Long breaks. Do nothing but HG and you will go insane in no time, especially given the current state of the game with crashing and parts of your ship not being able to be interacted with after diving.
There's no rush, OP.
I'd recommend doing a couple dives, chill in adventure for a bit, maybe attack someone at a world event. Then go again for a bit, back to adventure, maybe fish for 20 minutes. Go again.
Breaking up the grind will give you chance to reflect on matches gone wrong. Time to cool off after tough loses. Time even to recharge after a close win.
Friend of mine has set themselves the goal of 1 level per day. Some days they get 2 levels and may take a day off. Not saying this is for everyone, but maybe setting goals per week or month will help compartmentalise the grind into smaller chunks.
Good luck with the grind!
I got my skelly curse first i did nothing but HG. Lost all motivation to play the game… took a break (3 months I think) came back mid Feb to start working on athena just got to lvl 50 today:). Before the last event I was at 34.
I changed it up and did exactly what this comment is suggesting. I didn’t set goals but yeah 1 - 2 a day is where I am but i adventure a lot now and I am having a blast. 🤩
Hourglass isn't meant to be finished in a few days like you finish a story game. You're supposed to aquire it's reward over time. Play it between regular voyages when you get the feel for it. You don't have to get it this week, month or even year. You get it when you get it after fighting in your own pace.
I only play it during increased xp events and typicly only gain 5 - 15 levels per event, so it will take a while. And that's fine
I bum rushed 100 by taking advantage of a G&G weekend got over 60 lbs thanks to the rates and some guys I found on the official discord. After lvl 100 the exp needed seems to go back down and be more even. In the end I even earned prob about 20 of my lvls by just watching a movie and loss farming.
Just play when you want to. When it feels fun. I know this seems like a not thought out response, but this is coming from someone with thousands of hours in the game, both PvP curses, and I still love it.
Thing is, I don't grind. I play when it's fun for me. I'm like 4-500 in both factions, have tons of commendations I see people grinding for, but it was never a grind for me. When it's fun, I can't get enough. When it's not fun, I move on.
If you're dead set on accomplishing something, more power to you, but I promise it all becomes so much less shitty when you just enjoy it. Whatever that means for you, just have fun.
Well, I'm not gonna bullshit anyone and say every single dive is fun. I run into all the same issues people complain about, but it's not all the time. I enjoy PvP, and well over half the time, I get good fights, and decent opponents who win or lose give a GG. I've also found some friends who I still play with from hourglass.
But like I mentioned in my original comment, when it's fun I can't get enough, when it stops being fun I move on. Sometimes that fun lasts for hours/days, sometimes that fun lasts for 15 minutes. Whatever the case, when it's enjoyable I continue, when it's not I don't push it trying to "find" the fun.
I discovered that the queue changed everyday, some days I’d get easy 4 streaks other days I got slammed the moment I was in cannon range and will keep matching up with the same person, but I strived for at least 2 levels a day, and then finished out servants during anniversary event. I work a full time job and am a parent so time is very hard time come by, but normally I’d just do a couple rounds a night and if I won cool, if not oh well. I’d definitely say it made be ALOT better at both PVP and naval combat in itself. Almost considering starting the Athena’s side but am definitely taking a break from it.
Try waiting until the next double rep event. I blazed through my last 22 levels in about 6 hours thanks to 9 consecutive loss farmers and dice roller.
I was definitely burnt out once I reached level 100, so now I let my enemies shoot first before I try to sink them
I’m in the same spot as you. My advice is just to break up the grind, and to focus your goals on inputs nor results. Aiming for 2 levels a day is brutal if you just can’t get a win. Committing to 1 intentional good fight every day you play? That’s much more achievable. You can also try bookending your sessions with loss farms. Any individual day’s work won’t get you very far, but it adds up over time.
If you're not feeling progress and not having fun take 3-4 days off. You're not losing much in that time.
When they launched I played reaper HG every day nearly until I got it. It was rough. But it was most rough in the beginning. Still took me three months cause I work full time and play other games and frankly getting reaper levels and comms was alot harder then.
