3.25 Heist Feedback [VERY LONG]

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Toforto wrote:

+I literally cannot play heist right now because of all the mtx spam and texture flickering happening there. And no it's not just a hardware problem when the literal game is breaking and textures are flat-out disappearing,flickering and going gray.

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Toforto wrote:

It's the game's engine dying and not being able to load all these mtx on-screen.

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GUNDERSTRUTT wrote:

This has been one of my favourite leagues so far. Because the game feels like it's in such a good state, the bad stuff feels more obvious.

This post is about Heist--what it plays like today and what it might look like in the future. I might make more posts in the future about other mechanics, but I did a lot of heist this league and thus have a lot of feedback.

Heist is a very cool idea. A game mode divorced from kill power where survivability and speed are important where the capstone content rewards are very interesting (heist-specific uniques, replicas, overwhelmingly powerful base types, tinker/tailor orbs). It has gone through many many changes since its release until we've arrived at what it is now. You find a rogue marker, you go to the harbour, you do some basic story tasks and assemble your team. Cool. But there are many points of friction that can be improved.

Heist Issues

1. Story (green) contracts are not really a good mechanic.
You're forced to either ignore heist or sporadically commit to bursts of contract running lest your inventory be forever claimed. I had something like nearly a quarter of my inventory filled with story contracts after speed unlocking every rogue and mapping. You can't put them in your heist tab, nor your stash in general, and you can't destroy them. You're forced to either run them or cruelly leave them behind in some random map like an unloved family dog.

2. Unique contracts are somehow even worse.
Once you complete a unique contract you can still get the unique contract, which makes sense because you might want to target farm a particular unique drop. However, one, the unique contracts drop too frequently (I get one every ~2nd box), two, the uniques are all guaranteed drops and often the only thing in the bosses table (apex/nadir mode the sole exception), and three, the uniques are all bad (the exception being the fledgling, which is still only a few chaos at most and just okay).

"Oh but you can still run them for rogue markers!" Nope. You only get rogue markers the first time. Every subsequent time they cost you markers, which also might not be too big a deal if the reward chests were at all worthwhile, but you only get one rogue (sometimes someone without any gear) and per-marker you're much better off blueprinting or even normal contracting.

3. Contracts need fixing.
There was a change to homogenize blueprints because some blueprints were not worth running and the moving of transfigured gems to lab meant that there weren't enough blueprint rewards to justify the old system. This was a good change. But this problem exists still with normal contracts.

If your contract isn't deception then it's not even worth picking up. And why are deceptions worth picking up? Because they are Gianna's 5 skill and the doors don't close behind you when you grab the objective, meaning you can blast them super quickly for cheap unlocks. So, the only reason why deception contracts are the only ones people care about is because they let you spend the least time in contracts. Which brings me to...

4. Unlocks are a janky mechanic.
I get the idea of forcing you to do Heist to play Advanced Heist, but there are three mechanics for this already: Rogue markers, Unlocks, and Blueprints, and those require a mix of both mapping and contracting.

With other such systems in the game, to participate, you merely either do the required mechanic in the map yourself (kirac's maven invitations, syndicate, expedition, delve) or you can just buy the stuff off trade (maven fight, any particular map, ubers, eow/exarch invitations, shaper/elder, sirus, blighted maps, grove, king in the mists, beasts, cortex, sanctum, etc.).

The most involved of any other game mechanic is Jun, and while there is friction within that system as well, at the very least it only realistically requires mapping and the occasional syndicate safehouse / mastermind mission (which is ultimately, the payoff)--there's not a secondary (markers) or tertiary (blueprints/contracts) or quaternary (unlocks) currency you have to spend to make it work.

Heist, you farm blueprint unlocks (yourself) on a very specific contract type (either found somewhat rarely or bought in bulk), which you then still have to spend a ton of rogues markers on (farmed, found or traded for), on a blueprint you had to find/trade for, which then you have to spend more markers to actually run *after* going through the effort of unlocking your rogues, levelling them up, and kitting them out. Even just compare that to sanctum: all you need on sanctum is a generic Forbidden Tome and you're set. No currency, no unlocks, no forced content. Farm it in maps and go, or just buy it. Done and dusted.

While I don't think unlocks are wholesale just a bad mechanic, I think the degree to which they're expensive and necessary right now is a big issue. They cost too much time to farm them, too many rogue markers to unlock, too many contracts (which, as in (3), aren't nearly rewarding enough) to get a good base, and their expensive nature is incredibly punishing for people who want to unlock extra rooms in the blueprint wings because they simply are not worth it. Some of this is obviated by spamming Gianna deception contracts, but it ends up being a janky, inefficient system even buying in bulk.

5. Doors.
How come my rogue friends won't hold them open for me, are they rude? I can't even direct them to open the door with my action button. Maybe a heist-unique gem called "open nearby door" that I can link to automation.
While were at it can those dang safes open faster?

