“The First Descendant” has a big ultimate hero problem

The First Descendant is currently heavily promoting its first season, which will introduce a new heroine, ice sniper Hailey, and a new Ultimate Descendant, an upgrade for Freyna.

The problem is that these Ultimate Descendant releases have really messed up one of the main components of the game, which is acquiring and upgrading existing characters.

The core problem here is that it doesn’t seem worth spending dozens of hours, millions of gold, nearly a dozen catalysts, and an energy activator to fully invest in a “normal” character when, in theory, you should just wait until the Ultimate version comes out, whenever that may be.

They did this by default at launch, with Ultimate versions of all three starter characters, meaning any investment you made in your first character would likely result in an underpowered version. The same goes for Bunny, the first additional character everyone gets.

And for many of these characters, that is important. Lepic is the best boss burner in the game with his Ultimate mod. Bunny becomes an even better mob clearer with her Ultimate mod. It is not always the case that they are better, but you just don’t really know until they arrive, and as such I’ve heard a lot of people say that they don’t bother to really go hard on a character except the Ultimates and wait for newer ones to be released before they tackle them.

It’s pretty clear why Ultimate characters exist, as they are sold in the store in packs for $100. To be fair, they Are grindable, it just takes forever because you need so much luck. But it feels bad to invest in a character and not benefit in the slightest when an ultimate comes.

That’s not to say there shouldn’t be Ultimate versions at all. But the trade-off should be that the investment in a base-level character will carry over to a future Ultimate version to some degree. Whether it’s a used energy activator, catalysts consumed after multiple resets, or both, you should be able to get an Ultimate without having to annihilate your old character – just convert them to the Ultimate (Freyna’s preview literally presents this as a conversion process in the lore).

Otherwise nothing would change. Fine, they still sell it in the store and have a fancy extra costume. Fine, they still make the in-game grinding very hard and tedious. But allow players to reach their ultimate and not start from scratch, but put on the ultimate mod and outfit and keep going without having to do a complete reset. The current system is bad for everyone, including Nexon, and it needs to be changed.

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