Quills Standing and Focus

[(XBOX)Meier Voleran]

Greetings Tenno, 

   I wanted to bring up concerns about the total amount of Quills standing required to proceed in PoE. 

I will admit that I probably spend far too much time in Warframe and even with all of the resources available to me, the grind for Quills is too much. I also know that newer players or players who don;t have as much time in Warframe have significantly more difficulty with gaining Quills Standing. The fact that you need to farm so muny cores before you can even build your first half-decent amp adds even more salt on the wound and I think further gates off the fight for lower level players. Currently I'm the only one of my friends / clan that even has an upgraded amp, so when we fight an Eidolon I'm generally the only one dealing damage to shields and Vomvalysts. 

 

This brings me to my second concern, the new Focus totals. It's great that they raised the caps and added Eidolon lenses, but the fact that the requirements for leveling up nodes in the focus tree are so much higher makes it seem impossible to obtain for most people. This is especially exacerbated by the fact that the Focus Pick-up system is still in use. If the Cap is so high and the nodes require so much, Why not just let us always earn Focus like the Faction rep? We already have to obtain the lenses (Which is thankfully much more accessible now) and apply them. 
I had 5 Million Focus in Madurai and still could only unlock 3 or 4 nodes, not including the 1 Million cost "Unbind" option. There are a ton of awesome possibilities for operators in the trees, but I feel like the majority of players will never see most of them. It feels like the system was built with the 1% who play 10 hours a day, locking out a large portion of content for the people who try to play for 30-60 min a day. 

 

My Suggestion would be to Increase the ability to gain Quills Standing, be it guaranteed Core drops from every Vomvalyst, Increasing rep gains per core, or adding 3 special Quill missions per day akin to the top level Syndicate missions that earn you 2-4k standing per. Using Syndicates as an example, you can pick up the Syndicate items that you can trade for standing, but you can also gain rep with a Sigil and by completing the missions. It becomes FAR too grindy if you have to rely only on the items. 

For Focus I would like to see a system implemented where we constantly gain focus without having to use pickups, or change they system so that the pickup enables a multiplier to whatever base focus gain you have depending on the lens. We already have a daily cap that feels nearly impossible to reach. If there is going to be a daily cap, let us have a chance to actually reach it. 

 

[(XBOX)R3d P01nt]

On 12/1/2017 at 10:13 PM, (Xbox One)Meier Voleran said:

For Focus I would like to see a system implemented where we constantly gain focus without having to use pickups, or change they system so that the pickup enables a multiplier to whatever base focus gain you have depending on the lens.

That's how it already works.

When you put a lens on a piece of gear, you gain focus on all affinity going to that piece of gear (provided it is max ranked).  You get a different percentage depending on the lens.  When you pick up a focus convergence orb, you gain extra focus during the time the orb is active.

[(XBOX)Meier Voleran]

Quote

For Focus I would like to see a system implemented where we constantly gain focus without having to use pickups, or change they system so that the pickup enables a multiplier to whatever base focus gain you have depending on the lens.

That's how it already works.

When you put a lens on a piece of gear, you gain focus on all affinity going to that piece of gear (provided it is max ranked).  You get a different percentage depending on the lens.  When you pick up a focus convergence orb, you gain extra focus during the time the orb is active

Looks like you're right, I just ran a quick mission to test and got some itsy bits of Focus (With Greater lenses). 
I still think the amounts you earn should be greater overall. 

[(PSN)haseo_the_adept]

Have you gotten any brilliant eidolon shards yet? They give 25k focus in any pool so there isnt any need to increase the amount of focus you get with the lenses, plus the eidolon lenses do give greater focus

[(XBOX)Meier Voleran]

I have, but we run hunts blind and there are normally only two of us, so I've only been able to take down two Eidolons total. 

[(PSN)haseo_the_adept]

Mind if i spoil things for you if you havent discovered it yet?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Use chromas vex armor and harrows crit chance if you can and use a sniper and synoid gammacores, both with as much damage/crit damage as possible, also if youre just killing it grab lures and fill them with vomvalysts till they glow blue and theyll tether the teralyst and keep it from running and if you have teo fully filled lures grabbing each of his limbs when he dies youll get a garunteed drop of 1 brilliant shard a regular shard and a flawless core along with some exceptionals, my two man squad with just an oberon and my chroma can take two down in 50 minutes, lengthy grind still for sure but bearable at least

[(PSN)PrincessLizbeth]

There are ways to hit the daily focus cap in reasonable time. Problem is, they are too grindy.

