Ok this is a weird one and I’m not really sure if it needs addressing or how it would be addressed, I just wanted to put my thoughts down on it, so hear me out for:
For context, I’m still playing an old lv 90+ character offline for now since I’m waiting on servers and a friend to start fresh on cycle. I just wanted a chance to get a look at some of the new stuff like CoF. Since favor is a function of XP, obviously in empowered monoliths it’s gonna be a lot higher than when you first unlock the faction. So I don’t really have the context of how it feels when leveling up a new character yet. With that said:
The pattern that has been happening to me with the prophecies is as such: I get some favor and go pick up some prophecies, some for this content, some for that content, etc and then I go off to do them. However, a lot of these take a decent amount of time to complete, such as killing an empowered monolith boss if you don’t already happen to have the stability saved up on that timeline. And while some will overlap, such as the same condition or a kill x in y getting just casually completed while doing other things, most of them are completely orthogonal to each other. If I have prophecies for, say, Kill Herot, Kill Rayah, and kill the Flame Lich, I obviously can’t progress on more than one of those at a time.
So I go do one of them, and in the process of completing it I will get thousands of favor. Enough to replace that one prophecy with many more. Now, rather than clearing my list, it’s expanded greatly.
The only way to ever reduce the number of prophecies you have (other than canceling them) is to deliberately take only prophecies with the same or overlapping conditions. And there are systems for that. You can reroll, you can get lenses that completely remove some kinds of prophecies, and you can much later get the lenses that make the prophecies cost more but give more rewards.
But to me, it would seem like a waste if the system that could encourage variety in content instead reinforces the need to just farm one kind of content. There are already reasons why you’d want to hyper focus on one timeline since your corruption will be higher, you can target farm whatever unique it is you wanted out of it, and you can fish for better blessing rolls. Why add “Well I stacked all my prophecies for this one timeline” to that as well?
Anyway, like I said, I don’t really know what to do with this feedback. It’s certainly a better problem to have than favor being so scarce you don’t get to interact with the faction much at all. But it just feels weird. I just get stuck in this optimization loop where I keep going back to the faction HQ every few echoes to load up on more prophecies I won’t complete before going back again.
So what do you think? Not a real problem? Real problem but not worth a solution? Potential interesting solutions?