📊 The Best Dungeons to Grind for Minions

[KenpoKid69]

This is a ranking of the best dungeons to farm, derived from Higure’s Minion Guide found here: PQ3 Minion Guide - Throne of Odin - Google Sheets . Note that this list relies entirely on Higure’s specific ratings—if you disagree with how those minions are valued, the rankings won’t align for you. However, it remains the most comprehensive rating system currently available.

Note on the Rankings (Dungeons 9, 10, and 11):
These three are technically tied. To break the tie, I ranked them by the “best” single minion in each dungeon. This creates some trade-offs:

• (9) Broken Dream holds the highest spot because Mothling is the best solo minion of the group, though Efredi is the weakest.

• (11) Dragons of Light sits lower because Minticore is the weakest solo minion, but it offers the best consistency since Bombino is a top-tier “sister” minion.

[00h00m]

Yikes! Please don’t misuse other people’s hard work in a manner like this.

Higure’s minion sheet is extremely detailed and was created specifically for evaluating the theoretical maximum Extra Chest efficiency with 100% perfect chest and minion management. Reducing that level of granularity into simple dungeon averages defeats the purpose of ranking minions individually. The nuance is lost, and the resulting “Top 10” becomes misleading and is unnecessary.

[KenpoKid69]

I appreciate Higure’s work as much as anyone, which is exactly why I used it as the foundation. However, claiming that summarizing data (misuses) it is a bit of a stretch.

The original guide is a list of individual minions in descending order, but players don’t farm single minions — they farm dungeons. Not everyone wants to manage (100% perfect theoretical efficiency) — most people just want to know the best dungeons to farm based on the overall quality of what drops there. My goal was to turn that ranking system into a practical tool for the broader community. Most of us just need a reliable guide on where to spend our time and keys.

Plus, this paints a much broader picture since people can see everything else they are getting in a specific dungeon, like gear sets and spells. It lets players plan a farming session with a (totality) of what they are actually bringing home.

[HigureTheStillWind]

I think there is some very important information that is missing from the post and is necessary to fully understand it and all the necessary nuance behind it.

Kenpo Kid is referring to the “extra chest stat” that can be found in my minion guide. This is a theoretical calculation that tries to find the exact contribution of cunning and speed to chest farming.

A heavy farmer knows that the main limit to farm chests is that you eventually run out of keys and food to open them, so you have to stop farming. Minions stats help reducing this limitation, both by giving back keys (cunning) and by shortening the chest opening time (speed), and therefore food needed to open it ahead of time. However, there has always been some expeculation about what stat is best for that goal.

My “extra chest stat” tries to see which cunning/speed combination would be the most efficient in terms of allowing for longer chest farming (opening as much chests as possible), which can therefore be used to rank minions in terms of how good they are for this process. However, there are important things to take into account.

The “extra chest stat” basically calculates how many “extra chests” you would be able to open in a fixed period of time compared to a minion with 0 stats, assuming you are farming chests without stop and using multiple copies of that particular minion for it.

For example, let’s take a lvl 50 Zapling. Thanks to its 250 speed (-50% mission time), chests will take half time to open than with a 0 speed minion. Therefore, in the same amount of time you get to open twice the amount of chests. Additionally, thanks to its 100 cunning (20% bonus key), every 5 chests you will get 1 key (which would correspond to another extra chest opened), or averaging it you get 0.2 extra chest openings per chest opened. If you add both stats together, then you end up with an “extra chest stat” of 2.4 meaning that using this minion while farming chests will allow you to open 2.4 chests more than a 0 stat minion. So this means that, in theory, the higher the “extra chest stat” of a minion the better it is for faming chests.

However, this calculation is based on several assumptions and has some limitations, so let’s talk about all the nuance regarding this.

• First, it is based on an ideal scenario where variables have been simplified to make it much easier. The reality is much more messy; all in all it should still help compare the efficiency of different minions for farming purposes, but it is far from a perfect calculation.
• Second, it doesn’t take into account the time invested in getting the chests. When I talk about “extra chest” in reality I am talking about “extra chests you can open”. A free key is not a free chest, a chest slot that is emptied faster is not a free chest. You will still need to invest the time to win those chests. But I assume that whoever is interested in this is probably due to having enough time to get the chests but not being able to open them all.
• Third, it only works if the player is opening the chests as soon as they are unlocked or opening them ahead of time using food. If you leave the chests for some time after they have unlocked, cunning start to become the only relevant stat.

I hope that helps understanding what we are meaning when talking about minion “extra chest stat”.

[HigureTheStillWind]

Additionally, I have a couple more points regarding the list given in the post:

• The list is giving the average of the “extra chest stats” from all minion drops from that dungeon. If you are only interested in the minions with the highest “extra chest stat” and in which dungeon to find it them, you will have the ranking in the guide provided in the post.
• The list is based on lvl 50 mythic minions. However, a lot of players will only be using legendary lvl 45 or even epic lvl 35 minions, and this does change the ratings (basically, the lower the level the more important cunning becomes). For example, at lvl 50 zapling is slighty better than Good Telly, but at lvl 45 legendary they become tied and at lvl 35 epic Good Telly becomes better.
• The differences in the “extra chest stat” between minions isn’t too big, particularly at lower levels. It is good to try to optimize and be as efficient as possible, but don’t worry too much about always “making the right choice”. There are plenty of different minions that are great and will help a lot, even if they aren’t the absolutely most efficient ones. I do believe that the “extra chest stat” does help choosing the best minions for farming chests and helps progression for heavy grinders. But don’t forget that this is a game, and therefore the main goal is to enjoy playing it.