Okay, I would like to preface this post that it is probably a partial rant too. RnD since launch of it, (GU8 I believe?) has been somewhat lackluster. It was implemented in a way to min/max your character, but was held back by the spiraling need of constant crafting when you got a new piece of gear. Was also used to hear craft, which was really a difficult task for all the times we did have to do it. Where effort vs reward was skewed in a way that players just didn't do it. There have been consistent changes that resulted in it being useful then useless. We are back to useless with a twist, as it is also frustrating to boot. Not only does the only thing we have to craft be a complicated mess, it is also a massive mark sink and time consuming. What am I talking about? The generator mods from Flashpoint. 1) The mods are dropping like candy, but they are role specific again. This was a huge step backwards with wonderverse, that just got compounded with this DLC. At least with wonderverse and legion, we could physically earn the one we had and not craft them. Albeit, the bounty system was also a negative. 2) What we need to craft is mod plans that we buy to convert one type to another. But instead of having 3 plans to cover the 3 different color types, red yellow blue, we get 7 plans for each level. Each costing X amount of marks to craft up to the next level. Why?! With each of them requiring more to craft the better one. 3) Then there are the materials themselves. Which, in a way is simple, but way more time consuming. Catalysts cost 1 mark and you get 10. Great, but there are way too many types now? Do we really need a type for EVERY episode now? They all still cost one mark but they do the same thing. Then opening them is a problem, you need to open a number of them per craft that can be more than 10. And they only stack to 99. Then you have to use the dropped generator mod, and need a ton to boot, to craft the next type only to have to open those that you just crafted. OMG, my hand hurt after the 2 hours I spent to only be able to craft ONE 40.4 mod! (I crafted all, just that I only had enough materials to craft one completely.) 3) The UI is broken. Scrolling is a nightmare. You go to fast it makes it stop at a certain point, no where near where you want to be. The moment you hit craft, it refreshes the entire list and as long as you only want to craft a single type, you need to leave the menu and go back in and slowly scroll. This is made worse because we still can't archive anything and for some reason the crafting animation is slowed down and you have to wait until done with one to craft the next. Heaven help me, I don't want these feats that bad. Developers, RedFive, Charon, or whomever is in charge of this, please don't make the next episode have this. Please just go back to a random box that lets us choose, like in the the previous era. Also, please improve the system before adding a complex addition like this. It is really painful.
You're talking about the FP mods? If so, this is not new info. People have been hating on this mod setup since day 1 of the DLC. As far as the general RnD wonkyness...yeah...wonky indeed.
Yeah, I also remember posting about it when it launched, but I finally got around to working on it and still very frustrating.
I'm pretty sure that wasn't 41, but an inherent problem since archiving was introduced. I gave up on trying to archive anything.
Okay, I'm going to bring this up again. I just went through a 2 hour crafting session trying to utilize my dropped ones as well as buy ones to fit... I have 6 crafted now. UGH. This is by far the worst crafting element in the game.
The archiving appears to undo itself whenever they do some sort of more fundamental alterations to the game that aren't just run of the mill DLC's or game updates. My archiving had been in place for a while but came unstuck with this recent episode, takes a few minutes to archive it all again, but I've got way too much stuff in there to not do so, it' be chaos trying to do my day-to-day R&D with that mess in there
It took me a bit longer than a "few" minutes. I couldn't handle it yesterday and archived everything. It's funny when you see the "Archive" button's text start shifting to the left though and the more you archive the further it goes. When they first introduced archiving, there were a lot more plans and I remember getting it to almost off the left side of the screen.
Hmm, only takes a little bit for me, the only ones that become an issue are the tiers you then want to preserve some things in, but if you hide them you can continue down the list without having to scroll back through that category you're preserving (if that makes sense). I also use a controller (on PC) and can just press, I think triangle (going from memory) rather rapidly to just rush down through the list archiving everything.
RedFive and I actually talked about this on Friday and have a plan to make it more streamlined for future episodes. We liked the crafting aspect to it, but having so many different mods dropping, needing to collect them is rather fiddly. We want to let mods be salvageable into a single component that can let you upgrade the mods for that episode. The goal would be to not have more items for the system than augments or artifacts already have, these should be a little simpler.
Oh hell yea, thanks for listening to the feedback, when it first came out I was also concerned with how convoluted it was (despite in the end getting it all done) it's just so cumbersome. Improvements to streamline this and make it more user friendly would be greatly, appreciated. Thanks again.
Thank you for listening to our feedback. It is definitely a very complicated tedious and frustrating system. I finally figured out what to do, only to find out I didn't have enough. I'll be honest, the best really was the agnostic boxes that were in the BoP and older, as yes, it was random, but you could pick the one you wanted. If something can make it better than that, I'm all for it. The bounty system wasn't bad, but the farm was the problem, bit more enjoyable than the FP crafting system.
I dug the idea of crafting what I wanted. I miss that aspect of the game. But I also feel like until the R&D table interface gets some TLC, I never want to see crafting in the game again.
It would be really helpful if when crafting something you CAN craft a lot of, like soders or these mods, you had a way to pick a number. Hitting Square repeatedly is kind of a Pita as the animation ends up taking a long time over 100's of craftings. Same with opening the cat boxes....why these didn't come in boxes of 100 for 10x the price when we will need 1000's of them in the end makes no sense to me. I'm going to wear the X button out by the time I'm done.
'A few minutes' Yeah...like we have a few DLCs of content. I've archived these back on several toons. Even on the ones that don't have every plan like my main, it took 10-15 min. The interface is wonky and each one takes a few seconds to register then move to the next. Again, a better way would be able to collapse the whole tree and just archive the entire heading. Or better yet, leave the system as is, but how about we don't have to do it anymore? Next timme there is going to be a 'wipe' let's have everything default to 'archive' and we can go in and pull out the ones we want as active.
I like your idea of being able to do an entire tree, don't like the idea of having everything archive and then having to dig around in there to get out just the ones I want, I see that as equally counter intuitive
Yeah I have about 6 mods crafted so far... and can't recall last time I tried to craft more. That new system of crafting mods.... hate that system. Hope they never use it again.
What's to dig for? The top 1 or 2 exo upgrades, and whatever buff soders/consumables we are on, right? Make a lot of Enhanced Conqueror boots or Mid-nite back pieces do you? I know I made one of each....that's about it. But I'd take the tree option too. Collapse a tree, highlight and press triangle or whatever....confirmation "do you want to archive all the plans selected?'....yes/no, move to the next one.
