The First Descendant
The First Descendant Season 1 has launched today and with it, a massive patch featuring not just new hero Hailey and some harder Infiltration missions, but also a ton of quality of life changes. It’s an absolutely huge document to go through, so I will do my best to summarize the highlights here.
- There are now visual, directional hints when pinging to try to find encrypted vaults on a map, not just audio cues.
- A number of Escort Robot/Occupy Zone objectives in infiltrations that took forever have been replaced with more combat-oriented objectives like Extermination.
- XP gains for completing Hard Infiltration missions has been increased by 1.5x, as has defeating monsters there in both Hard and Normal.
- Hard infiltrations no longer play voice lines to avoid endless repetition.
- You no longer teleport into an Outposts when joining an active one, it’s seamless.
- Gold increased by 3x for completing larger Outposts.
- Void fragments now give double shards, and as such, you can now do a reactor after doing just one Void fragment run, and you only need one type of shard to activate them.
- Special Operations now give double shards on pickup, and there is now additional XP gained when you complete individual waves. Mine Blockade gives 1.5x more, Resource Defense and Neutralize Experiment gives 2x more.
- Once a catalyst slot is unlocked, you can now change its type to equip other types of mods if you had previously put that symbol there on another reset. Alternate catalyst layouts can be saved on different loadout pages for different situations (bossing vs. mobbing, etc).
- You can now dismantle gear when in combat.
- Research time has been decreased for Ion Accelerators, Phase Exchangers and Adjustment Control Axis.
- Reactors now have different looks depending on their attributes and Arche type.
- Jayber, Blair and Ajax have received the first major round of Descendant buffs (read those details here).
My favorite buffs here are the ones to XP gain, as it gets pretty exhausting to re-level characters to 40 eight or ten times in order to get all catalysts done. But I am disappointed to learn you have to do another full reset for each symbol on each slot to allow for switching of symbols in other loadouts, rather than being able to freely do that.
In terms of the “god that was so annoying” changes, I like that we can now dismantle gear while in combat, and also that the most boring parts of Infiltrations have been changed where you mostly have to stand around and do nothing, but is very dull.
All of these are good changes on some level, and that’s in addition to the actual new content arriving with the season. I’ll head out there shortly.
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