Spent today testing and firstly I’d like to say that this great fun PVE content, I think it’s going to blow up a lot of cruisers
Bugs So Far:
Take gate with drones out, it leaves drones behind but still connected in ‘remote space’ have to abandon them manually.
VNI’s with wasps in Dark Sites cant hit anything (Speed Bonus thing? Drones flying all over the place but no hits happening)
Not getting killmails for all losses
Some Logistics drones not showing up on overview (Even though they are added)
Some Strong_EM drones in Level 4/5 Electric not showing up on overview
Gate sometimes does not show up on overview
Sometimes drone battleships dont attack you at all (seem to be stuck on the gate?)
Heavy Deviant Automata Suppressor does not always start firing (Heavy one) leaving too many drones to kill too quickly so site not possible to complete.
Sometimes the 3rd loot drop is empty, this could just be random but…
Non Bugs:
Needs short ‘gate cloak’ (15 sec or something so you can strategise) ?
Sites with large amounts of drones but no Automata Suppressor can be impossible to finish in the time limit
Needs a timer or warning when your running out of time
Currently there seem to be very few scenarios, I hope that there will be more on release, it’s either drone swarm or single Battleship with logi drones (why cant we use logi drones on ourselves if they can!)
I think that as it currently stands if you go in and you hit a stumbling block (drones die, run out of missiles, simply cant break the tank on the opposition or take too long in the first pocket so you know you cant finish) the only choice is to wait until you die which is a kinda suckky mechanic.
Idea: Keep the filament in the cargohold once your inside and change it to ‘Activated Filament’ if you need to bug out, you can right click it and start a 30 second countdown and it forces you out of the pocket causing huge damage to your ship (5% structure left) and destroys everything in your cargohold (so you cant just keep doing pocket 1 and bug out).
First testing day, and as expected the performance is bad because of the giant structures and nebulas you can’t zoom away, barely reaching more than 40-50 FPS even when complete potato mode.
Tier 5 drone bs+ewar, drifters and last room again drone bs plus ewar firestorm so increased hp went boom to the timer(also had a disconnect inside the site so idk) in last room in an ishtar some thing i noticed the drifter cruisers with a few seconds after locking them aswel as the drifter bs gained 33% armor before it was 0
2nd tier 5 firestorm vagabond had drone bs+ewar,drifters half neut half scram+bs,frig swarm completed the site berely in time
3rd tier 5 firestorm vagabond again all 3 rooms all drone swarms finished in 12mins
4th tier 5 firestorm deimos drone swarm first room,drifters 2nd,drone swarm 3rd room played a bit with the towers finished with 1 min left on the timer
5th tier 5 firestorm 1st room drifters,2nd room drone swarm 3rd room drone bs ended with 4mins 30 sec left ship used ishtar
6th tier 5 gamma ray afterglow with ishtar room 1 frig swarm(some didn’t show up on overview),2nd room drone bs,3rd room drone swarm again finished with 3mins+ left
I like these ideas about some kind of emergency exit option, with a penalty like removing cargo, for situations where it’s clear you cannot win… but on the other hand, Burner missions were very cruel to player ships when first introduced.
just ran a couple Agitated after a couple days’ break. Man, the sites have gotten better. Bigger local phenomena, more towers doing more things, more varied drones. I had to think about how to handle it a bit (for the drone rooms my default strategy is still “park next to the suppressor and watch all the drones die,” which isn’t exactly exciting, but gets the job done).
Haven’t tried higher tiers yet, but the buffer Gila has been solid so far. I’m glad to see we’re getting close to the tweaking stage; it looks like the basics are getting more or less settled.
Also, I completely bricked a couple MWDs so far, but got some decent scrap out of them.
The ‘Dark’ Filament sites are extremely oppressive to anything that doesn’t use Missiles making it extremely difficult to complete with turret based / drone based ships.
The fact the sites also effect their encounters, means that in ‘Dark’ sites you barely ever get hit, making them feel almost stupid/pointless.
The AI aggression is very dumb;
Drone Swarms
The Support ships will swap agro to your own drones 100% of the time, while the DPS ships almost never swap
Drone Battleship + Support
Same as above, with the addition of; the support drones should be directing their attention to the pilots ship, Damping, Target Painting, TD’ing my drones does nothing, they should be making me easier to hit, stopping me from approaching, and damping my lock range while the battleship kites off.
Sleeper Squad
Almost wet myself when I encountered 10 Neut cruisers, then stopped caring again when all of them swapped agro to my drones and never swapped back to my ship.
In addition to this, the sleeper squads are always one type of EWAR instead of multiple, Why not make it more consistent with varying amounts of each ewar type.
*I’ll probably find more as I delve deeper into these.
@CCP_Paradox
So when will those of us getting stuck due to disconnects get their ability to test this back?
Frankly I am amazed this basic and to be expected situation has not been tested by the QA team internally before moving to SiSi. Especially seeing how it’s easily reproducible.
A sensible way to balance the discrepancies between the randomly generated rooms as far as ehp especially since 2 out of 5 sites gives increased hp would be like this:
You can have at most 2 battleship rooms currently 3 battleship rooms are way too high on effective hp.
You can have at most 2 frig swarms currently 3 frig swarms are way too easy with some aid from the towers and especially if you have some good dmg application.
Now I’m still waiting for the triglavian spawns to be added and how you will approach their fits especially their utility highslots because if they rep too much that’s ehp to chew through,if they smartbomb that’s most Droneships out the window except gila and reduced missile dmg because of firewalling effect.
I was also looking at some stats your dmg difference between tier 4 and tier5 drone battleship is nearly 50% you could try to make the gaps more even between tiers right now according to the files
Drone bs tier3:dmg mod 29.9 with 32.2kin 23 thermal
Drone bs tier4:dmg mod 29.04 with 32.2 kin 23 thermal
Drone bs tier5:dmg mod 41.2 with 33.6 kin 24 thermal
Yea, and that’s fine - but the problem I see is that not everyone is like me or many of us here who can fly every ship in the game to work around the sites effects.
The Dark site is the only one that has a such a massive effect on the ships that can be used. The rest are easily adapted towards.
Also in regards to your fit, looks great - how did your tank take to the larger battleship spawns? I was pondering you could oust the Invul for a web with Deadspace+implants.
