While Arknights has its share of decent or useful features, some aren't particularly as well received by players.
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Headhunting and Recruitment
- The Recruitment feature can serve as an alternative source of units but it relies more on RNG than the gacha-based Headhunting. Players could control which Operator can appear through tags however, tags that would guarantee at least a 4-star Operator is rare, even more so the tag combinations that can yield a 5-star. And there's the highly sought Senior and Top Operator tags that has abysmally low odds of appearing. One can reshuffle the unwanted tag in hopes to the wanted ones to appear, but they can only do it three times at maximum which each chances takes hours to refresh. Recruitment also requires permits which have limited sources daily. And the worst part, upon finishing recruitment, there is a chance that the chosen tag could be cancelled which can be Rage Quit-enducing if occurred to rare tags, such as Nuker or Summon, which typically yield very strong operators like Firewatch or Mayer. As for Top Operator, however, Anti-Frustration Features are thankfully in place: selecting this tag and searching with a maxed out timer (9 hours) will guarantee that the tag will not drop.
- While mostly just an annoyance for global players, the inability to skip an Operator's recruitment dialogue until the text has fully appeared is something that many players hope for a change to, though it is unlikely as this issue is less prevalent on CN due to the text being shorter and scrolling faster. This is often a contributing factor for players to do 10-pulls on headhunting banners without a voucher instead of pulling individually just to save time, which is notable since Arknights doesn't give bonus rate for doing so unlike in other gachas and thus it acts like 10x 1-pull, and several low-rarity Operators who frequently appear in recruitment such as Catapult or Popukar draw ire from players solely for their exceptionally long recruitment lines, to the point that some players actively avoid tags that can draw them just to spare themselves the annoyance.
- While Headhunting banners for non-limited 6-star Operators have a pity system ensuring that 6-star Operators can eventually be guaranteed after certain thresholdnote , there are no guarantee that it would be the rate-up 6-star. If the player is extremely unlucky and fail the 50/50 chance every time, it is entirely possible to go several hundred pulls without getting the featured 6-star character. This is somewhat remedied starting with Ines' banner in Episode 12: All Quiet Under the Thunder, where a "Focused Selection" system was added where, if you made 150 pulls without getting the rate-up 6-star, then the next time a 6-star appears, it will always be the rate-up one.
Operator-related
- The base skills of several newer operators. This started with Rosmontis, who has a base skill of 'When this Operator is assigned to a Factory, for every 1 operator in the Dormitories, Perception Information +1. Additionally, every 1 point(s) of Perception Information is converted into 1 point(s) of Chain of Thought'. After her, more operators came that work with the imaginary currency of 'Perception Information' and 'Chain of Thought', but the wording in each of their skills (to be more specific, those operators are Whisperain and Iris) makes it incredibly unclear of why they need to generate imaginary currencies and convert them into other imaginary currencies. Not to mention that in the game it isn't even stated what these imaginary currencies do. It has been figured out that they equal to Trading post efficiency and Factory efficiency, but even if all operators are at max and in their respective facilities, they're still beat by operators with base skills that don't use this imaginary currency. Further complications appear with Dusk, as her base skills are heavily dependant on her morale as she will either generate 'Worldly Plight' or 'Chain of Thought'. The overall consensus in the player base is that these skills are simply too complicated and need too much investment to be useful and are too covered in verbal faff.
- The Module system is a common point of heated discussion and one of the most notorious sources of criticism about the game's balancing, to the point where it's often said that the team designing them is completely separate from the actual game designers. To elaborate:
- On paper, it was advertised as a way to give a power boost to struggling Operators through stat buffs and modifications to their traits or talents. In practice, most Operator modules tend to give either paltry bonuses (eg. Fartooth's X module giving her 7% more ATK to her trait at maximum level), changes that are so out of place compared to the rest of their kit that they can barely be put to good use, much less salvage the flaws in their kit (eg. Tachanka getting more DEF instead of something to help his damage or skill cycles), or both (eg. Utage getting 4% ATK and DEF when below half HP, on a unit focused on all-out DPS). Half of the time, the modules are either so negligble or so contradictory to the unit they're made for that it can be genuinely wondered if the designer actually used the character in the first place, much less understood them.
