The first descendant
While I still enjoy The First Descendant, collecting characters and weapons, leveling them up, prestige them and pushing them further, there is one farm for collecting more expensive characters and weapons that isn’t necessarily difficult, it’s just deep, deep annoying.
That’s when you need Abyssal Void Fusion Reactor parts. This process is so tedious that I don’t want to do it at all, and I know I’m not alone in this. The steps for this are absurd:
- You have to raid a specific outpost on the map, one that has a five minute cooldown timer. The way to reset it is to warp to another zone and back through two loading screens, which might 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 high-end engrams you want, you’ll need to to have to silently invade the outposts, blow up 4 stations without being seen. This is effectively only possible with one character, Sharen, who can turn invisible, who you would need to farm to even start this.
- The process of sharing is exhausting in itself. You have to set the area to private, otherwise random people will come and disrupt your stealth. You have to dart in and out, breaking 1-2 stations at a time while you wait for your cooldown. Then you have to fight a enormous collection of enemies and bosses of varying difficulty, some of which are pretty insane, with a character who is probably the worst in the game at the moment who needs to be drastically beefed up to deal with many of these outposts. Ideally you should do this with a friend who stays behind and then helps with the actual fight once Sharen is done.
The first descendant
- Then, and only then, is there only a base 5% chance of getting the amorphous material you want. To increase that to 25%, you need to go around and take out unmarked stations everywhere the entire map. You’re lucky if there are 1-2 on the way to the outpost. So even a perfect Sharen run is probably more of a 1 in 10, 1 in 5 chance with the engram.
- Then you have to play an elemental wave minigame with a specific elemental character 3-4 times in a different part of the map, which will give you the currency you need to eventually get to the Abyssal Void Fusion Reactor. There you will often fight a very tough boss in hard mode, one that normally does not spawn extra enemies, so you cannot refill your ammo, health or MP.
- Then that amorphous material has an X amount of chance of actually getting the character/weapon piece you want. It’s often a not-terrible 38% chance, but it’s still worse than flipping a coin. Miss, and you have to do everything above again.
This is horrible. It’s five layers of RNG, plus the fact that you’re forced to use a bad character, which leads to pointless currency farming and fighting an exhausting miniboss.
What would I change?
- Remove the whole concept of Sharen infiltrations. No more stealth infiltrations. Let’s clear those with every character and drop the right amorphous material through that system. Reduce the timer to no more than two minutes to prevent the loading screen from hopping, which still gives the same result.
- Remove the entire elemental wave currency farm. It’s not hard, it’s just a completely pointless extra step.
- The Void Reactor boss can be tough, that’s for sure, but at least spawn a few enemies that can actually drop 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 ridiculously complicated. I hope it changes soon. Nexon is fast so maybe in the next patch this week to some extent? We’ll see.
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