Update (8/30): Just 24 hours after season launch, Nexon has already written up a list of changes that will be made to the entire seasonal structure and Hailey farm, based on rather furious fan feedback. Among the changes:
- It will be much easier and faster to color match and occupy circles in the first mission and to find and utilize drone symbols in the second.
- Enemy mobs will be reduced and some enemy types will be eliminated.
- There will be a patch next week that will allow these missions to be played multiplayer instead of solo.
- Hailey material drops from these missions will be buffed.
- Negative modifiers that apply to Inversion Reinforcement upgrades will deleted and positives will be buffed.
- In the future, they are planned Focus Group Testing so these kind of issues don’t keep coming up.
These are good changes, but again, it’s changing everything top to bottom within a day, making players wonder how internal playtesting allowed this to be shipped at all. Thankfully Nexon is very reactive, but this does keep happening.
Original article is below:
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I was excited to jump into The First Descendant’s first official season launch on Thursday in order to work my way up to unlocking the new ice sniper hero, Hailey. After a lot of talking and some actual story missions and cutscenes, the path forward to grind for Hailey was revealed.
It is absolutely terrible. Probably the worst grind I’ve ever seen in the game, and I’ve gone after stuff with 3% drop chances.
The problem is twofold, mainly that you have to run a new kind of special incursion with new objectives in order to farm Hailey’s material, as she is not unlocked through Amorphous Materials like everyone else.
These new missions are terrible. They are only playable solo, and feature two memorization mechanics that are deeply unfun. And they make you do them three times in every mission.
- The first is standing on a platform, revealing colorful circles on the ground, and you must capture three of them that match colors on a door. All the while mobs will run around you and try to capture those zones too. Nexon just said they were they eliminating capture objectives people didn’t like in normal infiltrations, now they give you smaller circles you have to hold solo.
- The second kind of new infiltration is much worse. You have to roam around shooting gunk off of pillars to find symbols that match floating drones in order to protect yourself from a insta-wipe explosion on a two minute time. The gunk reforms almost instantly so you have to memorize the similar-looking symbols and their placement, and continue to do so as you wander around being mobbed as drones putter by. This is also how you remove the irritating boss’s immunity shield.
So, these are horrible to play. But the next problem is drop rates. There are 144 materials you need for Hailey, and you can only get a max of 12 per day. And they are not guaranteed, and I’ve seen people go multiple runs getting zero. I currently have 3 out of 144, and there is probably no account for duplicates once you hit max, either.
All of this is intolerable and very much seems like it’s meant to push players to simply spend $15 to unlock Hailey rather than participate in this interminable grind. However, it’s so bad and the community is complaining about it so much that it seems very likely Nexon will step in soon and change how bad it feels or how generous it is. If nothing else, they almost always listen to players and do stuff like that. As such, I am playing no more of these missions until something changes.
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