The Trust System was prefect, why do we need to level them now?

I haven't looked at the trust system until very recently after playing through 5.3 msq only to learn that we now need to level up the trust to level 80 by doing each dungeon 3 times.

I know there were a lot of complaints about how shitty the AI of the trusts are when it first came out and the devs explained that they don't want it to be better than running with real players. Which is all well and good.....If I didn't need to deal with running each dungeon 3 times with them for them to be useful. I tried running with a trust a few times and its just painful.

Trust would be a good option when we occasionally want to get some immersion with our beloved npcs or when dps queue gets too long. Which is I believe is what the devs intended to begin with. But as of now it just too repetitive and takes too much effort for how bad the AI is.

While squadrons don't have any better AI than the trust, they can be leveled by spending currency and sending them off on their own. they also served another function which is retrieving squadron manuals.

Possible solutions would be to let us send trust out to level them up on their own, and or make the process less grindy by decreasing the number of times you need to run each dungeon, or just go back to not having to level the trust to begin with (which is unlikely)

Edit: I think I might have messed up the spoiler tags and can't change it in edit, pls help.

You're using strikethrough, not spoiler tags.

We don't have "black out text" spoilers. You can put it in a "hidden box" (hb) but they aren't good for mid-sentence.

Just delete the spoilery bits entirely - your point makes sense without needing to bring them up.

I agree OP. I'm not happy with it either.
I legit don't do trusts because you have to level them.
I'm with you, I hope they change it. I liked running Holminster Switch with everyone because it was fun to listen to them talk to each other and see how each character reacts uniquely to thinks (I hear they all have a different approach to crossing the bridge in Don Mheg), but I'm not gonna spend the time to grind them up, especially when they don't use AoEs. It's not like I have anything that I wanna level either. I'd be grinding just for them.

i levelled a tank and one dps thru trusts, it was great and easy. oh noes effort.

Why are you ppl so lazy? Leveling trusts and squadron is easy and fun. I wish the kittyboy was 71 so i could level him...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shahi

Why are you ppl so lazy? Leveling trusts and squadron is easy and fun. I wish the kittyboy was 71 so i could level him...

---

If only, we could send them to solo) group missions without us joining them like how we have for squadron

don't want to put in the work, then you don't get to have them levelled. but don't come here complaining about it. just makes you look super whiny.

It's not about the work, or the effort, it's about the time.
If I don't have any classes I need to level, grinding NPC up is just not worth my time.
I maxed out my squadron stuff because that also levelled up my rank with the grand company, and gave me access to new items through the command missions... But levelling trust NPCs does nothing but let them into more dungeons so you can keep levelling the Trust NPCs. It's too much of a closed system.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ItMe

It's not about the work, or the effort, it's about the time.
If I don't have any classes I need to level, grinding NPC up is just not worth my time.
I maxed out my squadron stuff because that also levelled up my rank with the grand company, and gave me access to new items through the command missions... But levelling trust NPCs does nothing but let them into more dungeons so you can keep levelling the Trust NPCs. It's too much of a closed system.

---

Their purpose is to help you level your jobs without waiting on a queue and to help you learn how to tank and heal without inconveniencing others. They also have a purpose for getting glamour gear without having competition.

Depending on your luck it could be a lot faster to level 3 of them to 80 and farm a dungeon for a DPS glamour item than it would be to enter the dungeon and risk rolling against someone each time, long queue included.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MartaDemireux

Their purpose is to help you level your jobs without waiting on a queue

---

That's fair... To a point.
But I was outlevelling the Trust NPCs on the job I was trying to level and had to leave them behind.
They level so slowly I find they're not too good for levelling.

It'd be one thing if Trusts had to be leveled up from the beginning, but they don't. All the way up until you finish the quest Shadowbringers, Trusts are always ready for the dungeon you currently need to run, and as I recall you can go back and run dungeons you've already cleared with Trusts after the fact as well.

It's only after you've cleared the aforementioned quest that this feature is stripped from you, and now you have to engage with an entirely unnecessary grind to "earn" it back. And thanks to the way Trusts approach dungeons, this is no small grind: It takes about three runs of a dungeon to level them up once, and each run will take around 20-30 minutes depending on how well you play. And because there's six Trust NPCs, you have to do this grind a minimum of two times—three if you don't optimize it by running them in a specific role. This adds up to a total of 18-27 hours for two Jobs, or 27-40.5 hours for three.

That is a massive grind, and the reward is lackluster: You get a title, the option to run with Trusts in a little over half of the level 80 Shadowbringers dungeons, and the ability to toggle between their old appearances and their new ones. The Story variant of the Trust system is also re-enabled, which is to say they give you back the feature they stripped from you after Shadowbringers. And that's it. Originally, it didn't even give you that last one—the option to run Holminster Switch with the Exarch and Lyna (the only dungeon at launch to have non-standard Trusts) was straight up gone for no reason other than to force you to engage the grind instead.

