Player Features and Ideas Discussion

As far as I know there is no game guide-esque cannon anywhere, at least that players can see it, that says that Level 4 missions are supposed to be easy. I'm going off of bits and pieces said by CCP over the years and the current state of the game. Level 4 missions are easy, CCP have never said anything to the contrary and all of their talk of player progression and PvE seem to point towards these not being difficult for newer players.

The risk to Carriers in Null is largely a player construction. Players created the safety and other players have endeavored to break it, and it's been an escalating war on both sides.

Renters are probably the least safe group in Null and that's where groups like Bomber's Bar, Spectre Fleet, and other roaming hunter groups get the majority of their Carrier and Super kills.

The major Null groups these days have people in FAXes on standby to save tackled Rorquals and ratters that are paid by tips from the people doing the ratting. It's one of the major reasons people say not to rat in the Staging System because then the rescue squad can't jump to your cyno and if they warp in-system it'll be too late.

In response to this other groups have started baiting the rescue fleets and dropping them with anything from Dread bombs to Supers and Titans.

I'm curious what you think ratting with a Carrier should look like in Null, especially in terms of ISK made vs time spent and what you think an acceptable risk profile should look like, or even how it should be generated. I feel like a lot of people complaining about "safe" Carriers, Incursions, Rorquals, ect don't actually think about what makes something risky vs impossibly risky and how to create that sort of environment. Not sure this is the thread for that though.



Quite a few of the harder missions aggro the room for you, like Worlds Collide, AE, ect. I was comparing the AE bonus room because it's one of the hardest single pockets in any mission and I had the numbers to hand.

"The Assault" isn't a particularly hard mission, at least if you're talking about the Minmatar Repubilc or Serpentis versions. The Guristas one looks harder but I haven't run missions against them in years so I can't comment too much there. Guristas are weird because they're often very very easy to tank due to having mono-profile resists.

The character you used to run on also, I would imagine, has maxed or near maxed cap and gun skills, which helps significantly with tank. As does using a ship with capless guns.

Also basically no one does L4s in a BC these days since the T1 BC nerfs a while ago. They can still tank a lot of missions but they don't have enough DPS to run them at all efficiently and at low SP can't break the tank on some of the rats.

The first pocket of The Assault against the Serpentis allows you to pick one pocket at a time, and is quite easy. The DPS is only high if you proceed to aggro everything in the room and even then it all has to burn at least 30km to get to you and the Battleships aren't particularly fast.

All of the Battleships that are there on warp in are relatively weak, with relatively low DPS, and they can be safely killed in order. At worst you should only have 4 Battleships and a mix of smaller stuff shooting at you at any given time, total DPS is below 500 before resists and that's only once they're in optimal.

The Assault first room is *easy*, like ridiculously so. The rats in it are on the easier half of the spectrum, the spawns and triggers are easy, and there's more than enough burn-in time on the rats to kill at least one Battleship or all of the smaller stuff before they're putting damage on you.

Some missions more likely to be hard on new players (This is going to trend towards Angels, it's what I've fought the most of):

Shipyard Theft - Has a good chance of having 1k DPS worth of mostly BCs and a couple of tougher Battleships on top of you right from the start of the mission. On top of that because so much of it is in BCs a newbie Battleship with poor tracking can seriously struggle to remove DPS fast enough.

Recon (1 of 3) - Easy if you rush it, very hard if you try to kill everything. Drops a fairly small number of tanky High DPS ships on the player at medium range (IIRC it's like 40km at most) and keeps dropping them about every 30 seconds in the first room for 4 waves. Also does a fairly broad spread of damage, making it harder to optimize your tank on a T1 ship. Peak DPS for the first room is up over 1k and it's on fairly tanky ships with decent regen that take a long time to kill which make it difficult to get enough DPS off the field fast enough.

This is basically a watered down example of why more EHP inherently makes missions harder for newbies. This mission was changed specifically in Rev 2.2 to make it harder, and it did, because the same DPS ended up in tougher ships that take longer to kill keeping the DPS on field for longer. I should also note that the individual ships actually have less EHP than the total of ships did pre-Rev 2.2

Vengeance - Tougher than average ships, nothing too nasty until the second pocket where you have one very high DPS ship with strong tank and an obnoxious orbit distance on top of dealing a ton of EM damage. Also almost any use of drones has a good chance of causing you to eat most of an entire pocket's worth of aggro in the face when you pull them in. Applied DPS in the second pocket on a good run (no agro mess) is over 600, and Moon orbits at 40km which is obnoxious to deal with in most Battleships.

Any version of Worlds Collide - Mixed damage types, everything on top of you as soon as it aggros in any room but the first, the long burns in the first room incentivize an AB further hurting cap and fittings, and because it's got two different types of rats you generally have to either split tank your ship or dock up after the first second room. Oh and any use of drones or a bad target selection in the last room has a good chance of making you eat the full room's agro.

Pirate Invasion - Generally harder rats, and proximity based aggro that can see you taking aggro from seven Battleships just based on luck. Also the spawns have linked aggro if you shoot them, adding further fun if the far one auto-aggros. Mitigated somewhat by burn time for the further spawns, but still potentially nasty for a newer player. Also basically forces long-range guns meaning lower DPS.

Dread Pirate Scarlet Basically forces an omni-tank, has fairly high DPS rats, and there's a lot of stuff whacking on you in the last room. Easily over 500 DPS sustained for fairly long periods, and Scarlet's orbit distance and relatively high tank for a newbie encourage short range guns or frustrate long-range ones, making the rest of the mission harder.

Cargo Delivery - AKA "WTF are Bloodraiders doing here and oh **** where'd my Capacitor go." Drops six fairly high DPS battleships on you within optimal range for most if not all of them and they neut.


So yeah, The Assault isn't that hard, at least the Serpentis version. It looks hard on paper but the mission setup makes it easy and the actual rats are on the easier side.

I want to stress that a newbie can complete all of these, but most of them will force at least one warp out to recover cap and/or tank on most newbie Battleships. If you make them harder though, especially if you increase the danger of being scrammed, then that quickly turns into newbie looking for a new Battleship.

Which is also another reason to leave Level 4s as fairly easy Starter+ content. They're the first and pretty much only easy PvE that involves a Battleship, which is often one of the things a newer player aspires to in the game early on, getting into and using a Battleship. Take away L4s and what's left for them to do with a BS in High Sec?

Cade, you are being delusional here.
You are claiming that the slightest change to the 'curve' (which seems to be something you've made up since there is a lot of variation in mission difficulty based on race etc anyway) will destroy the game.
But this 'curve' gets changed every single time CCP changes something anyway. If they buff a ship, introduce a new module, nerf a gun, add an implant, these all change the curve anyway.

And if a 'newbie' can't do level 4's yet? Well they keep doing lvl 3's till they can do lvl 4's, exactly like they do now!
Crying out loud, 'think of the newbies' isn't a valid argument here, since it buffs them in every other way possible.

So yeah, your argument is just a joke at this point.