Combat Completely Ruined for Non Engineered Players

[Macros Black]

Must admit I like the big explosions taking on the big ships, my first Elite's was done in the Anaconda, the rest in the Federal Corvette.

 

[Stigbob]

Must admit I like the big explosions taking on the big ships, my first Elite's was done in the Anaconda, the rest in the Federal Corvette.

The big ships are fun in their own way, the mediums offer the best of both worlds and are the best killers. The tiddlers are just bags of fun though, it's like taking on ATAT's in a snowspeeder.

 

[zeta]

I've been away from ED for over 12 months and thought I would come back and see how things are.

For the most part, not much has changed, trading feels the same and mining is still mostly profitable using Lazors (although I do like the new additions of deep core mining etc).

I also tried to give combat a go, it didnt take me long to realise that its been completely ruined by engineers.

I went into a Low Intensity Combat Zone in an A fitted Vulture and couldnt even kill 1 ship, I was fighting an Expert Cobra MkIII for around 20 minutes and it just would not die. The NPC ships use thermal weapons on you, their shields seem to recharge super quick and if you shoot the same target for too long, the entire instance seems to gang up on you and start blasting you.

I have tried multiple ships with Shield boosters, hull reinforcements, different weapon layouts and in all cases I struggled to destroy even 1 ship and that was just a Viper!

• Fer De Lance
• Clipper
• Vulture
• Krait MkII

Using the above ships with Grade A items and pulse, beam, multicannons, missiles - All sorts of loadouts, none of them were decent enough to be able to kill the NPC's.

I refuse to be dragged into the Engineers grind just to be able to PVE NPC's in a low intensity zone, it's an absolute joke.

Looks like im uninstalling again until Odyssey, hopefully that will bring some reason to play ED again, because Ship combat definitley hasn't.

I went to a low intensity CZ with this build, a stock FDL with 3 class 2 PAs and a class 4 and class 2 cannon:

EDSY

EDSY is a ship outfitting tool for Elite Dangerous

edsy.org

This build lets me fire 2 salvos before the capacitor is drained.
(stock PAs have high distro draw hence the cannons; class 2 cannon is gimballed to match speed)

I killed a python, one of the tougher CZ ships, under 5 min (maybe under 3) by FAOFF orbiting with pips 240, 042 / 033.

OP is right that ships are tougher, more agile, more hull, ... . It would be difficult to kill them using unengineered lasers / multicannons. Small and / or very agile ships are even more difficult to kill (vulture, viper MK4,...) without at least g3 thrusters and PD but not impossible.

I think unengineered ships need high burst damage, you are not agile enough to stay on target, and FAOFF is almost a must.

If the grind is an obstacle, you could try CQC. It is more of a level playing field. While the higher your rank, the better equipped ships you get access to, the rank progression is much much faster.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

This is flat out wrong and instantly obvious for anyone who's ever fought any other enemy in the game, especially anyone used to doing undermining. Every single NPC in all CZs is engineered, Spec Ops just have bigger buffs than the rest. A high CZ would be doable in under 2 minutes with a pure laser boat if this where anything remotely close to true.

If you've ever fired any engineered weapon, even just lasers, at an actually unengineered enemy like the Wanted ships in NavBeacons, you know that they go up in flames in approximately two seconds or so. Even the Eagles in CZs aren't that brittle. What in the world could possibly give you this idea?

NPC dont need engineering. Unleashing the full vanilla equipment arsenal did the job to make them cancerous bulletsponges. Which in turn means it was all nollocks right from the start, but they unnerfed the NPC after we were graced with this idiotic nickel and dime power creep arms race.

 

[Soon(TM)]

I went to a low intensity CZ with this build, a stock FDL with 3 class 2 PAs and a class 4 and class 2 cannon:

EDSY

EDSY is a ship outfitting tool for Elite Dangerous

edsy.org

This build lets me fire 2 salvos before the capacitor is drained.
(stock PAs have high distro draw hence the cannons; class 2 cannon is gimballed to match speed)

I killed a python, one of the tougher CZ ships, under 5 min (maybe under 3) by FAOFF orbiting with pips 240, 042 / 033.

OP is right that ships are tougher, more agile, more hull, ... . It would be difficult to kill them using unengineered lasers / multicannons. Small and / or very agile ships are even more difficult to kill (vulture, viper MK4,...) without at least g3 thrusters and PD but not impossible.

I think unengineered ships need high burst damage, you are not agile enough to stay on target, and FAOFF is almost a must.