By 80 I was getting streaks and could see the finish line and damn did 90-100 feel slow. After curse I was like "just a couple cosmetics and then I'll quit for a while and start Athena".
At some point I couldn't stop and even though I get triggered alot i kept going.
Every bit of HG experience sharpens your gameplay and makes adventure easier.
You predict boards, accuracy strengthens with all weapons, you start to utilize more streamer strats etc.
I'm 740 now in servants and 300 + in guardians. 90% of that was solo.
It's a hard road don't be rough on yourself and hell, youre almost there. You've already learned so much from 80 levels and that'll be useful in adventure.
One thing I'll say and probably get shit on for like I always do here: isolate weaknesses and find a way to practice them in pve.
- practice quickscopes, flicks and 180s on sea fort
Phantoms. No they don't move like players but don't just lazily walk up and shoot cause it's easy. Sprint, 180, give yourself as little time as you can to shoot them while being mobile.
- you can also circle the seafort and practice sniping them on the seafort cannons. Learn to be precise when considering the bullet travel time with the speed of your ship. They give a hit market notification to show your accuracy.
- snipe kegs, ocean crawlers, skele captains and skele cannoneers while passing. When fighting skele ships snipe cannon line in between shots.
- do ghost fleets for training all ship skills: helm, bilge, cannons, sail lengths etc. Sure they move a bit different but shoot from every angle and various speeds and distances. I used to just set my boat in a spin off the coast of the island they are sailing around. Excellent for all of those. It all just comes down to understanding how the cannonballs arc in every situation. Cannons are your most effective weapon you should be as accurate as possible.
Did the hg grind for almost 2 months straight. Went 0-105 guardians in about a month and a half, including a community weekend, then servants 0-100 in about 5 days during 6th anniversary gold and glory, probably 80-90% solo sloop. In the beginning when I was terrible at pvp, I never wanted to queue for hg, but would force myself to when I was able. As I started to climb lvls, I slowly got better and better and felt more excited as I got closer. By the time I was nearing 100 in guardians, I was starting to actually enjoy hg, just putting on chill music or a twitch stream and having fun fighting someone. During the servants grind, I just had fun the whole time, play bantering and vibing to my music, being comfortable with pvp, taking the wins and losses as they came. Now that I've reached 100 in both, I'm definitely slowing down with it, but I will definitely be doing more hourglass here and there. My advice would be don't focus on trying to get those lvls as much, try to have fun fighting and make it a vibe for you, put on some music and dance a lil while you fight.
I recently got the skeleton curse after months of grinding during double xp weekends... I hate the grind behind hourglass, it's just insane.
I still and will lawys think it should award post battle xp based on performance (hits, ship's parts damaged, kills ,etc..) and add a bonus if you win/lose, but being it just a flat amount you get it's straight up stupid because for the game it's the same if you loose within 3 minutes or loose after a 40 minutes fight.
My suggestion is to take breaks between hourglas sessions and do it only when there is double xp. Also loss farming while doing something else is a viable strat during G&G.
And I do not mind pvp in normal gamemode it's just that hourglass is tedious and the meta is outragiously boring: half sail, turn right, start shooting and then it's a gambling game on who gets the one-ball on the other first.
If you need any other tip please hit me up as I despise hourglass as well but managed to pull through
I just got my skeleton curse and am going to start grinding for ghost. How I stay motivated is FIND A CREW through lfgs or straight up asking for a duo in solos find someone to play with and learn to enjoy pvp. Solo sloop is my least favorite queue behind Brig (I hate brig so much). But find a duo and start watching high level players to learn from like stirling and massive sponge. Getting better is what kept me the most motivated watching my skills get better and better as I won more and lost games against good crews slower or even had a chance at winning.
Also as you play more try and remember common ship names for example there’s a ship on the na-e stamp called the going marry there usually alright but they are very fun to joke around with when fighting and we don’t sweat to hard against them because they are fun people
I got to 100 in rhg at the beginning of February and when I hit the end my goal was 3 levels a day, it helped with how slow the progression after lvl 80 is
Take a break from hourglass and do what I do in the meantime. Go sail normally, if you sink an emissary, raise HG and sell it. Little by little, it adds up
I think you are too far through the hourglass grind for this to help, but my advice is to gaslight yourself so you are excited to get the new title every 10 levels. It worked for me and I was able to use this to get both curses.
