Recommended Helium thresholds and farming strategies

[leqesai]

Can someone give a brief breakdown on Helium thresholds (when using optimized perks and other bonuses) for various challenges/farming points?

Specifically I'm wondering when to switch from Nom to Toxic, Toxic to Lead, Lead to Corrupted and Spire.

Currently I've got around 80m helium and I'm running Nom in about 1:45:00 for around 2M helium an hour. I think Toxic is ~60M and Lead is ~100M while Corrupted is ~300M and Spire (to clear it) is around 250M?

Relatively new to the game and I'm having some conflicting information on this stuff (most is outdated when I google).

[Gra̶bz]

From Discord:

Recommended total He (with Perky recommendations) for moving up to the next helium challenge:
• 100K - Electricity
• 1M - Life
• 3M - Crushed
• 10M - Nom
• 35M - Toxicity
• 80M + Headstart I Mastery - Lead (Push with a Daily to get Headstart)
• 150M - Corrupted
• 500M - Domination

Naturally you may have a better or worse time depending on whether or not you use an optimal Perk setup with your helium using e.g. Perky[grimy.github.io]

[alexander.julian.erhard]

Note that Lead is only really good with that Headstart I Mastery - it adds 45% (I think) Helium to Void Maps on the last Zones. For Lead you also want to run Void Maps at Z179 instead of Z180, because the double loot from odd Zones includes Helium I believe.

For Domination, in my experience it only started to outdo Corrupted in He/hr at around maybe 1B Helium, because I needed to farm a bit to complete it before reaching those 1B Helium. It is however a helpful challenge for unlocking lower cell stuff in the spire.

[leqesai]

Originally posted by alexander.julian.erhard:

Note that Lead is only really good with that Headstart I Mastery - it adds 45% (I think) Helium to Void Maps on the last Zones. For Lead you also want to run Void Maps at Z179 instead of Z180, because the double loot from odd Zones includes Helium I believe.

For Domination, in my experience it only started to outdo Corrupted in He/hr at around maybe 1B Helium, because I needed to farm a bit to complete it before reaching those 1B Helium. It is however a helpful challenge for unlocking lower cell stuff in the spire.

I started running Lead yesterday without Headstart 1 and it is definitely lower He/Hr but I figure it is better to run than Toxicity simply because it ends closer to the point when dark essence becomes available. In measuring the clear times of Lead/Toxicity they're about the same for me right now and the lower He/HR is really only because I'm clearing at 185 instead of 180 (farming that dark essence). Currently sitting on about 160m He.

Another question. At what point does it make sense to use Ethereal heirlooms? The cost to swap stats is crazy high compared to Magnificent quality (2500 compared to 900). Other than the higher base stat rolls I don't really see much of an improvement (at least not one that warrants 3x higher cost to swap variables).

[rexalian2000]

every time i have found a higher quality heirloom it was worth it to switch immediately. the base stats after swapping variables were usually higher than the fully upgraded stats from before. unless you get REALLY unlucky and find one with no stats you want and have to swap them all it should honestly be better right away.