I can picture the difficult conversation Ydiss is yet to have with his girlfriend over dinner one evening. “Sweetest, Darling, Sweetest, Dear… I know we’re not supposed to have secrets, but there’s something I haven’t told you… It’s about Elite Dangerous… ” (pours a couple of stiff brandies).
Oh I've told her
I've since left it up to her as to when we begin the journey. She's not brought it up since, we're focusing instead on EDO, which is a lot less nuts (still slow though, doing repeated missions for those x/10 unlocks you get zero way of tracking until they decide we're worthy, gotta love those "kill 10 rats" missions
) but it's at least doing something that's genuinely fun so it's better than "deliver 5 soontil relics" or "50 units of lavian brandy, enjoy those return trips I've needlessly sent you on unless you own a fleet carrier!". More to the point, it's not necessary at all to enjoy most of what EDO has to offer. It just gives you a nice bonus and flavour to your outfits. Upgrading weapons is important if you want to do combat but that's upgrading, not engineering (and they've separated that well enough). Upgrading is still slow. A lot better than when EDO launched as they reduced the volume of mats required. It is very slow though and a ton of mats are cross-dependent so you can't just upgrade "across the board" after you hit G2-3. I didn't mind this that much, I think it would have been better if EDO allowed data and goods to be traded at the bar. But the loops are much more neatly contained in EDO and the volume of materials is shorter (not short enough, but still way less complicated than EDH).
We met playing New World, which has a lot of bad coverage for its end game grind (and rightly so, it's pretty bad for it). I told her that Elite has a beer for holding.
We've also played Deep Rock Galactic, which handles its upgrade path just so brilliantly well, it's genuinely merged into the game you simply don't feel like it's a grind at all and although the upgrades do enable you to be more powerful, the majority of them are just strategic decisions and not straight power bloat.
Some people see this discussion as whining and it's fine if they want to call it that but, ultimately, it's people who enjoy Elite who know its "RPG crafting" doesn't need to be this way.
BTW, Dav's Hope has never been an essential option for me but there's no faster way for a new commander to simply fill up across a broad range of g1 to g4 manufacturing mats with minimal faff, or to refill the stock of some of the g4 items quickly instead of burning up precious g5 mission rewards to do it.
He said it's now "obsolete" as though I've missed some development or new meta, so I'm keen to know what that is. I hope it's not just "do missions and trade" because that would be disappointing.
A full combat engineer frequently requires 70+ g5 manufacturing materials. You can only get about 200 g5 mats for manufacturing mats by mission reward (biotech conductors and exquisite focus crystals). Cross trading those to another g5 costs 6 per 1, netting you only 33 total g5 mats if you burn the whole lot. And to refill 200 requires no fewer than 40 missions. That's a ton of grinding (even if you like doing missions).
Trading helps a lot and you can often cross trade lower end items as well, to finish off buckets of currency. It's quite expensive if you do it extensively, though. Those g3 and g4 mats are still precious and so it's important to gather them as much as possible and sitting about letting your limpets gather during combat is important (still another grind though, you're literally stopping what you're doing to wait for them to finish unless you're doing it whilst still fighting but then you're just slowing yourself down with the scoop and this is still just more grinding)
I sometimes do Dav's when I'm a little low across the board on mid range items and yesterday it helped me a lot (filled up quite a few g3 and g4 buckets). It's efficient enough. It's extremely dull. So...
I'm excited for someone to tell me what fun activity FD added to the game that has made Dav's Hope obsolete.
I finished my Mamba build last night. Dav's helped and I then burned all of those g5 materials I had to get some of the remaining g5s I needed but I still had about 45 core dynamics to get.
At this point, it's more time efficient just to go find those. 45x6 (trading from missions) would take ages.
So off I went to a high population federation none system to find HGEs, yay. It took me 10 minutes to find one but then it reminded me why I hated it so much... 4 proprietary composites
Oh yeh, hi there RNG my old friend.
It took another system and 3 attempts to finally get one that had cores. I then rinsed it with the relog trick because I'm not playing that game any longer than I have to.
It's just mind numbing. Who thinks this is fun? And this is me, a carrier owner with a fleet of fully engineered ships, a lot of experience as to how to cut corners and all the software required to mitigate the pain points of the process. I took a couple days doing this build but that's nothing compared to how a new player will do it. And imagine never finding out about edmh, inara and all that. Just in game tools.
They way over complicated the whole thing and I'm certain that was to make it feel like an expansion's worth of content. It could have been so much simpler. Simple isn't worse. And a time consuming task doesn't need to be bland nor repetitive. It can just be really fun if done right. And it needn't lead to bloat.
Elite used to have ships that had limitations, hard corners you grew to love or hate, with usually clearly defined reasons to choose each ship and you were often managing a limited power supply to squeeze internals and weapons into it, often needing to choose carefully and sacrifice modules to do it. Engineering enabled
every ship to equip everything. Engineers added a grind to upgrade every ship and simply bumped up the NPC ships to make it necessary to do, only adding some content that stretched the "upper end" (but exposed all new players to it anyway). That upper end is huge levels of tank sponge, with NPCs that bleed your hull right through your shield, requiring that you bring a heavily upgraded ship to defeat the encounters and.... then that ship renders it and everything else except for AX combat trivial - what ship you choose is largely trivial now. What internals you equip is merely a couple hours grind away from trivial (even a fully cold ship can still equip almost anything it likes these days).
The new player experience was ignored. I've since played 4 other commanders fresh and it isn't nearly as fun as it was to progress before EDH. You absolutely
must engineer if you want to keep doing combat and the game currently forces that onto you even if you don't fire a weapon in a ship (rank increases on foot, enemies scale up immediately to expert and higher, as soon as you become novice, and they all pack heavy engineering that renders your A grade ship either entirely useless or, at best, capable of winning but over a long, slow, dull slog - all negated by just signing under the dotted engineering line, enjoy the grind!)
I'm glad I wasn't hardcore into pvp. Imagine being into that?
