Disclaimer: This guide will obviously not focus on the one-way methods of obtaining steel, like breaking pots in the Story Mode. You came here for a guide on how to farm steel, not get reminded of the various one-time grabs you probably already know about.
However, just in case you don’t know all the quick ways to get a load of steel yet, it’s really simple: Break all the pots in the Story Mode (if you need help finding them, go to this guide), complete the Story Mode on Hard or Realistic, and complete the Warrior Trials tutorials found in the Training menu (note: you just need to complete them, not 100% them.)
Apprentice Trials gives you 2000 steel, and Warrior Trials gives 1500.
Completing the story mode on Hard difficulty rewards 4000 steel.
This guide will also NOT waste your time by talking about orders. You should know by now that completing your daily and contract orders is by far your #1 source of consistent steel. If you’re not even doing your orders, you clearly aren’t very interested in acquiring steel.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the meat of the article: What do you play and how do you play, to get the most steel in For Honor?
General Breakdown
It’s important to realize that your performance in a match does impact how much steel you get, although it is not known how exactly this is calculated. It’s safe to assume, however, that the more Renown you score in the match, the more steel you are awarded, and we’ll work with that assumption for the purposes of this article.
Using this handy chart, we can conclude the following:
- Breach is the most steel you can get from playing 1 match, no matter your settings or the match duration.
- Duel is the least steel you can get from playing 1 match, no matter your settings or the match duration.
- Winning or losing has no impact on your score (although your personal performance does).
- Brawl has the highest steel per minute efficiency ratio, on average.
Breakdown and Analysis
So that would seem to answer the question. Wanna farm steel? Play Brawls. If you’re going purely off these numbers, that’s your best bet.
However, in my extensive experience, this chart has some problems. I routinely get around 150 steel for a single Breach match, no matter how long it was (which was usually 20 minutes, not 25), as long as I played well and had a positive K/D. The rest of the chart holds up fairly well, however.
So, if we adjust the steel per minute for my experience as a competent player with Breach, we’d see Breach at about 7.5, not 4. Not enough to overtake Brawl, but it’s something. So it seems Breach still won’t net you as much as Brawl.
However, this is where another element comes into play: matchmaking and queue times. Matchmaking in For Honor is notoriously slow no matter what platform you’re playing on (although I’ve heard it’s fastest on PS4 and slowest on PC, and obviously some regions are worse off than others in this regard). Some game modes obviously have more queue time than others (cough cough, Tribute), but in my experience, Breach and Brawl tend to have about the same.
In order to play Breach for an hour, assuming fast queue times, you only need to matchmake two, maybe three times. We’ll go with two and a half. To play Brawl for an hour, on the other hand (again with fast queue times), you’d need to matchmake around fifteen to twenty times. This is a huge deal; if you grind for steel using a game mode that doesn’t last very long like Brawl, you’ll spend a lot more time matchmaking than you will if you pick a longer game mode like Breach. This will, over time, lean the numbers heavily in favor of Breach in terms of steel-grinding.
But what if you skip matchmaking and just solo-queue with bots (with the matchmaking turned off)? That will immediately remove all matchmaking time, but you’ll get less steel per match (even less than you'll get with matchmaking PvAI turned on). It may well be worth it, however, given For Honor’s queue times (ESPECIALLY the ones for PvAI). But not all game modes are impacted equally by solo-queueing. If you refer back to the chart, Breach only loses about 25% of the steel rewards, while Brawl (and every other game mode) loses 50%. This skews grinding viability even further in favor of Breach, and means that if you solo-queue, you’re hurting yourself even more by playing anything else than you would just queuing up normally.
One quick note about Arcade: If you own arcade, you can try grinding steel there if you want, but in my experience, and from the research I’ve done, Arcade is wildly inconsistent with how much steel it doles out after completing quests. But if you’re going to grind in Arcade (which I don’t recommend), make sure to always choose the highest difficulty quest you can. The quests all take about the same time to complete (unless you run into a particularly stupid set of modifiers, like permanently bleeding against Shaman or a Jormungandr who knocks you down with his knockdown punish).
Conclusion
Simply put, Breach is your #1 game mode for farming steel, whether against players or bots. If you have friends to play it with, I highly recommend Breach with PVP. It will shorten queue times, improve your team’s cohesion and strength, and just be more fun in general. If you’re playing alone, fight bots. They’re much less miserable to fight after the CCU, and there are no queue times whatsoever, so if you want to play on a particular side, you just have to re-queue until you get what you want. Happy grinding!
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