Newcomer / Intro Bounty missions, mission rank and engineering.

[Yingnei Gasua]

Hi, so I just kinda got my Krait engineered with everything to G5. I havent been specifically doing combat since I started so combat rank is still Novice. Only blow up those NPCs who try to interdict me when I am doing courier runs and that is not really challenging combat, one pass and the NPC blows up.

Now I see some of the bounty missions where it says the suggested rank is Master or Elite and it is 6 or 7 levels above my rank.

I tried one out and its like me against 4 or 6 enemies who seem engineered. Pretty impossible, I got the target down to half shields and fire from multiple ships pretty much forced me to run or die.

Guess my question is this, unless my piloting skill is supposed to get so much better later in the game, I dont see how I can do such missions (outnumbered 6 to 1) since my ship isnt going to get much better. Isnt the real difficulty (pilot skill aside) for such missions your ship stats vs the AI ships rather than the Combat rank? I dont see how I can ever complete these Master (much less elite) level combat missions. Are they meant for wings only?

 

[CMDR Jago Kain]

Are they pirate massacre missions or pirate lord assassinations? Which ship are you flying?

 

[Yingnei Gasua]

Are they pirate massacre missions or pirate lord assassinations? Which ship are you flying?

It was one with a mission title like 'Assassinate Huggy the Bear'. So I thought its me against him. But after tracking him thru 3 systems (meet this contact/scan beacon etc) it turns out it was him in his FDL and like 5 other buddies in big gunned ships.

 

[Dommarraa]

Sounds like you are taking a Wing mission if there are 4 or 6 enemies. Dont.

(Wing missions have 3 little blue balls in the bottom left of the icon)

 

[Krieger]

As @Dommarraa said, could be you took a wing mission. However, there are also single player variants of assassination missions that spawn a target in a well armed wing. Those missions are all illegal, for instance 'Assassinate politician <somename>'. There are also illegal versions of 'assassinate pirate' and 'assassinate venerable general' missions. They can be quite tough with 5-6 well armed ships and authority ships dropping in quickly if the target system is high security. I recently lost my G5-everything Krait mk II on such a mission. Tip: often the target appears in supercruise in a smaller wing than if you go to the mission signal source. If you can interdict them the fight is easier.

 

[d8veh]

Hi, so I just kinda got my Krait engineered with everything to G5. I havent been specifically doing combat since I started so combat rank is still Novice. Only blow up those NPCs who try to interdict me when I am doing courier runs and that is not really challenging combat, one pass and the NPC blows up.

Now I see some of the bounty missions where it says the suggested rank is Master or Elite and it is 6 or 7 levels above my rank.

I tried one out and its like me against 4 or 6 enemies who seem engineered. Pretty impossible, I got the target down to half shields and fire from multiple ships pretty much forced me to run or die.

Guess my question is this, unless my piloting skill is supposed to get so much better later in the game, I dont see how I can do such missions (outnumbered 6 to 1) since my ship isnt going to get much better. Isnt the real difficulty (pilot skill aside) for such missions your ship stats vs the AI ships rather than the Combat rank? I dont see how I can ever complete these Master (much less elite) level combat missions. Are they meant for wings only?

Some of those type missions are more about outwitting the NPCs rather than outright combat . You have to think about objectives and tactics.

If you want to rank up, got to a high resource extraction site and help the police kill the bad guys. That's a good place to hone your combat skills before going on to more difficult things. If you want to know about rapid ranking, ask again, and I'll tell you a few tricks.

 

[aRJay]

To get a higher combat rank you have to do more combat most of us tend to improve at what we do with practice even if we have the same level of equipment all the time.

Personally I have no taste for combat missions as I don't like the idea of massacring job lots of people even pirates never mind civilians. So I just go to Nav Beacons or the various RES sights and let myself get attacked or at least provoked, I might end up destroying similar numbers but I feel better about it plus I don't waste time trying to pick or stack missions.