I am in the process of trying to build the best gear possible for farming specific areas. After getting the best gear, the only way to make it better is to get the right unique variants on it. So, if I am trying to make sure my weapon has IAS, damage vs specific monster types, or charge speed: VH or max, would it be a better option to keep using 1* UV tickets until I get one, or keep using 3* tickets.
The way I currently see it, is a 3* ticket is 11x more expensive than a 1*, but a 3* ticket guarantees that it will have 3 independent stats. In other words, for a 1* if I get damage vs fiend low, I would have to roll it again, but with a 3* if I have damage vs fiend low, the other two slots cannot be damage vs fiend so it increases my odds of getting at least 1 of the stats I want significantly. However, with the 1* they are cheap enough that I can just keep rolling them until I get 1 stat I want then roll a 3* holding that slot.
Any information or input is appreciated.
This question is asked occasionally. You might try a Google search for something like "UV ticket site:forums.spiralknights.com", without the quotation marks. But the right answer changed at some point, when Three Rings added the ability to keep some of your old UVs while trying for new ones.
The short answer is: Buy 1-UV tickets until you get a UV that you really like. Then buy 2-UV tickets, holding the one good UV that you already have, until you get a second UV that you really like. Then buy 3-UV tickets, holding the two good UVs, until you get a third UV that you really like.
The details of why this is the best strategy are not especially hard to understand, but they take a while to lay out --- especially because the specifics depend on which item you're using (helmet, sword, bomb, etc.), how many UVs you're going for (1, 2, or 3), and how drastic they are (+1, +2, +3, or +4). Basically, it comes down facts like this: A 3-UV ticket costs much more than three times as much as a 1-UV ticket.
For example, suppose that you want a CTR+3 or CTR+4 UV on a Brandish. A sword can have eight types of UVs, so suppose that you have 1/8 chance of getting CTR. Now, our data from crafting suggests that, when UVs happen, they are +3 or +4 about 1/8 of the time. And it's reasonable to assume that these chances are independent of each other. So your chance of getting CTR+3 or CTR+4 is 1/8 * 1/8 = 1/64, your expected number of 1-UV tickets is 64, and your expected cost is 64 * 20,000 = 1,280,000 crowns. (This "expectation" is a concept from probability theory. Think of it as the average. You might get lucky and require fewer than 64 tries, or you might get unlucky and require more than 64 tries, but 64 is "average luck".)
You might want to try buying that first UV from another player, though the Auction House or some other avenue. Players tend to undervalue their UVs, relative to the cost of getting them from Punch. For example, a CTR+3 Brandish might cost only 500,000 from the Auction House (I haven't checked in a while).
If you do end up using Punch to get some UVs, please record each try in this thread: which item, which ticket, which old UVs kept, and the result. We could always use more data on how Punch works, to better answer questions from people like yourself.