#Make essences great again (improved illuvial fusing)

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willow sinew
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After removing Augments from the crafting menu essences have no use anymore. Playing PB4 right now it is obvious that there is currently no real idea what should happen with essences. They are just randomly added to every craft for no reason.

It would be good to gather some ideas what should happen with essences. I will share my idea but maybe someone else has a better one.

  • Reduce the drop chance of essences
  • Remove essences from every craft in the game
  • Use essences to enhance Illuvial fusing

So basically you use essences to get better stats during fusing Illuvials.
You can give every illuvial a single essence before fusing it. This results in max 3 essences per fusing. Every essence is assigned to a single stat of the illuvial (for example: red = attack power, green = defence, blue = omega power, yellow = crit, pink = overall power). Every essence has the % chance to max roll a stat of the Illuvial based on the base stat of the Illuvial but it can never exceed the max stat of the base illuvial.

Here is an example. Lets say we have 3 atlas. The max possible stat improvement is 5 on every stat. So a perfect Illuvial would have 5 in everything. Our base Illuvials have the following base stats.

Atlas 1: 2/2/2/2/2
Atlas 2: 3/3/3/3/3
Atlas 3: 4/4/4/4/4

When I fuse atlas without any essence the result is an axon with random stats in attack, defence, omega power, crit, overall power ranging from 2-4 based on the base atlas.
Now lets assume we have an essence that says 33% chance to max roll attack power. Giving this essence to all 3 atlas will result in 100% chance to max roll attack power based on the highest base atlas. Which means I have a 100% chance to get an attack power of 4 (not 5 because no atlas has attack 5) and the other 4 stats range from 2-4. I can also gamble and put in 3 essences for 3 different stats. But then it won't be guaranteed to hit a max and I can only hit a max of 2 on atlas 1 anyway.

Check my next post for why I think it is good

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  1. Leveling an Illuvial will be worth it. At the moment it is much better to try to catch a stage 2 or 3 Illuvial because it is way faster. Having the possibility to manipulate the stat distribution during fusing will give leveling a much higher importance
  2. It makes fusing more fun. Having influence on the fusing outcome will open up many new possibilities. Illuvials that would otherwise be useless will go up in value even if they only have a single stat on max. This reduces supply of Illuvials
  3. Trying to craft the perfect Illuvials could be a minigame in the game itself. It can incentify people to fuse one more time and try again, trying to pick the right illuvials and gamble one more time.
  4. It is not too OP because you can only fuse 2 times until stage 3 and it is basically impossible to easily craft a perfect illuvial if the percent chances on the essences are balanced because all other stats are still random on fusing.
  5. Making the drop chances of essences lower will it also make way more expensive to fuse for a better illuvial which won't impact casual gamer because they still can fuse without any essence for a totally random outcome.
  6. I hope the implementation of it shouldn't take too much time. But if it is not ready for OB just add it as new feature after OB. Essences could still be in the game for people to prepare for that.

Edit:
7. This will hold up the value of essences. While with the current system essence value might decrease since after some time everybody will have most of the items crafted. But fusing Illuvials is a core aspect of the game and will be relevant as long as Illuvials have utility.

meager knoll
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Your idea has merit, but I don't know if I like the idea of tinkering the fusion process. We want to incentivize collecting as many illuvials as possible. With this we would be artificially manipulating the illuvial stats.

That said, I do see potential in it if done right though. But only if the community wants to be able to tinker with the fusion process.
Giving players some agency in it is not a bad thing as long as it's not game breaking making all illuvials have perfect stats.

summer bison
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This idea I like.

I already have issues with the notions that everything needs to be scarce, difficult to get, and generally impossible to perfect. Things I feel don't have any business being in a game that's primarily based around collecting.

This idea would help alleviate some of the rng when it comes to finding those perfect stats for your competitive team.

It would give players more incentive to trade for Illuvials with specific stats, rather than just perfect or near-perfect ones.

As mentioned in point 4, it wouldn't be too powerful as you can only fuse 2 times at most.
But as mentioned in point 5, it would probably require that essences be more rare. Of course, this depends on how much players value the use of a mechanic like this.

willow sinew
# meager knoll Your idea has merit, but I don't know if I like the idea of tinkering the fusion...

Yes. That's why i only want to use essences to highlight already existing stats. And not to improve the stats. So you still have to collect mainly illuvials because they are the source of the stat.
If you look at it the essences only raise the probability to carry over a good stat into the next stage. This can also happen during a regular fusing process. It just makes it more likely. If i understand the current fusing mechanic correctly then you can already guarantee for example max attack by fusing 3 illuvials with max attack. Using essences you could guarantee it by fusing only 1 illuvial with max attack and 3 essences which probably greatly raises the fusing cost and you still have 4 random stats.

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The intention is not to generate many perfect illuvials but to be able to get an illuvial that you want for your team. For example max omega power invoker. But this is also only possible if someone catches a 5 omega power base illuvial

meager knoll
willow sinew
meager knoll
willow sinew
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Make essences great again (improved illuvial fusing)

meager knoll
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Ok I've been thinking about this and here is how I envision this:

It's not only essences that need more use cases it's also the plant consumables. Therefore my suggestion would be to create an entirely new set of items called Fusing Orbs, where the recipe to craft these would be a mix of Essences and plant consumables.

