Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26093926-20150909014645/@comment-26696906-20150909050855

Overall, I liked it though my feelings are biased since I was lucky to get Akashi and Nihongou through the event.

In general, it was amusing and it made you change your strategy for maps, seeing you just couldn't cheese your way with high-leveled parties in the first stages if you wanted a specific drop. The first clear stage bonuses were really neat, even though the Emas always got me 1:30s.

It was not for beginners, however. Assuming someone had just joined in less than a month or so, even with the Exp bonuses from the first two maps, it'd be hard to assemble a high-leveled party to beat E3 and E4 AND levelling up. Everyone gunned for Akashi in E3 because it had comparatively less yari to 6-2, less RNG trolling and you could bring other swords to ensure you got to the boss node (and no boss tanto). The drop rate was lower, though.

This brings me to my next point. My issues with the event were partially the incredibly low drop rate. I gunned for Tonbo in week 2 and checked that his drop rate went form 0.11% to around 1.8% with the drop calculator and I still didn't get him. Coupled with mostly tanto drops, it was jarring, since tanto drops are everywhere in other in-game maps (hello 6-2 Midare). At least other swords give more scrap resources. So they could limit drops to Uchigatanas and higher. That would in turn could allow some moving of drop percentages, since the chances of getting swords seemed to be an illusion in some cases.

Another thing was the swords to be added. Before the event I was missing Hotaru, Akashi, Nihongou, Kogi and Tonbo. I managed to forge Hotaru in a miracle time around week 3 unrelated to the event but he wasn't available as a drop and Kogi wasn't around either despite his legendary status as insanely hard to get. Considering his places of dropping are 5-3, 6-1, it was surprising to me that the pool was very limited. Same with Ugu being the only R4 available, and no chances of getting the others.

Finally, I thought that the inclusion of the rare-5 yari was more of a Fake Difficulty implement than actual difficulty of the game itself, for high-leveled users. My issues were rarely swords getting OHKOd in battle because of their level, it was the chip damage that accumulated in between runs. This damage, coupled with questionable campaigns like no token campaigns and heavy use of resources, hampered my runs at times with my leader getting to red and being forced back to the citadel. I do admit I went entirely unprepared, with 60 tokens, then dropped to 30 and had to scrap them from everywhere to not run out of them.

In summary, I think that if they got rid of tanto drops in the boss nodes and higher drop percentages for rare swords and better implement of event-specific campaigns, some of the issues could be improved. That said, the different stages and opportunities to get swords you were missing were nice, so you could just camp in one map, according to the sword you were looking for.