If the grind is an obstacle, you could try CQC. It is more of a level playing field. While the higher your rank, the better equipped ships you get access to, the rank progression is much much faster.

I'm not interested in the CQC mini game, never have.

I like being able to take missions and fight in the cz's, earn some credits and affect the balance in a system.

Now Fdev have taken that away from me unless I submit to the engineers grind, which I wont do.

I can't blaze my own trail as they say I can, so I won't blaze any trail at all, and will uninstall until odyssey.

 

[Soon(TM)]

Nope, I suspect you are just not very good so they seem super tough from your perspective.

Spec ops ATR and elite pirates have engineering, no other NPC's.

This is just wrong. I spent hours and hours in combat zones in vanilla ED and I can tell you I could handle doing that in a Vulture, and I could get kills.

Now I can't even kill one NPC in the same level combat zone with the same weapons and setup. So either the NPCs have been buffed or standard weapons have been nerfed.

 

[Soon(TM)]

There is. Apparently you chose the wrong place for your playstyle, and rather than learn from that, you've decided to come and tell us all about it. Which is fine, obviously - but it's not the game at fault here (note that that statement is categorically not that the game doesn't have faults, just that I personally don't believe that what you are describing is a problem in the slightest).



Or put another way, it's stupid for you to go into a CZ without engineering. There are many other places to pick a fight if you aren't ready for the CZ. Just because you personally don't like engineering doesn't mean that it shouldn't exist, and certainly doesn't mean that NPCs shouldn't have any.

Again, I go back to a previous comment.

Combat zones have various levels. Low, medium, high and hazardous.

Its not unusual to assume a non engineered ship should be able to survive in a low combat zone, leaving the others for you awesome engineered players to play in.

Fdev have removed combat zones for those of us that don't want to do the engineers grind, to me, that's a poor attempt at herding the player base to engineers.

And it certainly isn't letting us blaze our own trail.

 

[Soon(TM)]

The problem fdev have brought on themselves (and us) is that they (at least apparently) spawn NPCs based only on your cmdr combat rank and not on the number of engineers you have unlocked or the amount of engineering your ship has. So if you want to do combat in a non engineered ship you just have to make sure your combat rank doesn't increase too much and you should also avoid CZs and CNBs, not to mention PP combat. It appears to be a conscious choice by fdev to get players to do the engineering grind.
On the other end of the scale there are complaints that combat is too easy: you can in fact sit in a high CZ in a number of medium/large ships as long as they are G5 engineered and take on all comers, and you can also do the high level wing assassination missions alone.

Balance.... What's that right?

Nice one Fdev.

 

[Soon(TM)]

op, i don't understand. you want all of the game to be tailored to your refusal to participate in engineering? a bit self centered no?

Clearly nyou haven't read my post properly or the rest of the posts in here.

I never asked for a universal nerf, I said it's stupid that NPC's are so buffed now that a non engineered player can't even survive in a LOW intensity combat zone.

Any players that don't want to do engineering are now unable to take missions in any combat zone effectively, pushing them away from that part of the game, it also stops them having an effect on the BG simulation for any factions they want to side with and do combat for.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Again, I go back to a previous comment.

Combat zones have various levels. Low, medium, high and hazardous.

Its not unusual to assume a non engineered ship should be able to survive in a low combat zone, leaving the others for you awesome engineered players to play in.

Fdev have removed combat zones for those of us that don't want to do the engineers grind, to me, that's a poor attempt at herding the player base to engineers.

And it certainly isn't letting us blaze our own trail.

The difference between low medium and high (there is no hazardous when it comes to CZs) isn't supposed to be the difficulty in taking down each ship, it's the length of the battle and what you have to deal with. Low CZs are massively easier than mediums and highs since it's less ships to win the battle, you don't have scenarios and you certainly don't have a spec ops wing dropping in immediately behind you taking lumps off your shield.

Less tactics, less to worry about, but a CZ warship is a CZ warship. It kind of makes less sense that these wouldn't be semi engineered and full of HRPs.

All CZs have to count towards the outcome of the war as well. If you turned the ships that appear in lows into the sort of thing that appears into a Haz RES, the contribution from lows would have to be nerfed so hard there would be no point in doing them. That would annoy a lot of people.

 

[Soon(TM)]

I've spent some time playing a free alt this week and focused mostly on combat. I'd recommend anyone claiming the existing non engineers meta for PvE is fine try it.

