Fully agree, have two gates in first and second room or a switch mechanism at the one gate (blue or red pill, whatever), one leads to the exit the other to the next room. You can decide.
The harder and variable the potential puzzle you have to prepare for the less fit/ships options are on the table. This is fundamental different to the rest of EvE, the sandbox, where you excel by fitting for a specific purpose and engagement profil, instead of one size fits all. Because in the sandbox you have control over your encounters.
This shows again how fundamentally wrong procedural instanced content feels in EvE.
Please give players some control, choices, and room for mistakes to learn from. Tune down the RNG element, each room should give an idea of the next, so you can do an educated guess about whether to continue or back out, if you pick up the idea above.
Like this approach, when you open a filament your are randomly âmatchedâ to another playerâs instance, and only one can leave alive. Though this would be a different type of mini game.
Ran a T5 Dark Matter in a Gila, got murdered by a cloud of drones. Thatâs fair.
Ran a T3 Gamma in an Eagle, took 10m to kill FIVE Drifter Cruisers (3 Web, 2 Neut) and a Drifter Battleship. I survived, but wound up running out of time. Disappointing⌠Sketchy, but whatever, acceptable balance I guess.
Ran a T1 Firestorm in a Vexor Navy Issue, got murdered by two Triglavian Battleships. Nah.
I get that you want this to be difficult, but there is some serious balancing work to be done if a T1 isnât at least manageable by a 2009 Character with Mastery V in a Faction Cruiser. You might as well just cut out the âTech 1 Cruiserâ part of that access, because thatâs just going to be canon fodder.
I did run some more tests in firestorms tier 4 with an ishtar didnât find the trig bs spawn found a 3 neut demavik 3 neut vedmak spawn that munched up my plated single rep exile booster asklepian implanted ishtar for the next 7-8 mins or so then i gave up for the day since tq is awaiting
The trig bss stop reping when they gain 33% armor btw but that doesnt solve the ridiculous neuting and 60km range and tracking they have ow and damps webs smartbombs whatever
[Ishtar, firestorm ishtar]
Medium Armor Repairer II
1600mm Rolled Tungsten Compact Plates
Armor Thermal Hardener II
Assault Damage Control II
Armor Explosive Hardener II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
50MN Microwarpdrive II
Drone Navigation Computer II
Medium Capacitor Booster II
10MN Afterburner II
280mm Howitzer Artillery II
280mm Howitzer Artillery II
280mm Howitzer Artillery II
280mm Howitzer Artillery II
Medium Ancillary Current Router II
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump II
âAugmentedâ Ogre x12
Hobgoblin II x15
Republic Fleet Depleted Uranium S x1000
Standard Exile Booster x1
this is thus far how my usual firestorm ishtar would look the drone nav needs to be replaced with a federation navy web or better since i donât have access to those on sisi i have to accept this instead
Note i have been lately using mid grade asklepian implants to help with the tank aswel the plate is for frontloaded hp for tough fights/situations but even still a heavy neut vedmak group can shut off the hardeners no problems a trig bs group can munch alot of the ehp on aproach the ships speed is rather low despite armor layering 5 etc plus thereâs no way to test reliably against the vedmak fight without said faction web sometimes i win sometimes they win as the drones are just bad
Now why didnât i choose a deimos instead ei? well the blasters range with null is about 19km the whole plate rep mwd cap injector thing doesnât fit cuz of the guns pwg usage fighting with null at my worst falloff with blasters against vedmaks forcing my capacitor aswel is never going to work when they have some odd 12k armor each
Why not the zealot? Yes zealot fits with plate reper prop injector barely i actualy think i sacrificed both rigs for it however again we come against neut pressure and no aid for capacitor like in electrical storm sites cap hungry guns,need to rep,2 thermal hardeners since it already comes with a thermal hole and we got another ship that wont function against vedmak group let alone a triglavian bs group that nukes your cap every 24sec so zealot is out.
why not the sacrilege ei? lower overall dmg because of bad application you lose time and die to the timer regardless.
[Ishtar, Ishtar]
Medium Armor Repairer II
800mm Steel Plates II
Armor Thermal Hardener II
Assault Damage Control II
Armor Explosive Hardener II
Drone Damage Amplifier II
100MN Y-S8 Compact Afterburner
Drone Navigation Computer II
Small Capacitor Booster II
Small Capacitor Booster II
280mm Howitzer Artillery II
280mm Howitzer Artillery II
280mm Howitzer Artillery II
280mm Howitzer Artillery II
Medium Ancillary Current Router II
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump II
Hobgoblin II x13
âAugmentedâ Ogre x7
Navy Cap Booster 400 x35
Republic Fleet Depleted Uranium S x524
and this fit just died 5 mins ago to trig bs spawn in a tier 4 again only 2 bs had neuts mind you they didnât have any issues tracking me as i turned as much as the oversized ab allowed at 20 km around them cap was bad despite alternating the 2 injectors to maintain some stability again used asklepians and exile booster
The only way forward after this test that i see is to kite around the arena edge and just throw heavy drones at them and pray they die but this strategy also means we got no other choices in ships for tier 4-5 than ishtar and maybe maybe gila or cerberus almost forgot it existed after all itâs weapon nerfs
The more variations of spawns I hear about from corp/alliance mates and reading through this thread, I canât help but think this has far less to do with personal responsibility in fitting and more to do with luck.