The grind also used to be much worse. Trust runs used to give around half as much EXP as they do now, making it a solid 40-80 hour grind depending on player skill. And at the time, there was no benefit to doing so other than running Amaurot and eventually The Grand Cosmos with your leveled Trusts.

Finally, I doubt they're going to abandon the Trust system in the next expansion. If anything, I expect it will be expanded with additional characters, like Lyse or whatever new/semi-new character will be the sort-of face of the expansion. Maybe they'll all be like Trust NPC #7, and start at the level cap. Or maybe they'll start at 81 and you'll have to grind them up to the cap yourself. But what about the remaining six? Will they remain at 71 if you never engaged with the system? Will they be locked to 80, with "new" versions of some or all of them replacing them in 81+ dungeons? Will you have to grind them up to 81 from 80?

The problem is thinking that they're something solely in and of themselves. Trusts are meant to be an option to level with. You level at roughly the same rate that they do so you can take 2 additional jobs through trust dungeons from level 71 to 80 once you're done with the story. And it's entirely optional. Don't like the reward for the time spent then just don't do it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shahi

Why are you ppl so lazy? Leveling trusts and squadron is easy and fun. I wish the kittyboy was 71 so i could level him...

---

I don't think I'd call it "fun". Tedious more like. Takes like 6 runs to finish a dungeon with one set of characters, and they go so slooow (deliberately so, I'm okay with the fact it's like that, but the fact it's like that has put me off leveling up my trusts). God forbid trying to do it at launch when it took like twice as long.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Stepjam

I don't think I'd call it "fun". Tedious more like. Takes like 6 runs to finish a dungeon with one set of characters, and they go so slooow (deliberately so, I'm okay with the fact it's like that, but the fact it's like that has put me off leveling up my trusts). God forbid trying to do it at launch when it took like twice as long.

---

It felt kind of slow but only really took like 10-15min longer per run. DPS queues more than make up for that at times.

There's actually some neat tricks to take note of as well. Like if a fight is taking too long, Urianger will start casting Death on enemies to make sure the dungeon is completed in a (predetermined) timely manner.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by AKiwi

I haven't looked at the trust system until very recently after playing through 5.3 msq only to learn that we now need to level up the trust to level 80 by doing each dungeon 3 times.

---

This was explained to us that it would need to be done on Shadowbringers launch, and is not new at all. Recently they added the ability to do dungeons in "Scenario mode" which removed the leveling requirement, but also limits you to which trust NPCs were available for that dungeon in the story.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SnowVix

This was explained to us that it would need to be done on Shadowbringers launch, and is not new at all. Recently they added the ability to do dungeons in "Scenario mode" which removed the leveling requirement, but also limits you to which trust NPCs were available for that dungeon in the story.

---

Scenario mode doesn't unlock until you've leveled them all to 80.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mhaeric

Scenario mode doesn't unlock until you've leveled them all to 80.

---

ah, i'd already capped them all before it was introduced, so i guess that i missed that part

The worst part of the trusts for me was that it was roughly just as fast to run content with the trusts as it was waiting in queue and running with players (even on dps). Except trusts were painful to run with.
In addition to that, you need to at least level them twice to be able to go in with any role (that's about 50-60 dungeons?). Just simply not worth it. Like others have said here, not enough value in it to bother. Thus I leveled 3 of them to 80 and will no longer touch the feature. And if there are enough people like me then this feature was a waste of dev time.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EaMett

And if there are enough people like me then this feature was a waste of dev time.

---

I leveled them up so that i would always have an on-demand run of any supported dungeon on any class i should choose. For glamour hunting, mini chasing, or even just a khloe run when i dont want to deal with people. I imagine as i continue to level more classes, ill end up re-using a few of those dungeons as needed. And if there are enough people like me, then this feature couldnt possibly have been a waste of dev time. Which leads to the question, how much of the player base does a feature have to appeal to for us to consider it well used dev time? An ultimate fight will have a clear rate of less then 1% of the population, but i wouldnt consider it a waste.

I am one who loves the trust system. There are plenty of classes I am just not very good at, and don't want to inflict my horribleness at on others, and I wanted to get all battle classes to 80 for the amaro mount. The trusts were perfect for that. And I had no trouble leveling them while I was leveling classes I didn't get leveled through msq and side quests.

