You can't stack wartime massacre missions though, since they'll only be offered by the factions participating in the war.
Stacking only works for cross-faction pirate massacres.
How to do massacre missions with 80+ targets
- Thread starter grantcurell
- Start date
Stacking only works for cross-faction pirate massacres.
Right, but the OP is doing wartime massacres... so a guide to stacking porate isn't really going to help, especially not with that fitting. Would only really work for seal- clubbing pirate massacres which offer up non- engineered novices
Never even been into one. No idea what they're like.
My entire focus has been around getting ships ready for PVP. Have never seen a Thargoid, have done mining and trading only in service of the main goal. There's a ton of the game I know nothing about, but I do know that massacre missions, when stacked properly, give you a decent amount of cash plus influence/rep (if you need that for unlocking a faction), and materials for engineers. With a properly built ship, they're pretty easy too.
But again, just in service of the main goal. Another immersion timer, essentially.
If you read the OP again you can see there's definitely some confusion about the differing types of massacre missions. He even mentions pirates.
I think a good answer to his question (is there a better way of doing this?) is "don't do CZ/war missions, do piracy missions".
Those 81 kills are, as you say (seal clubbing easier targets), much faster to achieve and have the massive added benefit of stacking up about 5 times (even just stacking 3 is better).
I guess the other reason that answer works is because there are limited answers to "how can I do 80 kills in a CZ faster" besides "get better" or "get a better ship" or "do it with a wing".
They're all valid answers though. The answer given saying use all overcharged frags is a valid answer (even though Danquememe suggested it isn't, it definitely is... The fastest high intensity CZ clearance record is held by a ship that uses frags and synthesis counteracts the problem of limited ammo, albeit at a maintenance cost - but one that's quite quick to meet if you do crystal shards).
I suppose it all depends on what the OP actually wishes to achieve. If they only want to do CZs then our advice is a bit pointless but I have a strong suspicion that the OP would just like to be able to complete combat missions efficiently and make good credits now they've got a good ship.
If that's their aim, CZs are not the fastest way.
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This one makes it pretty clear the op has issues with cz massacres.
I'm also relatively confident nonwing massacres don't come in 80-ship kill varieties; 54 kills is the most.
Edit: either way, all more compelling evidence to nerf stacking, and fix the payout bug, if your advice is going to be "don't do cz massacres"
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Another good trick if hunting pirates is to do a black box mission first.
Then when you drop into a USS/haz rez they'll come to you.
Incoming hatchbreaker message gets a little annoying but in a decent ship it saves looking for them.
I prefer my bi-weave Vette with 10 SCB's as that buys me enough shielding to take out 80+ targets.
Added bonus is it'll improve your target cycling and kill times as taking too long to get a kill gives them a chance to overwhelm you.
Makes combat much more intense as well as allowing the missions to be completed faster as you don't need to scan or chase targets.
Then when you drop into a USS/haz rez they'll come to you.
Incoming hatchbreaker message gets a little annoying but in a decent ship it saves looking for them.
I prefer my bi-weave Vette with 10 SCB's as that buys me enough shielding to take out 80+ targets.
Added bonus is it'll improve your target cycling and kill times as taking too long to get a kill gives them a chance to overwhelm you.
Makes combat much more intense as well as allowing the missions to be completed faster as you don't need to scan or chase targets.
Yes, but are you certain the op only wants to do CZs? You can see the op replies to my first post and definitely seemed open to discussion about pirates.
Stacking missions was already nerfed. There's enough evidence that what we have now is 100% legitimate.
I'd say enough evidence to suggest mercenary pay needs to be significantly increased. But you say potato...
Also, that's all off topic. The op isn't asking for opinions about what should be nerfed. Any ambiguity aside, that's something I'm sure of.
Edit: even though it's off topic, I'd like to highlight that I've long campaigned for much, much better rewards for CZ missions... They deserve the highest combat rewards of all. If the credits per kill was tripled and killing spec ops and high intensity targets counted for more than 1 kill, it'd be closer to ideal.
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I tried a corvette ages ago, possibly pre engineers, and just didn't feel it was a big enough upgrade.
I may try one again at some point but I have always preferred nimble ships and for me that means I don't want all the pirates having a go at me but your suggestion is definitely a good one for rapid pirate killing
As many have already said, these are usually not worth it...
If I am invested in the conflict, and I intend to several runs into the conflict zone, I might pick one of these up, as I would most likely kill enough ships for such a mission anyway. But just to grab such a mission for the reward is not worth it.
When it comes to similar mission to hunt down pirates huge numbers, these are most of the time equally bad, as even with the special signal sources in the target system with 7 pirates, unless you have a real killing machine, you will not kill all the 7 targets before they start to leave. So if you manage 5 kills on average, that means visiting 16 such signal sources if you are to kill 80 ships.
The one kind of targets, that I usually look for is to kill pirate lord, these comes in two variants.
Solo and Wing.
Depending on how thrill seeking you are, and good at fighting you are, you can stack several of the solo ones, and venture to the target system and enjoy how you interdict the first target and notice how a few of the other targets tend to jump in to crash the party... Your Corvette should have no problem in dealing with these, but start with 1-2 solo mission to begin with, and then add more as you get more comfortably.
And when you are finding the solo versions "easy", go for the wing version, this is an Elite Pirate Lord in a FDL, and he has 2-3 Vultures as friends. So these can be quite the challenge, you can decide in what order to do the fight, kill the Vultures, saving the Pirate Lord for last, or go for the Pirate Lord and then when he is dead watch the Vultures flee....
And of course, combining these two can be quite fun, and if you have friends, you can end up with a wing mission pirate lord with 3 vultures, and then 2-3 smaller pirate lords that crash the party per player in your wing... so one time, we got lucky with having having 6 extra pirate lords crashing our party, when we where a wing of 3 players. Great fun! Sadly it is not often most of our "solo" targets decides to crash the party at the same time... I have never encountered wing mission targets to crash the party... that could have be interresting if facing multiple of these at once...
Sadly, the mission USS aren't nearly as efficient as cnbs. I appreciate the effort to make this more fun with these USS types but ultimately they're just not fun enough to do instead of cnbs, which can escalate into really fun battles with loads of ships frequently. The added benefit being you can do 50-80 mission target kills in a couple hours where 5x stacked = ~2.5m per kill not including the system bounty reward. This is better than most other activities.
The USS are fun enough to try but after a while the travel time is too much; as you said, you often only get 5 kills or so which isn't worth the extended downtime between USS. I'd love it if these mission USS were more dynamic so that after the initial engagement and security response, more pirates keep dropping in to keep it alive for as long as you like. It'd be like a pirate CZ. Maybe wing variants could continue to escalate into harder and harder fights the longer you stay. That would be perfect.
I did a few assassinations once whilst doing pirate massacres at a cnb and the pirate Lords kept dropping in even after I killed them. That was fun.
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Not worth it - you either try in CZ vs bulletsponges and take forever or you try elsewhere and take forever to find the right enemies.