Oh crap... I hate to make this one of the first posts, but it's necessary.
So you think you'll get to Inferno, play the easy mission 87 (by hiding in the rocks near the waterfall) and get a shiny new level 90 weapon and Inferno mission (and others) will be a breeze? Think again.
In their infinite wisdom, Sandlot decided that grinding for the weapons themselves wasn't enough. So all the weapons that drop are almost certainly at extremely low levels and almost all the major stats (damage, range, number of bullets, whatever applies) will be miserable. Unless you're lucky and get a really stacked one.
The WD is the one that is more affected by this. She has weapons with 8 upgradeable stats and all cores have 2. At least the vehicles only have an upgrade path (points to summon), and Ranger and Fencer enhancements curiously have no upgrades.
You got a new sniper for ranger? Fantastic, the problem is that its range will likely be lower than 500m, damage will be miserable and reload will take forever. You got a new turret for AR? Cry, it will likely have 2 or 3 turrets, and the damage will just tickle enemies. Don't even expect normal progress through the missions to help, if you play them sequentially, this is not an issue with farming specific higher weapons in higher missions. Around 70% of the missions will provide 10 or fewer weapon crates, and even if you get again the same weapon, which can make its stats go up, you must be lucky that the new one that droops has higher stats than the ones you already have, or zilch. If you're really unlucky, like me, you'll also only get upgrades for the junk weapons you don't want anyway.
An example. I wanted to try something with Spritefall Power Mode, so I took notes of how the grind to get it would be. Played all missions that the weapon could drop, specially the ones where the weapon would not be lower or upper limits as this would make it harder to drop. At the 11th mission the weapon showed up. At the 40th mission (with a ton of repeats as I had done them all), the weapon had dropped just twice more, and it didn't upgrade ANY stats in both times. This just burns your patience. It's pointless.
Another. Finally got the level 95 Phalanx ZT. Weapon dropped with Capacity at 1 star which is 105 (max will be 241 at 8 stars), Damage at 3 stars which is base 58.4 (max will be 91.7 at 5 stars), Range at 0 star which is 48m (max will be 96 at 5 stars), Energy cost at 1 star which is 284.5 (max will be 193.3 at 8 stars) and Charge Time at 0 star which is 2.7 sec (max will be 1.3 at 5 stars). I know it won't be necessary to max all stars to be effective, but as it is it's largely inferior to my level 84 Phalanx M5, and probably not much better than my level 64 Phalanx W2. Considering the time it took for the base weapon to drop I don't even expect to upgrade it to a decent level before finishing the game.
This affects the whole game, but it's more serious as the game progresses because low stats weapons are a joke in later missions and difficulties. The only items that are less affected are the vehicles, as their only upgradeable stats are the request points.
I even thought this was a japanese thing, but no, japanese players hate it too.
So Sandlot thinks of a nice weapons system and then makes it dreadful. When they had so many options. You could get stars from the next drops, and then you could spend them on upgrades for weapons you want, not the RNG junk, at the mission end so that you would have limits to what weapons you could apply them to. You could star the weapons you like and the drops would optimize for these. Something else would likely be better than this stupid, boring, dumb, pointless grinding system.
One of the interesting things in EDF games is to try a new approach to a mission with different weapons. This is something you now can't do unless you got lucky with the drops and got decent levels for the ones you want to try. Otherwise, you'll probably not even know if there will be any success with a different approach, as it's inconclusive if it's the strategy that doesn't work or the weapons that are still incompetent. The gameplay is good enough to ensure many gamers will return to try a different way, but grinding obligation to try to get something you think you could want is dreadful.
And then they wonder why people get fed up with the game and quit. Duh????? Hello???? Has anyone at Sandlot really grinded the weapons? Likely not, they surely have ways to unlock everything at max stats.
I know someone who grinded for more than 500 hours on EDF 4.1 to get Gungnir, his last weapon. He quitted, and cheated to get it (I probably would too). Took me more than 100 hours to get the fun but mostly useless Rule of God in EDF 2025. Is this the notion of fun at Sandlot? What are they smoking?
No wonder so many people resort to PS4 save editors to get all weapons at max stats (and other things probably). I can even imagine how bad it is on the PC version.
In the end, weapons acquisition is not stuck on skill, talent or brilliance. It's stuck on luck and / or grinding.
This is the most absolutely dreadful thing about the game, and it causes serious damage to it. Hope they see the light and change their way. Wishful thinking... RNG can be accepted sometimes, but for most things, it's a pain and dumb. It's easy to see why developers use RNG: it simplifies development a gazillion times. Sandlot takes the hard path on some things why go down the toilet on this crucial aspect?
Update - It's worse on EDF 6...
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