- At seemingly complete random, some Operators will be blessed with disproportionately powerful modules or at least ones that play to their strengths, such as Rosa, Kal'tsit, Ch'en, Passenger, and Ceobe to name a few - while others, like the Abyssal Hunters, instantly skyrocket to Game-Breaker territory. However, these are so uncommon compared to the others (and dubiously balanced) that it's likened the system to a roulette wheel with the odds heavily weighted against you if you want your favorite operator to get a strong module, especially if they have a glaring flaw that almost certainly won't be mitigated. On the other hand, Operators that were already strong don't have to worry about not getting a good module, since anything on them is just a net gain, much less if they happen to luck out with a module that actually boosts their strengths to a new level. This leads to the unfortunate result of the system designed to close the gap between struggling and powerful operators actually sometimes making it even wider.
- To further add to this, upgrading modules incurs a high resource cost comparable to skill Mastery, and not only does it use Module Data Blocks (which are notoriously uncommon), it also uses Data Supplements, which are only consistently obtainable by doing SSS stages (elaborated on below) and are capped per month to boot. It's worth noting that the scarcity of Module Data Blocks ends up bottlenecking the usage of Data Supplements since the former is needed for every level of a module, but this only makes the latter and the SSS mode more disliked for some people since you'll always end up with more supplements than you need, making the entire mode and the resources gained from them feel pointless.
- Mode-specific passives of welfare 5-stars have been received with mixed to negative reception due to it obviously being a way to make these characters seem special (5-stars usually only have one talent), and it also being rather obviously a ploy of the game itself to raise a character solely to upgrade their performance for one mode. To boot, even with this talent active, the characters it applies to (Shalem, Highmore, Valarqvin, Heidi, Dagda, Morgan, Delphine, Kestrel) are regarded as decent to average at best, with the arguable exception of Highmore who is saved by a strong archetype and her event-specific talent being uniquely powerful. It's similarly to raising an operator solely for their base skill, and the general consensus is that the costs ultimately outweigh the benefits. It doesn’t help that these operators are unlocked as rewards for completing stages or reaching milestones in their related modes, meaning you only get them after already completing a good amount of stages their talents would be useful in. Even worse, their potentials are scattered across more stages or further in the reward milestones, meaning you have to keep grinding their modes or clear stages up to the last H stage in a chapter to fill their potentials, which brings into question on why those operators are even worth using for their specific modes when they reach their strongest after many stages have been cleared (though the welfares exclusive to IS alleviate this by frontloading their full potentials on their respective initial reward milestones)
- The lack of class variety among the 6-star male Operators is a point of contention for players, as a majority of them are classed predominantly as Guards more than any other operator class, which some players feel is getting repetitively tiresome, even if most of the 6-star male Guard are top-tier meta characters; in contrast, the male Operators of a 5-star rarity or lower and female Operators of all rarities are far more varied in class options. With Zuo Le's debut, the total of 6-star male Guards would be brought up to ten, more than twice the amount of 6-star male Specialists (the class with the second-highest 6-star male operator count), who have only four members. Notably, as a side effect, the Sniper and Defender class do not have a male 6-star among their ranks, with all of the 6-star Operators of those classes being only female, while the Supporter, Medic, and Vanguard class had to wait more than 2.5 years, exactly 3 years, and about 3.5 years since the game's release before getting their respective first 6-star male Operators. Some players suspect that the reason nearly half of the 6-star males are Guards is because said class is typically a contender for having fairly strong archetypes that Hypergryph can easily develop a strong kit for, which they can use to sell a 6-star male better in an otherwise Improbably Female Cast game. However, others noted that this reasoning does not explain how some non-Guard 6-stars (such as Ch'en the Holungday, Mudrock, and Muelsyse) can have a strong meta presence despite not being a Guard, since this demonstrates that a 6-star male could have been given the same kit and still be meta without being a Guard.