6. The chaos -> div trinket doesn't seem to work properly.
(This was originally very long with data, but I'm cutting it down.)
This is something that should be a crown jewel of heisters. It's rare, it's expensive, it can't be crafted, etc. It should work the way it is worded, or at least close to it. I noticed after wearing it I was getting wildly more chaos than a 1:99 div:ch ratio. Unluckiness? Perhaps. But I started keeping track (including multiple chaos drops--the stacks of 2x or 4x or more from currency/normal chests and vindiri+brooches) and the ratio I ended up with was something like 1:400 even excluding the chaos from curio displays.

Base case: something in the heist causes a single chaos to drop. We roll a 1d100 and on a 100 we drop the chaos as a divine instead. I think this probably works properly.

The issue: the same scenario as above, but we double the reward with Vinderi or a heist currency-doubling mechanic (brooch or trinket). We roll a single chaos, that then gets doubled twice (once by Vinderi and again for the 4x from a brooch). This causes a single stack of 4 chaos to drop. There are two different ways the ch->div trinket should work in this scenario. Either the entire 4x stack is rolled with one single 1d100 roll and is entirely replaced with a 4x stack of divine orbs if we get very lucky. Or, the 1d100 is rolled individually per-chaos (ie, we roll 4d100 and drop as many divines as we get 100s).

However it seems to work neither of these ways. It seems to make a single roll for a chaos drop because it excludes the Vinderi/brooch-doubled chaos as possible conversion. I don't 100% know that this is how it works. I simply don't have enough data to say anything other than it doesn't seem to work on a per-chaos basis and the Heist reward duplicating mechanics seem immune from this conversion, resulting in a div:ch ratio much much lower than we'd expect based on the trinket wording and odds. Even if you assume the worst case scenario above and assume that divs can't drop naturally, the odds I got from my data were *still* worse than expected, but were at least within what would be considered a reasonable string of bad luck.

7. The mechanic is very feast or famine.
The removal of targeted blueprint farming was probably a step in the correct direction. But with the current state of scarabs and the atlas and other endgame content (sanctum), heist is largely relegated to two specific niche roles: day 1-3 currency farming for builds requiring a specific amount of farm (or required items) to get going damage-wise, and people blasting blueprints for the possibility of a jackpot curio cabinet.

And the solution to a feast-or-famine mechanic is frequency. Running as many blueprints as possible as fast as possible is the catch-all solution to this, which seems antithetical to the mechanic's vibe. The aesthetic behind the contracts and unlocks is that you're casing the joint, building up data, scoping the ins and outs of the place's comings and goings, yet, the best strategy seems to be a blind smash and grab. Hell, you don't even need to prepare the blueprints at all--just run them white, as there aren't any modifiers (other than no travel/ring/hiring fees) that meaningfully benefit you. This goes for contracts, too. The rogue marker value of the fenced item doesn't change and you're not concerned with quant really because it gets in the way of your curios/hour.

8. Too many of the rogues are just Not Useful.
There are nine rogues, only ~3 of which are meaningfully useful in heist.

Vinderi is the GOAT and the best one by far.
Gianna is useful only for cheap unlocks and then probably even only because deception missions are faster than the others.
Karst is good if you want to open a lot of chests (which isn't really the Heist mid-late league vibe).

The rest (Tibbs, Isla, Niles, Huck, Tullina, Nenet) are either bad and you only bring them along if you have to (Tibbs, Isla, Niles, Huck) or barely better than no one because at least they lower alert a little bit (Nenet, Tullina). We spend time unlocking them, equipping them, doing their stories, and they're just there to... scout enemies? Open a chest post-lockdown? They're effectively just a chassis upon which to place gear, and the only gear that realistically matters is job speed to make them even less visible.

9. The Rogue Harbour is hell.
When people complain about micro-transactions in towns in the game, I think they're largely overreacting. There's rarely *that* many people in the act towns and even if there were you don't need to be there fore longer than a few seconds.

The Rogue Harbour does away with this notion. It boldly asks the question "what if we took everyone with the most obnoxious, least performant microtransactions and jammed them into a tiny region of the town where not only both stashes are, but so is the NPC that opens contracts and blueprints as well as the portal to those locations!"

I've never experienced the same degree of screen tearing and texture issues anywhere in this game outside of the rogue harbour. I couldn't open my stash without my entire screen flickering and textures disappearing. While I was heisting, my internet provider actually capped my downstream. Coincidence? Definitely possible. But it did start when I was heisting and stopped when I wasn't.

10. Smuggler's caches are kinda just blande.
Not a lot to say about this. See a cache in your map, click it, loot everything and shuffle it off to your heist locker. Sometimes they have a blueprint which is cool but that's about it--there's not a lot of other gear or stuff that can drop. Heist doesn't have scarabs, so they can't drop those, your trinket doesn't impact anything from them, and they don't benefit from your heist progression at all (and arguably with the quest/unique contract state, your heist progression actually is a detriment).