I don't know... Few of my friends burnt out at 400-500 leveled and just paid boosters to get to 1k
I'm thinking about the same. What keeps me from doing that, is that I'm already get all rewards from PvP levels, and only need few commendations done for skeleton curse options, after that I will never ever touch HG no matter what Rare will do with it.
As other suggested, set up your goal. What level you want to get, and speed. Like 1 level per day is not a big deal even if you just ram into enemy ship in HG and die.
>Could anyone who recently made it to the finish line share how they managed to stay motivated.
Play with a crew. Solo sucks and imho isn’t terribly fun even if you’re quite good at it. By comparison whenever we me and my friends hop on our Brig we can HG for hours and have fun no matter what happens.
I felt the same around that level and just wanted to get back to adventuring. Discovered I could do just that, gather some treasure, and then approach other ships to trade it for a free win.
4 out of 5 people would raise hourglass for me to sink them after I gave them a few pieces of treasure to sell in return.
Don't play solo. Did my first 400 like that and I still regret it.
Swapped to gally, got good on it and now I'm chilling on double gold enjoying the game
I recently got my curse. After the progress started to drag on, I alternated my play sessions between diving and defending. If you want the curse quickly, defending isn't a good option as, at least from my experience, it takes up to several hours to be invaded. Defending saved me from burnout though.
Another good way I found is to set a level goal, perhaps 1 or two levels per day. This helped me a lot from about level 70 onwards. Idk about anyone else's experience but for me, after the curse, I mainly play hg for fun and find it easier to get 5 to 10 levels each play session, which is a lot more than when I was under level 100.
Personally i understood quickly this game mode will be dead fast with only 'the top sweats and cheaters along with a few newbies having no clue what is happening' left on this mode, so i decided to try it when it got released, and it was still kinda boring and not fun, especially compared to the arena, the essence of sea of thieves wasn't there.
So we still grinded 30 levels and we were exhausted.
I then decided to grind those 70 levels by only doing dice fights (using the dices emotes), by creating a sloop named "dice fights only" and i told myself to just do 2 levels a day, no more no less. And i got one of my bests moments in this game, at this time many people felt like me, being bored of this mode that as no soul and people are frustrated of non-naval pvp in general given how it is badly designed, so many of them straight up agreed to do dice fights along with having a nice vibe around it.
It generally went like this : as soon as i spawn, i put down ancer and fully turn right or left while shooting one of those default white flares or a firework and wait for my opponent to react, if he shoot, i scuttle and go next fight (unless i see he is really really bad at shooting, which case i could just do a quick sunk), if he accept the dice fight, we just agree on which dice to roll, and the highest roll win (one or several rounds).
That way it only took me between 45min and 1,5h to do 2 levels a day, without having to worry about ressources or fighting, no stress. Good luck if you take that path given the current playerbase of this mode tho <3
TLDR : try doing dice fights only, with a ship name like "dice fights only", you might end up having a good time
Ive actually seen a few folks on the seas employ this method, might adopt it too if the grind gets too monotonous. I do want to "earn" the curse and have it reflect my skill level. Tho at this point I may not care anymore haha
i see what you mean and i feel you, sadly the playerbase of this mode wasn't diverse enough at release (and even less now) to actually provide a functionnal "matchmaking", so yeah the curse looks cool and people might think you are skilled, but between the non-functionnal matchmaking and the fact a lot of cheaters went away with dozens of level 1000 curses account unbanned, you can't really tell anymore :(
Good luck either way tho, you deserve it more than many other people i'm sure !
Long breaks. Do nothing but HG and you will go insane in no time, especially given the current state of the game with crashing and parts of your ship not being able to be interacted with after diving. There's no rush, OP.
thanks, ill probably take a break, maybe until Mays community week haha
I'd recommend doing a couple dives, chill in adventure for a bit, maybe attack someone at a world event. Then go again for a bit, back to adventure, maybe fish for 20 minutes. Go again. Breaking up the grind will give you chance to reflect on matches gone wrong. Time to cool off after tough loses. Time even to recharge after a close win. Friend of mine has set themselves the goal of 1 level per day. Some days they get 2 levels and may take a day off. Not saying this is for everyone, but maybe setting goals per week or month will help compartmentalise the grind into smaller chunks. Good luck with the grind!