General Gameplay
- The Autoplay feature only works 100% of the time if you have a the most brain-dead AFK setup. Artificial Stupidity tendencies aside from, a jarring flaw with Autoplay is that it seems to run on a periodic tick timer. This means that any strategy that revolves heavily around tight timing with almost zero tolerance is sure to be screwed up with Autoplay. Worse still, depending on the device or what the device is doing (such as some Android phones having a screen saver to lock the screen but keep the game playing) the outcome can change ever so slightly, which can also screw up any strategy that has tight timing requirements. Another issue with it is that not all RNG-based skills are actually going to be locked into the seed, meaning that whereas Exusiai might consistently buff another operator for example, other operators might not yield the same results as they did when they were being commanded by yourself.
- The fact that failing or resetting Challenge Mode or Inferno Mode stages deducts half of their Sanity cost as opposed to just one point as with a regular stage is heavily disliked, considering these stages are already more difficult by design - namely, when a player would need a lower retry cost the most. A lot of these (particularly Inferno stages) qualify as That One Level, making it likely that most players, especially beginners, will have at least several failed attempts, depriving them of huge amounts of Sanity for zero progress. And if that alone weren't enough, even practicing a challenge stage costs three practice tickets instead of one, giving you a maximum of ten attempts daily, meaning it's not uncommon to lose all thirty of your daily practice tickets in a particularly difficult stage and still not be able to complete it. Most players agree that being punished more for failing a stage that's harder to clear to begin with, especially with no first attempt shield like a regular stage, is highly unfair and seems mostly done to make frustrated players spend their Originite Prime just to recoup the Sanity they wasted on their attempts. Fortunately, the 5th anniversary update will remove this mechanic and make all stages only deplete 1 Sanity on failure, a change which has received near-unanimous approval.
- The enemy guide has recieved scorn for using arbitrary letter grades instead of actual meaningful numbers for the majority of enemy stats along with not specifying exactly what certain abilities do, leaving players to either guess exactly how strong enemies are or look up a supplementary wiki. This is especially problematic when the letter grades themselves tend to be far too broad, meaning you could see two enemies that share an 'S' grade for HP but have actual stat values that differ by tens of thousands, and you have no way of knowing this. Furthermore, outside of specific stages, you can only see the enemies in the level after you enter (and likely lose) the level for the first time, which is no recompense when you get taken off guard and screwed over, especially in modes where you can't just reset the level and call it a day. Prior to an update, it was even worse, as enemies not only had less detail about their mechanics, but didn't actually inform you about weight or silenceable mechanics.
Level/Event-specific
- Even in Integrated Strategies, a Roguelike mode where luck plays a much bigger factor than anywhere else, a few examples have stood out.
- Treasure Chests can spawn randomly on any tile, and while they can be a source of extra income, they also make the tile undeployable, which can ruin your day if one spawned on a tile that you needed to mount a defense. In Crimson Solitaire, the chest also only gives you money if you successfully protect it from foes, which in turn can screw you over in the other direction if it spawns at a position that is all but guaranteed to have an enemy run it over and break it early. Mizuki & Caerula Arbor makes the chests now give money when destroyed instead of protected, but adds in two annoying variants that can ruin an entire formation if spawned on the wrong position - spiked chests which have an Attack Reflector that can kill anything without healing support (and some things with it, if their damage is high enough) while screwing over splash damage, and Chest Monsters with extremely high stats and the ability to collapse an entire defense if triggered early, letting enemies go through. Meanwhile, Expeditioner's Joklumarkar makes the mimics even worse, as they now deduct 2 Life Points if you leak them while retaining their absurdly high combat ability.
