[Suggestion] How to Rebalance Tier 4 and actually allow players to experience more of the game

10 Dec, '21
RedSpider Merged

Tier 4 requires a complete rebalance. For the time and resource investment into Tier 4 items, they are really not cost-effective or even viable upgrades over their lower-tier counterparts. The initial high cost on the Fabricator is fine, as this is the gateway to this tier but other items really need to be rebalanced. Right now, there is no real incentive or drive to progress to any Tier 4 items due to their almost non-existent return on investment.

80 Electronics for the Material Processor is just insane, and requiring a dedicated generator for the Electric Furnace is crazy.

If an item in Tier 4 is supposed to be an upgrade or replacement for a lower-tier version, it should be able to do EVERYTHING that lower-tier one can do and more and more efficiently. If I invest the time and mass of resources to craft Tier 4 items they should be powerful and worthy replacements. Right now, almost all of these benches are just cosmetically different, and so not worth the investment.

7

10 Dec, '21
IIMAVII Merged

Crazy expensive, needs a rebalance for sure.

1

13 Dec, '21
ZogTheHog Merged

Yeah I actually really agree with this, I think the cost of composites is also really high, especially just to get some decent armor. The Tier 4 items should be more efficient, the Furnace should do 1:1 for iron, copper and gold, and maybe 3:1 for Platinum and Titanium. And the Material Processor should make every recipe more efficient, either processing 5 at a time or just at a reduced cost. Plus I think they should be quite a bit faster to make them worth it.

If the Furnace cost stayed, and it smelled gold in a 1:1 ratio with ore that might make the rest of T4 manageable, but I hope there are tweaks coming for this.

2

13 Dec, '21
Skwiggily Merged

Agree with ZogTheHog, either making gold ingots cost 1 ore, or halfing all the recipes after the fabricator would be the minimum level I would need to feel it is worth it. At this rate I will never invest in the 4th tier till required to.

2

13 Dec, '21
Phillip McKenzie Merged

From what I can see in the community and my own personal views. Tier 4 seems pointless unless you plan on staying on a mission for 2 weeks. Everything is super expensive and really just gives a QOL upgrade so no one really ever uses tier 4 Maybe consider reworking the cost of everything in Tier 4 so that its a little more attainable or give it more of a reason to grind that.

13 Dec, '21
Osnauticus Merged

Right now, T4 is so expensive that some people are unable to complete missions due to getting bad random gold spawns. Looking at the costs of tiers, T4 is objectively too expensive. The costs to fully unlock each tier in ores is below:

T2 (Crafting Bench + Forge + Anvil): 80 iron ore.

T3 (Machining Bench + Concrete Mixer + Concrete Furnace): 194 Iron Ore, 80 Silica

T4 (Fabricator + Material Processor + Biofuel Gen + Electrical Tool): 172 iron ore, 968 copper ore, 320 gold ore, 264 silica, 40 titanium, 90 aluminum, 28 coal.

Even if gold and copper were as common as iron the jump from T1 -> T2 is about 2.4 times the resource cost, but T3 -> T4 is 6.6 times the cost. If you adjust for the rarity of gold (there are about 1 gold nodes per 8 iron nodes right now, at best) the relative gold cost is about 2,520.

1

13 Dec, '21
Elissa - Producer Admin Merged

"Tier 4 rework" (suggested by Phillip McKenzie on 2021-12-13), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.

13 Dec, '21
Elissa - Producer Admin Merged

"T4 should be 1/3rd its current cost (Math inside)" (suggested by Osnauticus on 2021-12-13), including upvotes (3) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.

14 Dec, '21
Kenneth Merged

some stuff in tr3 is way overpriced try making carbon arrows. And titanium stuff in tier 4 is crazy high to once you realize to make one titanium ignant you need 5 titanium ores

It's far cheaper just to make a gun and a stack of ammo for your gun then trying to make a stack of carbon arrows for your bow by a long shot...

1

14 Dec, '21
Hetstaine Merged

This one is a basic, should never have made it this far that it needed to be addressed in the release version.

1

15 Dec, '21
Lister Merged

The new increased Gold Ore spawn change recently implemented has now shifted the Tier 4 Meta towards Copper. Instead of balancing the requirement costs they applied a shoddily made Bandage which has fixed nothing.

The entire Tier 4 tech tree is a grindy bloated mess at the moment. It's artificially increasing resource costs to drag out the end game and it doesn't feel good.

