Steel Essence Acquisition Nerf after acolyte update 29.5

[TopSpeed]

 

 

Hello Tenno and  everyone, I'm TopSpeed and i'm playing for 7 years ( I know I'll get a life, I have a kid ….) 

 

now….

usually not open a lot of post only if i think something is have to  be changed 

after the update 29.5 Steel Essence drop from acolyte in Steel path, and can no longer be from Eximus unit.

 

This change affects all players who want to farm Steel Essence in endurance run and want to test their gear and frame.

 

This change affects a few things.

 

first it affect veteran players who want to have an endgame farming experience 

Second, it affects the amount of Steel Essence you can Acquire per minute on average.

 

also take away the fun for staying long in survival and wait for 5 min for getting just one acolyte, that by the way we one shot any way no hard.

 

A FIX suggestion

 

1. Make Steel Essence Daily drop 1 or 2 more per run. 

2. Also make the acolyte more hard and drop more Steel Essence base on progress of the for endless mission, every 5 or wave or a cycle ( Survival, defense , distribution, Interception ) the acolyte will be harder and cycle and will have higher chance to drop more Steel Essence , also after 20 - 25 minute make 2 acolyte to spawn will be grate , and after an hour as a bonus make acolyte and shadow Stalker spawn.

3. If shadow Stalker is spawn by chance please make him drop Steel Essence

4. Make some of the Eximus unit like buffed one a chance to drop Steel Essence also make them resistant to any crowd control ability or and stun or stagger , to not promote Viver Incident style game play ( a CC macro Gameplay )

 

Also if you guys have a better suggestion that i have for the fix and also keep our new END GAME fresh it will be welcome so please let me know.

 

TopSpeed singing out.

 

[Traumtulpe]

Look, the whole thing was an accident. DE had no clue what would happen when they made Eximus drop Steel Essence. And then they had no choice but make drop chance booster (and mission modifiers) affect Steel Essence as well (people were getting their pitchforks).

You got too much Steel Essence. 50x as much as intended. I know you tasted blood, and got addicted to Kuva, but I'm afraid the withdrawal is inevitable.

[-Kittens-]

Pretty much. And there's no way in hell  DE is going to allow umbral flooding given that it can be put on melee weapons.

[(PSN)Hikuro-93]

To me it boils down to the following:

- Quite clearly, DE did not intend for players to be able to farm SE the way they did. That's pretty much why despite having another 100 levels added onto enemies Eximus Units, which are supposed to start appearing often at level 15 or so, aren't swarming SP missions right from the get go, and we must stay for extended periods of time, in hard mode, in order to get good eximus spawn rates.

- DE underestimated either the capacity or will for players to  reach that far into Steel Path in order to get those SE rates.

- DE was dead wrong in their predictions about their players' stubborness and creativity (suprise! /s), because not only players can reach those levels, but they also absolutely will. Rewards are everything in this game - at least for the average player of today - let them be reminded.

 

So while a suggested fix is good, I doubt DE will make SE gains any less restrictive/controlled.

[Wyrmius_Prime]

7 minutes ago, (PSN)Hikuro-93 said:

To me it boils down to the following:

- Quite clearly, DE did not intend for players to be able to farm SE the way they did. That's pretty much why despite having another 100 levels added onto enemies Eximus Units, which are supposed to start appearing often at level 15 or so, aren't swarming SP missions right from the get go, and we must stay for extended periods of time, in hard mode, in order to get good eximus spawn rates.

- DE underestimated either the capacity or will for players to  reach that far into Steel Path in order to get those SE rates.

- DE was dead wrong in their predictions about their players' stubborness and creativity (suprise! /s), because not only players can reach those levels, but they also absolutely will. Rewards are everything in this game - at least for the average player of today - let them be reminded.

 

So while a suggested fix is good, I doubt DE will make SE gains any less restrictive/controlled.

DE knows exactly how far people are willing to go based on how much people complain about lack of endgame content, high levels enemies and such. The tradebans people received for going deep into Steel Path endurances runs arent exclusive to the game mode, those have happened in normal star chart runs as well. What they do not understand is how their own game functions. Regular missions barely spawn any eximus units if any at all. On the flipside the eximus units reach near 100% spawn chance on endurance runs. They didn't put any thought into Steel Path at all, they didn't even take a moment to think about how their own game functions. They pushed Steel Path out way too early amidst the enormous content drought we've had for ages before the Heart of Deimos update. DE cannot underestimate, be dead wrong or intend players to do something if they never even thought about these things in the first place.