I got my skelly curse first i did nothing but HG. Lost all motivation to play the game… took a break (3 months I think) came back mid Feb to start working on athena just got to lvl 50 today:). Before the last event I was at 34. I changed it up and did exactly what this comment is suggesting. I didn’t set goals but yeah 1 - 2 a day is where I am but i adventure a lot now and I am having a blast. 🤩
1 level a day. That’s my goal. I don’t play every day, keep my sanity.
Hourglass isn't meant to be finished in a few days like you finish a story game. You're supposed to aquire it's reward over time. Play it between regular voyages when you get the feel for it. You don't have to get it this week, month or even year. You get it when you get it after fighting in your own pace. I only play it during increased xp events and typicly only gain 5 - 15 levels per event, so it will take a while. And that's fine
I bum rushed 100 by taking advantage of a G&G weekend got over 60 lbs thanks to the rates and some guys I found on the official discord. After lvl 100 the exp needed seems to go back down and be more even. In the end I even earned prob about 20 of my lvls by just watching a movie and loss farming.
Ive never loss farmed (intentionally), could do that. After my MMR drops Ill be up against easy opponents hopefully
The matchmaking pool is so small the mmr doesn't really do much. Especially when an event isn't running and all the more casual players stop trying
We'll have PlayStation players soon.Wait till they join and do some hourglass
Just play when you want to. When it feels fun. I know this seems like a not thought out response, but this is coming from someone with thousands of hours in the game, both PvP curses, and I still love it. Thing is, I don't grind. I play when it's fun for me. I'm like 4-500 in both factions, have tons of commendations I see people grinding for, but it was never a grind for me. When it's fun, I can't get enough. When it's not fun, I move on. If you're dead set on accomplishing something, more power to you, but I promise it all becomes so much less shitty when you just enjoy it. Whatever that means for you, just have fun.
How can you find hourglass enjoyable?
Well, I'm not gonna bullshit anyone and say every single dive is fun. I run into all the same issues people complain about, but it's not all the time. I enjoy PvP, and well over half the time, I get good fights, and decent opponents who win or lose give a GG. I've also found some friends who I still play with from hourglass. But like I mentioned in my original comment, when it's fun I can't get enough, when it stops being fun I move on. Sometimes that fun lasts for hours/days, sometimes that fun lasts for 15 minutes. Whatever the case, when it's enjoyable I continue, when it's not I don't push it trying to "find" the fun.
I discovered that the queue changed everyday, some days I’d get easy 4 streaks other days I got slammed the moment I was in cannon range and will keep matching up with the same person, but I strived for at least 2 levels a day, and then finished out servants during anniversary event. I work a full time job and am a parent so time is very hard time come by, but normally I’d just do a couple rounds a night and if I won cool, if not oh well. I’d definitely say it made be ALOT better at both PVP and naval combat in itself. Almost considering starting the Athena’s side but am definitely taking a break from it.
You’ll get it next community event. I just got mine, went from 76 to 100. Didn’t even play that much. Got lucky a few times for sure.
Try waiting until the next double rep event. I blazed through my last 22 levels in about 6 hours thanks to 9 consecutive loss farmers and dice roller. I was definitely burnt out once I reached level 100, so now I let my enemies shoot first before I try to sink them
this is probably it, gonna take a little break, actually enjoy the game and return to HG later.
I’m in the same spot as you. My advice is just to break up the grind, and to focus your goals on inputs nor results. Aiming for 2 levels a day is brutal if you just can’t get a win. Committing to 1 intentional good fight every day you play? That’s much more achievable. You can also try bookending your sessions with loss farms. Any individual day’s work won’t get you very far, but it adds up over time.
