Excavation fissures - problems and solutions

[Katsuni]

So the excavation missions are great fun in general, buuuut... there's a few tiny flaws with them when it comes to fissures: in particular, the drop rate of reactant is just too low and pretty much invariably means that, instead of trying to actually power the drills, you pretty much get stuck sitting around waiting for stuff to spawn and being bored.

This is true regardless of whether you're doing lith all the way up to axi excavation fissures, and it causes problems in a few ways:

• New players get confused because the mechanics of reactant aren't really that clear, and you can get away with not knowing how it works in pretty much any other fissure type because you'll tend to get enough drops by the end that it won't matter.
• The primary goal of a fissure mission is to open your relics, since otherwise you could just play a normal mission without such. In contrast, the goal of the excavation missions is to power the drills, and there's a substantial conflict between these two as the latter directly prevents the former.
• If you do "too well" in the mission, you're actively penalized for such, which really should never happen.
• There's a significant risk for griefing if someone wants to be a jerk, because it only takes one person to forcibly fill a drill before anyone has their reactant which wastes everyone's time, and it's impossible to do anything to stop it from happening if they're capable of defending the drill on their own.
• More than anything else though, it's just not fun to sit around waiting with nothing to do.

So yeah, the excavation missions in general kind of have a problem with waiting for enemies to spawn to get the power needed to run the drills as it is, but the reactant drop rate is even lower so that you have to specifically slow down further. It's really not enjoyable to have to sit there waiting for an extra minute or two every round and being bored while you wait for more enemies to spawn. As such, a few simple requested fixes to various issues in general:

1. Make the enemies which hold the power cells be harder to kill and actually dangerous (especially the infested ones), but ensure there's always one spawned in the room next to a non-full powered drill with AI set to explicitly ensure it heads directly to that drill. This way it's not about waiting for enemies to spawn, but a matter of if you have enough firepower to actually kill the things that actually do spawn or not. This would be nice to have applied to excavations just in general.
2. Have these stronger enemies with the power cells drop 1 guaranteed reactant apiece. This will ensure that the rate at which you get reactant is in-line with the rate at which you get power, and that the limiting reagent is, again, stressed upon being powerful enough to continue to fight at a reasonable speed, rather than waiting on spawns.
3. While we're here... the exceptional and flawless relics are kind of pointless to be honest. A slight tweak so that the exceptional relics have the highest chance to drop the first uncommon item, flawless relics have the highest chance to drop the second uncommon item, and radiants specifically have a higher chance to drop the rare item, would distinguish these properly from one another. In addition, increasing the void traces needed significantly, while increasing the drop % for the specifically enhanced drop, would give players greater control over what they get, though at the cost of having to invest more time into the void traces themselves, rather than farming tons of keys and void traces both; overall the "average" time to get a particular item drop shouldn't change, but it should be less swingy due to less RNG is all so there's greater consistency. Incidental to the other points, but since we're already talking farming fissures, may as well cover it. =P
4. As an addition to point #3 - setting the exceptional/flawless/radiant drop to 25% and having it be additive for multiple players, would mean that if four players all spend the same key with a large amount of void traces each, they can guarantee an item drop, though it would require substantially more void traces than currently offered and a full team to do so. Again, the overall farming time should be roughly about the same, so to 'link' them in this manner would require additional void traces spent when in the mission per player. The goal isn't to make it easier, but to reduce the random chance factor.

Anyway, it's still an enjoyable mode, but after the last few runs I did, the flaws were a lot more glaringly obvious than they even normally are to the point that I had to post about it. I'm not looking for the game to be any "easier" - if anything, it'd be fine being actually harder, but based upon gear and skill rather than a boring time sink is all. The emphasis should be like the rest of the game, where the better you do, the greater your rewards. As excavation fissures are currently set up, if you do "too good of a job" you're directly penalized for it, which is something that really needs to be looked at. The stuff with the relics isn't as important, but it would be nice to be able to guarantee a drop over time by building towards it, rather than spending 15+ relics and 1500+ void traces and being no farther ahead than you were after the first one. I, and many others, would prefer to at least have the option to invest more for a guaranteed drop rather than leaving it solely up to chance.