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Brave Frontier |OT| No puzzles, just dragons

I have a full team of mono dark 5* + 6* alice, a rainbow team with 2 6* (alice and douglas), and soon a mono fire. Just gotta level up lancia I guess, but elimo and tree healers are still good.

Game is mad addicting.
 

Marvelous

Member
If y'all haven't done it yet, make sure to get xenon. The coming dungeon will require having both him and estia.

So dumb, if they actually go through with that. Gumi likes to change things for random reasons. They should make Xenon a guaranteed drop on the final floors if you encounter him.

In other news, I finally got the Mad God Zebra today. Now I need to get some Dark Pots to evolve him. What's the best to get Dark Pots?
 

Anfang

Member
So dumb, if they actually go through with that. Gumi likes to change things for random reasons. They should make Xenon a guaranteed drop on the final floors if you encounter him.

In other news, I finally got the Mad God Zebra today. Now I need to get some Dark Pots to evolve him. What's the best to get Dark Pots?

The Tuesday dungeon.
 

Lomax

Member
Well, just found out the hard way that if I leave the game minimized on my tablet too long mid-battle, it closes out and I lose that energy and get none of the drops... and of course the dark totem I needed had finally showed up. Oh well, guess that's what I get for getting distracted by the steam sale.
 
Well, just found out the hard way that if I leave the game minimized on my tablet too long mid-battle, it closes out and I lose that energy and get none of the drops... and of course the dark totem I needed had finally showed up. Oh well, guess that's what I get for getting distracted by the steam sale.

its actually a setting for apple products if you're using one.
 

Phades

Member
Totems and Pots are my bottle neck right now. I've got enough units for full teams of almost all elements but they aren't upgraded. D=

Yeah, I feel you on the pots. I need a bunch of those myself for a lot of filler units.

In other news, I finally got the Mad God Zebra today. Now I need to get some Dark Pots to evolve him. What's the best to get Dark Pots?

Possible to get dark pots in palmyna scars of the great war/the endlesss struggle. Worse appearance rate than idols on mistral though. Drop rate is probably similar.

If y'all haven't done it yet, make sure to get xenon. The coming dungeon will require having both him and estia.

That doesn't make a lot of sense. Completing the dungeons sure, but actually capturing both? Thats sadist...
 

Anfang

Member
That doesn't make a lot of sense. Completing the dungeons sure, but actually capturing both? Thats sadist...

Well it's better and more open to people than them requiring estia's dungeon line to be completed. That shit is ridiculous on the last two floors.
 

Phades

Member
Not really, since the capture rate is random, while the encounter design is fixed.

Case in point. My wife's 2 games, 2 of my friends, and 1 of my inlaws completed the first 100 floors and failed to capture Xenon. It is likely that most of them will also be able to complete the next 100 floors. Barring them from progressing because the RNG gods failed to recognize that they can complete the content is stupid.

I will also point you to the endless posts regarding drop rate of evolution items within evolution dungeons to reinforce that point of barring progression in spite of ability to complete and how it is a bad design concept.
 

Anfang

Member
Not really, since the capture rate is random, while the encounter design is fixed.

Case in point. My wife's 2 games, 2 of my friends, and 1 of my inlaws completed the first 100 floors and failed to capture Xenon. It is likely that most of them will also be able to complete the next 100 floors. Barring them from progressing because the RNG gods failed to recognize that they can complete the content is stupid.

I will also point you to the endless posts regarding drop rate of evolution items within evolution dungeons to reinforce that point of barring progression in spite of ability to complete and how it is a bad design concept.

How many times you gonna keep editing points in, this makes the third. -_-.

That said, xenons dungeon runs had a low cost, did they run only his dungeon or was it one and done. I call bs if they only spent energy on his dungeon and didn't get him in the week or so it's been up.
 

Phades

Member
His dungeon is not low cost. 1 run per 3 hours 20 minutes to 4 hours 10 minutes is not often (5-7 trips per day dude). He was not guarenteed to show up at all. He was not guarenteed to drop. It was not like the weekly dungeons where you could drop 25~35 energy and be done with it in a few runs if you were lucky and had the same length of time to do it. Never mind people still fail to capture in those events as well. I never got the last goddess or a serin.