Now, 4 months later, they are finally doing changes to the game mode that should have never been released so damn early and unfinished.

[Maziani]

Fandom wiki says that acolytes should spawn every 5 minutes, they don't. Wiki says that multiple acolyte spawns should be possible (multiple sequential spawns per mission just by spending longer in the mission.) I've never seen them.

A player who could do endless missions is less likely to engage with that content when the reward is significantly lowered.

[-BM-SniperKitten]

Hey!

I can understand people being upset. I really can.

I agree that Steel Essence farms suck now. Like, epically suck. But that's only cause I have the perspective of a veteran who used to get insane amounts with very little effort.

Yep, Acolyte spawn rates are bugged. And we get too little per incursion mission.
We stayed for almost 15 minutes in a mission waiting for that damn Acolyte to spawn, but we got too impatient and left.

You want a fix?
Hmm... OK... What about this?
A possible fix would be to make Acolyte spawn once every minute or so. That way people would be happy and chill, cause they'd have plenty of Acolytes to slay. Perhaps your buddy might be able to farm some of those sweet Acolyte mods too.

Also, would be nice if they'd make the Acolyte spawn that way in survivals too. A cool mechanic would be if Steel Essence drops would grow over time. Like give 1 Steel Essence first time you kill it, then 2 the next time, then 4, then 8, then 16... essentially doubling the rate for every kill. But you also make the Acolyte have 100% HP first time, 200% HP second time, 400% HP third time, then 800%, then 1600%... essentially doubling their HP after each time you kill it. Making it harder and harder to kill.
(*whispers* Shhh! Don't tell DE we'll still 1-shot them when they reach HP cap) ❤️

Good luck fixing this one DE! ❤️

[Cerikus]

2 minutes ago, -BM-SniperKitten said:

-snip-

I think the rate of aquisition of SE is very reasonable now. What should be changed is the probability of acolyte spawning. I thing it should be guaranteed that they spawn every 5 minutes, wave, etc., because that is not the case sometimes.

Also..

4 minutes ago, -BM-SniperKitten said:

Essence first time you kill it, then 2 the next time, then 4, then 8, then 16...

This is a terrible idea. This number sequence rises so quickly, you would get 2047 SE in an hour but 8388607 SE in 2 hours.

[-BM-SniperKitten]

21 hours ago, Cerikus said:

I think the rate of aquisition of SE is very reasonable now. What should be changed is the probability of acolyte spawning. I thing it should be guaranteed that they spawn every 5 minutes, wave, etc., because that is not the case sometimes.

Also..

This is a terrible idea. This number sequence rises so quickly, you would get 2047 SE in an hour but 8388607 SE in 2 hours.

Yeah. I know it's terrible. Just wanted to see if someone would notice it :P
Better would probably be it be increasing at a rate of n+1 for every time you kill the Acolyte.
So it would be something like this: First kill = 1SE, 2nd = 2SE, 3rd = 3SE... and so on.

Or if you want a different logical view:
1/2 n (n + 1)=

⁞
and so on...
So the 10th time you kill the acolyte you'll have a total of 55 SE and at 15th kill you'll have 120.
But you'd have to stay for an insanely long time to reach kill number 15. Especially if 15 minutes per spawn is intended and not a bug.
In that case you'll reach the 15th kill after 225 minutes. Or 3h 45m.

[Cerikus]

13 minutes ago, -BM-SniperKitten said:

Yeah. I know it's terrible. Just wanted to see if someone would notice it :P
Better would probably be it be increasing at a rate of n+1 for every time you kill the Acolyte.
So it would be something like this: First kill = 1SE, 2nd = 2SE, 3rd = 3SE... and so on.

Or if you want a different logical view:
1/2 n (n + 1)=

⁞
and so on...
So the 10th time you kill the acolyte you'll have a total of 55 SE and at 15th kill you'll have 120.
But you'd have to stay for an insanely long time to reach kill number 15. Especially if 15 minutes per spawn is intended and not a bug.
In that case you'll reach the 15th kill after 225 minutes. Or 3h 45m.