- Rejections in Caerula Arbor are similar to Hallucinations from Crimson Solitaire (although the mode also has versions of those), but made so much worse. Instead of being a global debuff, they debuff a random owned operator each time they trigger, with the main way they occur being when you roll a low dice value when entering a floor at lower Light. However, these tend to be both significantly more severe and more one-sided against your units, such as constant Damage Over Time that melts units without healing, Freeze on deployment to render them unable to quickly respond to urgent threats, automatic skill activation to ruin skill timings (although this one can also be a boon), and Metastatic Aberration being the most reviled due to halving most stats. A bad Rejection has the potential to turn normally effective units into deadweight with no way to control it, which can outright end the run if it lands on a carry unit, and outside of certain endings where you're pretty much guaranteed to stack Rejections, it's not only a Luck-Based Mission on who gets one, but whether you can roll high enough to avoid them. Furthermore, the threshold for being able to get Rejections is 99 Light, meaning that even if you've lost a single point of Light, a 3 or lower will land you with one, meaning you're at a 50% risk of a unit contracting Rejection every time you enter a new floor unless you have a larger die or can reroll it (which only works once per run and can result in an identical or even lower roll). Arguably what makes it the worst is that the mode offers very scarce ways to regain Light and cure Rejections, so once your units start getting them, you have to deal with them for the rest of the run; not helping is that Rejections often make it harder to get perfect clears, which will further reduce Light since losing Life Points or fighting at low Life also deducts it. Fortunately, Expeditioner's Joklumarkar alleviates this - the Collapse Paradigms are generally less dangerous than Rejections and return to being environmental conditions, and the game offers many more ways to lower Collapse value, which will actually purge the debuffs.
- In Caerula Arbor, if you roll a 1 when recieving an item, you'll get a completely different item from what was displayed, chosen at complete random. Not so bad when it's a relatively smaller item, but can be enraging when trying to pick a Game-Breaker and getting a significantly weaker item without any way to work around it.
- The Hui/Ming mechanic of "Who is Real" is generally considered one of the most unpopular event gimmicks due to being That One Puzzle players are forced to solve to handle enemies such as Blindeys that are Stone Walls that cannot be blocked without an operator sharing the same attribute as them, along with the various maps that require shifting the attributes of Hui/Ming tiles, which can be difficult to control as you have a very limited number of firecrackers and enemies such as Envy can change the attributes of tiles with their attacks. Many players have expressed displeasure at the gimmick's return in other events, such as Contingency Contract and the final stage of "A Light Spark in Darkness".
- Refraction, an enemy ability introduced in Episode 9 that gives its user +70 RES if it isn't silenced. On paper, it was perhaps a way to diminish Arts being a universal counter to most tough enemies seen prior while also giving silence more of a use, but unlike other events where specific enemies are designated as Arts counters, almost every Dublinn enemy in the chapter has Refraction. As a result, it effectively invalidated the entire damage type for the whole chapter, bordering on Character Select Forcing for physical damage due to Arts only dealing Scratch Damage to even basic cannon fodder. On top of that, some of said enemies also have very high DEF on top of that (most infamously the Companion Guards), turning them into massive bullet sponges for both damage types. Silencing them was also a problem, as there are few operators capable of inflicting it with enough consistency to neutralize continous waves of Refracted enemies (with the most reliable inflictor, Lappland, also being a physical unit that can't benefit from the disabled Refraction unless her S2 is up). Fittingly, it has never appeared again afterwards, although Dublinn's existing troops have gladly shown themselves time and time again in various events.
