I enjoy NHSSes for the challenge, I'm currently working on my basilisk solo technique whenever I can get an NHSS near me. I can solo a cyclops easily in pretty much any medium ship. I thought I must be good enough for CZs, right? Apparently not. I went to an AX CZ, I killed all the little ones. Then the big ones spawned and a load more little ones, with some kind of power up variant and some kind of healing or shield variant. OK, so I quickly figured out I needed to kill the shieldy healy ones quick, ok done, now the power up ones, and I was just dispatching the last one of those when the (what I later realised was a Hydra, one of two(!)) killed me so fast I couldn't disengage (pretty tanky krait mk2).
I thought to myself, this must be a bug, I must have joined some instance that a wing of 4 just left or something. I tried again. This time, I thought to myself, I should just ignore the little ones and focus on taking out one of the interceptors and doing some kiting. Eventually, the interceptors turn up. I start leading the whole pack away from what's left of my NPC buddies, since they don't respawn you lose nothing, and taking out the first of two basilisks (knowing I wasn't able to solo a basilisk, let alone two and its escort), I get the first heart down and I'm dead, everything had caught up with me and that was that.
I have a couple of squadron mates who are at the same level as me or better at fighting thargoids, and while we haven't had the opportunity to go as a wing yet, I'm pretty sure the three of us will have a hard time of it unless we take a support anaconda or something and have folks engage and disengage to repair and detox, etc. while keeping the instance open.
I'm all in favour of hard gameplay and a proper challenge, but this is simply too much, it's like a heroic MMO encounter in terms of difficulty and coordination and there's no other difficulty level (actually that's not true, sometimes you get 2 cyclops and other variations, is it random? And even then, to solo you need some synthesis and premium ammo). Considering the game only allows wings of 4 in the first place, I'm going to go ahead and say with certainty that 4
pug players cannot complete a CZ composed of two or three tier 3 or 4 interceptors, only 4 expert Thargoid hunters could do it with proper planning and support.
Things that need to happen in my view...
1) Reduce the numbers and number of waves of scouts (for ammo preservation reasons, primarily).
2) Introduce a threat system or at least, a lo-med-hi-haz nomenclature to identify what to expect.
3) Two hydras is ALWAYS going to be unreasonable until the AX/Guardian weapon limit is increased.
4) Give the NPC AX Support more teeth and LET THEM RESPAWN SOMETIMES!
5) Generally consider the overall difficulty level if you expect large scale participation.