This would be more reasonable.  I am affraid it would promt people to do long runs again to farm the 100th acolyte for 100 SE tho. :/

[NecroPed]

I'm one of the people who didn't like SE drops before and am happy with the changes now so take note. But, if there is a problem with the rates of SE then I think the best solution is to make the acolytes spawn in packs as the missions go on longer. Capping at all acolytes (or certain amount and adding shadow stalker perhaps?) and rotating from the start with one acolyte. 

And as a secondary possible solution, a bonus for completing all daily alerts each day. As it is now the rewards for the alerts are quite close to that of an acolyte and I can understand if people would rather do a 10 minute game for a couple acolytes over an alert for a mission they don't like. But, a bonus for all dailies would give incentive to completing all alerts, while also giving a little extra SE. 

[TopSpeed]

13 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

Look, the whole thing was an accident. DE had no clue what would happen when they made Eximus drop Steel Essence. And then they had no choice but make drop chance booster (and mission modifiers) affect Steel Essence as well (people were getting their pitchforks).

You got too much Steel Essence. 50x as much as intended. I know you tasted blood, and got addicted to Kuva, but I'm afraid the withdrawal is inevitable.

I understand, i ask for a compromise both world ... casual and hard core farming, making Eximus/acolyte  not effected by CC can increase the hard of the farm and not promot gameplay like AFK khora, at list find a balanced  

[TopSpeed]

5 hours ago, -BM-SniperKitten said:

Hey!

I can understand people being upset. I really can.

I agree that Steel Essence farms suck now. Like, epically suck. But that's only cause I have the perspective of a veteran who used to get insane amounts with very little effort.

Yep, Acolyte spawn rates are bugged. And we get too little per incursion mission.
We stayed for almost 15 minutes in a mission waiting for that damn Acolyte to spawn, but we got too impatient and left.

You want a fix?
Hmm... OK... What about this?
A possible fix would be to make Acolyte spawn once every minute or so. That way people would be happy and chill, cause they'd have plenty of Acolytes to slay. Perhaps your buddy might be able to farm some of those sweet Acolyte mods too.

Also, would be nice if they'd make the Acolyte spawn that way in survivals too. A cool mechanic would be if Steel Essence drops would grow over time. Like give 1 Steel Essence first time you kill it, then 2 the next time, then 4, then 8, then 16... essentially doubling the rate for every kill. But you also make the Acolyte have 100% HP first time, 200% HP second time, 400% HP third time, then 800%, then 1600%... essentially doubling their HP after each time you kill it. Making it harder and harder to kill.
(*whispers* Shhh! Don't tell DE we'll still 1-shot them when they reach HP cap) ❤️

Good luck fixing this one DE! ❤️

Sniper i think my fix is a bit more light and DE my accept this change and not go all the way , i dont think every minute is a good fix, it need to be realistic 

[TopSpeed]

12 hours ago, Maziani said:

Fandom wiki says that acolytes should spawn every 5 minutes, they don't. Wiki says that multiple acolyte spawns should be possible (multiple sequential spawns per mission just by spending longer in the mission.) I've never seen them.

A player who could do endless missions is less likely to engage with that content when the reward is significantly lowered.

100% true my friend 

[XaoGarrent]

13 hours ago, Traumtulpe said:

Look, the whole thing was an accident.

You and DE don't comprehend the concept of "happy little accidents" apparently.

It's a real shame. There are quite a few frames that are garbage or mediocre on the normal starchart that really shine in Steel Path, but it's almost impossible to get groups of any sort in Steel Path now that the only good farm it had has been nerfed into the ground, in favor of one shot dailies that mostly last a couple minutes to complete.

[VoidArkhangel]

hace 14 horas, TopSpeed dijo:

first it affect veteran players who want to have an endgame farming experience 

DE clearly said that SP was not intended to be endgame.

hace 14 horas, TopSpeed dijo:

Second, it affects the amount of Steel Essence you can Acquire per minute on average.

You get more essence early on the mission wich for the ones that have little time to play is a bless

hace 14 horas, TopSpeed dijo:

also take away the fun for staying long in survival and wait for 5 min for getting just one acolyte, that by the way we one shot any way no hard.