Hats off to anyone who has the patience for it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Frizze

I leveled them up so that i would always have an on-demand run of any supported dungeon on any class i should choose. For glamour hunting, mini chasing, or even just a khloe run when i dont want to deal with people. I imagine as i continue to level more classes, ill end up re-using a few of those dungeons as needed. And if there are enough people like me, then this feature couldnt possibly have been a waste of dev time. Which leads to the question, how much of the player base does a feature have to appeal to for us to consider it well used dev time? An ultimate fight will have a clear rate of less then 1% of the population, but i wouldnt consider it a waste.

---

Generally speaking, you'd expect a successful feature to be used by about 5-10% of the player population. Ultimate clears can go up to 3% iirc and I wouldn't be surprised if 5% at least tried it. But even without that, ultimate serves a different purpose, it's a cognitive flow structure. So it would be a decent use of dev time even if only 1% participated in it. Eureka clears were 5% iirc, etc. etc. It's harder to tell which percentage of the population used trusts since there's no public data available. But judging from forum posts it seems like the interest is mostly from people who use it to not engage with other players rather than a tool for faster/easier progression. (And I certainly don't have the 5% representation among the players I know, although that's somewhat anecdotal).
All that to say that it could use some tweaking to make it more useful and more widely adopted. And removing the ridiculous 50-60 dungeon requirement would be a good start.

I used it for all my tanks to get them to 80. Had all the Trusts levelled to 80 after getting 2 of the tanks to 80. I.e. for me I didn't even have to go out of my way to level them since I would have used them for my tanks regardless.

Ahh, but trusts do serve multiple purposes. People who dont want to run dungeons with other people(bad experience, anxiety, whatever reason)? Check. People who want to go extra slow without pressure from others? Check. People who want to run it on their own to figure out the mechs themselves? Check. People who want to skip a long que? Check. Solo hunting for loots? Check. And on top of that, you get tiny bits of story or character development from the NPC dialogues along the way - so the people who need to see every bit of story and lore have a reason to do them too. On their own, each of those groups is small. But i would bet that they add up to or exceed a generic 5% threshold.

Now im not saying the feature couldnt be improved. If the devs decided to just set the trusts to be equal to your exp(and you set an achievement flag to enable avatar/scenario mode i guess) i wouldnt complain. If youre using them to level, the "50-60" dungeons it takes is also roughly how much exp it takes to bring one tank and one dps class from 71-80(one tank and one dps being enough to level each npc).

What they could have done is added a grind to unlock extra traits and abilities instead of levels, so you could make your runs faster but you had to earn it first. Similar to Squadrons Offensive or Defensive traits, along with aoe for each character.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MartaDemireux

There's actually some neat tricks to take note of as well. Like if a fight is taking too long, Urianger will start casting Death on enemies to make sure the dungeon is completed in a (predetermined) timely manner.

---

This is actually a strange part of Trusts, where they almost encourage you to afk during trash packs. The Trust will adjust their damage too if yours is too low. The system actively punishes you for playing too well and participating.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

This is actually a strange part of Trusts, where they almost encourage you to afk during trash packs. The Trust will adjust their damage too if yours is too low. The system actively punishes you for playing too well and participating.

---

My guess is that it's a mechanic to make trusts inefficient, so you continue to engage in normal party content, while also allowing you to actually finish the dungeon in time.


If we were to compare it to your squadron, in Brayflox for example a melee dps squad npc with it's offensive tactics at max deals more dps than any player could at that level and two of them simply melt bosses while also taking significantly less damage than an actual player.

This makes running that dungeon with a maxed out squad more efficient than running it with actual players and SE probably wanted to prevent that from happening with Trusts.

Lets see. Waiting from 12 minutes all the way to 16 hours for a duty to pop to level up a DPS. Or just using Trust to level up?
I take trust.
Is a pity you cannot use the scions on all duties and not just some.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by rxantos

Lets see. Waiting from 12 minutes all the way to 16 hours for a duty to pop to level up a DPS. Or just using Trust to level up?
I take trust.
Is a pity you cannot use the scions on all duties and not just some.

---

No levelling duty should take 16 hours to pop - although as soon as you said that I guessed you're on a Japanese data centre (and having checked: greetings, fellow Typhonite). Have you set your duty finder to include all languages? There's an options button up in the top bar of the menu. It makes a huge difference to queues, especially eight-man content and endgame.

Alternately, you're trying to queue for EX trials or Binding Coil. It's not recommended to do that.

I gotta admit, Squadrons were fun for me for the most part. There were some huge level gaps between available dungeons which was frustrating at times for both leveling myself and my squadron members, but I would let my squadron do squadron missions while I didn't feel like doing command ones to get their levels up and I'd break those level walls soon enough. It's a very nice thing to have as someone who primarily uses POTD for 1-61 leveling and gets burnt out quick.

