There's a few CMDRs in the instance, but the bulk of the alpha damage comes from three "PlasmaCondas" in the instance (Anacondas equipped with 6 Modified Guardian Plasma Chargers.)
Spire Farming is indeed 2bil/hour ;)
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There's a few CMDRs in the instance, but the bulk of the alpha damage comes from three "PlasmaCondas" in the instance (Anacondas equipped with 6 Modified Guardian Plasma Chargers.)
It should also be noted that many cmdrs are reporting being able to kill just one or two orthrus’s before having to go and repair, if playing alone. Plus not everyone has min maxed condas: so a less expert solo cmdr y(ours truly for example) will probably make 100 million or so an hour, if factoring in rearm and travel time, with a few interdictions along the way.
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Now you just need something to spend the credits on
Any spire site that´s NOT in the dark 24/7?
Any spire site that´s NOT in the dark 24/7?
If spire site is important for thargoid really, spire site should have big-guns like titan dual-fire turret or hunter class. I think spire site is quite vulnerable despite having many gimmicks. I don't know future story for spire site, but I feel spire site is just one of new cash cow at now... useless cash.
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True, though you could say the same about almost any activity - someone with a T-6 is going to make less/hr trading than someone with a T-9, a high ground CZ will be done more efficiently and profitably in a fully-upgraded Dominator than it will be by sneaking around in your flight suit trying to get the occasional assist, etc.
(This has always been the problem with balancing: do you balance activities around what a fully-optimised player [wing] could achieve, or around what a more typical - but still, say, top 5% - player could. Both answers will give bad feelings from some vocal subset of players in any situation where different activities have substantially different optimisation curves.)
The big difference here is how much more viable it is with a group of players, compared to the ship/loadout. The 2 billion an hour headline gives an inaccurate impression of the whole picture, and also gives the impression that it should be nerfed asap, which isn’t necessarily the case.
Spire farming has the advantage that it's self-balancing - if too many players do it, then eventually they'll end up wiping the spires out. Not for a few months, of course.
It's pretty accurate though. So long as you have a couple of CMDRs with big guns, even folks in a sidewinder with a pulse laser can make the same money.
At the current rate it's more "weeks" than months - and just a couple weeks for the Maelstroms with the fewest controlled systems (e.g., Taranis)
I should have said that it’s great gameplay, possibly the best that frontier has produced so far in elite, and that’s from someone who has never really been interested in thargoid combat. I found the combination of the vast scale of the spires with the sound effects and mix of above ground and on ground gameplay to be very impressive: as far as ‘theatre of combat’ goes, it has hit the mark. Well worth it in VR for those that can.
Sure, I’m just reporting comments I have seen on other threads about how much credits they make if they don’t find other cmdrs. The difference is very marked, and frontier has a history of nerfing things too heavily.
Sure, if you're alone getting repeatedly shutdown by banshees, it's gonna be a rough ride.
But the point is - you don't need to be alone, and you don't need any kind of high level gear (except maybe a store-bought shutdown field neutralizer) to join in.
Prior to the Spires, my personal best was about 1bil/hr in a decent pilots wing at station-based AX combat zones (adding up bonds, CZ rewards, and stacked AX mission rewards.)
Yesterday night I think we cleared about 60 Orthruses in an hour ... that's what ... 60*40 = 2.4 billion.
Granted, it takes a degree of coordination (especially if you're going after the "quad spawns" which are very hard to go after, but also what enables those kind of numbers) ... but, still, its over 2x the money I've ever made in this game (and tons of fun to boot.)
For Maelstroms with weak layouts - Taranis and Leigong, sure. They are likely to be out of action very soon unless there's some trick or caveat that hasn't come up yet.
Hadad is probably do-able with the right approach using the existing tools, though a much harder fight and it needs careful planning.
Thor ... maybe? With the pressure reduction from cleaning up the first three and an extremely well-planned and well-resourced attack, I think it's doable in theory, though I'm less sure if it's possible in practice.
The other four, though, have extremely well-protected spires and densely inter-connected inner cores. Even if the spires are taken off them, they can just take them right back. Maybe Palin will come up with some additional force multipliers, but it's not attacking the spires themselves that's exactly the problem there.
