Only 5 Attempts at Aphra 1/Hondo

You’ve done only 5 attempts and are already prepared to give up? Wow…

No. Don't misunderstand me.

I am thinking not about giving up going for Aphra. I am thinking about selling my mods and uninstalling the game. This is literally the worst designed thing I've ever seen in SWGOH.

I am not interested in flipping a coin until it comes up heads 12 times in a row. It's not fun, it's not entertaining, it's not an intellectual challenge. This isn't about theory crafting or intelligence or skill. It's not even a real time game where it's about how fast I can hit the buttons.

CG has deliberately created an event where I am irrelevant and yet they expect me to somehow be motivated to spend my time on their game anyway. This is nothing but trash. If I'd encountered this event in my first year of the game, I would never have continued.

There is no criticism too harsh for this event.

I beat the Hondo tier on try 3.

Took like 30 to beat the Sana tier.

Not sure what coin flip happens in the Hondo tier but better mods helped.

Mods, mods and mods. Event is a pain in the butt.

I didn't ask for advice.

I know how to mod. I did remod. I did not try with weak mods.

The point is that you must dodge to win, and dodging is out of your control. There is no way that I can "git gud" and suddenly have more dodges.

It is not the number of attempts. It is not that I'm incompetent or won't grind (I have been playing for 7 years).

The event is literally designed to make my skill irrelevant by forcing you to wait for the right combination of dodges.

This is a terrible design choice, and I do not trust designers who would make this choice.

I'm not saying it's a horrible event b/c I didn't get the right RNG or because my mods aren't good enough

I'm saying it's a horrible event b/c it's designed to be dependent on something out of player control. That's why it only took 5 attempts to make this post. Lord knows I've spent more time on that getting zero shards on Reva just writing up theory crafting for the community, going through opening scenario after opening scenario and testing different mod combinations. Time consumption on its own does not deter me.

So don't give me advice. Give CG's developers advice. This tier of this event is the worst designed I've yet seen, and I've played through a lot of bad choices by them. It makes me question whether I want to play any future content from them because it's bad design.

So thank you for your reply, but you can give your patronizing mod advice to someone else. The problem isn't me. The problem is CG.

Just wait until you get to the third part...

I hear you, and I know that people have had problems with that as well, but I don't mind multiple attempts if I'm learning more about the puzzle during those attempts and I have a chance to get better at the event, leading to eventual victory through my own choices.

it's requiring dodge when Hondo doesn't have dodge in his mastery, there are no mods that boost dodge, etc. There's simply nothing to do except wait for the right RNG, and as a player I fundamentally resent having my success taken out of my hands.

I will not attempt this mission again soon. I can't say when I will attempt it again. Maybe this is all a rush of anger that subsides tomorrow, though I do not think so.

But if I ever do attempt the event again, and if I get to Tier3, I won't mind multiple attempts so long as my skill matters.

Of course, given how terrible their design choices are in T1, maybe skill doesn't matter at all in T3 either.

It took me about 60 attempts, frustrating that's for sure.
But, my spirits got lifted when I saw how short 1 attempt actually was, so in the end, I only lost about half an hour of so.
Nothing we didn't already see with GAS, Thrawn, ...

@CG_Tusken_Meathead

Because complaining without constructive criticism is of little use, here's what I came up with.

Although I object to events structured so as to depend on RNG, even if I accept for the purposes of the argument that the right design choice is to pin player success or failure to something beyond the player ability to control or even mod (evasion in this case), the event need not be frustrating AND the event need not be entirely out of control of the pleyers' hands.

In this case where you just feel absolutely compelled as a design team to force the player to rely on RNG and multiple attempts, you add a buff -- call it Luck of the Pirate King, or The Will of the Force, or just Plot Armour (since that's what it is).

Then make the bonus from this buff something that directly counters the frustration of the RNG. In this case, it gives a boost to evasion.

