A simple solution for the focus grind

[Flojke7]

I don't usually write posts to complain about stuff, but the amount of focus points and time needed to max out even one focus school is just too damn high.

So i've come up with a really simple solution:

• keep the focus cap as is
• remove convergence orbs and make their multiplier the new baseline
• make the costs for focus abilities cumulative

What i mean by that last point is that the cost for the last level of a focus node shoud be the total cost.

Taking Zenuriks "Energizing Dash" as an example, you'd need 50.000 points to unlock it and 150.000 for the next level. But you already invested 50.000 points into the ability, so you only need to add another 100.000 points. That would mean you could max "Energizing Dash" by reaching your daily cap twice, which should be easier to do since you can gain focus more consistently with my proposed changes. Hopefully this would make passive focus gain more viable.

Since Waybound passives take 1 million points to max, you would need to reach your cap 4 times. I think 4 days are a fair amount of time for a waybound passive. You'd still need 40 days to unlock all waybounds, but you could make meaningfull progress each day.

Maxing out Zenurik for example, without the waybound nodes, would take  3.075.000 points of focus, taking a little over 12 days to max.

So getting all waybounds and maxing one school of your choice would take you about two months of maxing out your focus. I think that's an attainable goal.

What do you think? I woud appreciate your feedback.

[ShakeyMac]

I like it.  Maybe the details would need to be tweaked but the overall idea is sound.  Focus gain now for anyone that doesn't actively farm to cap each day is ridiculously low.  Doing every bounty on the plains until refresh, with an additional two bounties after that, with quad-lens'd gear (3 Zen, one Naramon) as well as all 3 sortie missions resulted in ~25,000 focus.

If the sortie were different (surv and/or interception) I probably would have made closer to 40k total for the same amount of work.  The alternative is I go into a specific mission with a specific frame and a specific build for that frame, line up everything perfectly, then kill it all with the convergence buff, getting a huge amount of focus in the process.  Then I would repeat this for 1.-1.5 hours until I cap, after which I could go about actually playing the rest of the game.

Anything that encourages playing the rest of this amazing game in lieu of an hour+ of highly specialized focus farming is a good thing.  Focus is something that, when unlocked, should be advanced with measurable results each time a person logs on.  Time spent playing should be less about efficiently farming focus as hard and fast as possible, and more about focus gain being a bonus on top of the other stuff you do.  Naturally, people who want to really farm focus should be rewarded for the work they do, but given that a "full" completion of every focus tree will take well over a year, I don't see any problem with making the cost ceiling a little bit lower.

[-Temp0-]

I think they won't do this. Cause they're DE.

They made convergence way back when focus cap was a mere 75k ( or 100, i.e was NOT needed) and we only had basic and greater lenses. Making all of the above would make it "too good" for the players so clearly can't have this.

[Skrewyluie]

The issue is focus is intended for the long haul, something that takes months to complete. I am sure the first person to finish it will express how bored they are since they will most likely have nothing to do once they're done. Until they come up with a better time sink for players, focus will have to stay the way it is.

[Kinetos]

 

1 hour ago, Skrewyluie said:

The issue is focus is intended for the long haul, something that takes months to complete. I am sure the first person to finish it will express how bored they are since they will most likely have nothing to do once they're done. Until they come up with a better time sink for players, focus will have to stay the way it is.

It's not going to take months though, closer to a decade. Unless you dedicated cheese farm and burn out, then it will still take over a year, minimum. 

Edited October 25, 2017 by Kinetos

[Flojke7]

5 minutes ago, Skrewyluie said:

The issue is focus is intended for the long haul, something that takes months to complete. I am sure the first person to finish it will express how bored they are since they will most likely have nothing to do once they're done. Until they come up with a better time sink for players, focus will have to stay the way it is.

I don't think the "Endgame grind", or as you put it "long haul", thing actually applies anymore. Focus 1.0 used to be about giving more power and options for playing with your warframes, but now it's about the operator and integrating it. And since it's now about powering up the underowered operators and giving them useful stuff to do, i don't think this kind of grind is warranted, since you're not gaining that much power.

I like the idea of the operator. I like that they are trying to integrate them more. Right now nothing in the focus tree is actually mandatory, but i worry that when more opertor focused content comes out, this stuff will matter. And this grind is too much of a barrier.