This wasn't a casusal event. You did have to spend multiple days worth of energy just to get to the last one. If I can point out a cap rate of 1 in 6 accounts over the course of a week, you entire premise is flawed from the onset. Conceed the point.
 
I think the capture rate of Estia is probably 10% or lower, even on the higher floors, and the encounter rate is probably about 50%. The last 2 are completely out of the question without gemming, however I can definitely handle 171-180 without gemming. But I'm way more overpowered than most. But still, let's just assume I'm spamming 171-180. Just to unlock that floor is 165 energy clearing previous floors. By that time you get there, to hit the dungeon 20 times is going to be 600 energy. So we're talking about 765 energy, rough estimate, to have a pretty high chance of capturing. That's 127.5 hours, or 5.3 days of spamming non-stop. Even clearing on 171-180 is difficult for most though, and if you can clear it on 171-180 without gemming you definitely aren't casual. 161-170 is much more reasonable, but who knows what the drop rate is there? Much lower is a safe bet though.

I would much rather just spend the gems to beat the last level and then unlock the next event.
 

Phades

Member
Nope not yet. Given what CCP has said though, I'm probably not going to get one to drop unless I'm uncharacteristically lucky.

My inlaw who is rather lucky, hasn't caught Xenon yet or the new one, so I dunno. His account is arguably way better than mine (x3 Serin, Elimo, Felenus), but I had an easier time than him so far. My wife's account did better against Xenon than mine and her's isn't even level capped on most of her units so far.

Crapshoot really it seems.
 

Ferga

Member
For people who have done 181-200, is a team of doug+2 felneus leads+an alice for heals enough to beat it?

Don't have any more gems and don't want to waste a load of energy
 
For people who have done 181-200, is a team of doug+2 felneus leads+an alice for heals enough to beat it?

Don't have any more gems and don't want to waste a load of energy

If any of your guys have less than 6500 hp, they'll get randomly one shotted, even with seals. The issue isn't healing, although it's certainly not easy. The issue is not getting one shotted with a full hp bar.
 

Anfang

Member
For people who have done 181-200, is a team of doug+2 felneus leads+an alice for heals enough to beat it?

Don't have any more gems and don't want to waste a load of energy

Doesnt hurt to try, but if you cant get its w/e. She is way overtuned with how much dmg she puts out and the revive. I refuse to gem on levels so my mono thunder threw in the towel on 200 -_-
 

blackflag

Member
I got really lucky with these. I got Xenon on the first try of the final stage on the 100the floor didn't need to gem.

Got estia on like 150 or so. First time I saw her.
 

Credo

Member
I just got Estia on Floor 111-120. It was only the second time I encountered her. Things like this never happen for me, so I feel incredibly lucky. I assume this was payback for having to fight Xenon 20-25 times before getting him.
 
After going 0/20 on Estia, with every encounter being on the last 3 levels, i got this idea that maybe the game decides where you're going to get the drop and going anywhere else, no matter how many times, won't yield anything. Probably a stupid theory, but since i only had 20 energy left i decided to test it out by doing 121-130 which is the highest floor you can do for 20 energy. Encountered her on the 5th wave and she finally dropped.

So if you're in to superstitions, try going back and trying each previous floor until you have at least 1 encounter on every floor
 

Phades

Member
That would be downright evil if they programmed in that certain floors only drop the boss at certain times, or if it was hard set by floor to the account on start and you just had to run it till it showed up.
 

Lomax

Member
That would be downright evil if they programmed in that certain floors only drop the boss at certain times, or if it was hard set by floor to the account on start and you just had to run it till it showed up.

Seems really unlikely, that would be vastly more difficult to program. Most drop tables are pretty straight forward, but even with as high as 30% drop rate lots and lots of people will have really long streaks before getting the drop.

