Yea the armor logistic’s is interesting, jam drone’s do work wonders on them thou.
Agreed Buffer Tanked NPC is the problem here, maybe dragging a target into a cloud where they receive 75% less remote rep might be more interesting tactic. Or using Neut / e-war to break rep’s.
Or using alpha damage or something.
Feel’s like brute force is the only way to beat this content (super bling/mutated), instead of being smart and using tactic’s.
No given everything goes nutts after drones droneships are out for tier4 and 5 until now you could sacrifice some drones from an ishtar maybe lose a flight of heavies to win a tough fight but now nope
A shame too cuz drones and missiles are the only 2 purely selectable dmg types to take advantage of resist weakness turret ammo has secondary or tertiary dmg types
@Ember_Fireheart don’t put too much passion into finding a solution like I did it’ll consume you with frustration for nothing,there is no solution no matter how much bling you think you’ll need
There is always an admin ship with aoe doomsday xD Although might run out of time with the doomsday reload timer and fail the site. “Admin ship dies to new content, the unkillable just got killed.”
It’s weird thou before when I was running the previous few iterations of site’s even though they where hard It was enjoyable and I loved thinking of lot’s of different way’s to beat them, I find that these site’s now just make me super frustrated to the point where I can’t even be arsed to strategize anymore its a weird thought.
When abandoning a drone in a pocket by not waiting for it on the gate, it is not abandoned but set to “drones in distant space” and has to be abandoned manually to launch new drones.
I’ve done around 4-5 runs of every difficulity tier in the past day, and it seems that tier 1 - 4 are solvable in 15min now. For tier 5 i have not figured out a way to get enough DPS on a sufficiently tanky ship to grind through the total amount of EHP (+speed tank) of all enemies combined yet and died once per two filaments due to lack of time. The successful runs also take 15-20min. If it is just me not being smart enough to figure a sulution, disregard this. The Renewing Leshak in the battleship wave consumes the most time to grind through, while the 4 vedmark + support wave is the most scary DPS wise.
Other than my previous post indicated, the filament droprate issue is not fixed and the droprate of filaments per filament invested seems to still be greater than 1, with around 2,2 in all tiers atm. The multiplasmid droprate also remains marginal with non-decayed versions being rarer than DED loot.
A difference between tier 1 and tier 2 is noticable.
While EHP and DPS of the abyssal rats rise with rising tier, the environmental effects do not scale with them sufficiently. Automatica Supressors damage to drones is so little that their existance or non-existance has no effect on my decitions when running a pocket. The same is true for clouds, since the benefit they provive is a lot smaller than the cost of the time investment needed to use them / drag enemies into them.
My emotional reaction and sentiment when running these sites is stress due to the time pressue. The unnaturaly deformed view caused by the extended field of view causes me to mostly focus on the overview. The content feels repetitive quickly since once i found a working engagement behaviour for a certain type of encounter, it comes down to reproducing the same behaviour every time it reappears. The lack of need to interact with the environment contributes to this. My very first impression when first doing these sites after they were released on SISI was disappointment, since i realised that the basic mechanic of the site is just killing some NPCs to get to the next room with NPCs to kill, which i did not expect. After the Fanfest presentation i expected a varitiry of different tasks to complete in these pockets which do not all come down to min/maxing tank and DPS to kill rats.
From the point of its mechanics i think that with minor tweaks, you could release the content in its current from. It might not live up to what you wanted to create judging from fanfest, but it should work. I am personally not happy with your apparently desired target price of good abyssal modules. I expect only supers to carry them with the current setting and was hoping for you to aim for target prices of 200-800m a good module, with 3-8b for the 99%^x modules. Knowing i won’t get my hands on them hyped me down the most about Into the Abyss.
I see the issue of you only having like 10d left to do fundamental changes to the feature, which is not going to happen.
Agree, more variety was possible… and still is, if it’s successful enough in its current form to warrant expansion. The sleeper cache sites include in-pocket warp gates or tractor units, which if implemented here would allow players to chose which of multiple groups to engage, and wonder what loot we might have got, if we chose a different path.