I appreciate the fact you don't have much data on the endgame and not many people have reached it yet, but speaking as someone who has completed the mission Payday: Extraction several times, the bottleneck at Tier 4 is just so poorly implemented.

Increasing Ore's does not fix the fact that the costs of Tier 4 are so incredibly bloated it feels like someone pulled the numbers out of a sorting hat whilst dunk.

Yours sincerely: A man with Copper poisoning.

2

16 Dec, '21
Samantha Merged

My biggest issue is being able to pick blueprints in lower tiers that require hire tier items to make, This is pretty illogical.

1

19 Dec, '21
Meza

Adding to that achievement, higher tier items should feel like they're worth it. Take the arc furnace for example. The only benefit it gives is the ability to make composits nothing else. I would expect higher tier items to be better than the previous tiers. In the example of the furnaces, parallel processing or noticably faster processing for lower tier items.

Tools, weapons and such are barely worth making as aside from durability, they barely provide any benefits for a drastically increased cost. We still tend to stick to iron tools as they're easy to obtain and fix.

Back to OP's point:
The Sulfur grind for T4 is broken when you look at the whole gameplay at that stage and not just focus on one specific crafting tree.
At T4, players will be making guns, ammo, electronics, etc. Going out and finding enough sulfur is one thing but it being so heavy means that each player has to be running around to increasing distances just to haul back 2-300 sulfur that is gone in seconds.

19 Dec, '21
Psyestorm

I agree that there needs to be some balance changes with regard to resources. The bigger problem, however, is that there is usually not a great reason to invest in a large base or extremely high tech.

Missions need to be rebalanced to feel more significant. I don’t mean by that what the developers have currently done of “make stuff super far away so people have to run”. Missions in this game are far too basic. They need to walk people through building up a basic and tech levels and provide challenges along the way. Right now each mission just feels way too short to actually need to build a base and spend the time collecting resources to tech. It doesn’t feel finished. It feels like barely a start.

19 Dec, '21
Pete G Peperakis

This is a Band-Aid.. T4 and associated resources needs a top to bottom rework. If you have explored the entire map looking for resources to get to T4. What's the point of t4? I want to use it to complete the exploration. Not finish T4 and then get in my drop pod and return to the station.

19 Dec, '21
ZodiacChaosBlade

Can't agree with this more, Tier 4 is just not fun. Agree there should be some grind to get to the fabricator but the cost for things like material processor and electric furnace are just demoralizing.

22 Dec, '21
Humbled21

You have to grind for hour and hours and hours, just to get one item to go home instantly. Super dumb. The grind is way too high for a solo player.

22 Dec, '21
SuddenDeath81 Merged

Everything is way too expensive. I can agree with the costs for the fabricator, because it is the gateway to tier 4.

But another 80 electronics for the Material Processor? It is not only the gold. The Copper costs are insane too. And every bench costs massive amounts of electronics.

And for what?. For building things, you already have.

Also Ammunition costs in General. The best Arrow, from my point of view, is the flint arrow. It does a decent damage for its cost. Every higher Arrow is way overpriced.

I get the feeling, there couldn´t be so many mines on the map, to create a tier 4 base.

It takes the fun out of the game.

A massive tier 4 rebalancing is absolutly necessary.

25 Dec, '21
stb155

My proposal:
Stop making things harder for each tier in multiple places.
The base ore for higher tiers is already much harder too get, only 0-2 nodes per cave, and you need advanced picks to get it.
Enough.
No need to require 2-3 times the ore for one ingot.
No need to require 2-3 times the ingots for same tool, additional to already needing an better bench to craft it, and the blueprint.

The way it is now, the grind grows expenentially, but the tools are only fractionally better.

26 Dec, '21
Aaron

T4 is even more demoralizing now with recent changes to the Extractor(and other T4 stuff not really phenomenal). Unless it's mission based my group and I have decided to not even play with T4 anymore since it's a massive time sink to get there and then to just sit and wait even more for the extractors to run. Workshop tools are already sad enough with their sad stats and effects but making them harder and harder to get for something that just isn't worth it overall. I personally would rather have to do a ridiculous grind to get something expensive that's amazing then the current selection that is in the workshop. To be fair, there are some good items in the shop that are modest price but overall investing into the workshop isn't worth it overall. At this point I think it would be better to buff Tier tools and round off space tools.

