Bag of Tricks Vol. 69: The Companion Upgrade Token Pack Makes No Sense

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Welcome to the latest installment of our Bag of Tricks! On some days you will find useful tricks, gimmicks and ideas here that can make life in Neverwinter Online easier. Some of the stuff should be well known, but since even veterans learn something new every now and then, chance is you can, too.

In today’s Bag of Tricks we are going to talk about a ZEN item that made it into the store with Tomb of Annihilation. The Companion Upgrade Tokens Pack extends the line of service packs and at first glance it simply seems to be one of those “pay to accelerate” items. On second glance however, you realize the price make absolutely no sense.

Worse Than the Companion Helper Pack

The pack is going for 500 ZEN for 15 tokens. The Companions Helper Pack that includes 45 Tokens for 1,400 ZEN is already cheaper, and offers additional stuff. While that can be explained by buyers paying more for less quantity, the value vs. directly upgrading companions is flat out stupid.

Companion Upgrade Tokens have a fixed value based on the Astral Diamonds you can spend to upgrade your companions directly. The following table shows the costs and how much you would need to pay in AD for certain ZAX exchange values using the token pack.

[su_table]

Upgrade ADs Tokens ZAX 300 ZAX 500 ZAX Break-Even
 Common -> Uncommon  50,000  30  300,000  500,000  50
 Uncommon -> Rare  250,000  60  600,000  1,000,000  125
 Rare -> Epic  500,000  90  900,000  1,500,000  167
 Epic -> Legendary  1,000,000  120  1,200,000  2,000,000 250

[/su_table]

It’s Not Worth It

I think this pretty clearly shows why buying the token pack is not worth it. On PC where the ZAX is at 500, you pay up to ten times as much using the tokan pack. Even on consoles where the ZAX is substantially lower it makes no sense. The break-even point gets better the higher the companion quality, but never exceeds 250. Unless the ZAX somehow crumbles below that, or you can buy the packs on a major discount, you’re much better off just upgrading your companions with AD.


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3 thoughts on “Bag of Tricks Vol. 69: The Companion Upgrade Token Pack Makes No Sense

  • September 23, 2017 at 7:48 am
    Permalink

    There are no 50% discounts on upgrading companions with AD but 50%(40%) zen store discounts appear once in blue moon.
    At 50% discounts, the companion helper pack with 45 tokens can actually be useful if you already have a few more tokens to upgrade something to legendary.

    • September 23, 2017 at 8:32 am
      Permalink

      Thanks. We’ve added that discounts should be factored in as well!

  • September 25, 2017 at 1:56 am
    Permalink

    I open lockboxes to get companion packs with tokens so no need to worry about them 🙂

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