Buff / de-buff Structures have high enough EHP that shooting them is usually a bad choice, compared to clearing NPCs faster… but sometimes game designers like leaving players a few bad choices 
Players complained in large numbers that mutated modules could unbalance the game, and so it seems various nerfs have taken place during development, to ensure they won’t.
I am not sure if you misunderstood my post - i am not shooting the structures, the loss of time using them comes from moving towards them and staying there
And yes, we can still hope for the future. Also ‘solving’ the potential balance issues with not allowing people to use the new modules by economic mechanics… is a soft version of removing content.
Only the light suppressor has any use and even then questionable if it isn’t faster to just kill the rats alone since each drone npc depending on its dmg dealt can have different amount of shield armor or structure
Aparently vedmak speed was reduced to 1800m/s ?
No problem… I understood this usage… I went off on a tangent. Today I tried a couple 2’s and 3’s, dragging small drone NPC’s to a heavy automata suppressor… the damage it caused seemed mildly helpful, but not a substitute for direct action. I could not afford to wait the minutes it was going to take, to do all the work for me 
Separately,
I lost one of three ships today by not understanding yet which NPC’s might deploy small drones that I can ignore (focus on the parent ship) and ran out of time trying to shoot a dozen fast little things. Another I lost, in Tier 3, active dual rep Ishtar, while on the edge of tanking a variety of cruiser Triglavians… wasn’t sure which to primary. Pushed over the edge, when I thought I could deactivate an ancillary rep and let it reload… should have let it keep running, even with less rep per cycle. In normal space I might have got away with warping off. Maybe.
You can’t tank the trig cruisers they double their dps within 2mins of getting in range even if you find a way there’s variations of it generated with lots of neuting
POTENTIAL WEATHER REPLACEMENT IDEAS:
Firestorm keep thermal penalty replace armor hp with reduced heat damage taken by modules
Gamma ray afterglow replace shield hp increase with turret tracking bonus/missile application
Electrical storm can stay the same it’s alright
Exotic particle field replace scan resolution bonus for turret optimal/missile speed& flight time
Dark matter field replace ship velocity with reduced sig radius bonus,replace turret penalty for a flat smaller all resist penalty
To give equal and fair completion times as far as ehp grind i believe hp bonuses from sites have to go away
If you want lore i can add lore too for each effect because of the firestorms thermal pressure you compensate and increase heat dissipation across the ship thus affecting heat absorbed by modules, because of dark matter field your ship becomes harder to pinpoint for enemy sensors while your own sensors can’t feed information as effectively in regards to damage received,the gamma raw afterglow helps enhance the enemy ships footprint thus allowing you to hit more precisely.
Have to agree with you 100% that extra ehp is not that helpful and is more a pain in the ass to grind the extra ehp on the npc’s, Id’d actually have one of the bonus’s as -50% speed as it let’s you mwd without going out the barrier’s so easily and all the npc’s will be a slower so easier to track, although you will also be easier to track but then it become’s a range control game.
4 sites in a row against vedmak disintegrator rush group in tier4s electric sites and gamma ray,zealot,cerb,deimos all dead to the high dps in 2 cases geting neuted so badly i couldnt fire back didnt help either despite having good aplication,cap injector not a high cap usage fit . good skills etc.
One thing that irritates game designers is seeing all your puzzles solved on day one. They seem to be starting from “very hard” and working backward, until some number of players can sorta survive it 
I bet they are studying completions, losses and other metrics very closely 
after hard testing i can run tiers 4 each time succesfully but tiers 5 still very hard one mistake and your dead not impossible but need really a perfect knowledge about npc… name range effect etc ( this time TD can help : ) )
Did 2 t4s last night in my standard fit and finished them like a breeze!
Nice idea. Pretty well thought through. The buffer bonuses in gamma and firestorm do make the higher tier ehp grind tricky due to time limit. And I agree the concept behind dark matter weather problematic!
That’s kind of as it should be though! Tier 5 is the hardest content and should not be easily completed. Esp without some level of bling (usually unavailable on sisi)
Yea I don’t mind at all that 5 is super hard, but when you run out of time in a Tier 2 because of bad spawns xD
I would love to see a short range version of the MMJU placed in the center of the arena. Sometimes the neuts are too oppressive and would offer a chance to get recover.