Dauntless
PC/Epic Games Review

Dauntless is a cooperative hack & slash (with perhaps one weapon exception) game that takes place in a semi-MMO environment with other players.  The game has several different modes that gives some variety to what you will be doing in the game, however regardless of how many modes are in the game, players will find that the game is EXTREMELY repetitive, having to repeatedly kill the same behemoths to craft armor, weapons & other gear necessary to be successful.

Pros:

• The game is primarily based around a players real-time skill, rather than the equipment they use, so a player that takes the time to learn the attacks of the behemoths & the correct times to dodge can almost always come out ahead of even a more well-equipped player that rarely dodges.

• Seasonal events keep the game fresh around regular holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.), with new rewards (usually transmogs) for completing tasks during those events.

• Transmogs allow you to change your looks in the game & you are not restricted to a certain look (even the look from your favorite armor/weapon can be transmogged to another using transmog tokens) based on the armor you wear.

• It is possible to grind almost anything in the game, without having to spend a cent on it.

• The game has rolling Hunt Passes, which are refreshed ever each pass & award new rewards with each pass.

• The game has a guild function to allow for up to 100 players to invite others in the guild to their party to hunt with.

Cons:  (anything in green is affected my multiplayer functionality)

• While I did state that the developer are usually pretty good about fixing game-breaking bugs, this hasn't been the case starting in October of 2021, where the Challenge system was redone & new bounties were added that just couldn't be completed as a result of broken mechanics that weren't triggering their progression.  This continued to be a problem into November & still continues to be an issue today.  This particular problem not only affects Challenges & Bounties, but also Quests that had a limited time to be completed during the Halloween & Thanksgiving events (some of which couldn't be completed within the time allotted because they remained broken throughout the time of the event).

• The game is EXTREMELY repetitive, making it necessary to take down behemoths countless times just to craft equipment made from their parts.

• In addition to being repetitive on crafting equipments, the reforging rework only multiplied how repetitive the game was before the rework by making you have to level your weapons over & over every time you reforged them (meaning you had to go back to lower level areas based on the level restriction of the weapon just to level it again).  In addition to this, reforging (or at least double the aethersparks if you didn't have a weapon to reforge) was necessary to level your weapons to their maximum potential (rather than the old system of having to grind orbs from Patrols).

• While you can grind almost everything in the game without having to pay for microtransactions (although many of these come much later after their introductory events), you'll find that you won't be able to acquire everything in the game within the time it takes to grind what is necessary to acquire it.  This is because:

  • Time constraints can limit how many of a given item/currency you can acquire towards an item you are going to need to acquire it.

  • There just isn't enough of a currency to acquire that item during a given Hunt Pass.

  Because of these limitations, while it is possible to acquire most of what's in the game, you will only be able to acquire everything in a given Hunt Pass (roughly 40 days) if you are paying into the game (via microtransactions).  If you are attempting to grind what you need for a given store item, you will have to choose what is a higher priority over other items & focus on those first, leaving the lesser important items behind when you find you just don't have the game currency to get it.  In cases where it is required to pay Platinum & you don't have the platinum to pay it, you will either have to wait for it to become available again at a later date or choose to bite the bullet & pay for the Platinum to gain access or purchase it.

• While the game does factor in a high skill-based success factor into the game, the game also has a pay-to-win (P2W) factor in it, allowing those paying microtransactions to quickly gain levels over somebody who is not.  While this may effect the leveling process for those looking to take the plunge & sink some serious into the game, there are still some restrictions that even the included P2W mechanics will not get players past (such as acquiring materials from defeated behemoth's to craft new equipment), so P2W functions are still limited in their own means.

• While the Hunt Pass does give new rewards with each new pass, many of those can only be acquired if you have spent the Platinum to acquire them upon the Hunt Passes completion.  Note that the Platinum is the primary premium currency in the game & while it can be acquired (at a very small rate) to non-paying players, a significant amount of platinum is needed to unlock these premium rewards, so if you don't have enough platinum to unlock it (which can take several Hunt Pass completions from my experience, I had been playing for roughly 2 years when I unlocked my first Hunt Pass premium rewards with the platinum I had acquired from each Hunt Pass without unlocking the higher rewards), you won't be able to gain those rewards unless you pay into the game.  It does appear that missed rewards will eventually come back to the coins store however (those coins acquired by completing daily/weekly challenges & gaining Hunt Pass levels beyond the max level for that period), which you can gain coins to acquire them at a later date (of course you'll still have to pick & choose what is more important & focus on acquiring the most important items from the store before the end of the Hunt Pass, when everything resets).

