Player Features and Ideas Discussion

With the change to the missions allowing mission mobs to change targets we lost one thing I think was fairly important; we lost the ability to bring new players along with us to experience the joy of what missions are and give them a chance to feel like they contribute. I am totally for the change in missions mobs and I love how it has changed missions with my friends I regularly run missions with.

My Suggestion:
Find some way to give a small amount of PVE control over targets so that we can attempt to protect other players and ships. I have had a couple ideas on how this can be done.

1. A new skill and modules that will attempt to target jam rats for every target except the jammer.
perhaps the max targets effected would be built into the skill levels
2. A new skill and modules that will confuse a targets sensors and move them to targeting you.
this could be as simple as targeting your friend with the module to match his ships targeting sig or as complicated as targeting each ship targeting him.

I would not want any changes to alter pvp play in any way so this would be pve only. Also I am not strongly tied to the proposed solutions and if anyone can think of something better I would love to hear it in the comments below.


TLDR; can't run missions with noobs, need to find a fix

I agree with Blackfyre.

So put them in a hurricane/harbinger/myrmadon.

Remote reps are really hard to fit cap wise. Also, if you are not in a logistics ship then they have to hover near you and most likely not be able to hit anything, which was not the point.

Instead of taking noobs into higher level missions than they can't handle why not do the reverse? Go into LOWER missions and guide them while YOU are tanking the damage\RR'ing them?

Just a reverse spin on this OP's idea as mission aggro isn't broken and doesn't need fixing, in fact it's better as you have to adapt to the AI and the aggro management of it.

If you want to go that route then just point your friend. It uses less cap and rats hate it even more than they do RR.

My idea is not broken, perhaps misinformed. If you check the idea was to have a way to save someone from rat agro that seems to be completely random. I have since been informed that it is in fact not entirely random random as both Astroniomix and Alvatore DiMarco pointed out. I was under the impression that there was no rhyme or reason why the rats targeted who they did. Now I can try target painters and weak logi as a way to pull agro back to me.

Except that using logi and such in fact does not work even a little reliably.

I mission with friends all the time. In fact, when the AI changes were announced I trained leadership so I could do what little is possible in the game to help them. Leadership may be great stuff in PvP, but it's not all that useful in PvE.

I have seen the behavior where I activated a single RR on a fleetmate and got all the agro. I have just as often, without rhyme or reason seen them stay on my fleetmate until they were all dead. I have seen groups of battleships go down in flames trying to kill a frigate orbiting my RRing battleship. Sometimes just running the ganglinks will have my Damnation laughing at them until they all die... sometimes 3 ganglinks, 2 reps and a target painter will get completely ignored.

There is no proactive, reliable way to manage AI agro at present, and that is indeed a problem. The AI should never have been changed without the introduction of a toolset to handle it. That it needed changed is without question---but if they are going to include agro mechanics, they need to include agro management mechanics or just toss out the idea of players being able to bring in ships of various roles to work together in PvE.