Flash is gone and many players will be forced to switch or quit. I imagine apparel will be confusing to newcomers at first and some aspects of it are kinda obscure. I think with some community effort we can create a main thread with good info for everyone. I'll keep editing this if people chime in and hopefully we can create the apparel thread, I'll try to make it complete but I'm more interested in details that are not available like the way some stats work and drop rates and the like.
General intro: Apparel items are stat enhancing clothes that work in coin games, club clashes and showdowns. You can also create multiplayer games like stroke play or alternate shot with them on. In order to get them/level them up you need to find them in apparel packs, and the way to get apparel packs is to have a sponsorship active in coin room games.
You get 30 minutes of sponsor time every 6 hours for free, so if you use it when available you'll put the sponsorship on a 5h30m cooldown by the time you're done with your games (this cooldown can be paid for with credits, up to a maximum of 75 credits for the full 5h30m). During sponsor time loses give a bronze pack and wins give a silver/gold/platinum pack. You'll see both apparel packs and individual 1 unit (what?) bundles for sale in the shop at some absurd credit prices, needless to say you should ignore these.. if you wanna use credits to get better apparel your only reasonable option is paying for the cooldown and playing more sponsored games than a frugal player would. Generally speaking, you wanna grind the highest 1-hole room you can for efficiency.
The amount of any given item and the coins needed to upgrade scale pretty hard, with the last 9 to 10 lvl upgrade requiring 1000 items and 100k coins. The amount of items in every pack is also related to the pack tier which depends on the room's pack cap and is also limited by your actual tier
- E.g I'm in the legend tier and usually play the Tokyo room (caps at Tour Champ) which means I'm getting legend silver packs with around 11 items iirc, if I were to drop to the next 1 hole room down called Rio (caps at Tour Master) I'd be getting tour master silver packs with maybe 9-10 items? Difference might be more noticeable in the rarer gold/platinum packs, this is the kind of data I need help with gathering.
Pack Caps: This is stated in the room info section and it's a rather bizarre mechanic.. You can only get a "tier" of pack (you can see this stated on top of the pack before tapping to open) as high as your tier but it's also limited by the room's pack cap. It encourages higher tier players to play on the higher bet rooms. These pack tiers are supposed to influence the amount and quality of the drops. For reference these are the room caps:
Amateur: Paris (3-hole)
Pro: Chelsea (1)
Tour Pro: Beverly Hills (9)
Master: Casablanca (3)
Tour Master: Rio (1), Shanghai (9)
Tour Champ: Monaco (9), Tokyo (1), Montréal (3), Manhattan (3), Bellagio (3)
Farming efficiency: Obviously there's a lot of variance here but you should be able to complete 6-8 games for 1-holes, 3-4 for 3-holes and 1-2 for 9-holes so Chelsea/Rio/Tokyo are the best way to farm apparel packs during sponsor time.
Remember the sponsor state is checked right at the start of the game itself, so if you manage to find and start a game even with like 10s left on your sponsor it'll be a sponsored game. By start I mean the literal tee off almost, sometimes I've had my auto-activate on, managed to find a game (which can take minutes in the higher rooms) before it expired and somehow I lost the sponsor between loading and getting in and lost 75cr and got a re-activation, so care.
Appearance tab: Pretty simple but might as well include it for completion sake. Allows you to use the items you want for stats in the abilities tab without looking like a loser that can't afford a mirror, by placing the items you actually wanna wear for aesthetics in the appearance tab. I wear a snowman head but get the driver distance of an ugly cap. No regrets this is good value, recommend it.
Common vs Rare vs Epic Stats: This has already been solved in other threads. For any given stat a common would match a rare 1 lvl under and an epic 2 lvls. So a common item maxed out at 10 would be similar to its respective lvl 9 rare or lvl 8 epic. Most stats max at +100, where for level 10 common would be around 80, rare around 90 and epic would reach the actual 100. But rares/epics sometimes carry extra stats, more on this later.
Time to max: In that same thread it was also mentioned that you should expect to have your rares/epics at level 5/6 by the time you reach 10 with their respective common, I have found this to be very accurate, hence why I mention it. Therefore the average player, including myself, should expect to sit on their common item sets for a very long time.. the grind is real.
