[Trexmaster]

TL;DR

There is far too much of an overlap between what finished, high level characters want to farm and what low level characters wanting to progress want to farm to level comfortably. Especially when the high level players are often incentivized to solo so as not to lose desired drops to other characters, as outside boss fights the bonus for having other party members (10% IDR) is negligible compared to the cost (1/4th murai gain + 25% per member chance to lose your item to another character, vastly increased fight time if others aren't ending/taking their turn immediately).

We have far too few items that can be crafted that are only obtained via the global drop pool.

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Why it sucks.

Here we are again. Trex complaining about how much they hate grinding, yet they do it anyways. Curious!

How far have we come since the last thread? Well, Dev gave all non Terra Flamma dungeons extra spawns (1 extra mob per 5 levels) in the 5-60 range. It helped a little bit for the earlier grind so I must concede we have made at least some progress.

But why am I making a whole new thread again?

The most recent update, the Dark Amplifier, introduced Dark Shards as a desirable currency which comes, primarily, from random mobs that spawn with a suffix called Wrapped in Darkness that guarantees a Dark Shard. Some mobs were given a 5% drop chance but as it stands it isn't lucrative to target farm these specifically for dark shards compared to farming content you can more comfortably clear and hope for the suffix to appear.

This is a problem in that we now have yet another incentive for high level players to be farming content far beneath them and depriving lower level players the means by which to progress because someone's hosing down all the easily farmable mobs for dark shards. This isn't a unique problem to this update, either. Before it was for the sake of farming random drops quickly since the drop table, by nature, does not care what the mobs are. So naturally power farmers will take whatever is fastest and easiest. Thus when you are levelling, you are often stuck with the content no one wants to do, that is slow and tedious. Making the already slow and tedious nature of grinding for levels even worse.

"But Trex" you say, "You can farm an LE out in about two hours in Lava Lake!". Yeah. If literally no one else goes there for two hours. Someone else is going to go there, almost always, likely for that reason if not to farm gunpowder/dark shards/random nine stars.

Of course, as touched upon in my prior thread, levelling isn't the only issue when it comes to grinding. What comes after. Item farming. Is made extremely tedious due to the absence of determinism in how one obtains the majority of items in this game. The vast majority of items come from the global drop pool, with a very small number made craftable. Not a single non-puzzle item added post Korvara (2022 Q2) has been made craftable. We were at least given new material kits for the new materials, that's about it.


How it can be better.

I've already made numerous suggestions, including making more difficult mobs like those in the Minotaur Labyrinth have a much higher if not 100% rate of Dark Shards to make them a desirable target for those farming for Dark Shards.

Ultimately, whatever provides levelling characters a path to progression that wouldn't be contested by already finished characters is what we're aiming for. How this manifests is up to Dev. Ideally we'd get something akin to the Badlands Arena where you can farm mobs that only award badges + experience so players can always access something for EXP without competing with players for mobs that yield drops.

As for items, it's pretty straight forward. Making more crafting recipes would help alleviate the issue of determinism when it comes to finding the items you want. It would create more desirable items in the market, and reduce people's compulsion to bank swathes of almost never desired items in the off chance someone might want an otherwise uncraftable item. Another suggestion I made in another thread was to have dropped 8-9-10 stars break down into material to make other items of the same rarity, so it sucks less to drop the undesired high rarity items. Since Raremetal stopped being special as soon as we got a vendor that just sold you 8 star items straight up.

Oh yeah. And it'd be great to get the crafting recipes we're still missing from G6. Such as those for the hand-slot items like Ghosthands, Green Gloves, and the Bands of <x> series.