I never doubted your clear evidence of the possible credits per hour (and thanks by the way for your other content and guides). I had a spare 45 mins the other night and went to the nearest spire site , and didn’t find anyone there: I was a bit unlucky with constant resets and got just the one orthrus plus quite a few scouts before having to go and repair, total time about 35 minutes including travel with a few interdictions, so no time for another run, so a ‘paltry’ 40 million payout. I would normally get two or three kills before jumping out to be fair, and I’m not expert.
I just hope it doesn’t get nerfed to the same level as the titan rescue gameplay for example.
Join the Anti-Xeno Initiative private group (it's auto-accept from an account of the same name in-game "CMDR Anti-Xeno Initiative"; It has now over 6,000 people)
most spire hunters will be in that PG.
You can then try to "dirty drop" at the current spire target (it's hit or miss) or, if you are so inclined, join one of the discord voice channels and "ask for an anchor" (someone teaming up with you to allow you to instance with the group upon drop. All "large scale" instances require anchors to build, else the game has a habit of splitting instances up unpredictably and randomly. But with anchors you can get dozens of people into an instance (though with >40 lag at spire sites becomes unmanageable and we would split the instances ourselves.)
And thank you for the kind words!
As much as I like an opportunity for silly heaps of money, I've been focusing on collecting the spire site's "commodities" for Palin. I'd like to suggest a few things for anyone playing in Open not minding to bother having a bit of considerations to bear with for anyone who's on the ground.
When the instance is clear and I'm alone, I've been learning (and still am) more and more spots to gradually advance into the site with the ship nearby so that the harvesting of the megabarnacles takes a lot less time. The original wing of scouts that regularly pop in seem to be pretty lacking in vigilance and doesn't go ham on your ship so often. It seems their angle of awareness is pretty limited when they are in a no alert state unless the revs/banshees on the ground has managed to scream long enough to make this state go RED. This RED changes quickly and more often when people barge in to happily shoot fish in a b - I mean, Orthruses.
If anyone can clarify on the scout reinforcements mechanics (I think is an equivalent of at least 2 full wings of scouts?) but this is as what I believe what happens.
When an Orthrus manages to get away, 2 wings of scouts come in and are on an immediate seek and destroy pattern, compared to that periodic 1 wing scout. This is applied to any human ship that is detected, including the landed ones - the on foot guy harvesting and deleting banshees steadily. Quite becomes the inconvenience as people seem to ignore the scouts a whole lot and move immediately onto the next Orthrus and when they need to repair and rearm they just leave the instance while the seek and destroy scouts are still present.
I did notice that wiping those 2 wings will help anyone remaining in the area should they be on foot for harvesting&banshee clearing as the place resumes back to the periodic wing of scout popping in passively checking the surroundings just to wake a little later.
I humbly request a little consideration towards the people going on the ground as we aren't making that massive money and hoarding those materials and clearing the banshees take time; if you see after an Orthrus kill that took too long or that retreated, to clear the aggressive scouts out or at least clear the ones wailing on a landed ship. A lot of times when people just leave you just never see them again and for a while you are alone in the instance again and everytime you call the ship to empty your srv, or forced to call your ship because you are out of srv's (them sneaky goid sentries y'know) you have to make due with a "hull tax", only making your run cancelled sooner than you'd want, ultimately resetting an instance as well that started having less and less banshees to the benefit of any credit amassing lover.
My last request for ppl you know are on foot... If you see that landed ship or know someone is down there: please hold fire from the orthrus when it is doing it's scanning/whatever it's doing to the mega barnacle. Leave it barely alive, wait for it to go higher up. The caustic explosion is huge and often times will leave the ship nearby melting away. Since the caustic cloud is not considered an attack, the game does not prompt the person on foot that his ship is taking damage... It will do that only if it is actually damaged from what is tagged as an attack. Be it he's busy juggling 3 banshees and scrambling 5 revenants (tends to happen when you're getting close to the crown spire) or doing things at another adjacent megabarnacle, it may very well happen that he will know too late that his ship has reached low hp.