Set Bonuses: Obtained by equipping 5 items of the same brand with breakpoints at levels 4/6/9. It rounds down so for instance: if you have items of levels 10+8+5+7+9 you'd be getting the level 4 bonus. Game states you can fill up to 4 slots with wildcard items (which are mostly aesthetic items, like the jester hat) for the purposes of getting this bonus, but it wasn't working correctly last time I checked [got a re-confirmation that this doesn't work as it should*]. I assume this'll be fixed at some point but avoid the wildcard feature for now. Either way, I wouldn't prioritize these as they don't appear to be too big, but here they are:
- C&M: chance of +15% to apparel stats for 1hr on win. Haven't even tried this one, maybe someone can give an opinion but this one seems to be just awful, changing from base to apparel boosted play can already throw you off.. can't imagine how it feels with this temporary thing on top. Also C&M apparel seems to be just plain bad
-10/20/30% chance (lvls 4/6/9)
- FW: chance to save lost ball. I play with rocks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Again, if someone confirms this I'll edit but I assume it either gives the ball back when you lose it or at the end of the game. I'd also like any confirmation on whether it keeps the number of hits or resets it because that would be busted. Otherwise seems pretty useless, but the chance at level 9 is nice if you like to hit your balls into the lake
-15/30/60% chance
- M: chance of 1hr 20%Xp boost on win. Really good, nice simple and efficient if you need xp to level up. When I used this a long time ago it stacked as well iirc, so you could be perma boosted
-20/30/45% chance
- SE: chance of extra pack on win. Really good, the one most of us use I assume. Nice to grind some apparel, % is low but meh. Can confirm gold packs can drop from this, I don't see any reason why platinums wouldn't but I can't confirm it myself..just unlucky I guess
-8/11/15% chance
- TG: chance of 50% entry coin refund on loss. This is the same problem I find with the %coin earnings on apparel, by the numbers it's pretty good.. like mathematically it really does give you some fair increases on coin gains or in this case loss mitigation. Only 1 tiny little problem: COINS ARE USELESS. You only need a bank of some millions to be able to comfortably join any room, beyond that.. it really doesn't make a difference, having 10 million or 10 billion is pretty much the same unless you enjoy looking at big numbers for some reason. Therefore I can't really attribute any value to this
-5/10/15% chance
Hidden/Rare-Epic stats: some items get an extra stat when they go from common to rare/epic and if you're getting started you won't know this. I haven't played enough coin games to have all items but with some help I guess this would be the easiest section to complete, I'll just place a "?" in those I'm unsure about and hope someone can confirm. Extras not initially present are bolded
--------[Hats]---------
All> Putt. Prec. + Hyb. Spin
All> Hyb. Dist. + Hyb. Spin
Common/Rare> %Xp + Rough PWR
Epic> ?
Common> Driver Dist.
Rare/Epic> Driver Dist. + Rough PWR
All> %Coin + Putt. Forgiv.
-----------[Gloves]------------
Common> Hyb. Meter + Iron Spot
Rare/Epic> Hyb. Meter + Iron Spot + Hyb. Spot
All> Wedge Meter + Hyb. Spin
Common> Iron Meter + 3w spot
Rare/Epic> Iron Meter + 3w spot + %Xp
Common/Rare> Driver Meter + Driver Spot
Epic> Driver Meter + Driver Spot + Iron Spot
Common> Driver Meter + Iron Spot
Rare/Epic> Driver Meter + Iron Spot + %Coin
-----------[Shoes]-----------
All> Putt. Forgiv. + Sand PWR
All> Sand PWR + Iron Spin
All> %Coin + Putt. Forgiv.
All> Brush PWR + 3w spin
All> %Xp + Dirt PWR
-----------[Tops]------------
Common/Rare> Iron Dist. + 3w Spin
Epic> ?
Common/Rare> Iron Dist.
Epic> Iron Dist. + Hyb. Spin
Common/Rare> %Xp + 3w Dist.
Epic> %Xp + 3w Dist.+ Iron Spin
All> 3w Dist. + Iron Spin (just a worse version of the Max Epic top?!)
Common/Rare> %Coin + Iron Dist.
Epic> %Coin + Iron Dist. + 3w Spin
----------[Pants]----------
Common> Putt. Prec. + Putt. Spot
Rare/Epic> Putt. Prec. + Putt. Spot + Sand PWR
Common> Wedge Dist.
Rare/Epic> Wedge Dist. + Sand PWR
All> %Xp + Sand PWR
All> Rough PWR + 3w Spot
All> %Coin + Brush PWR
Apparel packs' item amounts: For any given pack tier (bronze/silver/gold/plat) there appears to be an item amount range that is randomized as far as I can tell. So for instance my silver packs (legend silver packs) they drop 10-12. Assuming an average 11 item pack I may get 11 of 1 item or 6+5 for 2 or 3+4+4 for 3...etc Whatever it is, you're guaranteed 1 item of your chosen sponsor at least. What I'm interested in finding out is just how much of a difference there really is between tiers.