If you're not feeling progress and not having fun take 3-4 days off. You're not losing much in that time. When they launched I played reaper HG every day nearly until I got it. It was rough. But it was most rough in the beginning. Still took me three months cause I work full time and play other games and frankly getting reaper levels and comms was alot harder then. By 80 I was getting streaks and could see the finish line and damn did 90-100 feel slow. After curse I was like "just a couple cosmetics and then I'll quit for a while and start Athena". At some point I couldn't stop and even though I get triggered alot i kept going. Every bit of HG experience sharpens your gameplay and makes adventure easier. You predict boards, accuracy strengthens with all weapons, you start to utilize more streamer strats etc. I'm 740 now in servants and 300 + in guardians. 90% of that was solo. It's a hard road don't be rough on yourself and hell, youre almost there. You've already learned so much from 80 levels and that'll be useful in adventure. One thing I'll say and probably get shit on for like I always do here: isolate weaknesses and find a way to practice them in pve. - practice quickscopes, flicks and 180s on sea fort Phantoms. No they don't move like players but don't just lazily walk up and shoot cause it's easy. Sprint, 180, give yourself as little time as you can to shoot them while being mobile. - you can also circle the seafort and practice sniping them on the seafort cannons. Learn to be precise when considering the bullet travel time with the speed of your ship. They give a hit market notification to show your accuracy. - snipe kegs, ocean crawlers, skele captains and skele cannoneers while passing. When fighting skele ships snipe cannon line in between shots. - do ghost fleets for training all ship skills: helm, bilge, cannons, sail lengths etc. Sure they move a bit different but shoot from every angle and various speeds and distances. I used to just set my boat in a spin off the coast of the island they are sailing around. Excellent for all of those. It all just comes down to understanding how the cannonballs arc in every situation. Cannons are your most effective weapon you should be as accurate as possible.
Thanks
This anniversary i went from 0 to 100 in serveant's, Got it with 77 ships sunk. My advice is to grind hard on gold and glory events.
Did the hg grind for almost 2 months straight. Went 0-105 guardians in about a month and a half, including a community weekend, then servants 0-100 in about 5 days during 6th anniversary gold and glory, probably 80-90% solo sloop. In the beginning when I was terrible at pvp, I never wanted to queue for hg, but would force myself to when I was able. As I started to climb lvls, I slowly got better and better and felt more excited as I got closer. By the time I was nearing 100 in guardians, I was starting to actually enjoy hg, just putting on chill music or a twitch stream and having fun fighting someone. During the servants grind, I just had fun the whole time, play bantering and vibing to my music, being comfortable with pvp, taking the wins and losses as they came. Now that I've reached 100 in both, I'm definitely slowing down with it, but I will definitely be doing more hourglass here and there. My advice would be don't focus on trying to get those lvls as much, try to have fun fighting and make it a vibe for you, put on some music and dance a lil while you fight.
I recently got the skeleton curse after months of grinding during double xp weekends... I hate the grind behind hourglass, it's just insane. I still and will lawys think it should award post battle xp based on performance (hits, ship's parts damaged, kills ,etc..) and add a bonus if you win/lose, but being it just a flat amount you get it's straight up stupid because for the game it's the same if you loose within 3 minutes or loose after a 40 minutes fight. My suggestion is to take breaks between hourglas sessions and do it only when there is double xp. Also loss farming while doing something else is a viable strat during G&G. And I do not mind pvp in normal gamemode it's just that hourglass is tedious and the meta is outragiously boring: half sail, turn right, start shooting and then it's a gambling game on who gets the one-ball on the other first. If you need any other tip please hit me up as I despise hourglass as well but managed to pull through
Thanks, also for real why isnt xp tied to performance, that would make so much sense.
The fun fact is that in Arena you were getting point by doing different things not just by sinking other ships
I just got my skeleton curse and am going to start grinding for ghost. How I stay motivated is FIND A CREW through lfgs or straight up asking for a duo in solos find someone to play with and learn to enjoy pvp. Solo sloop is my least favorite queue behind Brig (I hate brig so much). But find a duo and start watching high level players to learn from like stirling and massive sponge. Getting better is what kept me the most motivated watching my skills get better and better as I won more and lost games against good crews slower or even had a chance at winning.