The main concern here, is that the best way to gain focus is to utilize specific grinding methods. Simply using lenses on all your gear won't help much. I had lenses on all my prime gear and ended in like 500k Focus in every school beside my main. Which is like 2 days of right grind per school.

So I'll upvote you post.

[(PSN)MaKTaiL]

Quill Standing is quite easy to level up if you capture 2-3 Eidolons everyday. Just find a random group on the chat like I do and you will level up in no time. You also mentioned it takes time to craft a new Amp but that's wrong. As soon as you are Rank 1 on Quill you can buy all three parts for the new Amp.

[(XBOX)Oussii]

6 hours ago, (Xbox One)Meier Voleran said:

Looks like you're right, I just ran a quick mission to test and got some itsy bits of Focus (With Greater lenses). 
I still think the amounts you earn should be greater overall. 

I use eidolon lens on banshee and i get 12k focus point each time i get the orb

[(PSN)HAXwtf]

I agree with the focus requirement beeing too steep and the amount you gain too low. 

I'm playing a couple of hours every day since PoE and have yet to max a SINGLE focus skill from the focus I gained during the last 2 weeks. 

[(PSN)Voidkraken]

I think it's worth keeping an eye on this thread, since the devs are openly discussing their next steps on the focus tree, which seems to involve some pretty large reductions on the total costs:

https://forums.warframe.com/topic/890214-dev-workshop-the-features-of-focus-25/

There's nothing there about changes to focus acquisition yet (plenty of requests for the same thing the OP proposed, of course), but it's relevant to this discussion.

[(XBOX)R3d P01nt]

1 minute ago, (PS4)Voidkraken said:

There's nothing there about changes to focus acquisition yet (plenty of requests for the same thing the OP proposed, of course), but it's relevant to this discussion.

To be fair, there's no functional difference between reducing the costs and increasing the amount we accrue. 

[(XBOX)Meier Voleran]

22 hours ago, (PS4)MaKTaiL said:

Quill Standing is quite easy to level up if you capture 2-3 Eidolons everyday. Just find a random group on the chat like I do and you will level up in no time. You also mentioned it takes time to craft a new Amp but that's wrong. As soon as you are Rank 1 on Quill you can buy all three parts for the new Amp.

2-3 Eidolons every day is a ton of playtime, especially waiting for 3 night cycles to complete. 
I used to be able to put a ton of time into this game, but I'm at a point in my life where I can't put more than 1-2 hours into the game each day and when combined with everything else in the game, Alerts, Syndicates, Focus, PoE, Getting weapons, Using Forma, Growing a Clan, Helping new players, Thinking about playing PvP before giving up on it; All of this is too much for an average player to do. You could argue that it's a great issue to have, but when I do the math on how long it's going to take me to max a focus tree at my current Gains (Also factoring in that I already had 5 million Focus in said tree) it feels like I'll never complete it, let alone get to jump into the other 4. Add Quills standing that requires 39 zillion cores to max, when I have to make sure I get on at night in between everything else, it's just too much. And I'd consider myself a veteran player at this point, I can only imagine how new players or casual players feel who don't care enough to come to a forum or Reddit to announce their feelings, but won't ever get to experience some amazing content because of it. 

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

42 minutes ago, (Xbox One)Meier Voleran said:

2-3 Eidolons every day is a ton of playtime, especially waiting for 3 night cycles to complete. 
 

Once you get it down with decent gear, two people can capture 4 eidolons per night session easily assuming the game doesn't crash and/or glitch (which admittedly is currently the biggest hinderance to hunting at the moment - we lose 15 minutes of night session just loading the plains, loading cetus, returning to ship, reload plains, reload cetus, etc... Then typically lose another eidolon every other night session due to lures glitching)

 

[(XBOX)Meier Voleran]

1 hour ago, (Xbox One)Tucker D Dawg said:

Once you get it down with decent gear, two people can capture 4 eidolons per night session easily assuming the game doesn't crash and/or glitch (which admittedly is currently the biggest hinderance to hunting at the moment - we lose 15 minutes of night session just loading the plains, loading cetus, returning to ship, reload plains, reload cetus, etc... Then typically lose another eidolon every other night session due to lures glitching)

 

I understand that you can to a certain degree Min/Max  to make the grind easier, but I feel like the total amount of players that do this are a louder, but smaller group. 
Not to say one way is better than another, I've avoided strategies to take eidolons down, I almost took one down by myself which I'm proud of, and I've taken two down with only one other player, again, which I'm proud of. 
My point isn't that it's actually impossible to meet the requirements or caps, but that it is an immense grind for the average player. 
Fighting the Eidolon should be an undertaking. It took a lot of hard work to battle and clear the fight before sundown, but it felt AWESOME after we did because of the challenge. 

