Solarfury
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Posted - 2005.07.06 12:22:00 -
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Edited by: Solarfury on 06/07/2005 12:28:25
Zrakor,
The problem with lvl 4 changes is not just about missiles. More importantly, the new changes are contradicting the idea of encurage more people to do lvl 4 missions in group.
First, the bounty payout from lvl 4 missions got reduced by good 40-60%. This alone made lvl 4 not really worth doing in term of use it as income generator. For those who can do lvl 4 missions solo, they can easily make 5 million isk per hour from mining veld, scordit and etc... However, the new lvl 4 payout fall far short of that mark. Thus for all the risks of losing a high value ship, the reward is actually much less than mining the most common ores without any risk. That is just for solo, if people do indeed group, the payout for each persons would drop below 2 million per hour easily. So, with such low payout and the risk involved, is it really worth it for people to do lvl 4 in group at all? It would be a total waste of time if people want to make isk from missions. I'm sure many will say that a group will do mission faster than 1 person. That is true. However, it still take time to travel from mission to mission. Thus at the end, it would still be better money for the mission group to go mining together instead. I think the mission boughty need to be increased by at least 20%. Lvl 4 mission payout should be better than mining the common ores isn't it?
Second, the new missiles changed tanking a lot. I'm not talking about players, i'm talking about npc missiles. NPC missiles are flying and hitting ships at very high speed. It made defender missiles and smartbombs useless against them. Even with the best rocket launcher, one can only kill 1 incoming heavy missile out 5 at most and it is not possible to destroy any cruise/torp missiles under 50km range. With the lag and delays, it is next to impossible to use smartbomb as missile defense now. I know defender missiles can fly faster now. However, it is not about how fast the defender can fly, it is about how many defenders can be fired by launchers. I'm sure many would say that just fit more launchers with defenders. However, that is not possible for many ships which only got 1 launcher slot. Worse yet, the ships which don't have launcher slot cannot really use smartbomb for missile defense anymore. So this missile change made missile defense next to impossible within 60km range. Missile speed should be decreased or we need new launchers, new defender AI and smartbombs with less cycle time to counter the speed increase.
Third, boss type npc rat is tanking too well. When trying to bring down one of those named boss down in mission. It took 2 people almost 20 minutes to do it. They simply shield boost and run repairer way too often. The fight is like this: We lock and fire, send out 18 heavy drones from 2 ships. Every time we take the shield down to 15% or so, it would boost it's shield back to 75-85%. When it starts to lose armor, it would go nutz with the shield boosting and push it back to near full then the whole cycle starts all over again. This whole thing last over 18 minutes at least. Sometimes go beyond 25 minutes mark. Consider it only worth a little than one million in bounty now. Should it be that hard to kill? 14 cruisers would match it's value yet wouldn't take more than 6 minutes to kill the cruisers. The boss rat buffing has done a bit too much. This change didn't make mission harder, it made missions boring and just purly dragging along the time.
Those 3 things are the ones that not just I have problem with, but also many that I usually team with as well. We find the new missions less fun, took longer, far less payout and totally not worth to do them in team. By all means make the mission harder but not with the current changes. We don't mind doing missions in team since we used to that very often as corp groups or helping others to do finish their mission in local. At least the missions used to worth the time and effort to do in group but now they are not.
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