Your first instinct when you see the effects of a Dark Matter is to run drones/missiles, so you fit missiles and drones. Except, the Automata sentries kill both. So maybe you try to beat the effects by fitting tracking computers with medium turrets? Nope, the drone-clouds will kill you quicker than hell because they benefit from the velocity bonus. So maybe a smart bomb fit to deal with the drones? Even then, you might get an unlucky roll on the RNG and get a neut-spamming group like Drifters / Triglavians. Can also kiss your active tank goodbye.
Coupled with a VERY limited choice range for dealing with the drones, you really are subject to the RNG being friendly with how these things are laid out. Itâs pointless trying to fit for everything because, well, you canât. Moreover, you canât refit while in them.
What it all boils down to is that while the unpredictability is a nice change, itâs TOO unpredictable to have a chance at except, well, by pure chance. Your fit doesnât matter nearly as much because the variations between spawns in the same difficulty tier is enough that you canât prepare for anything, let alone everything. Dark Matter sites are particularly obtuse just because a single room with an ill-placed Deviant Automata will reduce your applicable weapon choices to â â â â â â â zero.
Thus far with need for 60km dmg projection to keep the bs ball at bay but also have enough tank for potential vedmak fight Iâm kind of at a loss I slapped together a dual asb cerb but Iâm not confident itâll hold against the vedmaks
Gila just doesnât seem to have room for a capless asb tank and with ishtar missing a potentially essential faction web.
Tried an abyssal after a few days break, Chaotic Firestorm. First room was a battleship spawn which took me 9 minutes to clear in my vagabond. 2nd room was new to me, I spawned in, started moving and died immediately. Here is the spawn: https://imgur.com/a/sigZeoV
I am sure there is some way to kill this room but I doubt that it is possible to clear with the other roomspawn and complete in the time limit, I didnt even have time to target anything. At the current rate for pve if you make it instant death for this stuff it needs to be balanced appropriately or no one will do them. I am sure it is fun and fairly easy to make content so difficult that makes it a challenge to complete and not 100%. However with no way to escape, and you are having to use a 500+ million isk ship to run these things you better balance them,
I have run multiple test Abyssal (I think Abyssal is a plural as well as a singular word) on SISI using multiple ships and fits. I have read all of this and had many conversations with corps and alliance mates. My characters that I have used are all 10+ year characters and all the fits/skills are L5. I can run the T1 to T3 Abyssal with good reliability. I am no better than 50/50 in T4 and T5. My failures come from either mismatches of ship/spawns or just running out of time against an impossible spawn. From what I see above, this seems to be a common issue. I love the âincident pitâ described above.
I think the Abyss needs a bailout option. Luck of the draw, spawn vs ship vs fit, plays too much of a role. This should be an adventure of choices and decisions, not just luck. The former is much more interesting than the latter and has the chance to open up a whole new EVE adventure. I cannot wait until an exploration/hacking set of Abyssal comes into the game.
My suggestion would be add an escape hatch in each room with a decreasing escape chance. For example in room 1, the escape hatch has a 75% chance of letting you escape. In room two that chance would drop to 50% and in room three it would drop to 25%. As you proceed through the Abyss, in each room, you would have to assess your situation and make a decision â Is what you have gained worth the risk of losing everything? Are your chances better to forge ahead or take what you have and run? Do you have a chance of winning against that five Triglavian BS fleet that you just encountered when you came through the gate?
This puts the risk versus reward back into the game and makes it a decision, not just a luck of the draw. It rewards making good decisions not blind luck, yet retains enough randomness to make it interesting.
That to me is what EVE is all about and also makes the Abyss adventure fun and more interesting.
per the imgur they were within 40km of me. I start at 0 transversal and was alphaâed as I started moving. I havent seen much in the way of balance passes that have made them more realistic for us to want to do them once they go live.
That scenario I just ran into is a no win situation and if I was on Tranquility I would be livid that I just lost that ship in pve to a no-win situation with no way to get away.
If you get a single battleship spawn with frig logi in the first room, the 2nd room is another battlehship spawn you might as well self destruct you wont finish the site. I have seen that plenty of times, I havent seen any comments by devs as to the balancing of these sites. They have only ramped up the difficulty, which will insure they will not be run.
They need to rethink this whole permadeath feature. No one is going to risk a billion+ ISK fit and billions of dollars in implants just for the 1:100 chance of maybe getting lucky with the spawns on the F5 filaments.
And with probe-able filaments and suspect status, these are going to be risky as fsck. Add to that potentially horrible loot drops, nerfed mutaplasmid tables and mutated outcomes weighted in favor of negative resultsâŚ
Donât even get me started on the lackluster Trig ships, fitting and stats. At the rate this expansion is shaping up these are going to be rarer and considerable more expensive than the CONCORD variants that were recently introduced.
This is all quite true although thereâs only a fraction of tq players testing itâs pve and pve gets done alot if these sites arenât balanced all the work put into abysal space will end up on the trash with resource wars