- The Stationary Security Service mode is one of the most disliked game modes implemented in the game so far due to notorious amounts of Fake Difficulty that incorporates the worst parts of Contingency Contract and Integrated Strategies. The reasons for this mode's notoriety are numerous, but the most common points of complaint are the following:
- In all SSS maps, you only have a paltry 4 unit deployment limit which only increases on the later stages when enemy stats and the number of points that need defending increase, which extremely limits your gameplay options. Not only that, but enemy difficulty rapidly ramps up as the map progresses, and the intention is for you to tag out Operators so they can give each other buffs. The problem with this, however, is how the buffs are not balanced well between classes, with Medics being essentially useless in this mode due to a combination of a terrible buff note and enemies doing too much damage for their healing to keep up, physical damage becoming increasingly worse without massive ATK buffs in comparison to Arts damage the farther you go due to enemy HP and DEF increasing but not RES, and Supporters and Specialists being mainly used to shuffle your deck for the Operators in classes you do need. This means that if you have not raised enough Operators in the classes (read: Arts DPS such as Goldenglow, Eyjafjalla or Passenger and Arts damage buffers such as Saria and Suzuran) that can actually handle the buffed enemies, the later stages can become practically unwinnable due to just how obscenely powerful enemies become, with blockers being taken out in two or three hits even with over 2000 DEF.
- What makes this imbalance worse is that you cannot actually control what Operators you have available. You can only pick a number of Operators to be in a pool, and they are randomly allocated to you when the map begins, basically making every map a Luck-Based Mission because if you're not given the Operators that you need for that particular map, you can possibly lose before it even begins. And the further you get within the mode, the worse this gets, because you are forced to choose two new Operators to add to the pool after every stage, which will bloat your deck with Operators you don't want if you already have an established strategy with your existing lineup, which you likely do from the starting roster you selected. The strategy to deal with this is to load your deck with Supporters and Specialists so you can cycle through your roster until you have all the buffed units you need on the map, but even that can become a problem the farther you go if the RNG simply refuses to give you units of those two classesnote , adding even more Fake Difficulty to the already difficult later stages.
- The designs of the maps themselves are also subject to some criticism, with some stages immediately rushing you with fast moving enemies such as wolves or even Wraith Leaders that are already buffed with a high Danger Level before you have had a chance (or even the ability if you got a bad draw) to set up a proper line of defense. You are practically required to have a strong blocker and DPS, which you may not even want to put down because you might need them buffed later, in order to not lose immediately. A few stages have Elite Mooks such as Tiacauh Braves or Hateful Avengers that path down their own lane, necessitating you to devote your defenses to stopping them specifically, and on certain stages they will idle on undeployable tiles before they move, letting the Danger Level increase to buff their already high stats to truly absurd levels, unless you are capable of sniping them from range with a buffed unit such as Horn or Goldenglow.
- Because of how frustrating and time-consuming this mode is, Players would have likely ignored the mode if it wasn't one of the few ways to farm extremely rare module upgrade materials, and even then, the strict caps on how much material you can farm per month means fully upgrading modules, especially for 6-star Operators is heavily time gated. Reception was so negative that Hypergryph eventually reduced the difficulty and number of map clears needed on the CN server while reworking a chunk of the system. Most damning of all, however, is that there is no option to autoplay or skip SSS, even if you have already completed a full run previously, which can be a huge drag because an SSS run could be just as, if not more, time consuming than an Annihilation clear. The current consensus is that the best method for grinding the repeating rewards is to simply do the first three or four stages, which can generally be done consistently with the meta Operators, and then quit and start over, which is indicative of just how hated of an experience this mode is.
- Additionally, this mode is currently prone to crashing even on newer devices between stages and even simply by selecting new Operators or equipment to add to your deck mid-stage, which while not as damaging as in Integrated Strategies due to there being no penalty for resetting other than losing an opportunity for a trimmed medal, still can be infuriating if one is close to completing a stage and making it border on Obvious Beta in the eyes of some players.
