Assuming you are splitting the reward, what is the benefit of running missions with a group?
In theory more people mean more damage thus completing the missions quicker, but at the same time it gets divided about as much as your speed is increased (sometimes less if player doesn’t have the most optimum ship or flies as a healer).
Mission Pay, Bounties, LP, and I even think standings, are all divided.
One of the things Resource Wars gets right is that the reward isn’t split, and more players aren’t a hindrance. The only other activity like this in rewards is Incursions, but those take a fairly sizable time to group up the players required to do them.
Am I looking at this wrong? Does doing a site together make more than 50% faster to complete on average? Or is just more of a social thing? I am not a big mission runner, and have very little experience with doing them as a group.
I think CCP said they are looking to overhaul missions in the future, at least to using the new AI and being more dynamic, but I don’t know about making them more engaging as a group.
yes and after 2 years lvl 5s spawning in empire was considered an exploit, so they made them unable to spawn in empire and most of the people running them stopped, except for the pvpers that manage to control the low sec the agent is at.
Hmm… Define worth doing though. Are you basing this only on an isk per hour ratio? In that case, the only advantage (assuming all things being equal), the more people you have, the more times you can reject missions in a 4 hour period.
On the other hand, if my friend and I plan our ships accordingly, we may be able to speed up the time to completion. He can take an anti-frig HAC that is designed to rapidly destroy cruisers, dessies, and frigs. I can bring a BS geared for the larger targets only. This may make completion easier.
In the case of burner missions, 2 frigs make the mission easier than just one.
Because the time to warp/move is not divided by two. So instead of being reward /#players / (travel_time+kill time)/#players (which would mean same reward per hour), the /#players gets only applied to kill time.
So effectively you reduce your income.
Rats rep must be taken into account
if the rats rep enough, your also divide their rep by two. That means that missions where rats have good buffer/reps are better done with two characters.
Most rats have bad buffer rep so this is not usually a problem. However some can be, eg
the last boss in the epic soe
burner missions
some ded bosses (ded4 , 10, 8 serp I think)
rats dreads
Support multiplies your damage
What’s more, if you can apply some ewar to rats, this ewar actually multiplies the effect on the other characters.
only one ship is needed to paint the rats, thus making dps ships be able to bring in more dps.
same goes for webs, you can make your bs track and shoot the frigs very fast with one grappler BS and/ore one vindis with web.
same goes for logis/remote sebos.
same goes for command ship with skirmish burst. especially those apply to both travel and fight time.
note that domis can spider tanks, and use a mid slot for ewar.
note that damps are completely useless while ecm and tracking/gguidance disruptor are marginally uselful.
Thanks Anderson Geten and Lady Ayeipsia for the breakdown!
But can you explain this more to me
I get that target painters help with everyones hits on enemies, but a dedicated ewar ship would technically not as good as another dps? Same with logistics. Wouldn’t more DPS be better most of the time, for a purely profit and efficiency standpoint.
you can’t just do the “theoretically efficiency”, you have to do it by trial and error.
As I mentioned, some ships can bring both DPS and ewar.
Now when I talk about multiplier :
Applying cruise fury on frigs
Let’s say you are X people shooting fury cruise on frigates
fcruise : 100m/s, 453m
frigate has 200m/s, 60m
drf is 0.908
=> (100/200*60/453)^0.908 = 0.085 . Your application is 8.5%
now we remove one pilot cruise and replace it with a bellicose and one painter (+60%sig).The application is multiplied by 1.6^0.908 = 1.53 ( = +53%) while the raw DPS is multiplied by (x-1)/x (because you lose one pilot shooting cruise)
so your total applied DPS is multiplied by 1.53*(x-1)/x . This equals 1 for x=2.9.
As soon as you are three people, it is more interesting to be 2 cruise launchers and one painter than 3 cruise launcher - against frigs at least.
your base apply is 61%. if you have rigor T1 (/0.85) +flare T1 (*1.15) it becomes 61 *(1.15/0.85)^0.908 = 80% apply. Since you can’t go above 100% apply, apply mods can at most give +25% apply (+20 out of 80).
If you kill BS as the one I linked, you need to be at least 5 people to have one dedicated painter worth it.
Adapt
Again, this is theoretical values, so when you fight rats you have to try and adapt.
