- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
there's also a dialog making fun of it, so the writers are at least aware of it.
what annoys me the most and makes an objective discussion about it borderline impossible is the smoothbrain "if players never get what they want they gonna grind forever, yay!" take you don't even see from most western devs, and it's hard to get lower than that. on top of that they don't even really understand the system in the first place, like when they talk about the new artifact refinement mechanic (which is a kneejerk bandaid to placate critics at best and outright trap at worst).
a deterministic grind can still take ages, it's all in how you tune the numbers. if it takes 2 weeks (sounds short, right?) to properly make a BIS artifact, that's still two and a half months for one char alone. 10 months for a whole team. and abyss has two teams, plus extras of whatever variety you want. and that's not considering the resin cap where you also have to spend resin on char upgrades, which also cost mora. the main difference is that this way a good drop shortens the time you need, and isn't a requirement to get good stats in the first place. to put it in perspective, even if the game had such a mechanic from the start, people still would not have one whole properly geared team by now.
the basic "idea" of the artifact system is actually quite simple. ignoring mora and exp for a second, you're supposed to level an artifact, if it's shit dump it into another (you get 80% of exp back, with a lvl20 5* you need around 50k artifact exp max it again), rinse repeat. this way even a considered "shit" artifact has the potential to be an upgrade in the end if the 3/4rd substat rolls the the stat you want and upgrades often enough. sure, you miss out on 2 upgrades at worst, but if those 2 upgrades go into flat ATK on a perfect rolled 4 stat artifact it hardly makes any difference.
my personal gripe (besides the layers of RNG) is that to reach the point where you can comfortably rotate 2-3 artifacts to slowly upgrade your stats over time you have to waste a lot of potentially good artifacts for the exp - which is the main reason the new artifact refinement is shit, you lose the exp and a potentially good artifact (not to mention unless I hear otherwise I assume it's as skewed as the domain droprate for the stuff you want). my suggestion would be a better resin conversion for artifact exp besides artifact domains, which is 19/9 runs to max a 5*/4* (you also got the change to find an upgrade, but unless you already got a good one it also means you'd have to upgrade it again to see it's true value for a proper comparison). artifact exp from the realm depot is a start, but still awfully slow and artifact slots are limited too.
there's also no reason 4* artifacts scale worse when they're already capped by their max level, it just reeks of slapping the same design chars/weapons have (where it makes sense because they all have the same max level) on their supposed endgame grind, so you can't even really use 4* as a placeholder.
as for the layers, I already sperged about that enough, splitting them up in individual slots would at least take care of one of them (while still needing the right set, with the right stats, which then upgrade properly).
