I love abyssal deadspace. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had playing solo in Eve. It’s also the most heartbreaking. There are times where due to the random nature of the pockets, your ship is just doomed to failure. And this is true even on low tier filaments. I had a great pocket (with no rewards) just this morning where two Vedmak’s were in the last room, and I went into structure on my bling-fit ishtar, and it was very scary but great fun. With some good overheats I was able to win, and all was good. Even my first HAC loss was due to my misplaying and picking the wrong targets to prioritize in a tier 3. That’s great.
However, I then lost my Ishtar on a level 2 filament I expected to blitz through because it so happened that all the spawns were frigates that for reasons beyond my understanding, none of my drones could track. It took me 12 minutes to get through the first room. Twelve minutes of knowing I was about to lose more than I’d made in all my time doing Abyssal content. The second room I got through in six by overheating my omindirectional tracking link to death. But the fact of the matter was, I knew from a minute in that I was doomed by the fit, the buggy allied drone AI, and the lack of helpful pylons. Which I could swallow a lot easier if it was a high tier filament.
Honestly, the gameplay in these things is FANTASTIC most of the time. Best in EVE, and I really want it to be iterated on and expanded. I’d love to see a version for small fleets of allied players. I’d love to see a version for battleships.
But it also too punishing randomly punishing in ways that good gameplay can’t overcome. I can’t get my drones to manually line up a transversal on speeding damiviks in a Dark filament room.
Ultimately, it was my fault for not bringing a depot and alternative fits. But it’s also simply too punishing, in an inconsistent unsatisfying way.
And as much as the EVE community loves mining salt and so on, if the gameplay experience of your players is too shockingly bad too often, they won’t keep paying to play. I came back to EVE to play this content. I started paying for it again, to play this. I can, thankfully, afford to keep doing it. I have spare ships. But so far the experience has been more negative than positive, despite the great design and atmospherics, despite the great gameplay, because the lower tiers are too randomly hard, and the quality of the loot is not high enough to justify what appears to me to be guaranteed losses at every level above 1.
Can the tracking pylon maybe affect drones too? I simply don’t think there should be pockets full of drones that hobgoblins with a tracking link can’t hit. That just doesn’t make sense.
I used two webs on vexor in tier 1, it makes drones and other ships very slow so drones and guns can hit them. Helps applying dps a lot more than links for me.
I have to agree the mitigation of those frigs are rediculas Im using a 7.5 per level bonus on auto cannon ship and even with pilon’s its ridiculously hard to to track these damn web frig’s, their signature is just crazy low.
But you knew this. Its in the description of the filament. Less weapons range, increased speed.
Enemy ships will be faster, AND your drones will have less optimal range/falloff. This will make them harder to hit.
You shouldve come prepared. You knew they were faster, and your drones have less optimal. Both combinations will mean you will have a lower chance to hit.
Its not really random, its working as intended. You can read the description, its right there. It says it in bold letters. Its not a random bonus/detriment.
Were you shooting at rogue drones or drones?
As in: what icon did they have?
If they are actual ships, you have to kill them, but if they’re the actual drone sized drones that triglavians deploy, you can ignore them.
Even hobgoblins have optimal ranges and a speed cap.
Remember, the way drones work is that they use their MWDs to get close, then orbit and shoot. They still follow the laws of turrets in which they have tracking speeds and optimal/falloff. Dark fillaments decrease turret range and increase speed, so it makes it harder to hit smaller targets. I.e. bring a web.
I’ve nearly lost an ~800mil Phantasm twice now to something that I’m fairly sure isn’t a feature, but a bug. Sometimes, it seems that enemies “desync” and where they look like they are, what direction they’re going in and etc. is not actually where they are according to the server. I get spans where generally neither me nor the battleship (it’s almost always a battleship in my case) can track eachother, nor can the battleship be webbed (despite it being within web range).
It gives me the standard “[target] is not within range of your stasis webifier” error, but with no target name. Now, what makes me think this is some kind of desync is the fact that I can very often pilot myself into a position where the range, angle and velocity of the enemy ship does not matter and I hit it almost perfectly with whatever crystals I’m using, often for massive damage. For some reason I don’t have to actually move once I find that one spot, and I don’t seem to experience any damage falloff once I’m in it.
The impression I got in the site was that the speed bonus also applied to the my own drones, and that that was causing the drones to move too fast. I actually had to use heavies because they were the only ones that were slow enough to actually get the occasional hit in.
And yeah, in hindsight, I really wish I’d kept my web and mobile depot on my ship. I assumed that with everything moving faster, my drones would keep up with the hostiles, and all would be well. That, obviously, is not what happened, and is something I’ll keep in mind for future sites of that type.
The shocking thing was that in sites of all other types I’d attempted, all of my drones could hit enemy targets of basically any size or speed with the set up I had. To enter the dark site and find that my insurance hobgoblins and hammerheads were utterly incapable of hitting targets, it’s just an awful feeling, and I think at tier 2 that could be looked at and maybe tuned down slightly. To have success or failure, at the low end of the abyssal sites, hinge completely on one module being equipped, is very punishing.
And of course, if I’d been in a missle boat it would have been fine. Which seems to be the motto of PVE in EVE.
I have been testing these sites an awful lot and they are very complicated to the point that I won’t be wasting more time on them. I just can’t seem to work them out because there literally isn’t any information available as to what ships do what and what should be priority over the other and well for a 600m + ship there is only so many you can throw at them before you go “screw this”. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand the space but its beyond me and there doesn’t seem to be any decent cheap fits that will allow you to learn the pockets before losing the ship. I’ve entered the sites so many times in cheap ships trying to make an understanding, I’ve also entered them on sisi in as good as ship as possible and just always end up at the start again wondering what to do.
I know the Dark filaments negatively impact optimal and falloff on dronesl. You can offset this with stasis webs, but I haven’t been able to figure out what the best combination is with a omnidirectional tracking link: speed, optimal range - or both.
Well, everything is a trial and error in eve. If you dont want to lose your ships but want to try, then go to SISI.
I dont think it needs to be toned down. I do Dark tier 2, and i can complete it just fine, but i never touch the Tier 3 darks anymore, too much of a hassle. Just gotta know what to take and what to avoid.