When the Definitive Editions of Xenoblade 1 and Xenoblade X came out, they both handled Affinity very differently with the original leaving it unchanged but X greatly easing the amount of grinding required to unlock character missions and Heart to Hearts. Affinity in those games is closer to Trust, which blades require to unlock most higher levels on their charts (including their side quests and heart-to-hearts.)
Things that increase Trust (ignoring DLC) include:
- Reaching Max Affinity in battle (1000 pts, takes maybe 30 seconds depending on actions/pouch items), 10 points per battle.
- Consuming pouch items, 8-21 points per item for all equipped blades on the driver.
- Completing Quests, 100-300 points per quest across all equipped blades in party when completed.
- Completing Merc Missions, 10-80 points per mission across all blades dispatched.
- Heart to Hearts, 900-1000 points for the rare blade equipped based on choice made (story blades get 100-300 but have multiple across the game not just one.)
This is all good, but the total needed for your average rare blade is 9800 Trust to unlock their full affinity chart (there are higher level requirements but no gameplay stuff is locked to those levels), which means for most players if they want to do a completionist run you will be spending hours feeding pouch items to your rare blades to unlock everything available. DLC introduced the Love Potion to gain 3000 trust as a pouch item, but that is very much a workaround rather than actually making Trust something that naturally unlocks as you play and doesn't lead to you managing it as a commodity to make sure you aren't stuck grinding it when you want to do the blade quests.
So how do you feel: is this already a problem mostly solved by the DLC that will likely be built into the Definitive Edition or would you like to see changes? Options I have heard are scaling battle affinity trust to enemy level, bonus trust from preferred pouch items, or just lowering the caps to make it more feasible than things currently stand. I know it would never happen, but if they tweaked a few affinity charts to move heart to hearts and missions off of level 5 it would improve things immensely: Rough Diamond requiring Praxis to get 9800 Trust before you can watch it (and that being a requirement before Theory can unlock her third level) is particularly egregious.