Your apply increase depends on what takes the most time in your gaming session: killing bs, travelling, killing frigs, problem with enemy ewar or elite cruisers ?
And of course if you have a cruise missile fit, please go with painters on it. and rigor and flare.
I see the usual collection of yes they are and no they are not, so here is my thoughts.
This is a game we are supposed to be playing because we want to have fun. With that in mind if you and a group of friends are having fun laying waste to missions (level is not important) then they are worth doing as a group.
A group of well coordinated players can run content that is well above their characters level so in that regard yes running mission as a group can be both fun and more lucrative (ISK/LP) than running them solo.
If max ISK is your thing the missions as a group can be a terrible waste of time.
So that gets me to the real answer. Only you can decide if running missions or any other PvE content for that matter as a group is worth it.
This is a game we are supposed to be playing because we want to have fun. With that in mind if you and a group of friends are having fun laying waste to missions (level is not important) then they are worth doing as a group.
A group of well coordinated players can run content that is well above their characters level so in that regard yes running mission as a group can be both fun and more lucrative (ISK/LP) than running them solo.
If max ISK is your thing the missions as a group can be a terrible waste of time.
Yeah, once you reach a certain threshold (say 950+ dps) there’s not much need for a buddy. The clears will be maybe 33% faster (remember only a fraction of mission time is dps, there’s still travel, salvaging, approaching and activating gates) but at -50% rewards. If however you and your buddy fly 500-700 dps BC/T3/HAC, then you have much to gain from teaming up.
All that said, even with a 1400 dps pimp ship I still team up with friends because talking with another human makes the whole process much more tolerable.
The corporation I joined as a new player had a “mission Monday” event where a group of veterans and new players would run level 4 missions for a few hours. Bounties were split and loot/salvage went to corp.
It was a huge amount of income for the new players involved and some memorable experiences - the angel extravaganza bonus room is pretty impressive when you’re only a couple of months old!
Your comments are typical, and yet so sad.
Group mission runs are not about everyone providing DPS, group mission runs should be about forming a team that can and does run mission significantly faster. In my corp with teams for DPS, teams for loot / salvage activities and teams that transfer the loot from mission sites to stations.
Ship fitting and tactics are often overlooked but incredibly important to quickly and efficiently clearing missions as a group so you need to look at that as well.
Here is our basic model.
Shoot all the things, bookmark each room and then move on to next room or mission.
Meanwhile the loot / salvage teams are cleaning up whatever they can find / decide they want.
And to keep the loot / salvage teams on the field so to speak they simply jet can when full, bookmark and others pick up and transfer to stations.
Using this model we on average easily complete 4 to 5 missions in the same time it would take a solo player to complete just 1.
You can’t convince me that there is an isk benefit to teaming up on missions, assuming a conventional even split of the rewards.
A “loot/salvage” team is useless to me. I know what is high value loot, and I know which loot yields good reprocessing. There are only a tiny handful of missions that I need to start jettisoning the poor isk : m3 items (Gone Berserk, Damsel, Blockade but only sometimes). I tractor + salvage the whales as I shoot (Vargur, Fleet cruise Typhoon, Loki - all have multiple utility highs) so a dedicated salvage team is only going to pick up frigate/cruiser scraps in my wake, or those 80km BS wrecks I dont care to spend time on. Ok if it’s a Serpentis mission you got me, I salvage every Serpentis ship for that Lorentz stuff and a dedicated salvage buddy would maybe make himself worth that 50% split.
In extremely dps dependent missions like Scarlet, Blockade, World’s Collide, Assault, and two ships doing 1300+ dps each with spare highs to get 80-90% of the salvage, the completion time is rarely double what I can do solo. Only in cases where I get badly ECM/dampened or have to warp out if I screwed up 3 triggers in a row on Blockade do I see a tangible time value of having a buddy.
I think you may be noticing short-term isk/hour increase because with 4-5+ people you can cherry pick the nicest mission offers, but eventually you have to do those awful 4-jumps-each-way for Duo of Death and so on. If your play sessions are under an hour, you probably never have to deal with the glut of low value missions and your numbers are arbitrarily high.
Dont think you stuck around to read my last line though where I stated that in lieu of all these isk factors I still prefer to fly with other humans, i.e. isk per hour is meaningless when you just want to have fun and hang out.