that they put alot of time and effort into the game.

and as for the dude that said about a title that isnt grind>skill. The gamer title track, if you leech in any of the matches your team is going to lose, and if your terrible your team is going to lose. last dragon arena i saw alot of r2's and r3's and when i saw them play wondered how the bloody hell they got that title.

Was there really a time when people made hundreds of ecto per day? I never got into farming (once I tried PvP the PvE became pretty uninteresting) so I'm kind of uninformed. If that is true and there are people sitting on inventories full of ecto, then someone will do it. It will be a royal pain turning all that ecto into keys, but its attainable.

If you really had that much would you blow it ALL on one title?


An excellent point though I was under the impression that the return was MUCH lower .... all I've ever gotten is worthless crap .. though I guess one item could change that.

very very very very very first bunch of 55hp monks, the ones that costed about 300k to buy the equip for, they used a prot bond build. then anet smashed it with their favourite hammer and introduced dying nightmares to the uw, and so the next bunch of cheaper 55's came along. but the very first bunch did make thousands of ectos and probably sold them for 10k ea.

GvGers get 4500x8 reward points and the winning hero battler only gets 1500. The winner of the hero battle AT should get twice as much as in GvG (like between 9000-10000 rp), since only one person gets it.

Affect on other titles:

i mean we get unided golds sweets alchohol from this thing what affect is it going to have on those titles ?

and also The gold req 9 weapons can be sold for like 25k minimum so get abit of cash back.

R9 has already been posted and I don't really see why people automatically start calculating how long it will take to get MAX rank. What does it matter if YOU will not attain it. That doesn't mean others won't. Everything isn't meant to be obtained in a day a month or a year even. Some things most people will never attain. It would be very EASY to get someone an R12 though by merely giving all ones keys from a guild to that one person. Not very likely to happen, but, considering say a family is playing in a guild you could have 4 5 6 who knows how many in that guild giving up their keys to that one person to gain them R12. So not attainable? hardly It doesn't really matter anyways since it's only an emote. I'd be pretty happy having rank 1 that's all I need to drive a spear into a rangers or assassins butt. Titles are things to attain over time perhaps a long long time for most and I'm pretty sure everyone that wants it will achieve rank 1 and I doubt we're going to get calls for grouping Looking for R7 Zashien rank only. lol How rediculous.

And how do you think they got RICH they had to EARNT it. lol If you've EARNT the money in the game you certainly have the right to spend it in the game for things you want in the game. Not everyone is a gold buyer who is rich. Now I shall make my way to buy my 20000 keys and be famous and have R12 in a year or so. haha

Ah ... I see. But now that you mention it ... anyone that made that much ecto so early in the game's lifecycle probably did not hold onto it. It must have been very tempting to buy lots of cool stuff, most if which is now quite worthless.

It's funny. While you guys were farming UW, I was farming RA with my 55monk. Oh the memories of hiding in the alcove casting Prot Bond over and over and over until I got that freaking +1.