tactics.tools: https://tactics.tools/player/na/gouphee/quack

reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveTFT/comments/18y1mem/ramifications_of_streak_changes/

Intro

Hey everybody, it’s Gouphee! This post is going to be different from my usual posts. Instead of verifiable math and equations (ew yuck!), I’m going to be sharing some of my thoughts on the new streak changes (woah cool!). I am by no means an expert in anything (see my match history for more on that), and these are just my initial thoughts on what less gold from streaks mean, and what I think the long-term ramifications might be on the game.

Less gold and what it means (in my opinion)

In my opinion, the most important change for Patch 14.1 is the change to gold gained from streaks.

If you aren’t up to date here’s a table:

TFT is a game where gold matters a lot. My personal thesis on gold is that everything in the game has some amount of value that can be translated to gold, from items to augments to traits. You can think of your overall combat power as a mix of board value, item value, and augment value.

With this change there will be less gold in the game on average. With less gold from streaking, there is less gold in general. As a result, gold itself is worth more since the value of gold hasn’t changed.

Since there is less gold in the game to be used towards buying units, rerolling, and leveling, overall board values will be slightly lower. However, that means augments and items will have slightly higher relative value since their values haven’t changed.

Augments have more variance than items in my opinion, so I think that choosing correct augments will be even more important. Economy augments (augments that directly give you gold) will also be much more powerful, since the value of gold is higher relatively. Heartsteel will also be broken for a plethora of reasons. Switching Gears will be broken too.

I also think that greeding for econ will have higher value. Leveling for tempo or to “start a streak” has less value when you aren’t getting as much out of a streak. I can only see it being useful when you are already on a 6+ streak and you would be getting 3 gold. If you are only early on in a streak, it would probably not be worthwhile since the amount of economy loss if you lose is going to be much more impactful in comparison to the effective value of an early streak.

If the previous holds true, we will see overall lower tempo in the game. With less gold, there will be less leveling and less being punished for greeding your economy. However, this also means that if you truly have a good tempo spot, it might be less likely to have your streak contested.

Furthermore, economy starts are going to be strong. Less gold means hitting interest thresholds later/less often. Getting a headstart on that is going to be able to propel you to an even larger advantage. I personally think that the balance team should look into adjusting the amount of gold dropped on economy starts to account for forecasted economy breakpoints since the gold gained from full item starts should theoretically be lowered with less streak gold.

Stage 2 streaking analysis

Now, at this point, everybody knows that open fort is dead. However, I believe that loss streak is also dead for stage 2. This section is going to actually have some math to back it up compared to the previous section that had just my thoughts and opinions.

Let’s take a look at the amount of gold you get from full loss streaking through stage 2. You would get 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 2 (PVP) + 2 (PVE) = 6 gold. Previously you would get 10 gold from full loss streaking.

Now, let’s look at some worst case scenarios for mixed streaking with the new streak changes. The two possible candidates would be LWLWL and LLWLL.

For LWLWL, the amount of gold would be 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 = 2 gold, while LLWLL would just be 1 gold. Obviously, these two scenarios suck, but these are the literal two worst outcomes for stage 2 possible. Previously, LWLWL was also 2 gold, while LLWLL was 3 gold since 2 streaking gave gold.