Test Server Feedback

Other than the Blood Burner (which won't actually be decreasing in overall power much in this change since I'm giving it some more ehp to make up for the rep decrease) we're quite happy with the power level of these guys.

There are a few changes in the pipe already with tweaks that should make them a bit more fun to fight (for instance we are increasing their inertia a bit so you can do things like slingshotting the Guristas one) and to adjust the rewards a bit but none of those should change the basic nature of the fights.

You're correct that the structures don't drop any loot, good point on the hp.

I really like the concept of those missions.
Although this ist not real PvP-training, it does showcase the abilities of these ships and different tactics in an environment where it is easier to learn.
(you will sometimes meet pilots in FW who will use such incredibly maxed out fits against you, but you will not really be able to "train" against them)

Also:
Maybe you can get CCP Rise to integrate some T1 frig versions of these burners somewhere in the new player experience (or better: in a special L4 mission pool for characters who are less than 6 months old)?
Preferrably in a mission where the acceleration gate allows any ship size.
That would maybe help saving time as one would not have to argue for two hours why the Megathron is not "the best" ship in the game over and over again.
Thankyou.

That's it. I surrender. Gurista's burner too stronk. Only chance I see for me is max faction pimpage and or links. With T2 I just succumb to the amount of micro-managment it takes to get that thing tackled. Lost five worms in a row, mostly to module burnout. I need to overheat both MWD and web to grab him and can't pull it off with all that overview lag.

If anything this has reminded me how steering a space ship with a weird excel sheet and a sea of buttons is the polar opposite of fun times.

Solo test runs, my char is mostly all V including specs for hybrids and rockets, except Drone specs with all IV. Tank Skills are all V including Shield EM compensation, Shield Therm compensation is at IV.
On TQ i'm a solo/small scale pilot, flying very often Assault Frigs.


Cruor, Blood Raider
Any ship has to be completly passive fitted that means your tank and weapons = no cap use, no other way to beat the current coded NPC Cruor
Tank = 2x medium ancillary shield booster + high EM+Therm resis (NPC is using conflag so 50:50)
DPS = AC, Rockets or Drones, has to be at 290DPS for kin or explo.
Possible Ships:
Hawk
Worm

Only the Worm works due to its Drone DPS. The Missile hits (difference between faction and T2 is minimal) weren't as good as the Drone hits, i mean Drone kinetic DPS was at average reduced about 25% while the Missile kinetic DPS was reduced way beyond 50%. Can't prove it yet as i forgot to copy the logs from the Hawk and Worm.
Worm fitting:

I dont like that. I tried maxrange kite crow on the crior, yesterday it worked, beside that my dps was WAY too low, but today, that cruor tackled me 2 seconds after i landed... impossible to get any range.

I dont know anything about 1on1 stuff, so i cant really find a way to kill that thing

Dafuq is wrong with these NPCs??

I only tried the burner sansha hoping to kill them all and find strategies and stuff.
I have to admit I limited myself to T2 ships, I didn't try notably the Worm which seems to be the best ship to do these missions.

BUT MAN WAS IT IMPOSSIBLE TO KILL THE SANSHA BURNER.

I tried a gallente assault frig with blaster. Utterly dumb, my bad. I discovered that both stasis AND scram had 15km range, okay.

Then I tried a sentinel with 2x range disruption and 2x tracking disruption. Of course the dps was lacking but I was curious of how the NPC would react to e-war... well it choose not to react at all. And resumed hitting me as perfectly as before even though it was orbiting at 3km/sec with -70% tracking, and orbiting at 15km with -70% optimal range and falloff. LOL.

Energy neutralizers didn't work either, but that was expected. I'd swear to have read Fozzie say that non-cap-warfare e-war should work, but whatever.

I came back with a Jaguar. The mission says that the sansha uses Scorch. Scorch is 9em + 2 thermal damage. So reaching 97% resist EM and 67% resist Thermal seemed like a good idea with a Jaguar. Hopefully a buffer of around 75k EHP should be enough to survive while I was applying 250dps. At that point, I realized in my jaguar, with my buffer going down faster than expected, that the Sansha Burner was equipped with railguns (WTF).

Maybe I told to myself, maybe the NPC is bugged and actually hitting me with kin/therm. So I tried a hawk, but given the 300dmg volleys I was receiving with 0%em/80%thermal/70%kinetic, it wasn't therm/kin.

Oh did I mention that this NPC shield boost every 2sec without any visual effect and always go back to full regardless of the number of damage and neut applied?

Of course all these tests were made with assault frigate V, electronic warfare V, T2 rigs, T2 guns, T2 drones and all that.


So TL;DR: I don't know what you feed your NPCs with, but I want the same thing!

Second TL;DR: I wasn't planning on doing lv4 missions just to have fun with a burner from time to time, but given that the risk vs reward seems off the chart, I'd rather try my luck looting wrecks with a -10.0 character in front of Jita 4-4 to make isk, than doing these missions!

My feedback- the burners are WAY OP. I went up against the sansha burner using a daredevil with 5 gang links boosting me an a full slave set. had 330 DPS and even though i immediately double webbed him and got to orbit or 1 km i was moving at 180m/s and he still got me into structure using scorch ammo, did i mention i had 70% resists for both thermal and EM. how the heck was he even hitting me?

The guristas one orbits at 40 km (and points at that range), MWDs at ~3.7 km/s, does pure kinetic damage with lots of alpha. Don't have an exact figure for its dps, but I was slowly bleeding armor with a 212 dps tank against kinetic per EFT. Seems to have effectively unlimited range on its missiles and a moderate active tank - maybe 150 dps-ish? It broke slowly against an unimplanted neutron blaster daredevil with no damage mods, anyway.

The blood raider one scrams out to ~14 km and webs out to ~50 (?) km. It orbits at around 800 m/s at ~5 km and neuts out to 7 km or so. If you get much more than 10 km away from it, it sometimes accelerates to something like 1.8 km/s to try to run you down. It can't apply damage past ~5 km or so. Can't give you a dps figure because I used an untanked frig and just kited its dps at the edge of web range. It has a permarunning active tank of around 250 dps, but that's apparently getting nerfed.

The angel one orbits fast (maybe ~1 km/s, I forget) at ~500m. It has a scram and web, does moderate damage. By far the easiest of the five, IMO. It has enough dps to put a worm with ~9k EHP into structure in 30-40 seconds...

The sansha one orbits at around 14 km on an AB and has a scram and web that reach out to at least 16 km. It does maybe around 150 dps and has a weak active tank (I was able to break it with a ship doing ~150 EFT dps), but its sig is tiny and it orbits fast (I think around 2 km/s), so it mitigates *a lot* of incoming damage unless you have good application/tracking.

The serpentis one has a 90% web and scram, and orbits at around 1.1 km/s at 11 km. It deals maybe 250 kin/therm dps and tanks 200-ish.

Any level of risk can be fine so long as the reward is appropriately balanced with it, so as long as you factor the number of ships people lose to them in your mission reward calculations (which I don't think you do...right?) the rewards might be worth the risk.

Still, I think these burners are probably too strong the way they are now. You really need a second ship to compete with them without using implants/snakes/blingy modules. If they're getting link bonuses, I'm really fighting two ships, not one (frigate + booster). I think your should remove their off-grid boosting bonuses or make a structure that grants the bonuses that we can destroy to even the playing field.

Edit: Dat Sansha burner is crazy.

Were any of those successful ships Minmatar?