While I am still enjoying The First Descendant, collecting characters and weapons, pumping them up, prestiging and pushing them further, there is one farm for the collection of higher end characters and guns that is not necessarily hard, it’s just deeply, deeply annoying.
That would be when you need to get parts from Abyssal Void Fusion Reactors. This process is exhausting to the point where I just don’t want to do it at all, and I know I’m not alone in this. The steps for this are absurd:
- You need to invade a specific outpost on the map, one that is on a five minute cooldown timer. The way to reset it is to warp to a different zone and back again through two loading screens which may knock that timer down a bit.
- A normal amorphous material from these outposts has a 20% drop chance, so 1 in 5 runs. But for the higher end engrams you want, you have to invade the outposts silently, blowing up 4 stations without being seen. This is effectively only possible on a single character, Sharen, who can go invisible, who you’d have to farm up to even start this.
- The process with Sharen is exhausting by itself. You have to set the area to private, lest some random come and mess up your stealth. You have to dart in and out breaking 1-2 stations at a time waiting for your cooldown. Then you have to fight a huge collection of enemies and bosses of varying difficulty, some being kind of insane, with a character who is arguably the worst in the game right now and needs to be dramatically powered up to deal with a lot of these outposts. Ideally you should be doing this with a friend who hangs back and then helps with the actual fight once Sharen is done.
- Then, and only then, there is just a 5% baseline chance to get the amorphous material you want. To up that to 25%, you need to go around and shut down unmarked stations all around the entire map. You’ll be lucky if there’s 1-2 on the actual way to the outpost. So even a perfect Sharen run is probably more like a 1 in 10, 1 in 5 chance at the engram.
- Then, you have to run an elemental wave minigame with a specific elemental character 3-4 times in a different part of the map which gives you the currency you need to finally get to the Abyssal Void Fusion Reactor. There, you’ll fight often a very tough boss in hard mode, one that does not usually spawn any additional enemies so you cannot refill your ammo, health or MP.
- Then, that amorphous material has an X amount chance to actually get the character/gun piece you want. It’s often a not-terrible 38% chance, but it’s still worse than a coinflip. Miss, and you have to go do all of the above over again.
This is awful. It’s five layers of RNG on top of being forced to use a bad character, leading into a pointless currency farm and fighting an exhausting miniboss.
What would I change?
- Delete the entire concept of Sharen infiltrations. No more stealth infiltrations. Let us clear those with any character and drop the correct amorphous material through that system. Lower to reset timer to no more than two minutes to avoid loading screen hopping that accomplishes the same thing anyway.
- Delete the entire elemental wave currency farm. It’s not hard, it’s just an absolutely pointless extra step.
- The Void Reactor boss can be tough, sure, but spawn at least a few enemies that can drop actual ammo, MP or heals. Even the giant Void boss fights do that.
Even with all these changes there are still multiple steps and layers of RNG, getting the amorphous material and then getting the actual part once you turn it in. This is how most other farms work, but this one is stupidly convoluted. I hope to see it change soon. Nexon is fast, so maybe in the next patch this week to some extent? We’ll see.
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