  • Note that how much platinum you gain back from Hunt Passes by paying the platinum fee to get higher-tiered rewards is misleading, including platinum you gain through the free (unpaid) tier, so while it is possible to get back all the platinum you paid into the Hunt Pass in a given season, the entirety of what it stated you get back also includes what you could have grinded if you hadn't paid the platinum fee to have access to the higher-tiered rewards. 

• While Dauntless does offer a vertical invert in your camera options, they do not offer a separate vertical invert option for when you are using your glider if you are playing with a keyboard & mouse.  The camera alignment when using your glider appears to be the opposite of what you have your vertical camera settings to, so if you prefer vertical invert & play with this option on the ground, it goes back to standard when you are using your glider.  Being a vertical invert keyboard/mouse player myself (and mostly avoiding games that don't offer this option), this is a negative on the game for offering the option to gamepad players & not keyboard/mouse players.

• Disconnects are a common problem in the game, while this issue has largely been dealt with, player can & will run into the problem from time to time.  If not a full disconnect, you may find yourself dropping to the ground, as if you are standing up from being knocked down, which was an early issue with unstable servers that briefly dropped the connection to a player, which would interrupt your attacking prowess (or dodging prowess) if you were in the middle of a battle.

• Changing chat channels in Dauntless isn't made obvious & unless you have technical skills, you probably won't know how to change them.  I had been playing for 3 years before I realized that this was an issue, trying to get back to the global chat after somebody whispered me from my friend list & having to test a number of commands to change the channel before I eventually figured it out.  Chat channels are changed through /commands & if you don't know what they are, you are going to have trouble switching channels when you need to (this may be different on console systems, but seeing as I play on PC, this is not something I can speak for).

• The game is designed to be played in a multiplayer environment, however you may find that the hunts (or modes) you are attempting to join will just be dead & nobody to be found (more common during night in your country, as it appears that matchmaking is region-specific and not mixed or allow for definition of what servers you want to play on).  This leads you to having to solo a lot of hunts during off-hours, where new players may not be ready to do so, not having enough experience or damage output to take down a behemoth without help.

• Wait times on matchmaking (currently affecting Escalations & Trials) can take anywhere up to roughly 6.5 minutes, timing out when nobody else joins, leaving a lot of wasted time if you keep trying to get into a team or just having to resort to a private hunt & soloing it without any help.

• People leaving hunts (such as matchmaking-powered modes like Escalations or Trials) results in a lot of wasted time trying to get into a team.  This leaves you with the option to either leave & try again or just attempt to solo it.  Ironically, I can't see any way to leave a hunt once it's already reached matchmaking on the PC version, yet I  see it happen fairly regularly (expecting they must be Alt+F4ing out of the game or killing the game's process to leave the hunt) and there is no penalization for leaving a hunt before it's over, so relying on matchmaking is many times a losing proposition.

• In addition to people leaving hunts, there are also cases where you may just get a player that doesn't know what they are doing (or they are just screwing around not really attempting to be helpful) or really too low level to even be effective (even though there is a level minimum for most hunt types, many just go to the highest level possible regardless of whether they are equipped properly or not).  The point here is there is no skill check in Dauntless (based on success rate, not gear level) & getting paired with people with a much lower skill level than you (or even much higher) is fairly common, where one player will ultimately be carrying other players that really don't have the skill to even be running those hunts.

• Running across people who simply idle in range of the battle (or at the start of a hunt type that they don't have to move within range to acquire rewards) is a fairly common problem (particularly in the early levels) & these individuals feel they can just sit there and reap the rewards of your efforts (while their presence makes the behemoth more powerful, having more life & more resistance to your attacks).  While you can report these players, just how effective those reports are are still to be determined, as I have not seen anybody complaining about being banned for leeching in hunts.

• There's also a lot of verbally abusive players in the game.  A lot of times you can report them (note that you have to type their name manually, which may be difficult if a player is using characters not present on your keyboard) or just block them if you don't want to hear it.

• Spamming in general chat is a common issue I see pretty regularly, which can make it difficult to read anything worth reading if you're trying to get a team together.  There is no mute function in Dauntless, the best thing you can do is block somebody if their spamming is excessive.

• The game does not allow players on your friend's list to join your team without an invite.  While this might be preferable to most, it also leads to players sending out mass invites if they are needing a team for a specific task, the end result being either the player needing help may not be able to get into a team or other players just being pestered with invites (usually leading to removals of those friends).

