Idea to help the new player experience at the early mid game stage

[Klokwerkaos]

While I far from consider eidlons or other arcane hunting to be a challenge, many new players find it is far beyond their scope and thus, short of very large plat purchases, get very resigned about arcanes because they can't afford any, have none, and aren't geared for farming them.

This also creates a massive power gap between newer and older players that is a hump that seems insurmountable to many and leads to a lot of players dropping off the game at the 12-18 level bracket.

My suggestion to close that gap without adding any greater power level to the game would be:

Create a sub set of lower tier arcanes.  These are arcanes can mimic the bonus of another arcane but are a MK1 version, ie, arcane agility MK 1.

This creates no additional balancing necessary because these arcanes have aproximately 10% of the effect at 0 rank as a rank 1 regular version of the arcane, and when fully ranked up, would be equivalent to 1 rank 0 regular version of the arcane.

These arcanes take 10 to rank up instead of 21 (this is important, players should not be asked to grind 21 of these for a set at this stage) and they drop from world bosses post lua/second dream with maybe a 10% chance for it to roll on the MK 1 drop table (that is not taken away from other drops but is an additional roll, and then it rolls the table with the MK1 arcanes which will mimic the regular table but with MK 1 versions), with their first drop being included as part of second dream completion (which could be random or predetermined, but I'd suggest it's random, replays of this mission offer a 10% chance drop like other bosses).  This gets the player involved and teaches them to learn about arcanes as a standard earlier in the game, for which they will then discover other more powerful versions they will want and they can use the trash versions in the meantime.  This helps give the player focus at the early mid game stage, exposes them to a new system (arcanes) and helps close the massive power gap between older and newer players, but not to an extent where it invalidates prior player progression.  It also helps the player understand earlier that the way to progress is by replaying and farming older missions, not just for frames, but for everything.

Because these arcanes will be much weaker, incentive to farm them will be mostly left to earlier players as higher powered players will be better served by farming actual arcanes and not the MK1 versions, additionally, while players might accumulate these, they won't sell for much because of their massively decreased power level, nor will it much affect the regular arcanes, because the only people that will really want these are people that simply can't afford to buy/farm regular arcanes.

They should probably be sellable for maybe 2k credits or something like that, cheap but enough to make a difference to early game players if they should get duplicates beyond the first set.

these would be intended to be a temporary measure for players to get them involved in the arcane system, teach them that system, and help them bridge over into the next challenges.

These would not break anything in the game either as players can already pay to skip the grind entirely and that doesn't go away.  All this does is give a minor reward to players earlier and additional incentive to farm other base frames early on, plus the power they give is miniscule by comparison, but notable to a player that has none in this area.







 

[(XBOX)DA ZACHYZACHY]

Eidolons are meant to be tackled later on. The first eidolon can be tackled pretty easily by anyone who’s done the WW quest, and has a semi substantial build. Nothing special, just someone like volt, some corrupted mods, ect. Not that arcanes are necessary at all.
 

There’s plenty of ways of getting plat, relics are great early on. 

[(PSN)Stealth_Cobra]

Arcanes aren't really necessary (although they do make a huge difference). They also made huge strides in making them accessible with Scarlet Spear, which is going to return every now and then apparently. Also , many arcanes sets are actually quite cheap, even moreso now that their value has dropped due to everyone farming full sets in scarlet spear. Perhaps they could give a couple starter arcanes for free in a junction or something, just to let new players know these things exist.

[Klokwerkaos]

9 hours ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

Arcanes aren't really necessary (although they do make a huge difference). They also made huge strides in making them accessible with Scarlet Spear, which is going to return every now and then apparently. Also , many arcanes sets are actually quite cheap, even moreso now that their value has dropped due to everyone farming full sets in scarlet spear. Perhaps they could give a couple starter arcanes for free in a junction or something, just to let new players know these things exist.

I wasn't aware of a planned return, can you provide a reference link?

If this is accurate it would pretty much negate the need for any of this.

[BahamutKaiser]

Getting your arcanes yourself is obnoxious even for finished players, they should replace eidolon drops with exchange just like the event, maybe at a higher cost.

I feel bad for the new players, the shwak kick back is so annoying now, I'm glad it didn't interrupt me back in the day, just doing one tridolon for a friend was grating. If anything they could dramatically improve some of the weaker amps so new players can do the content attached to the progress, instead of being completely unapproachable so they don't even engage the content they're building towards til after they've progressed externally.