Super powerful NPCs?
- Thread starter Kenan Uchimata
- Start date
to echo other people's posts, usually in certain situations, ships are more powerful. i.e. wing pirate lord missions, those ships are engineered. Rez sites, not engineered... I feel like ships can be engineered in some czs but not positive. Maybe they started engineering ships that interdict with the latest patch?
edit: also could just be possible that you got hit with a full salvo of a hard hitting loadout. I honestly don't know how hard anacondas hit because I'm in smaller ships that stay behind them.
edit: also could just be possible that you got hit with a full salvo of a hard hitting loadout. I honestly don't know how hard anacondas hit because I'm in smaller ships that stay behind them.
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You shouldn't have to use engineers to play ED but hey ho, FD forced thought this dlc was a great idea make ED more 'meaningful'.
You don't have to use them. Point in case: whenever the game gets a new ship, i first take it to a two hour tour or so to a RES. Non-engineered. Only when the ship performs well and i like the profile, it is kept and engineered. Despite intentionally taking on the hardest enemies in HazRES to really see what the ship can do, i have not yet lost any of the non-engineered new ships there. So if a mediocre pilot like me can take on elite Anacondas in non-engineered ships, it's not like engineering is absolutely required.
That being said, i also think that engineers did more bad than good for the game. Their mere presence is fine. The process of engineering is much better than it was when it was introduced. Of course people had some awesome ideas on how engineering could be even greater, but it is what it is: most of those ideas would require huge additional effort to implement. FD is better off creating new content, than reworking engineers once again there, i guess.
What i really dislike about engineer is the insane power scaling. I mean, if they'd provide like 10% or 15% more of offense and defense, they would already be awesome. A fully engineered ship would already be a real advantage in a fight. (In other games, people go for great lengths to get a 1% advantage. ) But we can have like +700% on defense. That's way out of scale.
So yes, reworking and nerfing blueprints would be perfectly fine for me. But unfortunately there's a vocal part of the community, who successfully cried away even small nerfs. An actually full scaled nerf would result in a riot. I doubt we'll ever see that happen.
That should still be true. But there's one exception to the rule: pick up a high ranked mission, and you also get hunted by NPCs of appropriate rank. You pick your pay, you pick your risk.
He's not alone. I have Admiral rank and I'm still a novice in combat. Obviously, Fed Rank is not based only on combat. I'm elite in trade and one step from elite in exploration.
ED is not a combat focused game imho. Why give us a wonderful model of the Milky Way galaxy just so pilots can fight in it.
I'm thinking this is the case as well. Plus what was the rank of the mission you took, OP? I ask because the other day I took an Elite ranked trade mission to transport gold and had four Anacondas come after me one at a time. First three were ranked Dangerous and the final one Deadly. They were no joke (though I had a real good time taking them down).
This is exactly what most CMDRs should be doing when it comes to the more potent hostile or potentially hostile NPCs.
The idea that everyone, even the most inept combat pilots in the shoddiest of vessels, should be able to face down anything, is pure insanity and Frontier catering to it really holds back the game.
There's a very easy answer to this; Follow them and shoot them in the bottom. None have escaped me yet
And it's easy credits. And doing it to an Elite FDL feels so much better. The AI is so bad it has to run away.
I would even argue that npc encounters like those described by the OP don't happen enough. Any viable engineered combat build only gets destroyed due to pilot error. I look at an npc Anaconda after being interdicted on a cargo mission and my only thought is the size of their bounty.
Engineered npcs when my ship was 'only' a-rated did make early stages of the game harder since I was regularly melted by engineered Pythons, but it gave a sense of achievement when I got a better ship and learned some basic combat tactics.
Your posts are extremely reasonable, with a very wide view of the game, lately. Have some rep once more!
What people need to understand is, if a game only had optional content, it wouldn't be a game. Also, looking at the history of video games, a player in general had to get better skills and/ or gear in order to progress. It is a normal thing.
So, OP, learn to run and do a bit of engineering. Some G1 and G2 mats are really easy to come by. The days were the AI was so not dangerous you could fly shieldless in an Asp are, fortunately, long over.
On another note, game balance seems to be still out of whack. I was fighting a Corvette as main target of an assassination mission. It could only take out maybe half of the 500mj shield of my Clipper.