• The game does not allow players to join a hunt you are already in, you have to go back to town & invite them into your team to have them join your hunt (meaning they have to be in your team when you leave to join the hunt for them to be a part of it).

• Certain events have left open loopholes for players to exploit them not only to grief other players, but to sabotage events.  The Unseen Summons event is a good example of this, where they allow players to light braziers to allow for a better reward upon completion of the event, but it does not stop players from lighting the last brazier, so this ultimately allows a player to intentionally fail the event simply to grief other players in the same hunt...

• Outside of those that are simply in the game to cause problems or don't know what they are doing, you will often times find that in certain modes, you are lucky if you can get ANYBODY in a match through public matchmaking.  These typically affect the higher leveled modes such as Trials or Heroic Escalations, as well as lower leveled Missions surrounding some of the NPCs storylines.

Review last updated 2/12/2022

Aside from the game itself, I found that their official Discord server is extremely toxic, most of the regulars having a nature that tends to chase of new people to the server pretty quickly with passive-aggressive taunts that tends to get past the moderators' detection; I left the server 2 or 3 times in a matter of days after joining due to this toxicity on the server, only joining to either verify or report an expected bug at the time.  The last time I joined the server, I mostly stayed quiet & didn't attempt to be an active part of it to avoid the toxicity of the regulars on the server, every time I did try to be active, getting some snarky response from them that really only pushed me back to being silent because I got tired of getting everything I said flipped to being something else other than where the comment was originally directed at.

On 10/23/2021, I ended up snapping (after talking to 2 of their moderators over DMs on 3 different occasions) & blurted out the reality of the nature of the Discord, about it's toxicity & pretty well stating that it was not worth trying to be active on it or provide suggestions, because almost everything I said on the server was responded to with some smartass retort.  When I found that even the moderators couldn't see this & they were crying that I was breaking the rules of the server (not even addressing most of what the regulars said), I decided that the server was no longer worth my time & as I stated in a final statement to one of their moderators over DM, I would stick to listing known bugs publicly on my review of the game.  I left the server for the last time after I made that statement...  After leaving the server, I also set up filters with my bot on Twitch so that the server could not be mentioned in chat to prevent anybody giving a link to that server.

As stated before, I originally joined the official Discord for the purpose of confirmed expected bugs & reporting them (usually with video evidence, which is the reason why I have a Dauntless Technical Difficulties playlist), decided after that final fiasco on their server that it would be better if I started this list here:

Known Bugs:

• A new Bounty was added to the game in October of 2021 where you had to kill Umbral behemoths.  Note that while Shadowtouched behemoths are technically Umbral, it seems that they didn't count towards the completion of this bounty.  I later found out that Thrax (the Umbral Escalation boss, hard difficulty) also didn't count towards the completion of this bounty.

• Starting with the rework of the weekly Challenges system in October of 2021, a bug was introduced that affected coin rewards for completion of weeklies.  Coins were not being awarded on completion, meaning all players were getting was 100 coins per day, which wasn't enough to acquire a lot of items that reset daily/weekly (in my case, the weekly aethersparks were always priority over anything else, missing the first week because it didn't get fixed until the second week after I started going off about it in their Discord server & stating that I was putting Dauntless streams on hold until fixed, it was apparently hotfixed during that rant).

• The Halloween of 2021 event brought with it a bunch of bugs, some of them simply missing words to clarify what the exact terms of completion were (like getting so much damage in one hit), others not counting the task (even when completed) unless you were in a private hunt.  A lot of the details on these bugs & why they still remain broken still remains unclear and whether we will get the rewards for tasks we have completed (when/if fixed) is also unclear, many players just hoping that we haven't gotten permanently scrubbed on what we should have already gotten.

• I found that the game can occasionally crash, the one specific to my system is when it states in a window that it's missing a specific DLL (dbgmodel.dll).  It's likely this is an OS specific DLL (not required on other OSs, so it's not installed on those OSs), as other games over the Epic Games launcher has been causing a similar issue when starting (despite saying a DLL is missing, the game still runs, but doesn't prevent the game from running).  This has become a pretty regular issue on older operating systems, crashing multiple times almost every day I attempt to do any hunts (however avoidable if I don't leave Ramsgate).

• As stating in the note above, Dauntless also started having the same issue with throwing an error stating a missing DLL on startup (api-ms-win-downlevel-kernel32-l2-1-0.dll), but the game will still run regardless.  This particular DLL that it claims is missing is specific to Windows 10, therefore not required on my system (Windows 7), so it shows that the game is not checking what OS it is running & simply expecting the DLL is necessary to run the game (even if it isn't for that OS).  As with other games on the Epic Games platform, I can simply click OK on the error window & it loads the game fine.

