Cloud Of Darkness HTBF

This is probably a dumb new-player question, but how difficult have the VD versions of the last couple HTBF's been? How do their progs compare to something like V25 Bumba or Crystal Paradise?

Day 1 VD farming will happen.

People will be farming VD in no time. The REAL question is will the loot be Shinryu level drop rates or no. Fingers crossed it's a normal HTBF like the ones before it.

Considering both RDM and SCH can easily solo Shinryu VD and I know at least SCH can Solo Lilith VD, not even remotely difficult in comparison. Not even on the same playing field.

My two cents about these fights when they got released:
Lilith was tough, not the type of fight you could easily PUG on VD, and I'm not even talking about the special version with three spitewardens.

Odin was... toughish and very annoying, doable? Easier than Lilith but again not something easy to PUG, most reliable strategies were about cheesing it.

Alex and Caith Sith had their troubles but they were mostly okaysh. Caith Sith a bit of a gamble with the intrinsic randomness of some parts of the fight, but I succeded in PUGging it several times very early, with several failures but still.. I guess that means it can't be that bad.

Shinryu is super annoying but zergable, as long as you kill it fast and you have means to handle the Doom and the high AoE Damage, I dunno, I'd say it's not that bad and very puggable?



Cloud of Darkness, we'll see, depends on how hard they dedided to go. I can see it being very hard if they really bumped up on its stats.

I've killed Shinryu VD on RDM completely solo with no mules, and while I have excellent gear I'm no exceptionally skilled player.
But I have very, very, very good gear and it took me a long time to learn the fight, and I can still easily fail if I lose my focus.

A very very good SCH can easily solo VD Lilith, but again, how many years after the fight got released, for that to finally happen?
How much Trial & error and gear creep?
You weren't seeing a plethora of SCHs soloing VD Lilith on launch day heh.

Oh 100% it wasn't happening right away, but speaking from experience it's definitely possible. I'm 100% going to see what my SCH manages to do on day 1 Cloud of Darkness HTBF lol

It's a HTBF, not a Master Trial. VD HTBF is usually content on par with a Difficult V1 Ambuscade; there's a boss, a "mechanic" you need to watch out for and overcome, but HTBFs are usually straightforward because it's designed to be cleared by all players (as evidenced by the adjustable difficulties). All of the newer HTBFs have some (as I have said before) "annoying" mechanic, but the fights aren't hard if we're being honest. Gear creep has weakened a lot of midtier content to where you can oftentimes just ignore whatever mechanic the battle throws at you. I.e. every one of the Selbina HTBFs are zergable with the right setup, and have been since day one.

CoD HTBF has a Pain Sync-type mechanic and probably something else you'll need to look out for, but it won't be anywhere at the level of Bumba (not even a V15) or Crystal Paradise...lol.

There was some Mewing Lullaby/MNK Subtle Blow strategies that people did for VD Odin HTBF, until SAM yaegasumi was thrown into the mix. Fight was "hard" for about an hour, then it was something you formed a party for to do 7 of them straight in an hour or so.

Blast from the past: remember ten years ago when people were getting scared and upset at the addition of new HTBFs because they said the fights would just be boring RNG fights? Man time flies

shinryu is laughable on rdm, he's easier than lilith odin cait all of em. you can fully bot shinryu on rdm, or so Iv heard... just his drop rate is abysmal. if new HTBF has shin Droprates i wont even bother, ill get all the items from trove.

They've been talking about mid-tier content as new additions not just bleeding edge stuff so hopefully it's not gross wrt drop rates.

I remember soloing the original for people on Corsair. I'd stick on Dancer's and Tacticians rolls, and fire off Wildfire/Fire Shots while kiting it around the edge of the arena. Slow kill, but fairly safe.

If the drop rates are similar to Shinryu, they shouldnt even bother adding the HTMB.

Just put the gear in the pool for AMAN trove and save tens of hours of development time remaking a fight.

Not going to discuss the theme, but the CoD HTBF items won't be in the trove right away, possibly not for months or years, and maybe never. I wouldn't count on getting these items from trove, if you want them on a timeline that's not counted in years, IMO

Wyrm God added July 2021

Earliest screenshot I can find (for now) of a Trove drop is April 2023, with claims from April 2022. This one coincided with the April 2022 patch where "new items were added to Trove".

Its kinda outlandish to say it will be "months or years" considering there is very little precedence to work with such a timeline.

The same can be said if you expect to get Crep visible gear from the HTMB.

If you have limited resources and need to make new content to keep people invested, the drop rates have to be low + fights difficult. The moment people get all the gear from the fight they won't do it anymore, so the devs have zero incentive for the drop rates to be decent.

Adding them to AMAN to boost the number in circulation is a good idea, for various reasons (including giving casual players a way to make money selling orbs)

I wish they would add +1 versions of the items from these fights and boosted the drop rate of the normal versions, this would allow people to be rewarded and still give reasons to keep doing the fights long term. +1 versions of all these items won't break the game,it's minimal dev effort and it will make almost every htbf relevant again for everyone.

