The general opinion appears to be that PvE in EVE is somewhere between not very good and bad. After my six weeks of playing I can see there are definitely issues, both in PvE combat itself and mission structure and rewards. I don't think they are particularly terrible, though. Of course any change would have consequences which might make things worse. Also I have only done L3 missions and below and some exploration, so I have no experience with more advanced forms of PvE.
One issue that is somewhat subjective, but become apparent to me early, is that individual enemies are typically much weaker than a player ship of an equivalent class. This means that typically in a mission the player would be significantly outnumbered. Rather than give an impression of being powerful this mostly knocks me out of any immersion because I have to wonder, why are even the NPC navy ships so bad? More practically this gives combat somewhat 'whack-a-mole' feel. And makes looting tedious, especially since the wrecks tend to be spread out in an area dozens of kilometres wide. Salvage drones really help with salvaging, but even with a tractor beam looting stuff takes a relatively long time.
Of course, looting is optional. The irritating thing about loot is that it is very random, and as far as I can tell there is no way to know what the value of the wreck is without opening it. Or I suppose filling a mid slot with a cargo scanner, assuming that it can look into wrecks and/or containers. I really wish there was some indication of high value loot, or at least a stronger correlation between a type of enemy and possible loot, other that faction commanders.
Which wouldn't help with navy tags. I stopped doing missions against major faction navies partially due to wanting to avoid standing drop, but the other reason was that every single enemy ship wreck was marked as not empty. And almost always it was just a tag. And they gave no bounty, so to get anything for destroying them you had to loot every single wreck. Which is annoying and I suppose a reason why tags are relatively scarce on the market.
Another issue is that most NPC enemies are tank heavy and low on DPS. Especially effective DPS, because they seem to have no concept of group cohesion and are easily kited into separate, easy to destroy groups. This also makes missile based NPC groups disproportionately powerful. Of course, they have to be if they are to seriously outnumber the player.
Unfortunately, the effect is that once your tank gets good enough there is essentially no risk when running missions. I read that before NPC started to sometimes target drones, it was possible to just leave a good enough ship inside a mission and leave, and drone would eventually kill everything without the risk of your tank getting breached. Once you have sufficient tank the only factor that remains is how fast can you destroy enemies. Or at all. I remember I got a single battleship in one L3 mission, which couldn't even hit my battlecruiser reliably, but I couldn't get through its shields (Myrmidon without Drones V being perhaps a sub-optimal idea). Eventually I just left, refitted with five blasters and finished it, but it was still tedious.
I think missions would be better if they were more of a DPS race. Which would be more similar to how I understand, from what I have read, PVP usually goes. It would certainly be more exciting and require closer attention. On the other hand, the problem with low, but significant risk, is that the expected payout value necessary for profit varies wildly with small changes to risk, which makes it very difficult to balance without getting serious advantage to people who overpower the difficulty rating.
The lack of granularity in mission difficulty is a bit strange, too. There are five levels of missions, and the missions themselves appear to mostly scripted, as far as enemy strength goes. They seem to vaguely correspond to ship classes. But the power level of players is much more granular. Especially if you are not focusing on getting to next class of spaceships, there can be long period where the missions become trivial, and the only progress is that they get completed slightly faster, while next tier missions are still impossible or glacially slow.
I have seen an opinion that mission do not encourage playing them with multiple people, but that seems false. Due to the healing based tanks in EVE double DPS means being able to finish them more than twice as fast. Even with split rewards, this should be worth it, at least for groups of two-three people. Unless I am missing something, I have yet to try running a mission cooperatively.
Most LP store rewards appear to be wildly imbalanced. Especially modules. Even apart from the tag issue exacerbated by the tediousness of looting them one by one, the static base prices seem to be very high when compared to modules T2 counterparts. Especially considering that most of the faction modules are only marginally better. Or, in the case of Federation EANM and suchlike, no at all, attribute-wise. The only way it is better is a slight fitting advantage and lower skill level required. The former is situational at best, and the latter is useless to anyone except characters that can't really afford faction modules. It is just easier to train a bunch of levels required for a T2 module, which is around five to ten times cheaper.
I am not sure what the balance is with guns… they are weaker than T2 variants since they cannot fire T2 ammo, but requirement for T2 weapons seem to be much higher than other T2 modules, so maybe they have a niche.
Generally the situation with missions in EVE is not that terrible. I can see how they can become boring after being ground excessively, but then they were somewhat clearly, if I may try to divine the design intent here, designed to be an introduction to EVE, rather than main gameplay. Although if they do require a fit that different from effective PVP one as the internet seems to imply, then perhaps something should be fixed.
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