A thousand rads for a 30-hour grind session that relies on either splitting key costs and/or the gates happening to have good gate rotations (which they haven't had for the past week), just to get a weapon to +10?

Does no one else remember when heating something to +10 was just a matter of spending a few hours doing FSC or even just a few runs of arcade, maybe with a heat amp?

Like, heat bonuses never improved when xtals came in, and they aren't so great an potent to be worth the unbelievable trouble they've become to heat up.

Has anyone checked to see if they didn't change the Radiant drops today while no one was looking?

A radiant every 4 mins? That's an average of 15 / hour, or 10 treasure boxes over a two-hour T3 run. Slow, but tolerable. (Yes, a T3 elite solo arcade run does take me two hours or more. Maybe you're so highly skilled, or have such elite gear, that you can go faster?)

Except that I don't think I've ever found 10 radiant-granting treasure boxes in a T3 elite solo run. The most I've found was 3 or 4 boxes in a run, and more often I don't find any. Where are you getting your luck bonus?

bopp: probably referring do DarkFire Vanaduke.

@Ewbte

You're not wrong, but at the same time creating new weapons is part of keeping players in the game. If you craft a new weapon, you get a new experience, and that's a reason to keep playing right there. If you can't afford to do that in terms of time or money (since both have gone up drastically), then there isn't much left for you at all. More than that, having tons of weapons and items makes the game more interesting for you. If I craft a polaris, I don't just get the experience of using polaris- I get the experience of using polaris with my brandishes, bombs, whatever else I have.

I don't think radiant fire crystals should be a given, where everyone just gets them right off the bat, but I don't think they should be some kind of mystical force that no one can ever get their hands onto without grinding ultimate firestorm citadel either.

'Absolutely everything needed to craft' has always dropped. Crowns and materials can be turned into CE, one way or another.

They made it a good bit harder to afford making stuff by removing mist energy, okay.

They made it insanely harder to heat anything because you're reliant on getting ~300 heat crystals over time. With a failure chance if you don't go 100%. Not okay.

Would trade the complete removal of orb drops for the complete removal of heat crystals, but I know the majority of firestorm farmers would not go for that.

I haven't had much experience farming Radiant Crystals but over the past week~ I've had A LOT of experience farming Shining Crystals to heat my 4* gear, of the 90~ hours (been no lifing, for me 90 hours over the course of a week is no lifing at least) I have been able to get 2 Armor Pieces, 1 Shield, and one Weapon to level 10, that's about (this is if the crystal requirements for 1-10 are correct on the wiki, which is 309) 1,236 Shining Crystals in 90 hours, of those 90 hours the primary mission I ran was "The Rotten Metropolis" and usually 4 Tier 3 floors, normally 18-23~, of those the average amount of Shinings per run was about 3-30 with a few outliers like a really lucky Danger Room that gave me 40 Shinings alone in one run, I'm wishing I took the amount from each run so I had solid data but this was about the range for what I got per run.

Most people would probably make 5 maxed 4* items assuming they had a very solid idea of what they were doing, 1 Armor Set, 1 Shield, 2 Weapons, this would be 1545 total Shining Crystals, keep in mind that my general run time for the mission runs was generally 20~ minutes while the Arcade runs were usually 30-35~ minutes, so yeah. If I took what Noxiousnarwhal and farmed DFV to get all the Radiants required to max a normal 5* set (5 pieces for most people probably) it would be 453 Radiants for each 1-10, 2,265 total. Lets highball it and assume you get 40~ Radiants a run of DFV (Which I doubt if I base this off of my depth 26-28 Arcade runs where I got at best 6 for each run) it would take about 57 runs (1,800 for each key, even if you split this between 4 people it is still an insane amount that I don't see many people willing to do), 102,600 Energy, I'm honestly not sure how these payouts would even out, 102k Energy to max 5 5* items? nty. Assuming you don't farm DFV (probably like most normal players) you'd probably be farming FSC or depth 26-28 Arcade/Missions, and probably getting maybe 20 a run for say 30~ minute runs, this would be about 57~ hours of farming assuming every run took 30 minutes and you got 20 Radiants each run, now lets be real... that will never happen. Honestly at my best guess the general time for a normal player to max 5 5* items if they had 0 Radiants to start with and soloed most of the farming would definitely take at the very least 80 hours minimum...