All the heist-specific stuff is further isolated away from them behind blueprints, meaning that the only way to benefit from the rewards of the caches if you don't wanna full-send heist is to sell the stuff you drop in bulk. Which, when you go to do, you will realize how little people care about non-deception contracts.

11. There's not really that meaningful a distinction between Heist locations for blueprints/contracts.
I understand that this is kinda a fallout of historical changes, but it still feels a bit weird.


Heist Solutions

1. When the league rolls over, port Heist to Kingsmarch.
Turn Rogue's markers into gold, add the Boatman to your hideout and make him cost a few coins to take you to Kingsmarch (or get Adiyah to make a portal and have that as a hideout obj). Add the ability to hire rogues and have them run contracts for you a-la the current mappers. You can give them rogue-ish subspecialities and have a little criminal organization.

2. Turn green contracts into town improvement quests instead of items.
Make the current unique contracts (representative of character story capstones) green contracts, and incorporate green contracts into the town upgrades instead of being drops so that there's actually a reason to do them. eg: Killing the slaver gives us more recruits per refresh; getting the admiral's records lets you add fenced items to shipments; killing admiral Darnaw opens up more ports; breaking the unbreakable lets Isla improve the map device to take a scarab; etc. etc.

3. Add new unique contracts that act like scarabs for the town.
Let's say you find a Jun contract from a Smuggler's Cache in a Jun map and go give it to <whatever personnel manager>. Now, each contract includes Jun and rewards safehouse/mastermind intel with the possibility of betrayal league specific items and veiled rares for some amount of uses.

Or you find an Einer contract and now each map will reward rarer and rarer beasts with escalating difficulty until you fail a map.

Or a Gianna contract that awards you "unlocks" for each mission run until a failure.

Or a Sonia contract and it makes all harvested Kingsmarch crops also produce Harvest juice for an hour. Etc. etc.

4. Add interesting rewards/drops to Contracts/Smuggler's Caches (like above) that integrate with rest of the game so that Heist doesn't feel so isolated and contracts/caches feel more interesting to do/open.
Instead of automatically hiring rogues after running a mission, maybe you can randomly find Recruit: Karst and he can become a permanent rogue for your campaign out of a Smuggler's Cache.

Add luxury goods to contract rewards and caches for extra shipping value (eg: dust, effectively).

Add Lesser curio displays to contracts where you'll be offered 2-3 choices instead of just the one right now so they're more like mini blueprints and more interesting. The stuff you add that can be rewards from contracts can be rarer rewards from smuggler's caches as well to give them more variety.

Maybe you can randomly find Adiyah instead of a Smuggler's cache in your maps and she can portal you to a random Blueprint curio room.

5. Allow for more interesting affixes to appear on blueprints and contracts.
To enable more interesting farming strategies compared to "just run them as fast as possible" there's gotta be a reason to actually roll blueprints, even if that's just an alch and go. Maybe something like "unlocks" instead are currency-free better-odds rerolls on blueprints rather than just something that gates the content (essentially, harvest juice but for contracts/blueprints). Or maybe blueprints drop fully revealed and are unmodifiable except for some minor shaping you can do with "unlocks". Maybe the location of the contract/bp affects which modifiers it can get.

6. Add more interesting and specific perks to the rogues.
Like Isla's perk could be that she generates a specific type of reroll or she can prevent some % of traps/blockers from arming during heists; Huck could work like an empower gem but for the other rogues so everyone gets +levels of their main skill based on his, maybe Tullina is a more gold multiplier. Maybe Tibbs will just open doors for the player (I guarantee if you made Tibb's ability <opens doors in some scalable range> people would lose their mind, especially if, like Huck, you could get him in your maps).

There's so much you could do, and I personally think it's important to do something very specific and cool that 80% of people won't care about than something blande that 100% of people wont care about.

7. Keep blueprints fun.
The heavy RNG of blueprints are fun as long as the rest of the mechanics are too. So, I think it would be cool if there were more fun medium/high-roll options in heist.

Buff the cruddier replicas (and lower their frequency), prevent a single curio room from having more than 1 identical curio (the amount of times I've seen like 2+ Replica Prismweaves or Lavignia's Spirits or Leer Casts or whatever in a single room...), and add more replicas.

Maybe even alt-replicas? A replica replica badge that sets maximum power to your maximum endurance charges? Replica original sin that converts all phys to lightning, all lightning to cold, all cold to fire and sets nearby enemy ele res to 0 but prevents chaos damage? I dunno, just more stuff. Busted old league uniques can just become rarified Heist-specific drops instead of disappearing forever (eg: That Which Was Taken).

The side-rewards chests in Blueprints are somewhat weak right now as well, but I don't think they need a change if the meta-level rerolling is improved and rogues are given more interesting abilities and/or items.

Okay, that was a lot. I'm impressed by anyone who read it.

SUPER TL;DR: do away with rogue markers (make them gold), do away with unlocks, add more cool stuff, integrate heist with Kingsmarch and convert the crud parts of heist to cool parts of Kingsmarch.