There follows a description of my gameplay experience with a Massacre Mission this weekend, which I found to be unsatisfactory on a number of levels [down]; read on if you want more details.
I was working out of Diaguandri and My Wing Mate wanted some 'Modular Terminals' to unlock Marco Qwent, and it just so happened there was a 'Wing mission' to Masacre 'Balante Jet Posse Pirates' offering over the full requirement of 25, 35 of them IIRC and alternatively about 3.5 M Cr for taking down 36 targets. On the face of it this looked to be ideal. So in my fully engineered Vette and my wingman taking an inaugural flight in his new Clipper we set off for Balante.
Balante does not have ringed planets so no RES sites
In the first hour we managed about 13 targets with me pulling targets from SC with an FSDI, mostly Novice Mark IV Cobra's with a few Viper's thrown in to season the mix.
My wingman had a couple of trips to the local station to refine and improve his load out, as he was finding the small agile ships difficult to tag with fixed weapons with poor convergence.
We also visited the local NAV beacon and picked up a few 'Mission Targets' along with a few other 'Wanted' targets of opportunity.
In Supercruise we visitied various - USS
Weapons Fire Detected threat level(varied).....most with nothing happening in them ALL ships being clean and no mission targets.
Distress Call threat level (varied) .....again a dearth of mission targets.
Next session I did on my own spent about 2 Hours and managed another 12 targets
And in the final session of about 2 hours (with my wingman joining for the last hour) we finaly had some results with finding multiple 'Winged' mission targets
When SC scanning for targets or NAV Beacon hunting we would come across 'Wanted' - 'Balante Jet Posse' aligned targets but most (approx 75%) were not 'Mission Targets' and so did not count towards the mission - ( I tried a few just to make sure).
Of the 'Wings' we came across of 2/3 ships, they would usually contain only One mission target.
When we did manage to find a target they were of comparatively very low combat rank and not challenging, in fact most of my targets were one shoted or close thereto and dead before the FSD cool down had finished.
So all in all 5 Hours hunting for 36 low grade target ships, with no risk to my ship whatosver and to top it all wingman did a delivery mission of his own during my down time and got the required modular terminals for a straight delivery run. So we didn't even need to finish the mission.
I was working out of Diaguandri and My Wing Mate wanted some 'Modular Terminals' to unlock Marco Qwent, and it just so happened there was a 'Wing mission' to Masacre 'Balante Jet Posse Pirates' offering over the full requirement of 25, 35 of them IIRC and alternatively about 3.5 M Cr for taking down 36 targets. On the face of it this looked to be ideal. So in my fully engineered Vette and my wingman taking an inaugural flight in his new Clipper we set off for Balante.
Balante does not have ringed planets so no RES sites
In the first hour we managed about 13 targets with me pulling targets from SC with an FSDI, mostly Novice Mark IV Cobra's with a few Viper's thrown in to season the mix.
My wingman had a couple of trips to the local station to refine and improve his load out, as he was finding the small agile ships difficult to tag with fixed weapons with poor convergence.
We also visited the local NAV beacon and picked up a few 'Mission Targets' along with a few other 'Wanted' targets of opportunity.
In Supercruise we visitied various - USS
Weapons Fire Detected threat level(varied).....most with nothing happening in them ALL ships being clean and no mission targets.
Distress Call threat level (varied) .....again a dearth of mission targets.
Next session I did on my own spent about 2 Hours and managed another 12 targets
And in the final session of about 2 hours (with my wingman joining for the last hour) we finaly had some results with finding multiple 'Winged' mission targets
When SC scanning for targets or NAV Beacon hunting we would come across 'Wanted' - 'Balante Jet Posse' aligned targets but most (approx 75%) were not 'Mission Targets' and so did not count towards the mission - ( I tried a few just to make sure).
Of the 'Wings' we came across of 2/3 ships, they would usually contain only One mission target.
When we did manage to find a target they were of comparatively very low combat rank and not challenging, in fact most of my targets were one shoted or close thereto and dead before the FSD cool down had finished.
So all in all 5 Hours hunting for 36 low grade target ships, with no risk to my ship whatosver and to top it all wingman did a delivery mission of his own during my down time and got the required modular terminals for a straight delivery run. So we didn't even need to finish the mission.
