What you need to know
- After some controversy, Nexon has released the 1.04 update for The First Descendant.
- This is a smaller patch update, but actually does include some nice improvements and changes for players.
- While the “Valby Run” is still being nerfed, it turns out that The Fortress Outpost is remaining a better farming ground than other Outposts, so Nexon either listened to players or its second community letter on the exploit was also “misinterpreted.”
- Nexon is also increasing the Module storage limit by 50%, decreasing cooldown times for Outposts, adding new rewards to Special Operations, and has teased the upcoming major content update dropping next week.
Nexon is not great at communicating its true intentions or plans to The First Descendant community to an almost-hilarious extent, but the new 1.04 patch update now rolling out across all platforms does seem to be a mostly positive release with some helpful changes and improvements for players. The hotfix, coming in at a modest 558MB on my Xbox Series X, implements player feedback in a number of key ways ahead of the major Update 5 coming next week.
For one, let’s address the Colossi in the room: the Valby Run farming exploit in The First Descendant has been nerfed. For those not up to date, there has been a small controversy in The First Descendant community regarding the Valby Run, a popular Gold and Kuiper Shard farming technique at The Fortress Outpost, where rewards would drop at 2-3 times the rate as other Outposts. First, Nexon claimed it would tweak the Valby Run to be less broken, but enhance other Outposts to be more efficient farming locations.
Then, Nexon claimed this was a “misinterpretation,” with the new translation stating that The Fortress Outpost was actually being nerfed to be exactly like all the other Outposts in the game. Now that the 1.04 patch update is out, neither is quite true (of course). The Valby Run exploit has been patched, but The Fortress Outpost will still give out much higher rewards than other Outposts to make it a more attractive farming location. Okay, I’ll take it.
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In addition, Nexon has updated other Outposts to have much shorter cooldown times (one minute instead of five minutes), and adjusted reward drop rates to be slightly higher (the time between monster respawns has also been slightly increased). Was this always Nexon’s plan and the studio was just incredibly bad at telling players, or was the 1.04 patch update adjusted before release in response to player feedback? I doubt we’ll ever know for certain, but the final changes are a nice middle ground and shows that maybe Nexon is listening to players, it’s just not good at telling us.
Other helpful changes include a very welcomed 50% increase to Module storage! Now players can have up to 1,500 Modules at a time, instead of 1,000 (this may seem like plenty of storage, but there are a lot of Modules in The First Descendant and upgrading them makes them take up more space). Nexon has also increased the amount of Gold received from consuming Mark for Arrest and High-Value mark for Arrest consumables (rewards from Special Operations) by 10 times the original amount (the new value is 100,000 and 1 million Gold, respectively).
Finally, Void Fragments are going to be easier to obtain. Nexon has added Void Fragments as a potential drop when defeating monsters in Special Operations, with the “Neutralize Void Experiment” Special Operation having the highest Void Fragment rates. This is an awesome change that will make farming Void Fusion Reactors far less painless. All-in-all, I’m really happy with this update. The changes are all positive for players and Nexon isn’t needlessly introducing any new roadblocks or slowing progression, and it’s good to see. Seriously, though, Nexon needs to get better at communicating its intentions to players.
Finally, Nexon took some time to tease Update 5, the first major content update for The First Descendant that’s coming in one week. This update comes ahead of the momentous The First Descendant: Season 1 “Invasion” release, and looks like an exciting one for Descendants everywhere. For one, area-of-effect specialists like Valby, Blair, and Freyna are getting performance buffs, and various Ultimate Weapons are getting critical hit rate and damage increases or Unique Ability improvements. That’s right, no nerfs here.
We’re also getting Ultimate Valby with a unique outfit and two unique Transcendent Modules, a brand-new musical support Descendant with Luna, a new Unique Weapon and Unique Module, and a brand-new Colossi Intercept Battle against Gluttony. I’m personally excited to see what Ultimate Valby is like, as I just started learning how fun her abilities are. You can see the original post from Nexon on The First Descendant website.