My biggest problem with this and things like the totems (from normal dungeons) is that not only do you have an appearance chance, but then you have a low drop chance as well. Either have a guaranteed appearance with a low drop rate, or a random appearance with a high drop rate, not both. It especially kills me when the spirit or totem I need appears and doesn't drop, it's just completely demoralizing.
 

Phades

Member
Yeah i know, i was just going conspiracy to run counter to superstition. I just found it really odd in the first tower that when 2 different accounts ran the same set of floors close together in time ~5-10 minutes, the exact same results occurred in regard to appearance rate and subsequent drop rate tit for tat across multiple floors.

It would make more sense to have a generic generation format and just re-use it everywhere. However, I'd expect it to have more variation account to account, minute to minute/hour to hour. I was able to sneak through the tower's last floor on a weaker account, since I already "scouted" it on a better account and hit no instance of Xenon on it scoring the gem. It shouldn't work this way, but it did.
 
Seems really unlikely, that would be vastly more difficult to program. Most drop tables are pretty straight forward, but even with as high as 30% drop rate lots and lots of people will have really long streaks before getting the drop.

My biggest problem with this and things like the totems (from normal dungeons) is that not only do you have an appearance chance, but then you have a low drop chance as well. Either have a guaranteed appearance with a low drop rate, or a random appearance with a high drop rate, not both. It especially kills me when the spirit or totem I need appears and doesn't drop, it's just completely demoralizing.

It wouldn't be hard to program at all. There's 10 floors. So AccountID % 10 is the floor that she'll drop on for you, so you need to just keep running that floor until you encounter her. Just as an example, not saying this is the algorithm, or even that they use any such algorithm, I've just experienced enough weird stuff with their drop system that I'm pretty sure there's more going on behind the scenes than everyone rolling the exact same fair dice.
 

Phades

Member
It actually wouldn't surprise me if some of the content generation wasn't pre-set at 10 minute slices and re-generated at 9:58 or whatever and distributed universally to everyone. A dungeon can take a while to complete, so if the same person was diving through the same dungeon, it could give the illusion of variety when in reality it is something different going on.
 

Lomax

Member
It wouldn't be hard to program at all. There's 10 floors. So AccountID % 10 is the floor that she'll drop on for you, so you need to just keep running that floor until you encounter her. Just as an example, not saying this is the algorithm, or even that they use any such algorithm, I've just experienced enough weird stuff with their drop system that I'm pretty sure there's more going on behind the scenes than everyone rolling the exact same fair dice.

It adds an unneeded level of complexity. When it comes to randomness, weirdness is the rule, not the exception. They don't have any vested interest in doing anything super weird short of putting in some means to increase drop rate with each fail, and there doesn't seem to be any indication that they do. Occam's razor and all that.

Now, as I'm sure you know, it's impossible for it to truly be random, so if they are crappy programmers (as they seem to be) and have a small number of seeds generated based on time, you'd see results like described above where both players saw the same results around the same time.
 

Phades

Member
It would have been interesting to test that further, had I read his post sooner and had energy to dive throug the 121-131 section of the tower.

If for nothing else, would have saved me a lot of time and annoyance over the weekend if it turned out to be correct.
 

Lomax

Member
So is the tower still open for people that cleared to 100? Or is it done now for everyone? The announcements seemed contradictory.
 
It adds an unneeded level of complexity. When it comes to randomness, weirdness is the rule, not the exception. They don't have any vested interest in doing anything super weird short of putting in some means to increase drop rate with each fail, and there doesn't seem to be any indication that they do. Occam's razor and all that.

Now, as I'm sure you know, it's impossible for it to truly be random, so if they are crappy programmers (as they seem to be) and have a small number of seeds generated based on time, you'd see results like described above where both players saw the same results around the same time.

I don't think it necessarily adds an unneeded level of complexity. A level of complexity, yes. Unneeded, I'm not so sure.

The only thing they care about, at the end of the day, is how many gems people are buying. If they can implement some complex scheme that results in people spending more gems, they will do so. Many people have observed that the drops seem to be unusually "streakish" in this game. I've observed it myself, and I have a master's degree in Math, so I know what randomness looks like, I know about the observer effect, etc. I've played a lot of online games that people have superstitions about how to beat the RNG in, and in all those games I'm not convinced that it's anything other than a standard linear congruential generator, or similar. In this particular game, I'm not as convinced.