That situation has happened to me already 4 times out of 6 instances when ppl would pop in. Now, remember about the aggressive scouts that come to help mr. Orthrus? You combine the two of those situations and you end up leaving with barely above 8tons of grabs and next time you're back guess what, it's start at the edge of the mega barnacles again because you're in a new instance.
I hope to see more people do this stuff on foot but alas, the almighty credits god is not favoring this task right now. Or try to do it for a bit and notice how things go when others drop in for Orthruses. If you're an angry piggy like me, you might just feel a bit of unjust treatment creeping up
When the instance is clear and I'm alone, I've been learning (and still am) more and more spots to gradually advance into the site with the ship nearby so that the harvesting of the megabarnacles takes a lot less time. The original wing of scouts that regularly pop in seem to be pretty lacking in vigilance and doesn't go ham on your ship so often. It seems their angle of awareness is pretty limited when they are in a no alert state unless the revs/banshees on the ground has managed to scream long enough to make this state go RED. This RED changes quickly and more often when people barge in to happily shoot fish in a b - I mean, Orthruses.
If anyone can clarify on the scout reinforcements mechanics (I think is an equivalent of at least 2 full wings of scouts?) but this is as what I believe what happens.
When an Orthrus manages to get away, 2 wings of scouts come in and are on an immediate seek and destroy pattern, compared to that periodic 1 wing scout. This is applied to any human ship that is detected, including the landed ones - the on foot guy harvesting and deleting banshees steadily. Quite becomes the inconvenience as people seem to ignore the scouts a whole lot and move immediately onto the next Orthrus and when they need to repair and rearm they just leave the instance while the seek and destroy scouts are still present.
I did notice that wiping those 2 wings will help anyone remaining in the area should they be on foot for harvesting&banshee clearing as the place resumes back to the periodic wing of scout popping in passively checking the surroundings just to wake a little later.
I humbly request a little consideration towards the people going on the ground as we aren't making that massive money and hoarding those materials and clearing the banshees take time; if you see after an Orthrus kill that took too long or that retreated, to clear the aggressive scouts out or at least clear the ones wailing on a landed ship. A lot of times when people just leave you just never see them again and for a while you are alone in the instance again and everytime you call the ship to empty your srv, or forced to call your ship because you are out of srv's (them sneaky goid sentries y'know) you have to make due with a "hull tax", only making your run cancelled sooner than you'd want, ultimately resetting an instance as well that started having less and less banshees to the benefit of any credit amassing lover.
My last request for ppl you know are on foot... If you see that landed ship or know someone is down there: please hold fire from the orthrus when it is doing it's scanning/whatever it's doing to the mega barnacle. Leave it barely alive, wait for it to go higher up. The caustic explosion is huge and often times will leave the ship nearby melting away. Since the caustic cloud is not considered an attack, the game does not prompt the person on foot that his ship is taking damage... It will do that only if it is actually damaged from what is tagged as an attack. Be it he's busy juggling 3 banshees and scrambling 5 revenants (tends to happen when you're getting close to the crown spire) or doing things at another adjacent megabarnacle, it may very well happen that he will know too late that his ship has reached low hp.
That situation has happened to me already 4 times out of 6 instances when ppl would pop in. Now, remember about the aggressive scouts that come to help mr. Orthrus? You combine the two of those situations and you end up leaving with barely above 8tons of grabs and next time you're back guess what, it's start at the edge of the mega barnacles again because you're in a new instance.
I hope to see more people do this stuff on foot but alas, the almighty credits god is not favoring this task right now. Or try to do it for a bit and notice how things go when others drop in for Orthruses. If you're an angry piggy like me, you might just feel a bit of unjust treatment creeping up
Oh, it's good to know Guardian guns do work for Spire sites. I could use smth better than standard AX missiles. While I can kill two Orthruses in one run, they manage to escape from me much too often than I'd like.
I do use salvation modded plasma right now, works fine at the spires if you avoid the field. Also FWIW, they seem to work great on normal NPCs too..
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I have to ask - if you're farming the spire-specific items (not the drops from Orthrus), why are you even in an instance with other players when it's going to make your life harder?
Instead of expecting other people to change their playstyles to suit you just switch to solo.
Hopefully. Then we can move on to content.