26 Dec, '21
El Gigantor

I made a suggestion that I feel needs rolled in to this one. Its all over the discord as well. Tier 4 feels unnecessary and not "advanced" at all. Just a grind.

28 Dec, '21
Sosig Fairy Merged

For context, to unlock most of Tier 4, you need the ability to make composites. To get these you need the fabricator, materials processor, electric furnace, biofuel generator, and biofuel composter. Iron and steel costs of all these are reasonable, but many of these need electronics and some need additional copper ingots.

In total, you need 212 gold ingots, and 652 copper ingots. Gold and copper are both 2:1 so that means 424 gold ore and 1304 copper ore.

That *just* gives the ability to make composites. To make composites paste you need gold ore. Most T4 items are electronic so you need more electronics. Furnace needs a dedicated generator so you need to build solar panels or another biofuel generator.

This takes "unbalanced" out of the usual realms and into the 4 light year distance from Earth to Icarus.

28 Dec, '21
Trent Merged

T4 grind is just not fun, at all. I've done it once with a few other players, all of whom have no longer been seen playing Icarus since then. It burned out everyone I wanted to play with, and they've moved on to other games. No one wanted to even think about doing that grind again... let alone, again.. and again.. and again.

I mean, if your intent is to burn players out and lose them, it's working. If you just wanted to grind a game to a standstill for the sake of making it tedious, it happened.

If you want people to have fun and enjoy the world, and reap the benefits of T4 technology, it needs to come WAY down in time-cost. Far too many man hours to achieve that goal, and that entire time a player is left thinking "what else would I rather be doing with my time right now."

The rest of the game is great; this is the one hang up that just hurts the experience, so badly, that players hit the burnout breaking point too fast.

28 Dec, '21
nateprokrasti Merged

The requirements for T4 benches needs to be lowered by 33-50% at a minimum (electronics specifically). Grinding through the tree is so time consuming and resource intensive it kills the motivation to make the actual gear available. It seems to be balanced for a game with continuous progression and not session based gameplay.

28 Dec, '21
Trent

Tier 4 is a tedious, un-fun event which made the other guys I play with not want to play anymore. It was bad enough the first time, but having to repeat that grind every mission you want to (or need to) build top tier items? No. There's other games which don't make you feel like you're working a repetitive job for 20+ hours just to tick a checkbox.

30 Dec, '21
BOU Merged

Dear Developers,

I like the game and have not regretted to buy the supporters edition.
But I now deinstalled the game, as for a solo player doing missions where approximately 150 electronics and 60 composites are necessary is no fun.

Please rebalance and improve.

I am looking forward to returning to Icarus in some time. But for now I reached my limit.

Kind regards

31 Dec, '21
Insaneguru Merged

everyone I've played with burns out on Payday Extraction, including me. RIP Icarus, one day after you get passed early release, maybe I'll give it a shot again.

31 Dec, '21
Paying for Alpha crap Merged

What the devs and "every other" dev team FAILS completely to realize is their own math is ridiculous. Take the weights of literally anything in this game. We have arrows that weigh a pound, bullets that weigh a half pound. Come on have some modicum of common sense. For the sheer temporary nature of this game, wake up and cut the resource cost down, take a hard look at everything. In under a month - it is already becoming un-fun to remake everything EVERY time. I don't mind grinding, I come from a time when grinding was the norm, a raid was 300 people and took ALL weekend, but this is insanely and unnecessarily ridiculous.

01 Jan, '22
Morness

I've only played the game solo, and T4 is nuts. I managed to build some composite paste and was gutted when I realized I needed an electric furnace to craft it. A solo player modifier making gated recipes cheaper would be awesome. I realize that people can join in progress which could be exploited but perhaps you could tag a solo prospect preventing that possibility. There are a lot of people that only play solo.

02 Jan, '22
DBM

Yes! Holy crap! T4 missions are terrible experiences... Grind every cave on a map (not enjoyable), and then mission is done! T4 stuff should not be this bad to grind but even so you should extend T4 missions such that they allow you to enjoy the fruits of your labor. For instance, prepare a T4 forward operating base, then need to clear multiple tough bosses to retrieve lost pod. Would be nice to actually enjoy using the hunting rifle, cooking up high tier foods, and electricity. The objective of T4 missions shouldn't be to grind then done. Grinding should lead to subsequent missions.