When the game launched, the scale of npc difficulty was exceptionally good (albeit the AI needed enhancing but it got that and I'm talking purely about the meta for ship load outs, how much time it took to kill, how intricate combat agility was and how balanced weapons were). I remember trying it a second time just before Horizons landed with my first alt. It was so much fun starting out in a Sidewinder and working your way up to the Vulture. As a harmless pilot, your harmless opponents would lose shields and hull integrity at a decent rate, so fights were relatively short and sweet (both directions, depending on your opponent). But you could take down an Eagle or Viper in relatively short order if you got the hits in.

Now, the harmless Vipers are like tanks. Plus they now use the hit and run strategy (as soon as they lose shields they bolt, impossible to catch in a Sidewinder and tough to keep up with otherwise), which extends the fight time over several minutes. They're harmless, so they pose very little threat, but their hull feels similar to how I recall Anaconda npcs used to be way back at the beginning.

As soon as the rank of the npc goes up, you immediately begin seeing engineering. A competent npc will have strong shields, damage and hull relative to the new commander. Might as well not bother engaging them at all. Competent!

It's tedious. Combat as a new player should be much more fluid and not so bullet spongy. Small, weak ships should behave that way. The game had such fantastic balance with the original rating meta. Engineering has hugely imbalanced it.

Our friend started playing not long ago and joined us bounty hunting. Our targets weren't excessively high rank (it was a low res) but they knew they were doing very little damage. We let them try soloing a low rank npc and the fight went on for a very long time. They flew fine and were keeping the target in sight more than enough and they won the battle of a thousand cuts but the npc just waked out at 40%, with zero chance of stopping it.

That's not how it used to be. They'd have won the fight pre engineers based on what I saw, much faster and with a greater chance of actually getting the kill even if their target fled.

Obviously, our friend saw how fast our engineered ships were, how much damage we did... They're not going to say "ah that's OK I'll just stick with nav beacons" like some suggest here.

They went and did the engineers grind of course. The game is a shadow of itself unless you do. So many claim that it's optional but that's so heavily subjective and laughably inaccurate if you wish to focus on combat at all.

I've almost finished engineering (unlocks and first build) with my alt (not the free alt my first one that I paid for). Even just with partial upgrades on their weapons (no more than g3), the difference in dps is vast.

By the time my free (non engineered) alt had upgraded to an Eagle, the urge to drop everything and just go engineer is irresistible. The long, dull fights against npcs that should be relatively easy kills, I'm talking about harmless targets here, paints an entirely different picture for the new players. It's worlds apart from the new player experience pre engineers.

It's absolutely not better. It's only "better" when you've started engineering. And I'd still argue the excessive power creep, gigantic shield and health pools and ridiculously powerful weapons versus anything not in the former bracket has done nothing to make combat better or more fun than what we had.

In short, from the perspective of a player who has experienced combat as a new player in three different eras...

I agree with the op absolutely.

Thank you!

An very well written post, props to you.

 

[Soon(TM)]

The difference between low medium and high (there is no hazardous when it comes to CZs) isn't supposed to be the difficulty in taking down each ship, it's the length of the battle and what you have to deal with. Low CZs are massively easier than mediums and highs since it's less ships to win the battle, you don't have scenarios and you certainly don't have a spec ops wing dropping in immediately behind you taking lumps off your shield.

Less tactics, less to worry about, but a CZ warship is a CZ warship. It kind of makes less sense that these wouldn't be semi engineered and full of HRPs.

All CZs have to count towards the outcome of the war as well. If you turned the ships that appear in lows into the sort of thing that appears into a Haz RES, the contribution from lows would have to be nerfed so hard there would be no point in doing them. That would annoy a lot of people.

So Fdev should have taken engineers into consideration and not just spawned ships based on your combat rank, they should have another check in place to see if the commander in the CZ also has engineered modules and spawn NPC's accordingly.

Like that will EVER happen.

 

[Ydiss]

Again, I go back to a previous comment.

Combat zones have various levels. Low, medium, high and hazardous.

Its not unusual to assume a non engineered ship should be able to survive in a low combat zone, leaving the others for you awesome engineered players to play in.

Fdev have removed combat zones for those of us that don't want to do the engineers grind, to me, that's a poor attempt at herding the player base to engineers.

And it certainly isn't letting us blaze our own trail.

I think most people are trying to say non engineered ships can survive in low CZ. And they're correct. But there's a vast disparity between just surviving, killing slowly and killing at a decent rate.

Low > medium > high definitely present different challenges (though I tend to see spec ops in medium and capital ships in high; spec ops are probably the hardest opponents before Thargoids and capital ships currently pose less threat than a dangerous Eagle...) but people claiming there is enough content for the very low end of ship builds are really stretching reality to suit the narrative that engineers are fine.

