Answer would depend on your targets. For simple comparison:

• Silver chests
  • You get more gear pieces per gems spent - at least 10 vs max 3 from golden chest per 500gems.
    This means, that as long as you don't have just any item in every available slot - choose silver chests.
  • You get approximately 50% item levels per gem spent.
  • You will always get some gold from those chests, which you might use to upgrade your champions a bit and push further.
    With this knowledge, you should keep them in your inventory till the point, when you're unable to push further and use them to progress a bit, which would result in more favor gained.
  • Overal higher chance to get shiny item per gem spent. While actual probability to win shiny item from any chest is the same (around 0.1%), with silver chests you're testing your luck 10 times vs single chance in golden chest per 500 gems. Remember though, that 10 chests won't give you 1% chance, just like 1000 chests won't give you 100% shiny. It's just more dice rolls and natural 20 is still far more probable.
• Golden chests
  • Only source of Epic equipment. This means that if you are targetting to get "full purple", you have to focus on golden chests.
  • You have 100% chance of getting at least Rare item. This is a huge boost over either Common and Uncommon, so after you get every slot geared with either of those from silver chests, your best bet is to open those, to get both Rare and Epic equipment in process.
  • Only source of Epic (Huge/Large) consumables, i.e. contracts and potions. If you want to maximize buff you're getting from using potions, you will need items of every kind of rarity.
  • Only source of bounty contracts. Not just Epic, only source for any kind of bounty contract. While both bounty contracts and silver chests drop gold, only contracts drop event tokens during events.

Some statistical info, quoted from steam store product page:

• Chance of a Rare equipment card in a Silver Chest is approximately 3.2%.
• Chance of a Rare equipment card in a Gold Chest is 100%.
  Chance of an Epic equipment card in a Gold Chest is approximately 12%.
  To mitigate bad luck, a system exists to guarantee at least one Epic equipment card within every 10 Gold Chests.
• Chance of a Shiny equipment card in a Silver or Gold Chest is approximately 0.1% per chest.

To sum it up, if you are focusing on getting gear only (leaving gold and consumables behind), first you should focus on silver chests to get an item for every slot (any rarity). Then, switch to golden chests to get at least full Rare (obviously with some Epics). When that is done, slow grind starts, as if you're unlucky, you will need 10 chests for single Epic item, so you can either keep going for golden chests until you will see only purple equipment slots or go 50:50, or whatever rings your bell. There is no simple answer what you should do at this point mainly because you get more than just equipment from those chests.

After you get to full Epic status - go for silver chests only (remember, that's if you only care about equipment levels on core champs). Both kinds of chests offer you Blacksmith Contracts as well, to help you increase item levels further, but there is not much of a difference in how many levels you will get through contracts from either kind of chest. Value of contracts gained per gem spent should be about the same.

You SHOULD start with these two:

• Starter Pack ([Razer] , [Alienware, lvl 2+])
• Celeste's Starter Pack ([Steelseries] , [Alienware])

After those, if you're really sure that you want to spend money - buy familiars. There's never enough.

Why not Champion DLCs? You will easily gear them up without those DLCs. It will make your grind a bit longer, but if you will really play this game to complete it in 100% then you have at least a year of playing as more and more content is being released. No need to be in a hurry.

If you wonder if Founder's Pack DLC is worth it - it is (has familiar in it), but it's expensive and offers an interesting weeklong buff, that you won't be able to fully utilise as a new player.

Events are time-limited campaigns, that let you unlock new champions and significantly boost your favor through favor conversion. Many people ask, what happens, when event ends. For you it basically means those four things:

1. you loose all unspent event tokens (currency used to enter event adventures),
2. you can no longer enter event adventures (until another event starts),
3. you can convert gained event favor to one of your permanent campaign favors,
4. forced favor conversion timer (set for 1 week) starts counting down.

You will find more on those points below.

Another popular question is whether one should use tokens to buy event golden chests or pay for free play entry? Answer is simple - if you have the time, always choose free plays. For 10,000 tokens you can buy only single golden chest. On the other side, you can enter 4 free plays. From 4 completed free play runs you will also get at least 1 golden chest and 3 more chests, either silver or golden. One plus something is always more than one.

As I wrote above, you can no longer start new adventure (free play), but you don't get kicked out of the adventure you've started before event has ended. There is also no time limit for you to complete this run (maybe a year long time limit, because at this point event will be restarted).

Favor you've gained during event is converted to one of your permanent campaign favors based on this simple formula:
favor_boost % = 10 × log₁₀( event_favor )
If you're not good with math, let me make it easier for you. If you display the amount of event favor in scientific notation (keyboard key Y, or change that in settings), you will see a number like this X.XXeYY. Take exponent (i.e. the YY), multiply it by 10 and this is approximation of your favor boost expressed as a percentage, e.g. 1e12 event favor would give you 120% boost to one of your main (non-event) favors.
This whole conversion is a percentage based bonus, so the more base favor you have, the more favor conversion would give you. Knowing that, you should try to increase your base (Trom, Kelemvor ...) favor, before you do the conversion.

There is a time limit, after which aforementioned favor conversion will be forced. This time limit is 1 week after event ends. However, it is not a strict one. It applies only if you've already left your final event adventure run. Favor conversion won't be forced until you will complete this last run.

This game if heavily based on Random Number Generators (RNG). In some cases, we have official information about chances for some events to occur. To mitigate bad luck, pity timers got introduced to this game. Those let you be sure, that after stream of bad luck of certain length, a successfull event will occur.

For now, there are only two pity timers. Check this table to learn more about them.

Feature	Epic item PT	Golden event chest PT
Short description	Ensures getting Epic equipment from Gold Chest of any type, at least from every 10th chest.	Ensures getting Golden event chest from event free play run, at least every 4 runs.
How it works?	Count down timer, counts from 10 to 1. Illustrates number of chests still needed to open to get Epic item.	Count up counter, counts from 0 to 3. Illustrates how many Silver Chests you've got since last Gold one.
Starting value	4	0
When it resets?	On success
Chance of success without PT (according to CNE)	12%	33%
Shared or separate?	Separate for each chest type	Separate for each champion/chest type

Conclusions, after reading above table, should be as follows:

• To become full Epic on core champions, you will need, at maximum bad luck, 10 times more chests than the amount of missing Epic items.
• To fully gear up an event champion (make it full epic) you will need to get at most 54 champion specific event Golden Chests, 3 of which you will get from event adventure variants, 1 more can be obtained from chest code given away on official stream. This leaves a total of 50 chests to get from free plays. Again, with maximum bad luck, you will need a total of 200 free play runs to get those.
• In case of weekend chests, you always get 1 free from the newsletter's chest code, so buying the cheapest chest pack (3 chests) must give you at least single Epic item. That's because initial value of the PT for each new chest type is 4.

It is also being frequently asked about, but from the official information we can say that there are no more pity timers:

• No pity timer on getting shiny item from chest. Just a probability of around 1‰.
• No pity timer on boss dropping a chest (actually in the data there is some counter, but it's hard to tell what it's purpose is).
• No pity timer on Time Gate Piece being dropped by killed boss. Just a chance of 1/20 = 5%.