The First Descendant has its claws in me and I can’t escape. Early this week I was engaged in an activity called Outpost farming. These open world events were on a five minute timer. Essentially a bunch of monsters spawn at a given location every five minutes and after defeating them a boss will spawn and hopefully drop the item you’re looking for but probably not. The fight itself only takes about a minute so you end up sitting around for a while between fights. I was approached by a rando asking for help with a mission in the area. I ran them through the mission and afterwards explained that I had to get back because I was farming this boss every five minutes. They told me they knew an exploit that would let me fight the boss over and over without any timer. Obviously I was intrigued!
The exploit involved starting the fight, getting to the boss and then backing out of the mission zone until a countdown timer to return started. You then had to kill the boss at the exact moment the timer hit zero. I tried it a few times and could not get it. My new friend then stepped in and showed me how it works executing the exploit flawlessly and I watched the entire encounter restart without any timer over and over. “It’s easy, now you do it” he said and even after watching him do it a few times I could not get it. He wasn’t done trying to teach me though. Instead he had me move to a much lower level Outpost mission where killing the boss was a trivial matter and so it would be easier to get a handle on how the exploit worked. Still I could not manage it. “You have to be watching the boss and the timer at the same time!” he explained and I told him I understood the concept. It was just the execution I was struggling with.
This guy worked with me for over an hour alternating between showing me how it was done and watching me attempt it. Finally he just straight up asked if there was something wrong with me. I could not help but feel like there probably was. I told him I was old and perhaps not hardcore enough but I appreciated his help. We parted ways but I kept at it and eventually I managed to get it to work. I was so excited, I actually Direct Messaged my Sensei in game and told him “I did it! I did it, thanks!” but he never responded. I assume because he was so disgusted with having wasted his evening on me. The best part is that literally that night there was a patch released that reduced the timer on these Outpost events from five minutes to just one and removed the exploit.
Anyway, if you are out there reading this Himmothy, I just want to say thank you for putting up with my shortcomings as long as you did.
Also, I changed your character for the comic only because I really wanted to draw Freyna.
-Gabe Out