I also wish they would tell the player when an item drops that they already own, it's better to see that than see nothing drop for vast numbers or runs.

+1 versions as in like +5 to some of the relevant stats like STR and magic evasion and then like +2 to things like store tp?

I like that idea. I'd like it even more if you have to have the NQ to be able to get a personal drop of the +1 or an item used for an easy synergy.

And yes, a message that no one could acquire X drop so it went to the ground would be great.

This is probably the best idea i've read on this site in my rememberable past. It really would make HTBF 'relevant' again while helping newer players get gear (image the +1 stp on each piece of Malignance and the must have white box!?).... the queues though... the QUEUES! lol

Only in a vacuum but if we look at shinryu people stopped doing it once it was clear the drop rates are that outlandish + higher entrance fee.
In reality the old HTBF design probably kept more people busy for longer than shinryu did. There is a sweet spot and shinryu missed it by a mile.

Tell that to the people with a thousand shinryu kills.

Drop rates need to be low, but not ridiculously low. The majority aren't willing to grind the same fight every day for months to get what they want. If they make it like Odin/Cait Sith/Alexander/Lilith, that's acceptable, but if they make it anything like Shinryu... it will quickly end up as another piece of content going to waste.

Also, the drops should never end up in AMAN Trove. That thing kills motivation to do content and is a cancer to the game. Imagine how many more players would have done Shinryu had they not made the gear more likely to drop from the subtle gambling machine disguised as content.

The developers simply needed to ease up on the more ridiculous drop rates (Platemail/Omen Bodies/Shinryu etc.), and then there would have been no need for AMAN Trove. But of course, SE purposely introduced it to encourage players to pay for more characters. It was a trick, much like bloating our inventories and then offering extra wardrobes for money.

Everything is calculated to squeeze every last penny out of the community, and AMAN was one big fat gambling gimmick with rolls and flashy rainbow boxes to trigger dopamine spikes in players. I never knew what apophenia was before I started talking about AMAN, because I'm no gambler, but this thing highlighted to me what it is like.

I kinda agree in general with your concept, but not sure Shinryu is a good example to support your point though.
Just sayin' ^^'

Quite a few more may have done it. Although the gear isn't groundbreaking, some will have tried harder to seek it out. I have gotten most of my Shinryu gear from AMAN. The only thing left is the Crep Mail and Cloak. If AMAN Trove did not exist, I may have set some time aside to do Shinryu runs, although it definitely would not have been a regular thing.

Even hundreds and look at how relevant AMAN trove is because of it. Shinryu isn't a miss, it's a strategic success that we hate as players. Think about how many extra mules and accounts were created because of it.


It's not subtle, they are offering lots of different kinds of content to broaden their appeal now that they don't have the staff to properly serve their core audience. Gambling just happens to be one of those offerings that is made more attractive to their native audience just like pachinko.


I did do that for 2 months and after I got the knife and gave it to my wife, I said I'd rather work on gearing more jobs for v25s. I now have many more jobs and I got a scythe from a friend out of trove. No crep cloak but impact spends mp just fine in an occult acumen set either way.

Theres a massive difference between a shared drop slot with a 20% load rate and a shared drop slot with a 0.2% load rate

Aman Trove has it's place, it's essentially a Gacha game for people keeping subbed for daily / monthly stuff. It exists to provide a method that someone might get something they otherwise couldn't.

The real issue is the content itself having a lower procurement rate then a random Gacha game. All HTBF's should implement a point or currency system, every time you beat it get +X amount of "Shinryu/Caith Sitch/Odin/Lilith/etc.." points, with that amount going up based on difficulty. When you have enough points you can then exchange them for one item out of the list. Point acquisition vs exchange rate should be something like 10~20 VD wins for one item, and somewhere like 80~100 VE wins for an item.

Something like that would incentivize people to do the content, there is a guaranteed non-random goal.

Despite a mercy system being vastly superior (tl;dr points) you don't get the same engagement from it.

It has a pre-determined hard limit, but gamba/random is infinite. Not difficult in the slightest to see why they don't/won't use it.

The reward doesn't even need to be bcnm-specific equipment to get people to keep playing. REM Tales, RMEA upgrades (plutons etc.) are great, but what if you got a couple thousand exemplar for clearing VD? ***would be on farm for eternity.

You're missing a 0 in both terms because you're only thinking about yourself. The quicker everyone gets there own stuff taken care of is the faster the population that is willing to do new content diminishes and then they ask for new content. If you've done 100+ VD Shinryu then you'd be willing to do another 100 for the drop you want guaranteed. If you haven't, then it'll be in the trove for you eventually and it's still content you can do at any time if you're bored.

This game has always been a grind. I don't see their grief system suddenly being merciful unless it's 1 time RoEs like the +2 earring.

HNM. When you add all the factors involved in getting the drops from those, the drop rate was 0.02% That was the best content they ever added to the game, from their point of view.