03 Jan, '22
thirdeyeguy

Make tier 4 allow you to save a certain size house from previous mission to be able to place after gathering resources for it can make it expensive. Give bonus missions to tier 4 with cool new updates

03 Jan, '22
OmNominal

My main frustration with T4 is the resource grind to produce enough electronics to build anything is massive. I feel like it would be more reasonable if Electronics were produced in stacks of 10, like nails are now. That would still keep the challenge of acquiring the resources needed and having enough of them available to spare, but the cost wouldn't feel so prohibitive when trying to make things like the electric furnace and materials processor.

04 Jan, '22
Jonny

t4 resource grind: make the hurting stop.
I have 160+ hours in current game and more than that by alot in the beta weekends. I've been here for all of it. The gold rebalance did help. but T4 needs a rebalance.
the materials processor is the BIGGEST problem. it's next to useless, and is really only good for composites, really only needed to make a radar. skip the rest of T4 the grind I have worked out after completing EVERY mission:
Firearms in under 90 minutes.
fabricator around 4 hours in.
the radar? add 8 additional hours of game time. Run to this mine, mine it, smelt it, run back. Shortcut. Build another smelter, run that out, set up a mini base near multiple caves, mine and smelt those, run back to t4 base. it's an unnecessarily BRUTAL slog.
Also if I'm going to bust my glass for 72 electronics for the generator and electric furnace, it daggone better speed up my titanium smelting by leaps and bounds, and iron or t1 materials should be near instantaneous.

05 Jan, '22
AntiiMatter

What Jonny said.

06 Jan, '22
stb155

They need to add more sub-mission goals to drops.
So that you can do what now are 2-4 seperate missions/drops in one drop.
Sub-missions could be optional, and each have own reward, so that you not get shafted too hard if one is buged, or you can't complete it for any reason.

For multiple missions it would make sense to build up to T4.
For one mission, that is not compex, but just has been made an endless chore by spreading POIs all over the map, and requiring insane amount of resorces, it will never make sense to do it.

But even then T4/3 needs some re-balance.

07 Jan, '22
byCarlsJr

Electronics cost in T4 needs to come down. The material processor and the electric furnace is ridiculous to achieve. The Fabricator should cost the most to build and everything else less.... pain

07 Jan, '22
ITsAGreatGame

I fully agree with this thread. The resource economy in this game needs a major redo. The amounts of ingots in the receipts make no sense. 12 ingots to make a platinum knife? 1 ingot to make a buckshot shell? what size are these ingots supposed to be?

07 Jan, '22
Cyclloid

Besides the issue of the resource balance, others in the thread mentioned how getting to T4 is the last thing they do before returning in the drop pod or already explored the whole map to get resources for T4, thus nothing left to do.
Another thread suggested to add the ability to request new missions while on the planet, such that there is more to do after you get T4 and getting to T4 will facilitate completing those missions in an efficient manner(ie provides value/reason to achieving T4).

09 Jan, '22
SuddenDeath81

I agree to almost all the points. T4 grind kills the fun. The Fabricator should be the most expensive Item, as a gateway. The other Stuff must be much cheaper.

12 Jan, '22
Zarthol Merged

Has there been any consideration to this? I am attempting to solo the extractor mission and the grind for gold / copper is actually ridiculous. I have a level 40 kitted character and even with all my optimizations it is nonsensical. Even if you were to increase copper / gold spawns (already did this once) it won't fix the problem.

We need the amount of resources to craft T4 things lowered. Let the fabricator be high, that's fine. But material processor / composite paste, just to make a radar to finish this mission? Way too many electronics are required for this.

I've gone through 8 mines of varying size and I am not even CLOSE to having enough resources to finish this mission.

I have traits fully increased to increase mineral output and using a platinum pickaxe.

Please consider this, and quickly.

13 Jan, '22
Wyza

The biggest issue is that there is little or no benefit to the vast majority of T4 Items anyway. The only exception is the hunting rifle which is extremely good.

Electric Furnace = Can cook composites, but is only slightly faster at cooking everything else.
Materials Processor = Can make composite paste, and while faster than other things, is not faster than just making 2 mortar and pestles at 1/1000th the cost/effort.
Refrigerator = Bigger inventory, but 2 iceboxes are just as efficient and again, a fraction of the cost.
Chemistry Bench = slightly faster, but no other benefit over 2 herbalism benches.
Electric Dehumidifier = Stops cave worms, but poor range.
Electric Heater = Get 2 campfires
Electric AC = stone buildings are enough
Solar Panel = more expensive & less reliable than a generator
Carp and Masonry Bench = Faster?
Omnidirectional Worklamp = runs on electricity, but has a smaller area of effect than handheld lamp. It should be 2x what it is now at least.

