Missions & Complexes

Is it worth the effort to do the lvl 4 bonus room?

Pretty much this.

Personally I always run it since I don't blitz.


DMC

Depends on whether you can run it without warping out.

How exactly is it unpredictable? Do you mean that you can blitz it and wrap the mission by killing Scarlet in the second room?

Yep. In fact, it's one of the ways I wish CCP would consider re-scripting some, if not all, missions. Okay, rant ahead, so you know...read it if you care to.

I actually hate that less than half of what's told in the briefings given by the agents pretty much let you know what you will face, who you will face, and how much of a challenge (at least relative challenge) you will face, all simply by giving you the name of the mission and nearly always giving you ID of the opponent. Apart from that much intel, nothing else really makes that much of a difference. Variations of spawns hardly make that much of a splash on the mission's make-up, the biggest of which being when EWAR is involved, though even then it's usually a minor inconvenience at its worst. You rarely see more than one OPFOR present on any missions, save for missions like Scarlet and Worlds Collide, which that alone kills a lot of opportunities for missions to surprise you in any given way. This makes missions feel more like a battle reenactment for the same battle than individual isolated operations that should be different somehow each time.

Would love for more missions where the agent says, "We don't know who did it, but somebody hit us/a convey of ours/some of our friends/etc. and we think they're hiding here. Go get them," and that could be any of the major pirate groups, Rogue Drones, or even a rival faction. Hell, throw us a curve ball and have an Empire agent send us against a rogue unit of their own parent faction's armada -- I wouldn't even care if they dropped tags, it would be something different at least. Maybe even script missions together so sometimes, on rare occasions, hitting the mission trigger causes a sort of escalation event nearby that the player has the option to go run, or they can call it a day and head back to their agent for a new assignment. Maybe a spawn shows up earlier than they are suppose to, or at a much different range than they did before, just to shake it up a bit. Get a mission from an agent with the Caldari Navy and seek out your foe, only for a random friendly Navy patrol to happen to stumble into one of the pockets you're in and offer some help (so as not to steel kills, maybe they do reduced damage so you have a better chance at the bounty).

"Smarter" AI, while I will applaud CCP for what I've even seen Drifters and the likes do that is rather interesting, even somewhat spooky, is one thing. But simply giving rats beefed up firepower, crazy tanks, and ship restrictions to force the player to use something other than the L4 norm can only do so much. I don't disagree that the AI could use an update of the sort, it just bugs me that everywhere else in Eve RNG seemingly always has a way of playing a role, yet it's the one thing that is completely absent when mission-based PVE comes to mind. Missions are mostly a rule of, "Once you've learned what to do, you do the exact same thing every time to get the exact same f'ing results every time without so much as one exception."

Okay, rant over, I swear.

It is true that missions are very predictable. Even the "random" good loot drops like the big Zor implant, Scarlets Implant and the silo in the later Angel Room are well known.

adding random enemies just means 'warp in, see who is there, warp out to refit or drop the depot if you can survive, and do the mission. really doesnt add much.
what I would prefer much better is a chance, even if very low, of some great drops, similar to anomalies, but much smaller chance.

Hello :)

I was wondering if it is worth doing the bonus room, but in the level 3 missions?

Thanks! :)

Or a powerful Guardian Elite Sleeper Class BS boss or two to kill.......along with a random faction loot drop.

Best in terms of isk/hr efficiency and all that? Probably, but then again, I've never been one to pass up chances like the one (supposedly) in AE3. Not until I've been given the bird about 50 times... after that, I'll leave it be. Besides, it's only an extra 10/15 minutes at worst, which is barely anything at all, by and large.