Set the baseline amount at something reasonable, and then allow the bonus to increase in an arithmetic progression with something that the player controls, but which also encourages that player to spend resources (and thus will encourage at least some players to spend money).

Here it's fairly simple:
Luck of the Pirate King: +1% evasion, arithmetically increasing, per relic level of the character. For those who don't understand the mathematical statement here, that's +1% at r1, +3% at r2, +6% at r3, etc.

Since Hondo doesn't qualify for the event until r5, this grants a minimum of +15% evasion. Since Hondo's dodge in this event is 27%, this grants a substantial buff and thus can be expected to reduce the total number of attempts, but without ever changing the fundamental nature of the event which requires dodges otherwise outside the player's control to complete.

And yet!

It is RNG. People can still get frustrated. But of course they can r6 their Hondo for a 48% dodge chance, or r7 for 55% up to r9 for 72% dodge chance.

At al levels there is a meaningful chance to dodge and a meaningful chance to be struck, but at r9 the chance to be struck is 28% -- very much the inverse of the chance to dodge we currently have without this hypo ethical buff.

in other words, you still depend on luck, but the player has meaningful choices available that can tilt the odds in the player's favour (and even when not taking them, the odds of mission success are not quite as bad as they were originally).

And yet some of those choices depend on giving cash to you, the game developer, for quick access to high relic tiers.

Why is this better?

It does not change the fundamental nature of the event: you want an event that depends on dodges and you still have it.

It reduces the number of attempts for players, decreasing frustration.

It returns a sense of control back to the players allowing them to make a conscious choice between More attempts while saving relic materials or spending relic materials and expecting success in fewer average attempts. Even though no matter what you do you are required to get some level of RNG, attempts vs relic tiers is now a strategic player choice, giving the player the sense that they are beating the level.

It increases CG's income by encouraging spending resources and thus ultimately cash on improving a specific, required toon.

There have been many events that are heavily RNG dependent in the past. While most of them have the option of minimizing RNG through raising your gear/relics to overpowering levels (as bad as many people believe GAS to have been you always had the option of taking your full squad to r7 since r7 existed at the time, and the damage and survivability of r7 did in fact make a meaningful difference in your chances of success), this event which requires multiple dodges to succeed will never feel satisfying to the player. It's a bad design choice. But you can make it better. And if you feel the need to design RNG-heavy events in the future, an arithmetically scaling buff can be crafted to those events as well.

Personally, I prefer more direct control. You could, for example, grant the enemies much lower offence but much higher crit damage. With enough enemies on the field, you can keep their crit chance low (no higher than 45%) but still come close to guaranteeing a critical hit for every turn the hero takes. Only now a Criit Avoid arrow reduces the chances of a critical hit to 0% to 9%. At this point you're testing the player's knowledge of the game and investment in their mods rather than pure RNG.

That said, even here you have a similar option: Insanely high crit damage with moderate offence can be combined with a CritChance of, say, 80%.

With a critical avoid arrow you still get smashed.

Drop in the Plot Armour event buff, using the same progression as above and you still get absolutely smashed unless you combine it with a CA arrow.

Combined the CC% of the enemy falls to 29% as your CA has reached 51%.

now add in the encouragement to arithmetic progression and you see that an r6 toon has only a 23% chance of being critically hit, an r7% has a 16% chance, an r8 an 8% chance, and an r9 will be immune to the critical hits of the enemy.

But even with r9, if you don't have that CA arrow your chance of being critically hit would be 35%, which might be frusttatingly high and cause a player to require a number of restarts.

In short: you've designed a really poor event, but you can do better. it's not even that hard.

Nothing we didn't already see with GAS, Thrawn, ...

You're missing the point that it's the design choices, not the hours spent. Dodge is not a stat under player control (at least for characters like Hondo that have no dodge in their mastery).

Skill doesn't matter in tier 3 either. You need to land the right stagger at the beginning, then get some lucky dodges.

Thank you for the warning.