16 Jan, '22
MueR

Electronics should create a stack of 10. It's insane to require a full bar of gold for one. But then again, a full bar of iron for a beer bottle cap is also stupidly expensive.

23 Jan, '22
Jason Merged

I disagree with this. The first time you need T4 is for the exotic extraction mission. This is WAY too earlier in the game and is probably what is turning off the more casual players. Plus you have to rely on mining from the Forest which simply doesn't have enough resources. As people are pointing out, you can end up with not enough to actually complete the mission due to bad RNG.

Additionally, I haven't played outpost, but if it is restricted to the forest, then people that play are going to hate this game. Outpost needs choice of landing zone and no out of bound areas.

I can think of two solutions:
1. Move this mission to much later. After el camino perhaps. The desert has enough resources to ensure T4 crafting is possible.
2. Keep the exotics mission where it is and open up the the desert as a playable area (and maybe have the dropship land near the desert as a hint that you can go into the desert).

24 Jan, '22
dredog11 Merged

Reduce the cost of electronics to 1 copper and reduce the amount of electronics needed across the board by half would make a big difference.

27 Jan, '22
ErwinB Merged

I think I agree with everyone in the comments, and something important is that all the resources considered in your experience are combined with a very organized and optimized consensus of all players, because someone using all the iron to make nails to reinforce the house with rock walls and roofs can make all your progress for the Tier 4, go down completely.

It's very frustrating and stressful when someone connects to the game and you have to tell them "please, don't waste resources", is not the way to experience a survival coop game.

Even maintaining a Tier 3 base is very hard when you have 5-6 players at the same time.

18 Feb, '22
Methos

A simple fix would be to reduce copper for electronics to 2 instead of 3. A lot less mining just by that one change.
Although, platinum and titanium are just extra grindy for no reason, change ingots to 2 to 1 like the others. And the gear shouldn't need so much resources.
Pretty much reduce the grind will make the game more fun to play and shorten some of the insane lengths of missions

23 Feb, '22
cmopatrick

Another solo player voting for T4 improvements. Right now, T4 seems to only be for getting the hunting rifle so I can safely solo polar bears and wolf packs.

16 Mar, '22
Carlos

I agree with all of the above. Another temporary fix, and especially at least for the Radar, don't make T4 items require composites. At least until there's a rebalance of T4 crafting. There's no reason that the radar should require composites, it adds way too much grind for that silly thing.

And no one has even mentioned the 80 cement bags required for the electric furnace... granted it's not as bad as grinding for 120+ electronics, but damn, it's unrealistic as heck! The electric furnace is TINY! Fab bench is only 30 bags! AND, the recent update made the cement mixer be ridiculously slower (45 mins for 30 bags). It would be fine to be slower, but... over 100 times slower? And ok, you made it to where if you connect it to water (which will be impossible to do until reaching T4, and by then, who cares anymore? you pretty much made all the concrete you needed) it's supposed to work more efficiently, I'm assuming, but it did no such thing... *to be continued*

16 Mar, '22
Carlos

*Continuation from previous comment*
So I connected the cement mixer to the water pump with the water pipes. It did acknowledge the connection, and I made sure the pump was working. And it did absolutely no difference. I think it may be a glitch or some error in the programming. I don't know, but it didn't seem to do anything.

But if that's going to be a thing, then the water pump should be obtainable at T3, not at T4 when you no longer need cement bags by the time you can even get the water pump working.

I've said this before and I'll keep saying it, I really do appreciate the hard work the team has been doing.

I really love the game, but it does frustrate my wife and I quite often, we even stopped playing for about a month or two. The weekly updates have been really nice and motivated me to play again, even convinced my wife to join me again. Still a lot of work ahead though! Also can't wait for vehicles and more things to see on Icarus!!

28 Mar, '22
JacksSmirk Merged

The main reason I upvoted this one is: water pump is needed for Tier 3 (and maybe T2?) items such as farming equipment or concrete production. This doesn't make sense to have to tier all the way up to a fabricator to use the water pump.

[Suggestion] How to Rebalance Tier 4 and actually allow players to experience more of the game

Comments: 77