Trusts, on the other hand, are quite a bit more annoying. Doing more 2+ dungeon runs to level up my squadron isn't anything new and if anything squadrons took more runs. The issue for me lies in how slow each run in SHB dungeons both feel and actually are. I will admit, they feel slower than they actually are, but they are still usually around 40+ minutes a run. The amount of runs I need to do just to level up my party is pretty egregious as its exp payout per run leads me to believe it assumes I will not be doing any leveling from other sources such as roulettes and is tuned accordingly (do note these claims are only from my limited experience with trusts and I'm glad to hear anyone else's experiences). I surpass the level requirement for the next dungeon before my party even levels up once most of the time. It gets even worse when I sometimes have to start the whole grind over when I level a new class like going from DPS to healer, requiring me to level someone who can replace the class I used to use trusts in (I'm willing to bet this can be prevented with you-know-who once you unlock them but alas I forget to use my second braincell most days and I'm sure many have probably forgot to plan ahead like I did).

In summary, leveling trust members can almost never keep up with the pace I and others I know level at causing it to fall far behind wasting what little time I have to play these days if I were to try to level my party. Now that I have Bozja unlocked, I can just go there to level at a nicer pace while getting my relic weapons worked on. I really hope they fix this pacing issue for Trusts because I missed the neat dialogue from all the trust dungeon runs since I always did duty finder, plus sometimes I need a break from Bozja but would still like to level at a good pace.

Trusts were fast and easy to level, even when I didn't need to level any of my jobs. I just ran them for fun while listening to podcasts or chatting with friends, and it never felt longer than running with other players. It actively removed the possibility of getting matched with someone who makes runs go slowly, which happens...often in the duty finder if I don't have a full party of friends.

Trusts are ok and all, but man, running an old squad dungeon makes them feel pathetic. Squadrons just faceroll everything. Trusts just feel disappointing after that.

At the very least, they shoul have all the Trusts to gain the same experience together, so you wouldn't have to go back and level the others you're not using from scratch again.

Trust was painful when I last used it to try running a dungeon for MSQ. Not touching it again.

Trusts will only get more painful when the level cap goes up.
When ShB isn't the current expac and they speed up the levelling process we're gonna be outlevelling the Trusts even harder.

Unpopular opinion alert:
It's nice it's an option for the first run but it should be there after or at least no easy to level. This is an MMO after all.

I leveled up my Trust NPC's while leveling up dps alts, fairly painless and a good way to level desynthesis at the same time. Sure it takes longer than with a group, but it's a great way to really learn the dungeons. The time to do something with a trust isn't that bad when you factor in queue times for dps. It's obviously less useful for tanks and healer leveling.

If you have enough alt jobs to level it's no effort at all, specially since trusts are so independent you can just "semi-afk" level while doing something else.

But that doesn't change the fact this is very pointless gating with very artificial payoff. With squadrons you unlock tactics that affect their overall performance, even after they're all lv60.
With trusts they never feel any better (and trusts in general are worse at their job than squadron). You're just leveling because you want the "priviledge" of using them in later dungeons after the MSQ is completed.

I love the very concept of trusts, not only because of my single-player mindset but also as I like the NPCs. However, grinding them to 80 was very exhausting for me. It had gotten so bad that -- before my break -- I felt sleepy as as soon as I entered the dungeon(s) (not that I had mastered them or anything fancy like that *lol* Far from it). For vets, doing the same dungeon 10 times and more is surely hardly worth a mention (1 group as DPS, the other as Tank), but it felt like a tedious drag to do it just to level them until the next milestone dungeon's available. I don't really care about them not doing AoEs as player groups should keep their speed advantage (otherwise, there'd be a flood of tears and spite), and I use them to clutch myself to safety for obnoxious mechanics. The reward for all the "work" itself is a nice idea, but honestly, I'd never put them in their pre-ShB outfits again, esp. Urianger ;).

I honestly enjoyed grinding the Trust NPCs. It was good exp for me leveling my alt jobs (got my Amaro mount thanks to it), great for skipping DPS queues, no nagging from other players for not knowing my job (I HATE melee classes and only leveled them for said mount), good gear for the leveling grind and when I was done with the gear I desynthed it all for my desynth levels, and I got some really rare minion/music drops that I didn't have to roll against other players for. I can see the argument against it, and certainly there are fixes they could implement to make the feature more appealing to a wider player base, but my experience with them was largely positive. Also I love the Scions and seeing their extra dialogue/how it changed with different party makeup was always a blast for me.

I honestly, truly, wish they'd implement trust for Trials. At least for the ones that don't explicitly "summon champions from beyond the rift" or have you "lead a team of adventurers" into battle. The ones where you canonically fight the trial with the Scions, in my opinion, would be BOMB to have trust access for.