I love my little Void Demon, i just want it to be useful...

[-Temp0-]

52 minutes ago, Skrewyluie said:

The issue is focus is intended for the long haul, something that takes months to complete. I am sure the first person to finish it will express how bored they are since they will most likely have nothing to do once they're done. Until they come up with a better time sink for players, focus will have to stay the way it is.

We're already bored FARMING focus. Can't get more bored than this.

Once I was done with focus 1.0 I was able to play the *** game that's what happened.

[Sunder]

1. Remove convergence orbs
   • Either make it a "Press 6 to activate" ability
   • Or just give us the multiplier at all times since it's already hard to gather focus through normal play
2. Get rid of the "Pool". It serves  no purpose what-so-ever. Just a focus dump.
3. Cut the costs.

Focus 1.0 VS Focus 2.0 Costs

• Madurai........14,575,017......-->.....26,958539
• Vazarin.........12,823,833.......-->.....22,945,968
• Naramon.......10,263,003......-->.....23,028,681
• Unairu...........8,769,625........-->.....27,785,014
• Zenurik.........11,895,147.......-->.....29,807,925

 

• Total -............58,326,625.......-->.....130,526,127

Even with the Old 1.0 costs? It'd still take minimum 236 days to farm all the trees with the cap we have now

1. So it takes 4 days to get 1 million focus
2. That means 4 (days) x 59 (million focus) = 236 (days)
3. Or 250,000 (focus) x 236 (days) = 59 (million focus)

I don't get it...why don't they just set a solid cost for each school? Why all the different prices? Overall they just need to make these costs obtainable. Not a chore that makes you want to gouge your eyes out...

Edited October 25, 2017 by Sunder

[Almagnus1]

DE also needs to completely throw out the pool costs.

Those don't really make sense as it's an arbitrary inclusion in a system that has WAAAAY too much grind as it is.

[ShakeyMac]

7 hours ago, Flojke7 said:

I don't think the "Endgame grind", or as you put it "long haul", thing actually applies anymore. Focus 1.0 used to be about giving more power and options for playing with your warframes, but now it's about the operator and integrating it. And since it's now about powering up the underowered operators and giving them useful stuff to do, i don't think this kind of grind is warranted, since you're not gaining that much power.

I like the idea of the operator. I like that they are trying to integrate them more. Right now nothing in the focus tree is actually mandatory, but i worry that when more opertor focused content comes out, this stuff will matter. And this grind is too much of a barrier.

I love my little Void Demon, i just want it to be useful...

This is a good point.  Back when focus was warframe-centric it wasn't as big a deal, as the focus trees added neat new ways of playing (loads of energy, quick/instant rezzes, stealth on crit, stupid amounts of armor, raw damage) that helped, but weren't required to have fun with the game.  Now that the, er, focus has shifted more towards directly buffing the Operator, a part of the game is effectively closed off by a stupidly long grind.  Yeah, you can have basic Operator functionality without anything in a focus tree.  But then why make more Operator-focused content like eidolons on the PoE?  What other Operator-focused content will be coming down the pipe?  Will the focus system have an influence on how you experience this content?  It had better, because if it doesn't that that's a kick in the nuts for the people who have invested a lot of time in the focus system.  Likewise, if the focus system doesn't change how you experience this content, then why is it even here?

As it was before, it was a nice addition that, even rather casually, you could progress through to acquire some neat little boosts.  These boosts, while helpful, were in no way necessary to enjoy the game, because the core of the game remained unchanged.  The Operator was now essentially an additional warframe power that wasn't tied to a specific warframe.  You could run support Vazarin as a dps frame, or bring high energy regen on a frame with low efficiency and focus your frames build on power or range or duration.  Further iteration of the Operator means a great emphasis on Operator play.  Focus is no longer a "perk" that comes in addition to the core game; it is now an entirely separate part of the game, and it's locked behind such a heavy grind that it is unrealistic to expect that anyone but the most hardcore players will ever plumb the depths of it.  Why go to the trouble of giving us this wonderfully complex system and then gate it behind such a huge wall?

Edited October 25, 2017 by ShakeyMac