for the last few months, EVERY breakthrough i have attempted has eaten at least two seals, sometimes as much as four at a time. this is in reference to lvl 100 and 120 artifacts, not 180 or 200....this is fornicating equine feces.....why don't you just send someone to my house to grab my wallet? if you're going to tell me its all random chance, then you need to check your RNG generator and make sure it isn't glitched? at least one out of ten ought to go through the first try, but that is not the case, every one has taken at least two, and i feel lucky getting off with that.
Two is honestly...a low amount. During the double XP week we have currently I was getting two Troll artifacts to 160 and 120 on an alt and I got VERY lucky with the breakthroughs on 120 and 140 for the first one but then ended up going through...an amount of Seals of Preservation that I don't want to mention (but the cost was less than buying one seal of completion) getting the second one to 120. RNG is RNG I'm afraid. You could have a 99% chance of breakthrough and still fail ten times in a row. It's not very likely to happen, but it is definitely possible. I'm not defending the system or anything like that, you definitely have the right to not be happy with it. I was getting frustrated myself getting that second artifact to 120 with all the seals I was going through, but honestly that was the worst run of bad luck I've had with the system so far. I usually don't go through that many.
I failed a breakthrough 7 times trying to rank an artifact to 100. I made a surprisingly polite post about it in comparison to how nuclear hot i was inside. For that reason i HATE artifacts and will never rank another to 100. Chances are it wont happen again....allegedly, but this game loves pulling away the football like lucy when charlie brown is about to kick it.
I learned to just purchase the Seal of Preservation for like 5 bucks. Saves a lot of aggravation and heartache.
I refuse to buy any more seals. Never again. It's a waste of money. As a result, I'm unlikely to rank my artifacts. This artificial difficulty added on to the real difficulty of grinding for catalysts is an insult to players. If that makes me a lousy player, so be it. Until there is an in-game way to get seals or they drop the breakthrough failure system entirely, no more ranking artifacts for me. And if it gets to the point where I can't play without my artifacts being ranked, that'll be what drives me from the game. As it is, every time I've used seals and failed multiple times in the past has made me leave the game for a time. This is one of only two things I actively HATE about this game (the other being feats in Time Capsules). The longer artifact breakthrough failures remain a thing, the less I want to play the game.
I agree with the breakthrough. To be honest, I spend more money then I should on seals of completion when I hit the 120 level. With a 40% breakthrough, I failed up to 4 times without one. I feel we are getting way too many artifacts, too many to keep up.
You don't need every artifact. You don't always need to switch to the "new" artifact. Find a set of artifacts you like, and that fit your play styles, then stick with them. Only changing artifacts on rare occasions. On my main, I had scrap and eye for both roles, with dead kings for dps and manacles for tank. This worked real well, but forced me to time pet usage and stay in one place and a dps. I switched before wv launched to be more mobile and better able to react to the situation. It's going to take something special to make me change those again, so I'll probably be sticking with them for a long time. As for breakthroughs, there's a link in my signature to help understand the probability of those. At rank 120, half of artifacts will take more than 4 breakthrough attempts. But even at 14 attempts, 1% will not have succeeded without a seal of completion. I made some guesses based on 2014 population data, and that 1% looked like as much as 2.16 million artifacts. Now, I'm not saying these success rates are fine. I just put that information together to help people make an informed decision. The 4th post in that thread has every artifact breakthrough, with the number of attempts before half of artifacts would breakthrough, and before 99% of artifacts would breakthrough, both without seals of completion. So it's good to reference that when preparing for a breakthrough to see what you are up against (and decide if you want to use a seal and which kind of deal you want to use).
On 2 of my alts, I had 4 failed attempts to upgrade my augments to 23 for WV dlc. The chance to succeed is 50%. This should basically be a coin toss, but 4x failed. Cmon! Since Artifacts are "extra" to our playing experience, I can understand the need to use seals to upgrade them. But since the Augments are part of our normal progression for the DLC, it should not require a seal to upgrade and just upgrade it. Stop nickel & diming your player base.
It's funny, I end up getting fails more often on the 60% breakthrough than the 40% (not ha-ha funny).
I absolutely agree on not switching Arts. I'm still using Tetrahedron on every DPS for example. Everything released after that is only equally good (and some not nearly as beneficial). Only time people should change is if something tremendously better than their current Arts is released, and that's proven to be really rare.
FYI - as far as Seals go, Seal of Preservation Pack of 4 costs 121 Marketplace Cash, while one Seal of Completion costs 450. So it would take almost 4 SoP packs (3.7 packs) to equal the cost of 1 SoC. So as long as you brokethrough using less than 14 SoP you would be paying less than buying 1 SoC. (hope my math's right) But the main problem here is that there is no way to get seals in-game. If they dropped, or if you could buy them for Source Marks, then this wouldn't cause any heartburn.
No real general problems with artifact breakthroughs. I have had decent luck with anything up to the 160 breakthroughs. Just for poops and giggles I wanted to test my luck on a 180 breakthrough and burned a little over a dozen SoPs doing that. Struck out... thats why when 180/200 is reached... SoC time. I have a few arts on a few alts that are sitting on 179 that I'll SoC'em when they have a sell on nth metal and seals etc etc.
If this is as big of an issue as you make it sound, use your monthly allowance of 500 marketplace cash on Seals of Completion. It's just how the artifact system was made. if you are spending money separate to your monthly allowance, I would always suggest buying Seals of Completion as oppose to Seals of Preservation.