For CZs to cater for non engineered, there'd need to be a seismic shift in how CZs reward players (specifically missions and influence). As it stands, if fdev further lowered the difficulty of low CZs then they'd become the absolute meta for CZs. Obliterate them fast, reset. Ignore medium and high.

As for everything else? Res sites are relatively well balanced but ultimately slow paced. Normal or low intensity work OK for normal ships but the level of pirate activity can sometimes be really pedestrian. But that's the same for hazardous. Sometimes, they kick off. Sometimes you're sat at the centre waiting for 10 minutes (or resetting yay game play).

Installations are buggy and a bit flat. I reckon the pirate targets aren't that tough and you usually have loads of help. I imagine new players could enjoy those but they're so, so rare. And, as I said, buggy. They tend to bug out after one full round and who doesn't enjoy getting shot at by the instalation you're defending because a stray shot scratched their paintwork?

Nav beacons are just the absolute worst. They're so slow it's almost only suitable for new players but my word are they a dull way to introduce combat. Compromised nav beacons are good fun (but definitely much less without engineering).

The list is getting thin now. There's interdiction hunting. I imagine that'll let non engineered players get some action but it's not really rewarding.

I don't know how many times this drum has been beaten but you'd have thought fdev would use the security rating for a system to help players easily locate content intended for them.

I know that it loosely generates content based on this but what I mean is....

High security: everything except CZs is non engineered. Everything. Res sites, beacons, instalations, roaming npcs.

Medium security: g1 to g3 engineered. Mostly g2.

Low security: g3 to G5, mostly g4.

Anarchy: g4 to G5. Mostly g5.

Then, rewrite CZ logic so low intensity is non engineered but add a physical ladder structure to how players interact with CZs. New commanders cannot enter medium or high. They're just not given license by the warring factions (heh, maybe military ranks might actually work based on military service?? Whoah! Mind blown). As you progress, you can apply for license to enter medium (moderately or highly engineered, no spec ops). Then high (as they are now, spec ops and fix capital ships so they're actually scary).

Then fix missions so they're specifically for low, medium or high. Finally, get rid of the nonsense idea that missions require a number of kills. Either set it to "win a high intensity battle" or give specific objectives within the battle. The idea that you need to win about 4 high intensity battles for 40m credits is a laugh. The fact that killing eagles in low intensity rewards you exactly the same is just bad.

 

[galahad2069]

This is just wrong. I spent hours and hours in combat zones in vanilla ED and I can tell you I could handle doing that in a Vulture, and I could get kills.

Now I can't even kill one NPC in the same level combat zone with the same weapons and setup.

That's pretty much the definition of not being very good tbh.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

So Fdev should have taken engineers into consideration and not just spawned ships based on your combat rank, they should have another check in place to see if the commander in the CZ also has engineered modules and spawn NPC's accordingly.

Like that will EVER happen.

Well, no it won't. How would you code that and balance it according to the different levels of engineering players have?

 

[Ydiss]

Well, no it won't. How would you code that and balance it according to the different levels of engineering players have?

There's no need. I really dislike the concept that anything spawns based on combat rank. It's really artificial.

Threat should, in my opinion, should be controlled and understood by location and state of location.

By all means, ai can happily bring in higher threat npcs in reaction to you (bust up pirates long enough and they'll call in higher ranked friends).

 

[Dillon Fallon]

There's no need. I really dislike the concept that anything spawns based on combat rank. It's really artificial.

Threat should, in my opinion, should be controlled and understood by location and state of location.

By all means, ai can happily bring in higher threat npcs in reaction to you (bust up pirates long enough and they'll call in higher ranked friends).

Oh I agree. I was just making the point that such a thing would be nigh on impossible to implement, especially since there's enough for them to do right now.

Checks issue tracker

Yep, lots of things to look at already, including someone inviting the devs to go kill themselves. Imagine having to wade through that lot.

 

[CaptainPugwash]

I think most people are trying to say non engineered ships can survive in low CZ. And they're correct. But there's a vast disparity between just surviving, killing slowly and killing at a decent rate.

Low > medium > high definitely present different challenges (though I tend to see spec ops in medium and capital ships in high; spec ops are probably the hardest opponents before Thargoids and capital ships currently pose less threat than a dangerous Eagle...) but people claiming there is enough content for the very low end of ship builds are really stretching reality to suit the narrative that engineers are fine.

For CZs to cater for non engineered, there'd need to be a seismic shift in how CZs reward players (specifically missions and influence). As it stands, if fdev further lowered the difficulty of low CZs then they'd become the absolute meta for CZs. Obliterate them fast, reset. Ignore medium and high.