Still a work in progress but I'll keep gathering averages. The numbers between {} are the actual results and the number between [ ] represents sample size, obviously the larger this number the more reliable the avg and max/min becomes:
Bronze [4]: 1,5 (max 2, min 1)
{2,1,1,2}
Silver [24]: 5,4 (max 8, min 2)
{4,5,7,7,4,4,2,4,6,6,6,6,4,6,4,8,7,4,7,6,7,7,6,4}
Gold [5]: 20 (max 20, min 20)
{20,20,20,20,20}
Plat [1]: 60 (max 60, min 60)
{60}
Bronze [6]: 1,8 (max 2, min 1)
{2,1,2,2,2,2}
Silver [26]: 7,6 (max 9, min 6)
{8,8,7,8,9,7,8,8,6,9,8,7,8,7,9,8,7,7,8,7,8,7,7,6,9,6}
Gold [3]: 24 (max 24, min 24)
{24,24,24}
Plat //
***This early data starts to suggest that bronze/silver packs have a range but gold and maybe plat packs might drop a FIXED amount based on tier, or it was just rng..we'll see
Gold/Plat apparel pack rates: based on what I've observed the chances of getting gold/plat packs do increase in higher tier coin rooms but I don't have enough data on this.. For what is worth fmags suggested somewhere that in Tour Champ rooms wins the chance of a gold drop is 1:4 and chance of plat is 1:20. Can we expand on this or get some approximations for different tier rooms? I assume this is gonna be the hardest thing to nail down because we need a pretty massive sample size but it is useful information.
Item rarity drop chance: Another kinda impossible thing to determine.. but it would be nice. Exactly how rare are rares and epics compared to commons, do they drop more often from gold/plat? From higher pack cap rooms?
As far as I can tell maxing out items doesn't decrease or prevent their chance of spawning and you get 200 coins per repeat unit, so if I have my common Swing Edge cap at lvl 10 and I drop 11 units in a pack I'm getting 2200 coins instead, which is better than nothing I guess. I have also tried running full sets of rares/epics in hopes of curving the drop rates from packs and I'm confident in saying it doesn't increase your chances of dropping them, so the only modifier is the sponsor you choose where it guarantees you get at least one item of that brand.
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Item stats' effect, subjective usefulness and what the numbers actually mean: some of these stat bonuses are straight forward but others are ambiguous to say the least and they use these +100 scales and stuff instead of clear flat numbers.
-%Xp/%Coin: I think both of these are pretty good and efficient. If you're grinding xp these small percentages and the max set bonus really start adding up. And stacking the coin percentages maybe even with the topgolf loss mitigation set bonus skyrockets your coin gains allowing you to be in credit even with a negative win % where usually you'd need a 55.5%+ winrate (due to wgt's "cut" in coin rooms). What doesn't make any sense is why the shoes are swapped.. generally Max is the xp apparel with xp set bonus, TopGolf is the coin apparel with coin set bonus but for some reason they either messed up with the shoes or swapped the stats on purpose which makes keeping the set bonus just awkward.
BUT for a lot of players including myself these hold absolutely no value, like actually meaningless... if you're lvl102+ you probably don't care about xp farming and unless you're getting started with building up your coins you don't need any multipliers because they're a resource with no value. As I said a 56% winrate is already enough to keep you in the green, and I don't wanna hoard even more coins for no reason. So I dunno, I just ignore these 2 when I look at apparel.
-Distance: In terms of usefulness this one is pretty clear but these 100 scales are a bit weird.. As far as I can tell every point represents a bit over 0.089% so for instance for the 291yd titleist: .089/100 * 291 = ~.26 per point * 100 points= 26 , 26+291=317. Can someone out there confirm that the 291yd Titleist driver with a maxed out epic swing edge hat reads 317yd for distance? Hard to imagine someone managed to get the epic hat to 10 but maybe..
Assuming this is correct you could reach an almost +9% distance at +100 and if we go by the rule of thumb for pro shop balls' distance rating of 1 dot = ~1%.. you're looking at 5-6% distance for some of the premium balls. Which means this apparel is pretty damn good in terms of the stat's "credit value". Obviously it only works on specific game modes, but still.
Personally I think both driver and 3 wood distance are best in class for hats and tops respectively. Forgiveness, meter speed etc.. can improve your game sure, but these are literally strokes gained from the back tees. Keep in mind the SE hat gains Rough PWR in the rare tier and the 3w distance top (M/SE) has Iron Spin built in, both of those can mess with your game.. especially if you have your stuff neatly mapped and whatnot, I play yolo style so I don't mind too much.
Irons and wedges distance are a different story, big scoring clubs don't wanna screw them more than we have to. Never tested iron distance since it's in the top section so it's competing with 3w distance. Wedge distance can be grabbed but I find it awkward and unnecessary.
Not gonna mention hybrids in any section, obsolete club
-Spin: I have no idea how to measure the degree of effect on this, not like the "ball system" in the pro shop is any better.. it could very well be the same percentage as in the distance scale. I wanted to get some shot shape data but the top tracer in the new version just refuses to cooperate with me so I'm gonna go off of feel and maybe we get some other opinions.