Long story short buff drop rates. Crystals are the biggest rip off and time sink ever. Oh yeah, if you wanted to buy all your Shinings for 1-10 it would be 2,450 Energy for each 1-10 4* item, while for Radiants it would be (Pretty sure there 750 for 50) 7,500 Energy for each, again going by the 5 item set that I assume most people go for first before making more the total would end up being 49,750 Energy, sooo yeah. Dunno.

Bigger picture. 100 costless energy a day, times however many mist crafting alts there were (a lot).

2-3* gear was effectively costless energy-wise, and 4/5 star gear got discounts if the players weren't using up their energy that day.

Orbs are like said costless energy, only they show up sporadically when playing instead of not, and firestorm farmers have so many 5* the craft cost of 5* isn't even factored when buying 5* gear.

Getting gear isn't horribly hard or time consuming, leveling it is the latter in spades.

And 'DFV' is darkfire vanaduke i.e. shadow lair.

Putting time in to find drops is not 'costless'. It costs you time - that is the whole point of the Radiant issue.
As for getting potentially huge discounts on the 5* craft, well that was their decision, not ours. Expensive Radiants might be a form of damage control, or they might be yet another convoluted obfuscation engineered to manipulate your perceptions of value.

>Where do you hurry, why stuff heating should be faster than it is atm? Ah wait I know, you want get faster to the endgame content and then cry on forums that OOO not give us updates.

But why it has to be slower than it was two years ago, when there was no Radiants?

> in an attempt to add more playability so that you don't burn through the game as fast before the update for Fire Crystals came out.
Padding. Awful repetitiveness. It shows since T2, where you realize that shiny new tier is exactly the same as last one, but with powered up enemies. Not good.

>Would trade the complete removal of orb drops for the complete removal of heat crystals, but I know the majority of firestorm farmers would not go for that.
Why not? Didn't FSC farmers were going for crowns/CE anyway? And neither of rarity drops are tradeable so it's not like voiding them would hurt anyone

All I know is, before the latest update, I was practically killing myself to obtain the 8,442 Radiants I needed to heat all of the new(-ish) 5-star gear I had in my arsenal. Now, that number has spiked to 12,519 Radiants, thanks solely to the nine handguns I wish to obtain from the update. At the rate I'm going, what with my having very little free time to play this game as it is, it would take me at least a full year just to obtain approx. 11,000 Radiants, assuming that I were able to obtain a minimum of 30 for every Tier-3 run I attempted -- and this is WITHOUT going through the tedium of playing the "The King of Ashes" mission every day.

There isn't anyone here that can't say that the drop rate for Radiant Fire Crystals isn't in need of an immediate overhaul, because when the general mentality of the game is essentially "the only thing that matters when you're a high-level player is spending all of your free time farming for Radiant Fire Crystals", there's something seriously wrong with it. :/

Drop rates are fine.

I think they just need to lower the price in the supply depot to like, 300 energy for 50 or something

You're not alone in your thinking, Konradin. Many others (including me) have theorized that Fire Crystals need to be restricted by star level to only dropping in each stratum. Of course, if the devs were to do this, people would complain about how no one (outside of recipe vendors) is going into the Arcade anymore, because they can just simply farm all the Radiants they wanted from the Stratum-6 missions. Like I said, the whole system of drops and availability needs an overhaul. >.>

Your "highball" estimate of 40 rads is actually way off - rads are the only fire crystals that drop in DFV, and they drop extremely frequently. An average run will give around 70, and it's possible to get over 100 rads in a single run.

