A Warning to all The First Descendant players…

Hey, look at that! You’ve found another catalyst for a Descendant you’ve unlocked. What’s this? It’s usable, and it can help you power up your arche (abilities)? Well, why not!

Stop! Before you use that catalyst, take this warning to heart.

What Catalysts do in The First Descendant

After using a catalyst to unlock a Descendant, you can farm it again and use it. This seems to be able to power up that Descendant’s abilities, but there’s one caveat. It also resets that Descendant’s level to 1.

A lot of players have been complaining about level resets on reddit. The reason? Using a catalyst, and the fact that it does reset your level isn’t always clear. I mean, it does state that it will, but in a game as fast-paced as TFD, who has time to read?

I tried farming another Bunny catalyst to test this myself, but this leads me to another warning about TFD.

Are drop rates accurate?

After the tenth attempt at a mission for an item with a 20 percent drop rate, I begin to wonder if all the complaints about drop rates might be accurate. You see, these are some of the items that negate buying things on the store. So if the drops rates were really low, how long would a player struggle before giving up and getting out the wallet?

The with random number generators (RNG) is that humans don’t understand them all that well. It’s totally random, every single time. A coin can land on heads over 12 times in a row, but since the chance every time is 50 percent, you’d expect that to never be a possibility.

Developers know this, and have been manipulating drop rates based on past results for as long as RNG has been a thing. Sadly, it seems as though one of two possibilities exist here.

Either Nexon has not touched the RNG and left it as is, meaning that every single time you complete a mission, you have to get that 70-90 roll in order to get your item. If a coin can land on heads 12 times in a row, your rolls can land outside of that range for potentially 50 times plus.

The other possibility is, of course, that Nexon manipulating drop rates against players, which seems like something that would come to light if it were true. I don’t think this theory holds any water whatsoever, but that’s my personal opinion.

So what’s the solution to this?

I would say that Nexon would do well to implement RNG manipulation that reward hard-working players. When you’re on your tenth mission attempt and you got the 10 percent chance item 5 times, it would be nice to have a bit of code that recognizes this, and perhaps raises the chance of that 20 percent item more on concurrent missions.

If you’ve done the same mission 12 times, the game should recognize what you’re trying to do and perhaps reward you for it.

The game is still brand new, and a lot still needs to be tweaked. Whether Nexon will take players complaints into account, however, remains to be seen.

For now, I’m done grinding for an item I don’t even want, and I’ll definitely get back and update this if anything I’ve said about using catalysts is incorrect.

Back to figuring out the best way to beat the devourer with Ajax, because sometimes using a hammer on a screw is just the way I do things.

While you’re waiting for that and maybe want to farm some, check out all the Amorphous Material Patterns in The First Descendant and where to find them.