I play with the rock and I think this is helping, one thing's for sure I'm carrying 2-3yds less on fbs so that has to mean I have a higher apex and the ball does seem to stop better.. that's for the irons, the 3w haven't noticed much of anything tbh but I guess it's helping to a similar degree, when I have to hit an approach with that club I just close my eyes and pray so haven't been paying much attention.
Would've been nice to get something with wedge spin just for some fbs fun, see how hard you could zip some premium balls considering the free ball on 12+ greens is already ridiculous.. but oh well
-Meter Speed: Pretty straight forward, I like it on approach clubs because of the rock ball meter.. but I've seen the meter speed on those premium TMs and Titleists and I can imagine slowing that further could be counterproductive even. I'm avoiding it atm but it's because this is another thing you don't wanna mess around too much with and keep consistent. Faster and consistent is just better than having different slow meters that you keep tinkering with. Once again the change could very well be the 0.089% from the distance scale but hard to say.
Notice that this is a glove stat so you're pretty much choosing between Driver, Hybrid, Irons or Wedge with irons probably being the best one.
-Sweet Spot: Ugh this one... What does that even mean? I can think of at least 3 things:
a) Dings go superstraight instead of straight
b) Ding line is effectively thicker so if you hit a hair early or late it snaps to the ding
c) Pseudoforgiveness so when you hit close to the ding it behaves closer to a ding?
Considering the putter one is called "Sweet Spot Accuracy" I have to assume a) is most likely. Hard to say how much value that has if any, perhaps it can patch low level clubs with low precision? No idea honestly, hard to say how the scale operates again. But at least it shouldn't hurt or throw you off coming from an apparel-less round, no harm it's just there.
-Putter Precision: Sounds good doesn't it? Sounds like birdie, rolls off the tongue, not even Kiawah camera angles can beat you with this..No, I can't imagine this having any value. The putts you wanna make are closer to 15 footers than 100, and from those distances the starter club and the billion dollar golden putter are virtually equal. My 150ft St Andy's dinged putt is less likely to go offline by 1/50th of a cup? Cool.
-Putter Forgiveness: Probably one of the more interesting stats actually, it's hard to say how much of an effect it has but if it has any or even works with the distance scale percentages mentioned.. it is something. Personally I putt with different degrees of offding very often, this is the last thing I'd wanna change and just anything about the putt in general, no changes or inconsistencies thank you.
But there has to be pure ding putters out there that don't ever change their mind on strike or choose an offding line.. players who just set their line and go for a ding every single time, in that case this stat has to be nice surely. It doesn't throw you off cause you don't play with either side of the ding and in case you miss it could help drop a putt that'd otherwise catch an edge or something.
-Surface Power: And we arrive to what I think is the most confusing stat, I really want to find out exactly how this works but I don't really know how to start. Different surfaces affect a shot in many more ways than "it goes shorter", they also affect different clubs differently, hence why people map this stuff for the highest level of play instead of deriving rules of thumb.. Way to many factors, "power" doesn't describe anything, also I assume this would force some remapping for players who rely on that, depending on the magnitude of the effect.
-Does it simply make the shot go further with other parameters staying the same?
-Does it affect your apex less with longer clubs?
-Does it let you keep spin from some of these surfaces if you upgrade it enough?
-Does it allow some shots that'd otherwise be scuffed from thicker roughs etc?
-Does it simply turn the lie into "more similar to fairway" affecting all different factors to a degree?
What I can say for sure is it messes you up, I play by feel but for the most part you start kind of getting little routines for these lies.. I'm in some nasty stuff: just go to punch, go 1/2 clubs up should be decent, that sort of thing.. But now everything's off, this is doing something for sure.
It doesn't help that you can get this thing stacked up, e.g. both SE rare/epic hat and SE pants give this. This is all subjective recalling but I'm pretty sure I've ripped some ridiculous wedges from like 40-50% rough while having this stat. Usually for a wedge and somewhat thick rough I'd expect a bit less carry and perhaps some release if I'm choking down but I've sent balls 5+ yds past a flag with a wedge and it has to be this stat doing that.
Which brings another question.. if you get this multiplier high enough is it possible that you get a "cleaner"/more powerful and longer shot from that lie than the actual fairway?
Heck there's even a wording problem here.. does rough include deep rough? Is fescue included in brush? I assume sand includes all bunkers and hard sand? How about dirt, is it really only dirt or also that mulch thing maybe?
Ahhh so many questions
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These are all the things that I could come up with right now but I'm sure I missed some stuff.. Anyway thanks for checking the post and a special thanks if there's anyone out there willing to contribute some stuff.
Happy Holidays!