IMHO The heat / fire requirements almost need to be flipped. In other words we should require limited resources/materials to upgrade something and more time heating (or gaining experience in a normal game) to level something. The problem is that in normal playing you max your heat waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay before you have any chance of finding enough fire to actually level something. and the balance is garbage in that regard.

sorry just my $0.02

Yes because 3600CE from the depot is reasonable for 1 5 star weapon. Say you need 3 more items after fully heating 1 item with the ones supplied from missions, that's still over 10000CE to finish a set of 5 star fully heated armour/weapon. Shield excluded.

They couldn't have just left the game with the previous crafting costs and make heating ten fold slower. Then heat amps would actually serve a purpose. Makes you realise how badly thought out decisions OOO makes are, I mean much less cumbersome solutions to people zerging the game were thought of, by people with no clue on game design, which were viable and completely justifiable, rather then the huge wall that hits you now.

Alright people, average FSC rad rate is 18 rads.

@Ralvurahva

They replaced mist with something that is almost just as bad. It scares off old players and still gives the game a bad rep.

I only have 2 problems with heat crystals

1: I have about 15 items that still need heating in my inventory while there are thousands of shining crystals I have no use for sitting in my inventory.

2: buying radiants from the depot is so expensive that it is LITERALLY INSANE just buying enough to heat a 5* weapon.

Math'd.

With numbers based upon info prior to the Feb. Buff [which improved F2P rates].
Speedruns gave even better benefits [which were far worse off prior to free elevators].

P2Pers see 8x cost increase. F2Pers were much closer to the same [and are about the same with the buff].

The only valid argument that I've seen in ALL of these radiant threads is that players are more willing to pay small incremental costs [10E per depth] than one flat cost [700E for 50 radiants] despite the total time cost if you were to farm it being almost the same.

I think a fair system is to put radiants in d21 and below and remove all shinings from depth 26 and below
but I really dont think its ever going to change

Let get one thing clear. Before release 2013-07-30, when elevators cost 10 energy per level, all advanced players could play as much as they wanted each day.

By "advanced" I mean past the middle of the game --- Royal Jelly Palace or so. These players could run Arcade strata and missions that paid more in crowns than they were spending in energy, for a net profit. Then they could buy energy and repeat. So they could play for hours and hours, accumulating net wealth.

As the Lancer Knightz mission data show, even when energy was at 9,500 there were still 9 missions that were profitable. At a more typical price of 7,000, there were 24 profitable missions. So at that price you could actually accumulate wealth pretty quickly. And I'm not even counting profit from reselling recipes, etc.

The new system used to be good before some things got changed.
The problem was that 4* crystals only dropped at the second half of tier 2, which was a pain to get to and not many missions are in that depth, so OOO added the crystal recipes so that you could craft shining crystals out of radiants, which fixed this issue.
But for some reason they thought that they needed to make shining crystals drop all over tier 3 and only make radiants start dropping after the second half of tier 3.

A simple solution for this would've been to remove the crown cost from the crystal crafting recipe, so you can downgrade 5* crystals for free, or to add a second arcade start point at the middle of a tier so that you can go faster to the parts where the crystals really drop.

Shadow Lairs give Radiants but they are extra content where you should use special gear. I don't think that you want anyone to play a shadow lair with their unheated 5* gear which is weaker than fully heated 4* gear, at least until it reaches level 5.

If OOO wants to make the weapon upgrading slower they should reduce the heat so that the heat boosters get a use.

Why can't they simply change the crystals back like they used to be at launch ?

...

Well, we already know that Shadow Lairs are part of the currently non-existent "Tier 4". The problem is, the devs aren't going to just go ahead and "release" it without adding some sort of barricade to prevent players from just going down there & farming Radiants non-stop, either in the form of a paywall, or monsters that can't be defeated by solo players (even those who elect to use Battle Sprites).

As I've said earlier, each type of Fire Crystal (amongst other things) should be restricted to dropping only in each of the six stratums, according to their star level. This would be the best way to balance the problem of "drops" in each tier.