As for everything else? Res sites are relatively well balanced but ultimately slow paced. Normal or low intensity work OK for normal ships but the level of pirate activity can sometimes be really pedestrian. But that's the same for hazardous. Sometimes, they kick off. Sometimes you're sat at the centre waiting for 10 minutes (or resetting yay game play).

Installations are buggy and a bit flat. I reckon the pirate targets aren't that tough and you usually have loads of help. I imagine new players could enjoy those but they're so, so rare. And, as I said, buggy. They tend to bug out after one full round and who doesn't enjoy getting shot at by the instalation you're defending because a stray shot scratched their paintwork?

Nav beacons are just the absolute worst. They're so slow it's almost only suitable for new players but my word are they a dull way to introduce combat. Compromised nav beacons are good fun (but definitely much less without engineering).

The list is getting thin now. There's interdiction hunting. I imagine that'll let non engineered players get some action but it's not really rewarding.

I don't know how many times this drum has been beaten but you'd have thought fdev would use the security rating for a system to help players easily locate content intended for them.

I know that it loosely generates content based on this but what I mean is....

High security: everything except CZs is non engineered. Everything. Res sites, beacons, instalations, roaming npcs.

Medium security: g1 to g3 engineered. Mostly g2.

Low security: g3 to G5, mostly g4.

Anarchy: g4 to G5. Mostly g5.

Then, rewrite CZ logic so low intensity is non engineered but add a physical ladder structure to how players interact with CZs. New commanders cannot enter medium or high. They're just not given license by the warring factions (heh, maybe military ranks might actually work based on military service?? Whoah! Mind blown). As you progress, you can apply for license to enter medium (moderately or highly engineered, no spec ops). Then high (as they are now, spec ops and fix capital ships so they're actually scary).

Then fix missions so they're specifically for low, medium or high. Finally, get rid of the nonsense idea that missions require a number of kills. Either set it to "win a high intensity battle" or give specific objectives within the battle. The idea that you need to win about 4 high intensity battles for 40m credits is a laugh. The fact that killing eagles in low intensity rewards you exactly the same is just bad.

Hmmm .. while I totally agree that high sec should mean a lot more I think that these suggestions are confusing the meaning of security rating: when it's high sec we shouldn't really need to worry about security threats, not because our opponents will be low level but because the cops will protect us. So if I do a trade run in a high sec system in my E-rated T6 and I get interdicted, the cops should arrive in time to save me and I would even like to see some kind of invitation from the cops for an escort service when I arrive in system, AS LONG AS I STAY IN THE SHIPPING LANE. If I venture out of the shipping lane (when I should be alerted) then the cops will arrive later.
Regarding conflict scenarios etc the security rating is no longer relevant: we make a choice to participate in a war (CZ) and they are fairly well scaled - a low CZ is eminently possible in a wing of 2 or 3 non engineered medium ships, and certainly feasible alone.

 

[Ydiss]

Hmmm .. while I totally agree that high sec should mean a lot more I think that these suggestions are confusing the meaning of security rating: when it's high sec we shouldn't really need to worry about security threats, not because our opponents will be low level but because the cops will protect us. So if I do a trade run in a high sec system in my E-rated T6 and I get interdicted, the cops should arrive in time to save me and I would even like to see some kind of invitation from the cops for an escort service when I arrive in system, AS LONG AS I STAY IN THE SHIPPING LANE. If I venture out of the shipping lane (when I should be alerted) then the cops will arrive later.
Regarding conflict scenarios etc the security rating is no longer relevant: we make a choice to participate in a war (CZ) and they are fairly well scaled - a low CZ is eminently possible in a wing of 2 or 3 non engineered medium ships, and certainly feasible alone.

I can agree with the sentiment about what security rating should mean, though I did say CZs are not impacted by security in the post.

I don't really care how it's achieved but there's just not enough variation of combat content. This becomes very much more so without engineering.

More variation would be good. By all means you're free to disagree.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

There's no need. I really dislike the concept that anything spawns based on combat rank. It's really artificial.

Threat should, in my opinion, should be controlled and understood by location and state of location.

By all means, ai can happily bring in higher threat npcs in reaction to you (bust up pirates long enough and they'll call in higher ranked friends).

Yeah, players should pick their own poison, depending on easily identifyable parameters. Location, jurisdiction and system state are such. Combat rank spawns me cancer NPC all the time and resetting the rank isn't an option. I played 500 h to get there already.