Honestly I don't even see most people working on 5* gear. They just kind of.. aren't driven to collect gear or go out and enjoy the game beyond a few casual runs. I thought that they would improve at least a little bit when DaN came out but they really didn't. It's a problem to be sure.

Eight hours of grind per 5* item is acceptable in my books (I mean I spread it out), though really what needs to happen is for the danger missions to get moved down with the release of the remaining missions. That way, the source of radiant fire crystals will be dreams and nightmares, whatever new core related missions come out and all 4 danger missions.

And as for Fangel-

Maybe you should, you know, find another game that actually keeps you happy while you play it?

I hate to bother you with this, but could you perhaps not request Paintool to leave purely on the basis that he sees something off with the game? It's a strange concept and all, but I quite enjoy Paintool's company.

@Midnight-Dj

You're clever and all and I don't want to offend you, but please just say what you want to say without putting it into a song because it's considerably harder to understand and it looks like spam.

The only problem with that is that I have nothing more to say than what was already been said time after time, I simply want to put down a song (or poem if you don't know which song I parodied ) to chill the OP, of course I can go on a long litany like Fangel that would likely to yield a response that is equally as recycled.

@Bopp

The main point of this thread seems to be that Radiant Fire Crystals are too scarce. I tend to agree. But haven't we been over all of this already many times?

Oh Bopp, always taking the middle ground, I will just sit here for the next rant thread that comes out, there are always more songs to go around.

I hate to bother you with this, but could you perhaps not request Paintool to leave purely on the basis that he sees something off with the game?
There's more to it than just that they see something wrong in the game. We all know what's good and what's bad with the game, and I would never recommend that someone leave a game that they enjoy.

But when the only time you open your mouth is to complain, rant, or otherwise relieve stress, then potentially what you're doing is stressful. If you've played the same game for nearly 5000 hours and are becoming stressed with the game, then perhaps you should take a break from that game? We should all be playing the game to have fun, not to stress ourselves out over its mechanics.

I don't want to encourage someone to quit the game, but I do want to encourage someone to find a better outlet to relieve stress, or at the very least have fun in the games they play.

Yea I'm going to be frank with you- being told to leave just doesn't feel too great and neither does having someone else's opinions forced onto you. It's impossible to say how much Paintool actually plays the game or how they feel.. there really isn't more that they can do aside from complaining or stop caring and for you to just suggest they stop caring is miserable.

I know I don't exactly have a perfect track record when it comes to being considerate either but I'd like to see us all at least get along somewhat. Maybe go on some nice runs with each other and perhaps craft some gear and you know, enjoy each other's company because there really aren't many veteran players in the grand scheme of things and we very forcibly make the time that we lose arguing out of stardust.

I'm not arguing with your frustration over the Forge, but two of your specific points require response:

you need to find an arena or hope for a treasure vault or run FSC over and over again for Shinings and Radiants

Shinings are massively available anywhere on Tier 3. Unless you're playing too-shallow depths, which are too easy for you anyway, you should be swimming in Shinings after not much playing time.

With mist, you couldn't play a lot, even if you wanted to play more.

As soon as you got to the middle of the game --- roughly Royal Jelly Palace --- you could earn crowns faster than you spent energy. For example, there were 20 missions that paid 8,000 crowns or more per 10 levels. So you could play forever, slowly getting richer.

Ah, the Forge.........the Forge. I honestly can't think of one "nice" thing to say about it, despite the fact that its inclusion into our much-beloved game is responsible for the removal of elevator costs. Although, as far as I'm concerned, they should have found a better method of "delaying our progress".

Before the "Forge" was introduced, our difficulties were simple.......annoying, but simple. We needed fixed amounts of Mist Energy and Crystal Energy to explore the Clockworks, and we were required to use that same energy in larger amounts to create new items or upgrade existing ones. For example, at the point in the game where I was, at least 11-13 months after the introduction of Missions (overlooking the obvious energy costs for elevators, which would have easily been negated with Elevator Passes), I would have only needed 22,550 CE (equivalent to approx. $60) to craft every item I wanted to get in this game. Even if I were to include the Gunner Update and everything I wanted from it (adding nearly 14,000 CE to the amount I needed), that would have only set me back by an additional $40. Going by my calculations, if I were to exclude the aforementioned elevator costs and the prices of recipes purchased in the Hall of Heroes or in the Clockworks, I would have only needed to spend approx. 2,715,000 Crowns (assuming that I purchased an Elevator Pass every month, and that CE continued to be sold by users at a fluctuating price of 7,000 cr - 7,300cr) to get everything I was attempting to obtain.

Ever since the inclusion of the Forge, those number amounts are now nothing more than "pocket change", because I'm now forced to try to farm at least eight times as much Crowns and/or CE as I originally needed (inflation-adjusted because of the high cost of Radiant Fire Crystals, and the constantly-rising cost of CE in the user market). The developers - for whatever reason under the sun which we still have yet to fully comprehend - decided that Radiant Fire Crystals "weren't rare enough", and changed all of the treasure boxes in the first few Stratum 6 levels to have nothing more than Shining Fire Crystals instead, sending everyone searching for Radiants completely off-balance. This became a problem for everyone, because Radiants were already considered "hard to find" prior to the first "Shroud of the Apocrea" event, and they didn't need to be made nigh-impossible to obtain, just for the sake of "balance".

What most people don't seem to understand is that the entire Forge system is in dire need of an overhaul. Sure, it takes away having to spend precious energy to use elevators, but what does it really bring to the proverbial table? Yes, every discussion concerning the Forge always finds a way to become a complaint about not having enough Radiants, but why should the usage of any type of Fire Crystal ever have been needed to begin with? All it did was add an unnecessary system of "you must have this before you can progress any further" that was already working perfectly fine when we were purchasing & using CE to craft our high-level gear. It costs exponentially more now to heat a 5-star item using the max. amount of Radiants (because most players don't like gambling away something that took weeks to obtain on a "chance to fail" that seems almost deliberately rigged against them) than it did to farm gates in Tier-3 to heat those same 5-star items when you were completely out of mist.

As I said before, the devs may think that "delayed progression" is necessary, but they went about implementing it the wrong way. There were better methods that they could've utilized, and creating a system that randomly punishes you for "not using the highest amount" of an item isn't one of them. Going back to the initial topic question, I do remember when the Forge first came out......and quite frankly, I'm now more or less wishing it never did. :/

Someone should notify The Lancer Knightz that the classic list should exclude missions that never existed in classic (all those fancy 10-1+ missions). This immediately chops the "20 missions" down to 17.

As far as I understand, no. The results shown in the Classic section are not computed from the tables shown above. They come from a completely different data set, collected and analyzed before the creation of difficulty levels. If you look back in old versions of the wiki page, you see exactly the same number of missions above 8,000, etc. Let me know if I've misunderstood you.

I will also note that you only get to pick between 5 missions to "slightly beat breaking even" until you get past the 4* HoH.

I can't argue with that.