When you've got a million, or 5 million, or some other large population, it's very easy to run A/B tests on this population and measure the effects of different things. The results are not always intuitive. I've experienced this firsthand. I've actually seen real numbers from a real game of how changing certain variables in subtle ways changes the spending habits of the population.

So not only would it not surprise me if they were doing something like this, it would surprise me very much if they were not at least experimenting with it.
 

Phades

Member
With that rational, it is making me somewhat depressed and in a way regret opening my mouth in the first place starting that avenue of thought.

And here I thought it would be fun to chase the rabbit down the hole...
 

Lomax

Member
I don't think it necessarily adds an unneeded level of complexity. A level of complexity, yes. Unneeded, I'm not so sure.

The only thing they care about, at the end of the day, is how many gems people are buying. If they can implement some complex scheme that results in people spending more gems, they will do so. Many people have observed that the drops seem to be unusually "streakish" in this game. I've observed it myself, and I have a master's degree in Math, so I know what randomness looks like, I know about the observer effect, etc. I've played a lot of online games that people have superstitions about how to beat the RNG in, and in all those games I'm not convinced that it's anything other than a standard linear congruential generator, or similar. In this particular game, I'm not as convinced.

When you've got a million, or 5 million, or some other large population, it's very easy to run A/B tests on this population and measure the effects of different things. The results are not always intuitive. I've experienced this firsthand. I've actually seen real numbers from a real game of how changing certain variables in subtle ways changes the spending habits of the population.

So not only would it not surprise me if they were doing something like this, it would surprise me very much if they were not at least experimenting with it.

Well they do have the two-tiered randomness with having both a chance to appear and a chance to drop. The theory that your drop is "locked in" at a certain point doesn't really mesh with the rest of the game though, as this event is one of the rare times it is tiered in this specific way. I don't doubt there's a lot going on behind the scenes, the most simple one is just to gradually increase drop rates with fails (WoW does this on quests) in order to eliminate very bad streaks. Personally, I noticed as I farmed a single level of the tower looking for a drop it went from me seeing the boss occasionally to the point where I was seeing him every single time and sometimes twice until I finally got the drop.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if drop rates didn't scale negatively with level, or have some sort of correspondence factor that resulted in lower levels having a higher drop rate for some people than for others at certain points. And like you said, they want to maximize profits, but they still rely heavily on the gacha machine to drive that I'd wager. Personally I still believe that clinging to this randomness that is so popular in eastern cultures works against them in the west, I'd be much more likely to spend gems on guaranteed characters (like I spent a bunch of gems getting one of the goddesses to drop) than I am to spend it on the machine which just gives me junk most of the time, and I think that's a cultural difference more than anything.
 
The tiered in theory as used would convince people not to buy gems. Gems have to show a reward when used and if you can't get a drop on the level you are running that has the opposite effect of making people want to spend more.

All it took was one week of me attempting to gem up a Dark Totem to convince myself it simply was not worth it.
 
The tiered in theory as used would convince people not to buy gems. Gems have to show a reward when used and if you can't get a drop on the level you are running that has the opposite effect of making people want to spend more.

All it took was one week of me attempting to gem up a Dark Totem to convince myself it simply was not worth it.

But there's the reverse too. Sometimes you get showered with rewards. My best MP run was gemming and I got 33 runs in, and collected 13 gods. That's like a 40% rate. That makes you want to gem even harder, and it's precisely that type of emotional trigger that makes a gambling addict keep throwing away his money, which is what they're banking on. See, for example, the hot-hand fallacy and the gambler's fallacy. One is the belief that continually losing means you're more likely to start winning, and the other is the belief that continually winning means you're more likely to continue winning. In both cases, it leads to the person thinking "if I go a little longer, I'll win". So if you actually do increase the frequency of people having losing streaks and winning streaks, people will want to spend more.
 