There would be 5 different recipes, one for each stat. And there would be 6 tiers of Fusing Orbs:
T0 - 10% chance
T1 - 20% chance
T2 - 40% chance
T3 - 60% chance
T4 - 80% chance
T5 - 100% chance

Another difference to your idea would be to have the choice to use the 3 Fusing Orbs on the same illuvial or spread them between the 3 illuvials.

And yes with this it would be possible to craft perfect stats illuvials, but I don't think that's actually a bad thing. Firstly, because right now from the sentiment I gathered from the community they are extremely rare, too much IMO. Secondly, the T5 Fusing Orb recipes would be expensive and only dedicated harvesters would be able to make perfect stat illuvials, since the plant consumables are not tradable. And thirdly, there are waaay more pros than cons with this, the only con I come up with is less rarity of perfect stat illuvials.

meager knoll
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This discussion of not being able to guarantee a perfect stat illuvial is the same as the master shard.

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What's the problem of having that option if it's really expensive?

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As an experienced crafter myself I can tell you it's very frustrating to gather up all the mats and have a 90% chance of success and fail. I would pay wtv it taked for that extra 10%.

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is it though?

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I'm refering to not having the option to guarantee one stat 100% and only being 80-90%

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that will lead to frustration for the crafters

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once again you're missing the point. There are no enchancements...

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you simply can guarantee that the highest stat is the one that passes up

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still you wouldn't guarantee all 5 stats

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neither me nor Smismi said you could use 5 essences

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maybe try reading what was said...

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might not seem so silly that way

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this is more than simply changing just because. It's to address one major issue we have right now with plants.

willow sinew
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The idea is not that you craft a perfect Illuvial, but that you can use essences to guarantee that the best base stat is used for the next stage. Which means the idea is more that you get an titanor with good defense or an synalph with good Omega power. So the base stats of Illuvials are important.
I don't think it is bad to make it easier to get an "better" axon than atlas because you will catch alot more atlas. So it is still not hard to get a good atlas.

meager knoll
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@humble valve you didn't had to delete all your answers. But actually reading before commenting would be wise next time.

humble valve
meager knoll
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For those worried about easily achieving perfect-stat Illuvials, it's important to point out the process would be challenging and costly. It would require the three Illuvials having two matching perfect stats, while the remaining three stats must be maximized and distinct from each other in order to apply a T5 Fusion Orb to each Illuvial and ensuring the retention of their respective maximum stat. The T5 Fusion Orb recipe should also be really expensive, akin to the Master Shard.

fathom dew
willow sinew
fathom dew
willow sinew
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Or is my proposal something for the longer term?

fathom dew
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Will be able to test before.

willow sinew
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Which could then be adapted to Illuvial fusing like I suggested here? Or is it still more of a basic item creation system?

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Or do you mean that essences will be used elsewhere and will get a dedicated use case soon?

meager knoll
fathom dew
boreal sundial
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Here's a thought I had recently that's kind of in the vein of this thread (my own opinion, not official in any way 🙂 ).

Right now stat selection is mostly random; for each stat we simply pick one of the three inputs. This means that fused Illuvials will tend towards average stats, making it almost impossible to fuse up to S3 with good stats, and making low-stat Illuvials near-worthless because they can only negatively affect the result. What if we used a weighted-random selection instead, with the weights based on the Illuvials' levels? Thus, Illuvials contributing more to the fusion would have a higher chance of affecting the outcome.

That would allow players to influence the fusion by focusing Illuvials with better stats, and still be able to include Illuvials with poor stats in the fusion with less fear of diluting the fused stats. And it gives more incentive for fusing Illuvials rather than simply trying to capture higher stages. But because there's still some randomness involved, it doesn't guarantee a perfect result. And it's a much simpler change than coming up with a whole new fusion system 🙂

night sage
willow sinew
# boreal sundial Here's a thought I had recently that's kind of in the vein of this thread (my ow...

I really like that idea. And the implementation of it would also be rather fast and easy.
But that means if you level an illuvial you could also influence the fusion in a negative way because the weighted system might also prioritize the bad stat of that Illuvial. For example we have an Illuvial with one max stat and all others are on the minimum. This would give a good chance for the max stat but (almost) no possibility to have a 2. good stat. Which would make certain Illuvials worthless again. Do you have any idea how to solve that? Or is that just the disadvantage of the system and we would have to live with that? Or isn't is as bad of a problem as I might think now?

boreal sundial
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If you're fusing Illuvials with roughly the same levels, you'd still get something like we have now, with roughly equal weights for all three. But if there's a big disparity in the levels, then yeah, the higher level ones would tend to dominate, for better or worse. I just figured it'd give people a little more agency in the fusion process than a pure RNG.
Then again, I'm a developer, not a designer, so there may be plenty of holes in this idea 😛

willow sinew
# boreal sundial If you're fusing Illuvials with roughly the same levels, you'd still get somethi...

I like the idea to have more agency in the fusion process and not just RNG. But idk why the design decision was made that way. Maybe not enough dev time to implement and balance a more advanced fusion process. Or maybe there is any other fundamental reason behind that. Considering the positive feedback on the idea here many others would like to see a change in the fusion process too. I hope at some point someone from the design team will look at it and give it some thoughts 😄