- The first season of Reclamation Algorithm, "Fire Within the Sand," quickly became highly controversial, and in particular was heavily disliked by more casual or beginner players. First things first, the mode is simply extremely complicated, requiring huge amounts of resource management and collection as well as complex mechanics that more casual players will likely get completely lost trying to decipher. It also doesn't help that the tutorial for the game mode is bare bones and doesn't really do a good job explaining how anything works in detail, along with the game just straight up not explaining certain important mechanics that are borderline necessary to succeed. On top of all the complication, the mode is extremely beginner-unfriendly and basically requires players to have endgame level teams due to the way resource collection works and how extraordinarily difficult the attack waves are, the latter of which will throw dozens or even hundreds of elite enemies at you with no time to prepare, making them nigh impossible to defeat without the most minmaxed meta comps or cheesing the raids with specific basebuilding setups, the latter of which require a lot of grinding and patience. On top of that, similar to Integrated Strategies, the mode has three endings that are not well explained, highly RNG-dependent, and have to be obtained over multiple successful runs. Arguably the main problem is that unlike modes like IS or SSS, it's a temporary mode lasting 1 month (and was concurrent with the highly anticipated Monster Hunter collab on Global to boot), mandating a huge time sink if you want to actually learn the mode. It really says something when the most popular guides on how to get the rewards are to simply start up and them immediately quit out of a run to accumulate points rather than trying to actually play the game mode, although guides for actually winning the mode are more in-depth.
- The initial runs of Pinch-Out-Operation, the Spiritual Successors of Contingency Contract, was less well-recieved and quickly became contentious due to a bad case of Numerical Hard and questionable balancing making them painfully annoying for veterans and nigh-impossible for beginners. Although the rotating maps of Pinch-Out had various gimmicks that made them more engaging, the UI is much more confusing and the permanent map is particularly infamous for the ridiculous stat bloat on the enemies, with the elite Power Armors in particular having HP in the millions and nigh immunity to both damage types;note this made one of the main strategies for the highest level clears to wipe the rest of the map, leak the Mini-Boss Dorothy (who had equally inflated stats on top of being unblockable and invisible, making her even more impossible to kill), then AFK stall said Armors for hours on end until they finally dropped dead. Although this more complicated risk system did end up making it into the next season of Contingency Contract when its reboot was announced, the absurd stat inflation thankfully didn't fully follow.
- Similarly, Design of Strife is contentious for being incredibly beginner-unfriendly and being another case of Numerical Hard making things ridiculously difficult for all the wrong reasons. Although more managable, the Trauma Intervention maps throw ridiculous amounts of enemy spam at once, and although the objective is merely to Hold the Line for a certain amount of time instead of killing them, there are just so many tough enemies that come in such huge hordes that you'll need top-tier durability and area denial for even a chance at survival. As for the main Formulative Battleground maps, they didn't force extended stall strats, but still have players face a variety of hazardous environments that gleefully spam Elite Mooks buffed up to boss level, along with Sverdsmeltr, an extremely powerful raid boss with enormous stats and an unusually large array of mechanics that demand extreme care and a roster that can handle them, lest players get obliterated instantly. Sverdsmeltr himself gets more praise due to being a genuinely interesting and engaging fight, but the same can't be said for his backup, where the stat inflation on the normal enemies gets so extreme that Sverdsmeltr usually ends up being less of a threat than the absurd enemies that can overwhelm even an endgame defense with brute force, which in turn forces players to have high-rarity units to counteract this through sheer crowd-control or bruteforce strategies as opposed to the boss actually requiring a more specific strategy to bring down. Design of Strife also reversed the risk system where you can pick and choose from a list of buffs to make a level easier, but your scores are penalized for using the buffs, with the score required to get all the rewards (or unlock the next map) needing you to not use them at all, which is counterintuitive to them even being available in the first place.