• While in a matchmaking queue, you are locked from changing builds or making adjustments to your build outside of items (which was locked until only recently also).  While this is intentional so you don't change to a weaker weapon after queuing up, this can cause some problems with switching when it is necessary (like when running an Escalation Patrol & you need to switch to another build).  This can be worked around once you are in the pre-hunt matchmaking screen, but one problem with it is you have to have a string of builds in a row if you want to change to a build you already have ready to go (like changing the weapon on the builds to the highest level weapon you have to make sure you can still switch without getting stopped from switching to the correct build.  The bigger problem is with the new system (after the town & Hunting Grounds reworks) is that only your weapon is the deciding factor whether you can run a hunt without having to force a Private Hunt, so changing your armor or Omnicells shouldn't matter (yet changing those are still restricted while waiting for the airship to take you to the hunt).

• The event alerts can sometimes get stuck over the top of the panel for bounties, challenges & tracked quests, forcing you to have to leave the area to get it to let you see what is under it.

• The game has a habit of not refreshing your challenges, daily pickups & coin rewards when starting up the game after a reset & affects more elements in the game particularly after a weekly refresh with the reworked Challenge system.  A way to get around this is to restart the game, which should fix the issue.

• I ran into an issue where the daily pickups (those that spawn around town give 5 XP per pickup, up to 10 per day) ended up spawning on top of each other, which meant you couldn't pick them all up in the first run.  What I ended up doing was picking up the 6 that I could find, then restarted the game & the once that did double-spawn (over top of ones I already picked up before restarting) could be picked up after the restart.  It was later determined that you could get this same reset by simply rezoning & coming back to Ramsgate (doing this with the Training Grounds appearing to be the quickest method, especially for those that are still getting a startup error on older OSs.

• The Shrowd's darkness ability can sometimes bug & never end (even when you are not in range that you should have been the ability, which counts as another bug), resulting in the effect remaining on you for the duration of the time you are on that map, as can be seen in this video:
  

• The Bloodshot Eye flare is currently showing as the Imperial Seal of Ostigaard flare when used in a hunt.
• Certain behemoths (usually newly added) don't show in the Journal > Behemoth Info section.  While clearly they are still getting marked as new in this section the first time you slay those behemothes, it appears the developers forgot to actually add them & the only way to remove the marker is to use the Mark All As Read button on the Gameplay tab of the game's Options.
• Certain lore items have not been added to the Journal > Collections section (usually new or limited event items).  While clearly they are still getting marked as new in this section when you first interact with them, it appears th edeveloper forgot to tactually add them & the only way to remove the mark is to use the Mark All As Read button on the Gameplay tab of hte game's Options.
• Opening cores can sometimes lock up & never completely redeem, resulting in needing to restart the game to get cores to open correctly again; this was first noticed on 12/5/2021after the Chainblade rework patch.
• Escalations are not supposed to have Behemoths show of the opposite element for that type of Escalation, however Sahvyt (the Shock Behemoth added early December of 2021) has been seen in Terra Escalations.
• Challenges that require bounty completions appear to be bugged, but not that they aren't counting like originally believed (at least not after week 12 of the Call to Arms Challenge season started).  Starting with week 12 of this season, I noticed that all bounties for this week were counting, but they were late getting registered as being completed, so they might not registered until after you had left the area & come back to Ramsgate.
• Since the Challenges rework in October of 2021, challenges regarding Escalations appear to count difficulties other than what is specified on the challenge.  This is a good thing however, seeing as there has already been multiple challenges since it's rework that have been Heroic Escalations & you can only ever have one Heroic Escalation element available per week, meaning the time you are being given to complete the challenge is less relevant than when you will be able to have access to it to complete it...
• The last patch before Christmas in 2021 was noticed to have caused a bug where the buzzing sound from Kharabak's attack would continue even after the attack had ceased, continuing to follow you around a map until you relocated to another area.  Additionally, it was later noticed that the Sporestruck Charrogg's poison affect sometimes also remained on you after you had already left the fight.
• The Sporestruck Charrogg's poison bomb usually does not count towards dodging through projectile attack tasks on Bounties/Challenges.
• Uncompleted Quests show markers on your Hunt selection screen, however sometimes the developer remove a behemoth from an area & forget to remove the marker for those quests.  While you can sometimes see those Behemoths in certain events, they don't technically spawn there to be able to complete that task, so it pays to make sure that the Behemoth actually spawns there even if Quest marker is on the Hunt (as when Behemoths started getting shifted around between hunts, these markers many times became inaccurate).
• Quests & Challenges that based their completions on Bounty completions won't update to show their progress if you don't exit the menu after the completion of the Bounty.  To get around this, you have to leave the menu after initializing the redemption of a completed bounty, then re-enter the menu to see it's progress on the Challenge/Quest.
• Sometimes after picking up an Aethersprout, the game won't actually register the pickup & you will have to rezone (or restart the game) to get it to show again.  When this bug happens, you can tell which Aethersprout you will need to go back to pick up as the lighting effect around the Aethersprout will remain at it's pickup location (even if the Aethersprout itself did not).
• Noticed on 1/27/2022, I ran into a bug that resulted in my inability to be able to revive other players that had been downed (this isn't a new bug, but this listing of the bug is an extension to the existing revival bug that's been around for years).  In addition to this, the reviving animation later picked up when I was attempting to activate a couple of things I dropped for myself & others that had helped on the last behemoth, which got me stuck in that animation & unable to get out of it (even the "I'm Stuck" option didn't work).  I had to rezone to fix it.
  • In the linked video, you'll also noticed at 7:28 that the screen started to shake & my mouse wasn't responding as it should have been, making it so I was not able to rotate my camera back towards the behemoth (possibly making it so I couldn't dodge the attack either); it's expected that the inability to revive that player earlier was likely the same reason that cause the late activation (which likely happened here when I was getting attacked & blocked my ability to dodge) & stuck animation that forced me to have to rezone to fix it at the end of the video.

