Shared focus pool distribution.

[TheMostFrench]

I had a thought about the focus system after reading a feedback thread about weapon use - People made the point that there are a lot of weapons which are the same, many go unused because the 'best' weapon with the strong meta gets used e.g Atterax has a powerful slash build, Soma used to be the best automatic rifle.

I am at MR23, I've mastered nearly every weapon and frame, so now the longest grind ahead is maxing out focus schools. Farming focus requires you to put a lens on an item, and it can generate focus once it is at level 30. Now the only way to farm focus is to use that item, so there is no reason to use anything else.

My suggestion is that once you unlock focus trees any excess affinity from a mastered item will go into the shared focus pool which can be spent in any school (the affinity conversion rate would be lower than a standard lens). The shared pool can distribute out to specific schools or spent on focus capacity, while items with lenses will immediately convert that affinity to that specific school just like it does now.

Now you can farm focus at a slow rate with any mastered item, but can still use lenses to farm it at an increased rate for specific schools. The goal is that now you can make some kind of 'progress' with whatever mastered item you like instead of getting to level 30 and throwing away affinity. Naturally there will always be some frames and weapons that do a better job than others, but at least using a specific focus farming build won't be a pre-requisite for progressing through the schools.

[--Aegis--MR9]

Farming focus with lens is very un-efficient and it will probably take you years before you can max all schools plus unlock passives. You should farm Tridolons instead and you will max all focus schools insanely fast. Goodluck.

[Loswaith]

There really isn't any reason for focus not to be just one pool now (arguably there never was, short of artificial gating).  Gains from the Eidelons essentially are a generic pool that doesn't require a lens, and in many cases (once you can do multiple a night) it can be far better than the default way despite them being designed as a bonus earning system.

Additionally buying pool ranks are also essentially from a generic pool, given that it doesn't matter which school you use to pay for them all schools benefit.

Thus a good half of the focus system is already generic, other than the basic earnings/lenses for whatever reason.  Any lens could give bonus to the generic pool, though a nice feature could be that if you are using the school matched to the lenses used a small bonus is gained as well (I'm fairly sure no one honestly thinks focus gains are too fast as it currently is).

[Steel_Rook]

I've said it before and I'll say it again - merge all of the Lenses into a single one and just let us pick which Focus School we're gaining Standing for. That way, a Lens - especially an Eidolon Lens - becomes a permanent non-removable upgrade to a weapon the same way a Catalyst or Gravimag is. That makes the cost of investment in getting one for all of my good gear worth it. Or, yeah - go the distance and just make all Focus generic. Let all of the Focus we generate from all of the Lenses on all of our gear go to a shared pool, which we can then distribute to the Focus School of our choice.

Generally speaking, I want to allow people to level up each School "a little bit" and have options to play around with, rather than being locked into a single Focus School due to the cost of switching Lenses. It's a massive grind seemingly for the sake of having a massive grind

[Birdframe_Prime]

The reason that Focus schools do not share their pools is to ensure that only getting one type of lens is not enough. It's to ensure that even a completely min-maxed player needs to get two of each type in order to blitz through their Daily and move on to Eidolons.

I say this because it was proven that without Eidolons, if a player of MR23 min-maxed and bought a booster, using the fastest Affinity gaining methods currently in the game (to the extent of levelling Naramon first to get the Affinity boost for Melee usage as well), it's possible to complete Focus in less than 48 hours. Not one school. To completely max it out.

That's why the Daily cap is so low, (somebody on MR 23 has 365,000 points per day meaning they should need three days to unlock one of the million point Waybounds) and why the Eidolon Hunts are so important.

If you trade for the ten Eidolon lens blueprints, and grab the relevant two of each lenses that build the Eidolon Lens for your specific school, the biggest grind is the Capacity, which you can pay for with any School's Focus points, and is over 12million on its own.

Without Eidolon farming you can do that in 33 days. If you complete a single Tridolon hunt will give you an additional 90k on top of your Daily, so a single Night with a good team will get you 270k which brings your Daily acquisitions to 635,000 or under 2 days to unlock a Waybound and drops your time down to 19 days.

Using that method you can max a school out instead, with a maximum of 92 Capacity for the biggest school (Unairu) and a grand total of 8million points required to max it and the Waybounds out, including two Brilliant Eidolon Shards for those, you can complete the largest School in the game in 13 days.

Meanwhile you're also levelling the Quills just... you know... passively. To get access to some fun Arcanes and some of the best Amp parts. 

Now... on to the question of the slotted Weapon and Frame: does this force you to use one frame and one weapon in order to gain your Daily Focus?

Yes. Yes it does, if you really, really want to be only getting the minimum amount of Lenses you need in order to get this done fast. You can slot multiple frames with them if you want to have fun with this, but the min-max way says 'yes'.

But guess how long that can take you to gain your Focus and start doing something else? Even without a Booster, players are telling me repeatedly that they can just go to Sanctuary Onslaught and do it in a single run. Others tell me that a Silence Banshee can run Adaro or Kappa a half dozen times to reach Cap in twenty to thirty minutes.

Then it's just the single Night on the Plains, which is easy with a recruited Squad and you're good to go.

My point in all of this?

My tl;dr?

Shared pools are not necessary because there are ways to ensure that the entirety of Focus can be completed in less than two months of play and that on the Daily play you have under an hour needed to exceed your daily Cap by two thirds to help with that.