- In Chapter 12, you start with a max DP of only 20. Not only does this make DP usage more hectic as any DP generated beyond that 20 is wasted, but it effectively neuters strategies that build around any expensive units as they become near-if-not-entirely impossible to deploy. The frustration is dampened somewhat by counter-measures - allowing identified friendly Civilians to enter the allied zone or destroying Roadside Emergency Reserves raise your DP limit a small amount - but these either only become available later in the stage and can be painfully slow to identify (Civilians) or open up faster flanking routes for the enemy to approach from (Reserves). This makes setting up an initial defense a nightmare, especially in later stages when the skies are flooded with Seeds of Withering that demolish any squishy units if unprotected. Seeing as how you can only deploy low-cost units initially, they will be squishy, and if you aren't running top-tier DP batteries they will be unprotected. Also consider that some operators are below 20 DP when not at Elite 2 and above 20 after promotion (such as Blemishine, who rises to 22 DP), making it a terrible idea to promote them while progressing through the chapter if they're vital to your attempts at early defense, making it one of a rare few instances of the game actively punishing you for progressing. If all that wasn't bad enough, operators retreating once can be enough to place their redeployment cost above your DP limit. It all adds up to an infuriating cocktail of effectively removing some operators from the playable pool, enforcing low-DP compositions, and just being unfun to work around.
- Hortus de Escapismo manages to combine multiple Scrappy Mechanics at the same time in its event mechanics, with the end result being an event so infuriating that many players found themselves resigned from the get-go. For starters, it reuses the reviled Civilian Escort Mission mechanic seen before, but now made worse - even though the Monastery Inhabitants can't be shot to death by enemies like Ursus Civilians, they will panic over time and when enemies get close, which will eventually cause them to enter a panicked state where they constantly lose HP and seek out a Holy Statue to calm down. Said Holy Statues can only hold off their panic for a short time unless you spend exorbitant amounts of DP to constantly use their ability, and enemies can also destroy them. It doesn't help that the civilians seemingly always take the longest possible path between Holy Statues just to spite you, some of which have holes in them which, if not repaired using the Makeshift Walkways provided, will have the civilians gleefully jumping to their doom and costing you the mission. However, not only does fixing holes often open up shortcuts for enemies, that's where the Crumbling Masonry introduced partway through the event comes in, invincible hazards which roll exploding boulders in a straight line to not only deal heavy damage to operators and Inhabitants they touch, but also destroy Makeshift Walkways, letting them re-open holes for Inhabitants to fall right into. To add further difficulty to all this, the civilians never enter the blue box to leave the stage, meaning you have to protect them until the very end. Only after contending with all of that do you get into the enemies, almost all of which are significant damage sponges with various means of hampering your DP generation, such as directly stealing DP, passively lowering DP regeneration while on the field, or lowering your DP cap while alive like in Chapter 12; the enemies that can't do this are instead able to screw with you in other ways, such as fast or flying enemies that can apply heavy Damage Over Time, or the Mini-Boss Fortuna whose targeting and damage is randomized with no real way to control it. On top of that, many of the enemies can spawn directly onto the map like Airborne Soldiers, with the game neglecting to tell you where or when they can appear, easily letting them bypass a defense considering how bulky they tend to be. All of this combined makes for a set of stages which can get incredibly frustrating to deal with, since the difficulty no longer comes from actually dealing with the enemies, but babysitting a bunch of incredibly slow and Too Dumb to Live NPCs and making sure they don't kill themselves before you can wipe the other enemies.
Items
- Sanity potions have an expiration date as a form of Anti-Hoarding, so they will eventually disappear even if they aren't consumed. The worse case happens if they expire before a grindy time-limited event, when players would've needed them the most. This limitation also means that taking a long hiatus from the game means risking any remaining Sanity potions left in your supplies.
- One of the reasons the Module system is so contentious is due to how difficult Module Data Blocks are to acquire, being entirely time-gated resources with no means of grinding them. The ways of acquiring them only refresh monthly with up to eight blocks available through spending yellow and red certs, both of which have tremendous opportunity costs note and one per weekly mission, totaling up to 12 per month, with one or two more available in side stories or other events where unique currency is used. The problem is that fully upgrading just one 6-star Operator's module requires exactly 12 blocks, essentially meaning that if you were unaware and upgraded a weak Module or upgraded a 6-star’s Module only for them to get a better one in a future update, you just wasted an entire month’s worth of resources. What’s more, many Operators, most of which being 6-stars, are heavily dependent on their modules to remain competitivenote , means getting all your Operators up to snuff can take months, if not the entire year.