Specifics on bugged Bounties, Challenges & Quests:

• Bounties

  • Too Smashed Too Furious

    • This bounty appears to currently be bugged & incompletable, not counting staggers triggered on enraged behemoths.

• Challenge

  • Call to Arms

    • This final step in the Call to Arms season (as it requires you to complete all other challenges during the season to complete it & obtain the Character Title reward from it) is bugged & even if you have managed to complete all the other challenges in the season, you will not gain the title (not surprising given there were so many bugs with other challenges in this season as well).  Despite the developers acknowledging the issue & stating that they were looking into it prior to the patch on 1/20/2022, anybody who should have acquired it did not & there was no shortcut around to acquiring it either (as there was with the 2 bugged quests during the 2021 Halloween event).

      • A later statement made on 1/21/2022 stated that players who should have gained the title will be awarded it in the patch on 2/3/2022.

        • Despite this statement being made stating that we would be getting this title if we completed the Call to Arms season in full, we still did not receive this title after the 2/3/2022 patch.  There has been at least 3 major patches since the statement that this was going to be fixed in the 2/3/2022 patch (including the one they stated they were going to fix this issue in).

  • Call to Arms: Shock Escalation

    • On 2/19/2022, I got this daily challenge & confirmed that completing a Shock Escalation did not count towards the "Complete 2 Shock Escalations" task.  2 "Normal" difficulty Shock Escalations were completed that didn't count, however they started counting when I started running "Hard" difficulty Shock Escalations, meaning this bug is that it's not worded correctly & should mention that completion of the task would require completion of Hard Shock Escalations.

  • Hammer Down

    • This challenge was confirmed to be bugged on 3/13/2022 & counting broken parts on behemoths other than just Radiant behemoths.

      • This bug was still in effect when I completed the challenge, so I was unable to track the status of the bug beyond the task's completion.

  • Island Events: Cape Fury

    • On 3/13/2022, it was noticed that this challenge (from week 3 of the Skullduggery event, after the challenge reset when the Reach of Radiance Hunt Pass went live) did not count an Aether Surge event completed in this area.

  • Island Events: Razorcliff Isle

    • On 3/13/2022, it was noticed that this challenge (from week 2 of the Skullduggery event, after the challenge reset when the Reach of Radiance Hunt Pass went live) did not count an Aether Surge event completed in this area.

  • Keys to Success

    • Based on the description of this challenge from Week 8 (During the Blinding Radiance event), all you needed to do was "spend 30 Patrol Keys", which should have (and I believe did earlier) counted keys spent towards the glider tasks.  On 3/31/2022, I noticed that keys spent towards the glider events were no longer counting towards progress of these Challenge.

  • Radiant Reckoning

    • This challenge was confirmed to be bugged on 3/10/2022 & counting broken parts on behemoths other than just Radiant behemoths.