Lomax

Member
But there's the reverse too. Sometimes you get showered with rewards. My best MP run was gemming and I got 33 runs in, and collected 13 gods. That's like a 40% rate. That makes you want to gem even harder, and it's precisely that type of emotional trigger that makes a gambling addict keep throwing away his money, which is what they're banking on. See, for example, the hot-hand fallacy and the gambler's fallacy. One is the belief that continually losing means you're more likely to start winning, and the other is the belief that continually winning means you're more likely to continue winning. In both cases, it leads to the person thinking "if I go a little longer, I'll win". So if you actually do increase the frequency of people having losing streaks and winning streaks, people will want to spend more.

Yeah, which is no doubt why they keep drop rates on certain things like totems low in spite of almost universal complaint about it. Which is sad, because they are really just appealing exclusively to whales and gamblers and saying that no one else matters to them in terms of purchasing, and I think long term that's a mistake.
 
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If anyone has room, feel free to add me/trade some friend codes. Just realized you get stuff for doing so lol.
 

Kreed

Member
So i got the Ice Tower dude and he suppose to be good later on?

Tesla? Yes, mainly for it's defense skills (particularly at 6 star).

Leader Skill: 20% boost to defense and HP of all units and chance of mitigating a small amount damage
Brave Burst: 50% damage reduction for one turn
Super Brave Burst: 50% damage reduction for one turn and large increase to defense all units
 

Phades

Member
Meh well cleared the tower and a several extra runs so far, no caps. Only needed to gem on the last floor, since my BBlvs and characters aren't completely maxxed out (in addition to support units due to recent evolutions).

Lv 9 hurt a bit, but not any worse than multiple xenon lv 9s, just a different approach was needed. Lancia was a liability, since she just didn't have the HP to hang around the fight. Basically the turn she stopped guarding to heal was the turn she dies. Didn't try phoenix, but I'd have to bring more healing items to make it work.

Basically it was all about compressing as much damage as possible to bring her down from just above 50% to 0% twice. I achieved it using fujin tonics. Essentially, did basic attacks till she was at about 50%, then unloaded all BBs knocking her out. She revived and hit back. I healed and used Fujins (all of them), knocking her back down again to almost nothing. She hit back and I lost some folks (lancia/lava), then finished her off. The status effects almost don't matter since the fight was so short, but an attack break could be crippling. I could see a heavy crit biased team working as well, but I am not sure all the units are available to make that work yet. The fact I had to use the fujin tonics like that pretty much sideline any long term farming thoughts.

Blah, still need the cap though. :(


Also, I think Tesla would make this fight possible without gemming by dropping his BB on any turn you use your primary healer to restore damage and keep the healer in play.
 

Kreed

Member
I avoided fighting the princess on the last two floors (quit until I got rounds where she didn't show up) just so I could clear the tower. I think it took 3 attempts for each of the floors until I got the normal bosses. But now I still have to farm for the princess (I'm doing the first lvl 30 dungeon which is the safest for my teams).
 
I think Duel GX is the key to winning Lv. 10 without gemming. Sadly I didn't think about it until it was too late. Basically you go in, immediately hit Duel GX's ability, then use ores, seals, lebra's buff if you can, and just unload. On the next turn use fujin tonics and then go again. 2 rounds of full dark BB's with increased crit rate should kill him.
 
My last run of Level 8 Estia before getting the capture, I got a bugged Estia.

Best...Estia...Ever. Every attack she did hit for precisely 5 damage. I think a squad of 6 King Burny would have stood a fair shot at victory.
 

Lan_97

Member
It seems like crit team is the best way to take down Estia. Take her down from >50% to avoid her multiple bb and revive. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to raise up my DuelGX, so had to try multiple times with my Serin team and power through with a gem when Estia showed up as the last boss.

Just farmed 151-160 afterwards for a capture.
 

Pbae

Member
Estia's dungeon is really getting on my nerves and I haven't had any success in capturing her.

Also, does anyone play Hello Hero? I just found out about the game and it's really similar to this game but fully 3D and it's quite fun.
 
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