Legendary Crafting: Crystalline Ingots Vs Funerary Incense - The expansion left behind

[Boogiepop Void.6473]

To make gen 2 legendaries, you can use either Magumma or Desert gifts (except for a few), which mean they need either 250 Crystalline Ingots or 250 Funerary Incense. I am going to skip talking about the Amalgamated gemstones as those are identical between the two. I will also ignore obsidian and ecto as you get those by playing generally.

 

To make Crystalline Ingots, you do the metas on the HoT maps. You need about 5-7 runs of Dragon Stand to get the needed materials, having done similar amounts on the other maps to get the currency to get Machetes to get the Crystalline or from the pods and gotten the other materials. Plenty of effort, but with many task to do and much variety in the acquisition.

To get finerary incense, you have to buy it. You can do this in two ways:

1. Do the Vabbi hearts DAILY for 1 from each. That would be 32 days to get enough for one gift if you do all 8.
2. Buy from the Primeval Stewart for Elegy mosaics, (750 total), trade contracts (2500 total), or Crystalline ingots (5/day so 50 days, but you may as well just do the magumma gift as there is not timegate on ingots themselves).

Practically speaking then, to get Incense, you are looking at a slow slog through very very repetitive content over an extremely extended period. Do the exact same hearts over and over, or do Legendary bounty trains, keeping in mind that, while there are 40-50 mosaic drops, the average is below 10 per bounty (average 25 bounties, but gated by instance and lots of moving around).

While the Magumma gifts get you engaged in content, helping maps, maybe running maps, and doing a huge variety of events, Incense actively discourages you from doing this. The Metas in the desert do nothing for you so you ignore it, and can even make it harder to finish hearts or bounties leaving you cursing people for getting in your way. Champion bounties, by far the more numerous (10-15 per map vs 2-4) are also not an option, forcing you to do the same fights over and over and actively encouraging you to ignore anyone doing the champions. Instead of making you engage with the expansion, Funerary Incense silos you into just the few things that can get it for you and makes you ignore the rest of the content in PoF.

This needs to be changed. Metas should give progress toward Incense (perhaps another crafting recipe?). Champion Bounties should drop mosaics (in lower quantities than legendaries). And all hearts, not just those in Vabbi, should have the option for Incense. With the changes, the desert maps would be brought to life, with people actively farming EVERYTHING and not just Legendary Bounties and the Vabbi hearts. As it is, the complete and total siloing of incense has left the desert maps half abandoned, with many metas simply not being done due to having no particular value to them (pinata only gets done due to its speed; serpent's ire is nearly never even attempted unless a guild arranges to do it for achievements) and many players struggling to find people to do champion bounties with them (and then only for the achievements before never looking at them again). All this content is simply left behind for other things in the game, as outside Incense, you can get more for your time and effort doing virtually anything else in the game.

Edited July 11, 2022 by Boogiepop Void.6473

[Endaris.1452]

Most PoF metas give you both Elegy Mosaics (at least 6 but up to 20 according to wiki) as well as a chest where you can select 100 trade contracs as the reward. So one meta = 3-9 Funerary Incenses.

So yes, they do help you progress towards whatever legendary you want to craft and actually not too little either, meaning that you definitely want to regularly farm both piñata and doggos.

 

I would generally agree that farming incense is very tedious compared to farming crystalline ingots though and very repetitive indeed. Unlike you said I would claim that you can farm the required crystalline ore in as little as 2-3 Dragon's Stand metas cause there are 60+ pods on the map that give ~1.4 ore according to wiki research, meaning you can get about 100 ore per meta (which is roughly my experience) if you come with enough machetes prepared - which is not that difficult given that you can get one daily for free using the ley energy matter converter. By the time you want to craft the next legendary (and have the funds), you probably already have 100+ machetes accumulated again.

Adding them as a purchase to PoF hearts other than Vabbi would do a lot and I also agree that regular champion bounties should just reward one Elegy Mosaic as baseline. That would make them good enough as an extra on bounty trains as they die very quickly in those scenarios.

 

As it is now, the most attractive option is to just trade 5 crystalline ingots daily, do doggos and piñata daily and that way you get around 10-15 funerary incense per day, meaning you can comfortably finish within about 3 weeks. And well, as mentioned, the only reason you would even do that instead of using the HoT recipe is that it doesn't exist, so for Vision and Coalescence.