Correction, it takes the reward from doing this missions not the fun and the eximus can be killed in one hit too so nothing changed at all

hace 14 horas, TopSpeed dijo:

also after 20 - 25 minute make 2 acolyte to spawn will be grate

This would be great, Violence clearly says "We will persist" and Angs says "We will yet find a way" so this would make a lot of sense

 

Stalker needs a rework but would be pretty if the hunters had a chance to drop 1 or 2 essence but what would be better is a chance to get x essence from rotation rewards much like vitus essence.

[-BM-SniperKitten]

I think I understand DE won't let acolytes spawn once every minute no matter how fun that would be. Imagine Acolyte Party! <3

What we really need is just a reliable way of farming Steel Essence. If that reliable way doesn't suck, it would be awesome too.

The best way I think would be if we made steel essence drop in miniscule numbers at the first few waves of endless missions. But the longer you stay the better the reward. So if you stay for a long time, the wait will be worth it.
This reward table would work great for both Defence, Interception, Survival

Picture from: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2B2%2B3%2B4%2B5%2B6%2B7%2B8%2B9%2B10%2B11%2B12%2B13%2B14%2B15%2B...%2Bn

So at rotation C which would be wave 20, you'd accumulate a total of 10 SE. This doesn't seem like much and I totally agree it would be pointless to stay unless things got better. But if you're patient and hold on until the next rotation C or wave 40 you'd have a total of 36 SE, which is significantly better. Kind of worth it, maybe?
Now imagine you stay all the way until wave 75, and get a total of 120 SE, would that be worth it? Maybe. With optimal killing squad setup this might be possible in around 150 minutes. or 2.5 hours. Not sure if you think that's worth it.

Sure it wouldn't be as good as 30 waves of SP on Odin prior to nerf (which yielded 250 SE btw) in about 2h 23m:

But at least it's something. And I think if people have the balls to stay for longer, it might even be better than when Odin was a thing.

At survival it would be kind of similar, every 5 minutes you get a reward. So 1SE at 5m, 2SE at 10m, 3SE at 15m, 4SE at 20m, ... and so on.
at 75 minutes you'd get 15 SE and accumulated a total of 120SE. That would be pretty good imo. Totally worth it and I'd even do it solo to avoid all the silly host migrations we've been having to deal with lately.

If this ramp up of rewards over time doesn't seem appealing to you, then I'm truly sorry, but I don't know what I can do for you, Sir. XD

[TheLexiConArtist]

In essence (ha) what the playerbase did was a soft exploit of the game to reach a state of the 'haves' and the 'have-nots'. Some also did a hard exploit on top of that.

The rate of acquisition was never meant to be so large. Or so small.

It was a design black-hole that tainted the currency forever, and that's why we now can't have multi-buy on the weekly offerings. People who were prepared to tolerate mindless whipping for hours at a time are sitting on multiple thousands, and people who didn't or couldn't, had maybe 100 total. Did the exploiters 'earn' buying ten Umbra Forma for every 1 bought by the rest? Nope. So we all get to buy just one.

 

They do need to come back and make the spawns of Acolytes a bit more reliable:

1. Shifting the window of opportunity to a sooner/shorter range mostly, but with appropriate delay so the next window is by mission time total, not by last kill which introduces shortening spawn delay variance over time.
2. Pure Archwing missions should probably not qualify for the Daily Incursions as Acolytes naturally cannot spawn there in any logical sense.
3. Assassination and Archwing-hybrid missions (most Kuva Fort and Uranus nodes) also need to spawn Acolytes while they currently do not. DE can use the same 'delay' logic they have on Corpus Treasurers to defer the random-spawn until after boss fights (notably Jackal) to allow Acolytes in these missions.
4. Some spawn bugging exists which should be fixed (Today's excavation incursion gave me an Acolyte flicker, but then no transmission/second flicker/spawn-in)

