The Great Hatchling Hunt level 4 - where to go?

Hello Dragon Ladies and Lords! Today's post will be about choosing your path at level 4 of ongoing castle event. Now, as the wonderful DML Wiki team has already posted costs and elements needed for battles here, you are most likely able to calculate on your own, which way you should go for minimum total cost of opening all the chests. However, total cost isn't most important here. As it is level 4, with 400 Egglets pool, your main goal should be obtaining the key to move to next level, which will provide you with higher Egglets pools and will help you to progress the event faster. Of course, you can't know which chest contains the key, as it's random, but you can consider the expected value of Egglets cost for obtaining the key in different orders of opening chests and different path. Now, considering path and order choice, there are 2880 different options, so it's quite a lot and I can't imagine ordinary DML player who would calculate expected value of cost for every one of these option on his own. However, 2880 isn't really big number for computer and my invaluable Silent Grey Eminence has created computer program, that calculates expected value of cost for every single path and shows the best one.

As there are 7 fights on this map, in theory there should be 128 possible costs for each option, depending on which fights player can win. This can change the best route between players, depending on what dragon they have. However, we can simplify this a little bit: first fight that needs to be completed on every path allows you to bring any elements, so I will assume that you will win it. Then, the rest 6 fights can be divided into two groups: battles that allow you to bring water and plant dragons, and battles that allow you to bring plant, metal and energy dragons. I will assume that if you can win one battle with certain set of dragons, you will win other battles with those dragons as well. Thus, there are 4 important possibilities: you can be able to win all the fights, no fights or fights of one of those 2 fight groups. For every of that possibility, I've put best route on the map. You can see the maps below.

For players, who can win any battle

For players, who can't win any battle with element restrictions

For players, who can win only plant-water battles

For players, who can only win plant-metal-element battles:

Note:

I know that starting from chest 3 seems very strange, but it's only because of the way that map was drawn. When you look at costs, not distance on the picture, it starts making sense. I know also that it seems strange that 3rd and 4rth maps look so much different, as the path between chests 4 and 3 contains both battle types, so you may feel like if going or not going through there shouldn't depend on which one you are able to beat. However, it also changes the costs of getting to certain chests, and this is the reason for the differences.

Important: the paths I have shown are ones that gives you the best chance of getting good overall event score (for the reasons that I mention in the introduction), but not the cheapest ones. Once you get the key, progress the event, get the Petal Dragon and come back to get all missing Princess pieces, stop following my paths, and choose the cheapest ones instead.

Come back to my blog tomorrow for maps for level 5 :) Have a wonderful day at your Dragonlandia!