      • This bug was still in effect when I completed the challenge, so I was unable to track the status of the bug beyond the task's completion.

  • A Slayer's Duty

    • On 3/13/2022, it was noticed that this challenge (from week 2 of the Skullduggery event, after the challenge reset when the Reach of Radiance Hunt Pass went live) did not count an Aether Surge events completed in Razorcliff Isle or Cape Fury.

    • On 3/13/2022, it was noticed that this challenge (from week 8 of the Blinding Radiance event, after the challenge reset when the Reach of Radiance Hunt Pass went live) did not count an Aether Surge event completed in Razorcliff Isle or Cape Fury.

  • What We Do to the Shadows

    • The task "Slay 3 umbral Behemoths" in this daily challenge does not count kills of Shadowtouched behemoths or the Umbral Escalation boss Thrax.

• Quests

  • Living Blade Carapace (IV)

    • The task "In a single fight, deal 20K stagger damage to Sahvyt" used to log the top damage you did in a single fight, but was noticed on 3/12/2022 that the value I had prior got reset to 0 after a fight against Sahvyt, so it's currently assumed that this particular task in bugged & no longer counting stagger damage towards it's completion.

  • Rumor: The 'Mane Attraction

    • The task "Kill a raging Sporestruck Embermane with any repeaters while wearing the Agaric Canopy helm (Escalations only) appears to be bugged & not counting kills under these conditions towards it's completion.

  • Red-Eye

    • The task "Glide for 45 Seconds without touching the ground" appears to be bugged & does not count gliding time (progress always remaining at 0s)

    • The task "Complete 10 events" appears to be bugged, in most cases not counting event completions towards the task's completion, only counting at maybe less than 5% of the time when an event is completed.

    • This timed Event Quest never did get fixed, only adding a Platinum shortcut option to the quest, which considering it couldn't be completed through completions of tasks & only acquired by spending platinum, this made it no different than a Store item in a different location.  This wasn't an acceptable alternative for me, so I lost interest in acquiring the Red-Eye Glider, spending the remainder of my Harvest Coins on Curiosities in the Event store (Honest Ozz).

  • The Unseen Arrive

    • The task "Deal 5K core damage to radiant Behemoths" appears to be bugged, but I've been told it just doesn't read correct; I'm told that it's supposed to say "in one hit".

    • This timed Event Quest never did get fixed, only adding a Platinum shortcut option to the quest, which considering it couldn't be completed through completions of tasks & only acquired by spending platinum, this made it no different than a Store item in a different location.  This wasn't an acceptable alternative for me, so I lost interest in acquiring the The Unseen Arrival Emote, spending the remainder of my Harvest Coins on Curiosities in the Event store (Honest Ozz).

Bug list last updated 3/31/2022

The game has also had a number of discontinued functions that more or less got replaced with other functions after those systems were reworked, but some of those functions were never replaced & as a result, it left a gap for functions that players become accustomed to, but taking from them (as far as I can tell, with no reimbursement for what they had in their inventory when the function was stripped from the game).

• One discontinued function was called Ace Chips, this allowed you to immediately complete a cell fusion to form a new one at the Middleman (the cost in Ace Chips was determined by how many hours were left on the fuse rounded up, so 5 minutes would be 1 Ace Chip, 23 hours & 5 minutes would be 24 Ace Chips).  This function was later switched to the cost of aetherdust (the same currency used to purchase cells from the Middleman), which simplified being able to rush-fuse cells when you needed them.

• Another discontinued function was Patrols.  This was a system where you got thrown into a random Hunt & awarded completions with bonus orbs (and material necessary to raise the power/armor level of equipement).  This system was later scrapped when Hunts became Hunting Grounds & aethersparks & aetherhearts were thrown into the game over the original leveling system of your equipment (now called Power Surging).

  • The Patrol system later got brought back when it was put in place on Escalations, which allowed players to get thrown into a random Escalations & gave a higher chance of actually getting into a team (rather than matchmaking timing out) & gave lower wait times to get into a team.  I haven't seen that there is any additional rewards on Escalation Patrols however (maybe something I missed, maybe not), so currently uncertain whether Patrols give any benefits over normal patrols other than lower wait times & higher chance of not timing out during matchmaking.

• The Middleman used to offer cells for purchase, which were supposed to change at a set refresh, but later just got removed from the game entirely after it was brought to light that some players NEVER had that selection of buyable cells change for them.

Discontinued function list last updated 2/9/2022