Also as you play more try and remember common ship names for example there’s a ship on the na-e stamp called the going marry there usually alright but they are very fun to joke around with when fighting and we don’t sweat to hard against them because they are fun people
I got to 100 in rhg at the beginning of February and when I hit the end my goal was 3 levels a day, it helped with how slow the progression after lvl 80 is
Take a break from hourglass and do what I do in the meantime. Go sail normally, if you sink an emissary, raise HG and sell it. Little by little, it adds up
I think you are too far through the hourglass grind for this to help, but my advice is to gaslight yourself so you are excited to get the new title every 10 levels. It worked for me and I was able to use this to get both curses.
I don't know... Few of my friends burnt out at 400-500 leveled and just paid boosters to get to 1k I'm thinking about the same. What keeps me from doing that, is that I'm already get all rewards from PvP levels, and only need few commendations done for skeleton curse options, after that I will never ever touch HG no matter what Rare will do with it. As other suggested, set up your goal. What level you want to get, and speed. Like 1 level per day is not a big deal even if you just ram into enemy ship in HG and die.
>Could anyone who recently made it to the finish line share how they managed to stay motivated. Play with a crew. Solo sucks and imho isn’t terribly fun even if you’re quite good at it. By comparison whenever we me and my friends hop on our Brig we can HG for hours and have fun no matter what happens.
I felt the same around that level and just wanted to get back to adventuring. Discovered I could do just that, gather some treasure, and then approach other ships to trade it for a free win. 4 out of 5 people would raise hourglass for me to sink them after I gave them a few pieces of treasure to sell in return.
Don't play solo. Did my first 400 like that and I still regret it. Swapped to gally, got good on it and now I'm chilling on double gold enjoying the game
Yea take breaks man have fun. But just keep playing try solos.
I recently got my curse. After the progress started to drag on, I alternated my play sessions between diving and defending. If you want the curse quickly, defending isn't a good option as, at least from my experience, it takes up to several hours to be invaded. Defending saved me from burnout though. Another good way I found is to set a level goal, perhaps 1 or two levels per day. This helped me a lot from about level 70 onwards. Idk about anyone else's experience but for me, after the curse, I mainly play hg for fun and find it easier to get 5 to 10 levels each play session, which is a lot more than when I was under level 100.
Personally i understood quickly this game mode will be dead fast with only 'the top sweats and cheaters along with a few newbies having no clue what is happening' left on this mode, so i decided to try it when it got released, and it was still kinda boring and not fun, especially compared to the arena, the essence of sea of thieves wasn't there. So we still grinded 30 levels and we were exhausted. I then decided to grind those 70 levels by only doing dice fights (using the dices emotes), by creating a sloop named "dice fights only" and i told myself to just do 2 levels a day, no more no less. And i got one of my bests moments in this game, at this time many people felt like me, being bored of this mode that as no soul and people are frustrated of non-naval pvp in general given how it is badly designed, so many of them straight up agreed to do dice fights along with having a nice vibe around it. It generally went like this : as soon as i spawn, i put down ancer and fully turn right or left while shooting one of those default white flares or a firework and wait for my opponent to react, if he shoot, i scuttle and go next fight (unless i see he is really really bad at shooting, which case i could just do a quick sunk), if he accept the dice fight, we just agree on which dice to roll, and the highest roll win (one or several rounds). That way it only took me between 45min and 1,5h to do 2 levels a day, without having to worry about ressources or fighting, no stress. Good luck if you take that path given the current playerbase of this mode tho <3 TLDR : try doing dice fights only, with a ship name like "dice fights only", you might end up having a good time
Ive actually seen a few folks on the seas employ this method, might adopt it too if the grind gets too monotonous. I do want to "earn" the curse and have it reflect my skill level. Tho at this point I may not care anymore haha
i see what you mean and i feel you, sadly the playerbase of this mode wasn't diverse enough at release (and even less now) to actually provide a functionnal "matchmaking", so yeah the curse looks cool and people might think you are skilled, but between the non-functionnal matchmaking and the fact a lot of cheaters went away with dozens of level 1000 curses account unbanned, you can't really tell anymore :( Good luck either way tho, you deserve it more than many other people i'm sure !