Opinion: Expedition Mutations are cancer and will kill this game in the long run if something doesn't change

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Hear me out.

Expedition Muts are a plague on this game for a multitude of reasons, but mainly because they gatekeep too much other progression. You’re practically forced to do them if you want to experiment with end game builds because the gear upgrade system completely relies on Umbral shards.

You hear people complaining about the lack of endgame content. Well, a lot of that can be mitigated if you just open up the capabilities for people to play around and experiment with different end-game builds and play styles. Nobody wants to find a piece of gear at end-game, then have to go run several mutated dungeons for umbral to upgrade that piece of gear just to play around with it to see if they even like it. It’s so dumb.

This becomes a much larger issue when you just want to join a quick public group and get it over with, but 15 or 20 minutes into it something happens and people disconnect, or quit because after an hour of trying the group can’t beat it. Then you have people pissed off fighting with one another and at each other’s throats because guess what? You get nothing. Zero. Zilch. Thanks for coming. Goodbye. Your time is wasted, you’re mad, and all you want to do is rage quit and log out.

People are only going to do that so many times before they log out and don’t come back. I’m close. I love more about this game than I don’t, but the stuff I love to do is hindered by being forced to do Mutated expeditions that are completely reliant on other people. I’m tired, so tired of wasting my time trying to do public expeditions with other people and listen to them fight and hurl insults for an hour then quit, when all I really wanted to do was upgrade my PvP gear and kill them all in game in the first place.

Seriously, take a look around. Check LFG and see how dead it is in there for most expeditions. You’ll notice that most of the comprehensive expeditions have zero, but the easier stuff usually has a handful of groups. Why is that? Because people just want to grind out and get their umbral and be done with it.

I’m not a guru at expeditions but I have the gear and knowledge to do M10. However, since I don’t want to focus that hard on gear management, I usually stick between m4 and 8 Gen or Laz. And even there it’s a struggle playing in public groups because this game and other people don’t respect your time if it’s not a well oiled machine.

Please for the sake our sanity, give us players who don’t want to or can’t commit to the expedition grind another lucrative way that doesn’t involve paying real money in battle passes to get Umbral shards. Orbs and casts don’t cut it. I have like 5 different builds I want to play around with to keep the game exciting, but it takes me a week just to upgrade the gear through casts, invasions, wars etc. to really see if it’s something I will enjoy.

Unless I run high end expeditions, then I can upgrade almost all of those 5 sets in a couple days… See my point? It’s ridiculous.

I also don’t think it’s very well thought out to force PvP centric people to go participate in high end lengthy PvE content to upgrade their PvP gear. In fact, is mind numbingly frustrating for someone who wants to experiment with end-game PvP builds and has zero desire to grind expeditions over and over and over.

Now that I’ve critiqued, I’ll offer a couple potential solutions.

  1. Just make shards obtained from Expeditions sellable in the TP. How many people out there are sitting with a million shards in their inventory because they don’t have anything left they want to upgrade? I do think people should be rewarded for investing their time and effort in the highest end-game content. So give them an opportunity to spread the wealth. To balance that, PvP players could maybe sell Azoth salt from their earnings. People are already selling umbral shards but through practically exploitative manipulation of the system. Open it up for everyone, not just the few willing to shirk the intended system mechanics.

  2. Give more Umbra in PvP track. A LOT more. Or make it a reward in OPR. You could even base the yield off of score at the end.

I’d love to see both of these, but I’m not sure I’ll see either of them before I do actually fully burn out. One can only hope.

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I think, I’m not totally sure, but in the PTR when you break an equipment, it gives you umbral shard. I hope so, this would help a lot. We have to see how long it takes to be implemented as well.

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Yes, this. I don’t even PVP much myself but it just makes sense to give a lot more umbrals within a player’s chosen mode.

I can’t see why they wouldn’t make umbrals BoE as well. If the argument is that people will just RMT to get fully upgraded gear quickly, isn’t that already happening through the expedition umbral sales? I tried to think how making them BoE would impact me and honestly, it would be like asmo or scarabs - I’d mostly not sell them but would be able to give some to a friend if they needed it, or sell when my cash got very low.

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M10 is the endgame… you literally don’t need umbral for PvP. Your armor rating across 5 pieces or damage go up…very minimally at 625. 625 was implemented FOR PvE scaling and doing mutations, not PvP

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that is not true

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LOOOOL

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Completely disagree. Even aside from the obvious you get extra stat points on your gear at 620 and your armor ratings go up as you raise the gear level, anywhere you can get an advantage makes the difference.

End game is subjective depending on what you’re into. Ultimately it’s pushing your character to highest highest possible performance in whatever you like to do, be it PvE, PvP, crafting.

But it’s not just about competing with other people. It’s about giving the player the creativity and customization to fit their play style. That’s what keeps people interested. Not running the same tired MuTs over and over again.

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Speak for yourself. I’d be gone if m10 wasn’t in the game

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AGS has few alternatives in this regard, it can make the shard much easier to get (breaking equipment for example and depending on the color how many shard you acquire, minimum 25 shard) or simply separating the PvP equipment with the PvE (the PvP carfter could be in the faction house) and that only PvE equipment is affected by shards.

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I never said m10 shouldn’t be in the game. If you read my post, you’d see that there’s much more to it than the headline.

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Definitely something to think about for sure. I honestly believe the easiest solution for AGS is to just made Umbra tradable.

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And materia. Don’t forget about materia.

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I have never run a mutation, I’d like to but I have a hard enough time putting together a good PVP set, much less grinding out different ward sets. Mutations remind me of Mythic dungeon runs in wow. I never cared for the Mythic dungeons as they seem to be occupied by elitist attitudes. I have to imagine the same can happen in mutations.

I personally miss the days of running things in one of two modes. Normal, or hard mode. What turns me off is all the degrees in between.

I get for AGS this is a way to reuse content over and over and get the players to chase the gear grind for that content. So on this hand I guess this stuff makes sense in a way. It gives players something to do. But on the other hand it just turns people like myself away from even trying to engage in that content.

That is my feedback, and again I am speaking for myself.

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On the bright side: they plan to reduce the amount of mutation levels. So maybe only like 3 levels to go through

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