Currently our rate-of-acquisition yardstick is 150 in a week for an Umbra Forma BP. At the moment we have 3-Essence *5 daily incursions, plus Acolyte spawns approximately every 4 to 11 minutes dropping 2 essences each.
Assuming for simplicity's sake an average spawn of 7.5 minutes and that our Incursions either spawn an Acolyte or we can knowingly speed through a mission without waiting for one (assassinate/archwing) to make up the time to farm an Acolyte elsewhere, this brings us up to 5*5*7 =175 essences in a week for a playtime of about 4.5 hours total, just in dailies. Already we covered the current upper-bound acquisition. If resource boosted, the yield increases to 259 essences, or requires only 22 dailies (~2.75 hours) to pass the 150 threshold.
If instead we imagine zero dailies, this takes an extra 1.5 Acolytes per missed daily (~11.25 minutes to hunt). At the current Acolyte spawn rate that means a little under 9.5 hours total if missing every incursion to pass the 150 threshold. If resource boosted, this time halves to 4.75 hours.

 

So we're seeing 3-10 hours for our worst time-gating case over a full week, and the upper boundary there is fairly unrealistic (why would you be skipping every daily). That seems fairly reasonable overall. The rest of the 'missing' gains, as they say, is exploitative Kuva addiction.

 

They expressly do not need to, and should not, make any scaling gain to Essence drops over endless missions. Sponge Path was supposed to stop excessively long Endless being necessary (for fighting spongy/levelled foes).

[-BM-SniperKitten]

Hmm

If given the opportunity, I think anyone would have been chillin' at an endless mission and grind out the steel essence to have an endless supply of SE for Umbra Formas later.

By nerfing the endless gains they took away our only reason to make teams with friends to optimize farms and have fun.

But perhaps some players don't want to play with friends, or don't care about having fun or simply prefer solo play, and since the nerf promotes antisocial gameplay this would suit these players.

By not having to optimize anything and just being able to do any mission with any warframe and almost any weapon, the strategic aspect of doing long SP missions got kind of ruined.

[(PSN)SilentEcho999]

I do not do SE farm at all but I would love for it to stay as an option.

DE listens to new players and spits on Vets and that's not acceptable. Vets are the ones who help ppl and spread good word about the game. A noob will not understand the point of view of a veteran player because they dont have the same amount of effort or hours put into this game so of course noobs will be ok with this nerf.

The 1st nerf worked 99% as they intended it to be, They didn't expect players to work around it and use smeeta's charm to farm about as many as you'd get with Eximis kills before.. so as always DE calls it an accident and decides to make it "Hard", but then also DE: Lets all ranks able to do almost everything in-game including event missions, Gives out Rdy to use Mechs in missions, Puts Railjack in market for purchase and reduces time drastically in quest, ect. Where's the hard part in that? DE doesn't realise that what they do affects actual loyal players that spend years on game and decides that new players that probably play for acouple of months then quits are the priority for some reason.

You want a good suggestion? Give ppl a cool down if they farmed too much or give a good weekly limit to how much you can farm.

Stop Nerfing things and calling it a "Fix".

>>If it's not broken dont fix it<<.

[Venus-Venera]

vor 8 Stunden schrieb (PSN)SilentEcho999:

I do not do SE farm at all but I would love for it to stay as an option.

DE listens to new players and spits on Vets and that's not acceptable. Vets are the ones who help ppl and spread good word about the game. A noob will not understand the point of view of a veteran player because they dont have the same amount of effort or hours put into this game so of course noobs will be ok with this nerf.

The 1st nerf worked 99% as they intended it to be, They didn't expect players to work around it and use smeeta's charm to farm about as many as you'd get with Eximis kills before.. so as always DE calls it an accident and decides to make it "Hard", but then also DE: Lets all ranks able to do almost everything in-game including event missions, Gives out Rdy to use Mechs in missions, Puts Railjack in market for purchase and reduces time drastically in quest, ect. Where's the hard part in that? DE doesn't realise that what they do affects actual loyal players that spend years on game and decides that new players that probably play for acouple of months then quits are the priority for some reason.

You want a good suggestion? Give ppl a cool down if they farmed too much or give a good weekly limit to how much you can farm.

Stop Nerfing things and calling it a "Fix".

>>If it's not broken dont fix it<<.

It can't be any other way: vets have too much plat and don't buy anything with real cash.

besides, i see no reason whatsoever to sit on a mission for more than 20 minutes. maybe when smoking with cool people. but otherwise it is too boring and the reward is missing completely!
SP used to be good because you could play there for a long time. however, many just used macros and you can watch a film on the side. well