The First Descendant's latest character gets close to introducing a pity system but becomes a slog to farm instead

Modified Aug 30, 2024 20:22 IST

Explore how bad the Hailey grind in in The First Descendant — The First Descendant's new character is anything but easy to farm (Image via Nexon)

The First Descendant's Season 1 update introduced Hailey Scott, a new iceborne Descendant that trailblazes a new way to farm character components. Usually, character parts are locked behind some form of RNG pool draw. In most cases, it's several layers of RNG pools: get the right lootbox (AMP) to drop, and then get lucky with your pull from said lootbox.

To curb your expectations, let us reiterate that there are no actual pity mechanics for the new character, Hailey. In fact, farming this character is a slogfest, and that's a shame—its new ideas could be the perfect precursor for a pity system.

Hailey will take two weeks to farm in The First Descendant, and that's if you get lucky

The typical character in The First Descendant will take four blueprints to farm: Stabilizer, Spiral Catalyst, Enhanced Cells, and the main blueprint (Code). As mentioned previously, these are usually blueprints you have to roll a lootbox to get.

Often, you'll get copies of other Descendant components you already have. The issue is that these duplicates have next to no use, and they sit in your inventory collecting dust.

The new loot pool is not gucci even by gacha standards (Image via Nexon)

How is Hailey atypical in this? Through the more granular nature of crafting her components. All of her "blueprints" are replaced with fragments. Instead of one Stabilizer Cell, you need 34x Stabilizer Cell DNAs to get Hailey.

These fragments are locked behind the new Invasion Dungeon system. These involve all-new puzzles that will take a while to get used to, but if you get good at it, you can finish it within a set timer to get 3x the Hailey parts at the end of the run.

This all sounds good in theory, and it's certainly more innovative than the usual lootbox-cracking affair we have come to expect. The problem is that you can only do four of these Invasion Dungeons per daily reset. The second problem is that you need 136 (34x4) total fragments. Furthermore, all of these fragments share the same loot pool, so the only guarantee here is that you will have duplicate fragments.

Putting this triple-threat conundrum together, it's evident that no player will have it before 12 days from the launch of Season 1, and most players won't have crafted a free set of Hailey even in the third week.

Players well-versed in gacha systems will have noted the irony here already. Fragments usually contribute toward pity systems in RNG-reliant games, where you get fragments as by-products of rolling the dice. It can be a little rainy day fund collected for scrapping duplicate rolls or as benevolent freebies on all lootboxes.

By Korean live-service standards, The First Descendant has a reasonable amount of grind. However, a vast majority of Western players in this looter-shooter have been asking for a pity system since day one. With Hailey, Nexon had the perfect opportunity to implement an alternative method of farming all the components.

Instead, the Hailey farm is a time-gated mess of unmatched tedium. This does not help an otherwise lukewarm reception of Season 1 and its staggered release schedule.

While Nexon has previously caved to popular demand on The First Descendant, they have no intention of introducing a pity system just yet. To address this backlash, Game Director Minseok Joo announced that they are simply doubling the drop rates from this Saturday with patch 1.1.0b. The recent developer letter from Nexon reads:

"...To accommodate opinion that Hailey’s farming takes too long, we are planning to increase the drop rate for Hailey’s Research Material about 2 times faster."

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Edited by Ritoban "Veloxi" Paul