If I read an article about how to trivialize the fight, and found a group of similar players to grind out Eidolons, I'll have robbed myself of that feeling of accomplishment. 
Maybe I'm just stubborn, but I want to be able to play my way and still make progress. Currently only 0.37% of players on Xbox have even defeated an Eidolon, and I'll bet a significant amount of them did min/max strategies. I just think that the current system is too overwhelming for most players to attempt, which again, is a shame because I truly love this game and it has so much to offer, but I know a lot of players who haven't touched Focus, or Quills, or even plains, because the perceived grind is too much. 
To the point that I can invest 5,000,0000 Focus into one tree and unlock less than 2/5 of it (Madurai: Inner Gaze 3/4, Eternal Gaze, 5/6, Phoenix Talons, 3/3 and Blazing Dash 3/5) is even disheartening to me with over 1,000 hours in game. 

You make a good point that it is possible to earn Focus or Farm Eidolons, and again, My playstyle isn't better than yours or anyone else. I play the way that I have the most fun, and I'm stubborn to the point that I want to learn and complete things my way (Which is generally solo or with a small group of friends). I just don't want myself or other players to miss out because we aren't willing or able to try and exploit ways to make a grind easier. 

[(PSN)Unstar]

I have to admit, in some ways I like the current Operator systems because of how bad they are.

Like, Focus is a pretty hardcore pain to get in any reasonable amount.  So that sucks.  And there's only like one ability per Focus tree that's really worth caring about, so that sucks.  And grinding Teralysts is only efficient if you play with a minor handful of frames, and even then it's a grind, so that sucks.  And after you've made the Tier 2 Amp, there's really nothing worth getting from the Quills, so that sucks.

But put all these systems these together, and you actually have a fairly brilliant system: one that takes an excessive amount of work to accomplish little of value.

In it's current state, it really only exists to give folks with nothing better to do the minor incentive they need to grind.  Grinders get something to do, and the rest of the community doesn't really miss out on anything.  Everyone wins!

[(PSN)Voidkraken]

18 hours ago, (Xbox One)R3d P01nt said:

To be fair, there's no functional difference between reducing the costs and increasing the amount we accrue. 

They are two different sides of the same general process, definitely, but have different impacts on how the player interacts and their overall experience and impression of the feature.

If you have the time/ability to grind at the right levels, you can gain focus pretty quickly using the convergence orbs (I've seen some videos of people getting 22k or more from a single orb in specific missions), so reducing the cost is beneficial to players who are doing this.  If, like myself and I suspect the OP, you are still in the kind of region where a convergence orb, timed right, only earns you maybe 1.5-2k Focus - then the cost reduction only goes some way towards resolving the basic problem. If, like some players might, you put your lens on the wrong frame or weapon, you potentially don't receive enough focus via normal play or convergence orbs to ever make meaningful progress in a focus tree...and that's a really serious problem for the success of Focus as a feature generally.

I'm with the OP in that the focus gains outside of a well timed convergence orb (which is really only viable in limited circumstances - during most missions types, it's utterly unhelpful and minimal), are a significant problem too, so resolving how much you gain through non-convergence actions OR replacing convergence with some other mechanic entirely, would help make ranking Focus skills up more practical and pleasant for those of us not into farming Focus on the grand scale...and encourage more players to get involved in Operator based combat too, I suspect.

My personal experience has been that Convergence orbs are only really valuable for gaining focus when timed alongside having a lot of enemies from which you can gain affinity - Defense and Survival missions typically.  This makes Focus farming a matter of playing these modes, and not the entire game - skewing usage and leading to people avoiding other less rewarding modes if this is their goal.  Shifting Focus gain so it has more of a relation to normal mission based play would move that incentive to farm these mission types only; players who are progressing normally will gain enough Focus to feel like they are getting somewhere and explore the interesting powers/schools; and everyone gets a bit more involved in Operators and their powers.

I'd still advocate keeping convergence orbs as a feature though, as that shift in gameplay priority can be fun - shifting them to act as a lower multiplier for the duration on Focus gain (for example: if "conventional" Focus gains were increased by x4, a Convergence orb might give x1.5 or x2 on top of that), giving a brief but welcome boost without it being the entire point of the process).