Fixing rarity distribution in the Clockworks (not just Radiants!)

This system has been bothering me for a while now and I'm glad you've given me the opportunity to really think about why, especially with your closing statement. I think that there should be parity between Rarities and their associated Strata too, but the possibility of getting "out-of-strata" rewards should be a percentage *in addition to* the chance of getting an "in-strata" reward, rather than a replacement roll. It is baffling to me that I can get shining fire crystals in firestorm by the truckload but not Elite orbs. That feels like an outright error.

(And I would probably call a theoretical 0* orb "Crude.")

Yeah, it makes very little sense to have Shinings drop all over the place, but the orbs used to craft the weapons they're used on limited to only a handful of levels. Likewise you can get Eternal orbs across all of tier 3, but as we all know the crystals to heat them only show up in the last couple of levels (if you're lucky). What drove me to write this was realizing that I was getting Warm drops across half of the entire Clockworks. Pretty sure I'd picked up several hundred by the time I stopped playing the event.

The frustrating part is that this issue has been around for a solid decade and been pointed out by countless people, yet GH has never made a move to address it. I don't think they've touched rarity distribution since the Shining "fix" broke Radiants. It's a very simple change that would make the everyday gameplay experience significantly less frustrating. I'm not asking for any drop rates to be boosted (though that's always welcome!), but just to have the existing drops happen in places that make more sense.

For me, nothing highlighted it as intensely as the spike storm event; spending so long in specific strata has made my fire crystal count *impressively* lopsided and it's really starting to show how the intent behind the original change isn't measuring right against the results of it.

Not to crosspromote but I had mentioned in another thread that the weapon donation prestige mission basically never gets done because of how valueless it is - if GH is worried about orb saturation by making this change, they can keep orbs in circulation by encouraging people to craft, use the ones that drop, and burn the result on earning a prestige mission reward.

The actual datagathering they'd have to do to balance that system would be a complicated long-term project and I don't know that they want to tackle that out the gate, but if you were to ask me, the safe startpoint I see is just stratifying (har har) the drops so they feel less haphazard and watching to see what impact that has overall before tuning the interactionally gritty and numerically crunchy details later. Nothing has stopped shadow-adjustments like this in the past so they have everything they need to perform a blind experiment using current rates as control. Just needs to be done bit by bit and conscientiously, right?

Shinings are most common just because you need to make the item level 10 before you can alchemize it to 5 star, and the original forge system had chances to fail if you didn't use the max amount of fire crystals.

But due to changes lately the need to use max crystals to ensure a successful forge is no longer present, it's still incentivized with the Forge Box system but I don't feel like the odds for a Forge Box are worth using max crystals especially for a newer player who may not have the time or resources to get them. In the old system not using the max could cost you time due to fails, but whether fails or success on max it was very slow progress. But now the reward for using max isn't really there... even with double levels and heat boosts... if you're not getting the Forge Box then it feels like you're wasting time.

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I do feel like part of the issue isn't just the depth at which Radiants drop but also the general depth that the late game levels put you at, which is often just shy of Radiant depth or just managing to scratch the edge before the end of the mission.... In fact.... after "The King of Ashes" mission, nothing else goes past depth 26 except for "Dreams and Nightmares".... Not even "Shadowplay" which is canonically supposed to end up on the exact same floor as "The King of Ashes" but is depth 26 for some reason instead of 28

I see your point, but on the flipside, under the current system most weapons actually lose damage output when crafted from a fully-leveled 4* to 5*, and it takes several levels' worth of heating to get them back up to the same damage output. So it greatly benefits the player to work on leveling their new 5* gear as quickly as possible...except they can't, because Radiant drops are so incredibly rare. Paradoxically this means it's often more useful to keep fully-leveled gear at 4* for a while, at least until you can bank enough Radiants to quickly blow through several levels. (The only exceptions might be weapons like the Brandish lines that gain an improved charge attack, but even then you're losing the free CTR medium they had at level 10.) Now one could argue that the entire damage scale should be reworked so that crafting gear to 5* doesn't hurt its output, but that would be a much more extensive balancing update than simply adjusting where different rarities drop.

The other issue is that, even with the Forge changes, no matter what option you're going with it still takes significantly more Radiant crystals to get a 5* item to level 10 than it takes Shining crystals for a 4* one. Making 1x forges guaranteed to succeed made the Radiant grind much more bearable, but it still makes no sense to have the more-required crystals be so much less abundant.

You're completely right about mission levels, though. For my money danger missions are by far the biggest offender. With how difficult they can be, that final treasure box room should leave you absolutely swimming in Radiants, but instead you usually get...maybe six of them. As a result there's no practical reason to keep rerunning them outside of enjoying the challenge they present. Forget about the regular daily prestige missions too; there's no reason why they shouldn't have their levels maxed by the time you make it to Vanguard. And I agree that every rank mission post-King of Ashes should be pushed all the way to depth 28 too.

Speaking as someone who has been through the gear grind a number of times, I also wait until I can heat a 5* to level 7 before crafting because I can't stand the fact that you *lose* damage when you *upgrade*.

To be fair, if it's something I have the resources for I usually just upgrade to 5* right away and accept the damage penalty, even if I feel like it shouldn't be a thing. I've been holding several weapons at 4* right now mostly because I'm trying to finish leveling most of the halfway-there 5* gear I crafted several years ago before I add anything else to the pile. Which, again, is made much slower by Radiant scarcity, which brings us full-circle.