Co-Op Missions dead?

Battleborn Battleborn General Discussion
#7

I can understand why the devs removed Heliophage from the normal queue because they probably expect players to not want to run it until they’ve seen the rest of the story (in my experience, new players tend to do all missions on normal, at least once, before jumping into advanced).

Of course, it made a lot more sense at release when a lot more people were doing normal modes. Now, separating out Heliophage is just making it nearly impossible for normal mode players to find people to do it with.

Now, for Heliophage Advanced, I definitely think that should be removed from the Advanced queue, if only because it takes twice as long as any other mission. Normally, you can expect a 25-30 minute game but, if you get people scrambling for Helio advanced (and I’ve seen a number because they have yet to complete it for the character unlock), you can get lasso’d and locked into a 50-60 minute mission.

I truly do not want to see this happen. When I queue up for a public run, I want to get into it fast. It’s not like PvP where you need to have equal sides and the layout is designed for 5 players. PvE works just as well for smaller groups as it does for full ones.

This would get even crappier if you try to find a game during off hours because there are fewer people doing public story. Requiring a public story to start with 5 players is a bad idea.

[quote]edit - BONUS CHANGE! Remove one of the boss rounds from Rendain in Advanced Heliophage. Currently you fight 3 rounds of 2x bosses. Make it 2 rounds, and random which of the three sets you get. (Mission time is stupid long, you could remove the Gunhulk fight entirely and make things so much better).
[/quote]

This I can agree with. Helio Adv is way too long and only has a single lootsplosion, which is dumb. It takes an inordinate time to complete and has an absolutely horrible rate of return, without even factoring in the obscene difficulty (woo, massive Brute horde spawns…).

In addition to removing one of the boss rounds, I would also like to see those bosses actually have their lootsplosions, with chances to drop their legendaries, so that the reward is commensurate with the risk and investment.

2 Likes
#8

I like 5-man runs because the enemy difficulty is scaled to its highest. That’s my favorite way to play.
As of now, I have to keep quitting out of the queue every 10-15 seconds to achieve these results.

#9

I thought of this too but anyone can just join and get xp and good gear immediately while the rest of the team worked for it.

#10

…Absolute truth! All the groups I play with are ticked at Gbox for only listening to the PvP players.

  1. Ronin are everyone’s list.
  2. MX Elite does way too much damage.
  3. Helio on Advanced can be really whack, beyond what your team can possibly do.
  4. The turrets on several maps in Advanced mode get destroyed instantly too easily.
  5. We can’t play Helio on Advanced by choice unless it is a private match or just by luck it shows on the menu.
  6. The first part of the Sentinel on Advanced.
    …I could go on but why just me, I’ll get called a hater by someone. :wink:
3 Likes
#11

I can’t imagine that a lot of the fixes for Story/PvE are as easy as the fixes for Versus/PvP. On some of the maps the spawns are all going to need to be reworked and that’s not going to be a simple fix. Some of the AI may need to be adjusted as well. There is a lot more geometry in the story maps compared to versus. I don’t think that the story is being ignored but at the same time I think it’s going to take a little more effort to fix so we’re not going to see all of the desired fixes as soon as we’d like.

#12

Disappointing, as I just got the game last week, and I’m wanting to start dipping toes into the shallow end with some coop story mode…

Have I missed that bus entirely?

#13

[quote=“wisecarver, post:10, topic:1540059, full:true”]…Absolute truth! All the groups I play with are ticked at Gbox for only listening to the PvP players.
[/quote]

I shall preface this by saying that I am extremely PvE focused. The only PvP games I’ve done have been half-hearted attempts at the lore challenges or collusion with friends to get those lore challenges. I play for the PvE and social element, not for PvP in the slightest.

Having said that, most of the problems you have listed are that a given piece of content is insanely hard. It’s not impossible, but it is damned difficult. This is, honestly, find and quite possibly the goal of the devs. They want the more difficult elements of PvE to remain difficult elements.

Some of what you’re talking about is due to Advanced groups not following a decent strategy. Ronin swarms are much easier when you know they’re about to occur and have the party coordinate to take them out. Personally, I haven’t found that MX Elites do too much damage; if anything, they take too long to kill while they’re damage is alright (they hit crazy hard, but they telegraph so you can avoid it pretty easily). Also personally, I haven’t noticed that they are particularly fragile in any way; even on Renegade and Saboteur (which they’re basically required for), I see them last the entire way through most of the time, unless you simply assume they’ll always take care of everything and never watch over them a bit (also, repair drones make them last so much longer). The first part of Advanced is all about the group staying together. It’s easily manageable and not that difficult if the group actually sticks together and avoids spawning multiple areas at once (also, breaking some of the big shards actually triggers some of the teleport spikes; those jackasses that run around breaking all of the shards while stuff is still around are exactly that: jackasses).

For your 5th, you can replace “Helio advanced” with any of the story missions. That’s just how it happens. Personally, since Helio Advanced takes twice as long as any other mission and is a massive increase in difficulty over any other Advanced mission, I actually think it deserves its own queue rather than Helio normal.

The PvE “problems” you’re talking about aren’t really huge problems and, quite possibly, they’re working as intended. The PvP problems (having to wait an extremely long time for a game, some characters and tactics being curbstompingly powerful such that they dominate a scene that’s supposed to be varied) are actually straight up problems.

As long as characters are strong enough to complete PvE, they’re fine; some characters’ kits are going to be insane for PvE and others are not. It’s not like everyone is competing for spots on the team and can be excluded for playing a weak class/build, which happens in MMOs where playing the “weak” tank will often get you ignored or kicked out of a deep end raid group; if it were that way, class/character balance would be insanely important. As it stands, for PvE, it’s just a minimum threshold of performance for each character. As long as PvE can be completed by a satisfactory (as determined by the devs) fraction of those who start those games (and they can datamine all kinds of information about those games to get an idea of what’s happening; if X difficulty has too high of a failure rate and when those failures tend to happen).

PvE is, imho, in a pretty good place. As long as they keep putting out new characters and maps for me to play, maybe tweak how the queues work so there’s a bit more control over what maps you get put into, they’ll be doing well in my book, and they’re doing an excellent job making sure PvP changes don’t bleed over too heavily into PvE (which is one of those eternal worries; thankfully, it’s not too difficult for them because the 2 most popular modes have some level of PvE-ness thanks to their objectives).

2 Likes
#14

I think the comment about story mode being dead was for the EU servers, and usually going at only 2-3 players. To be honest though, I think the ideal team size for story mode is 3 players.

US/Canada seems to be fine on console; not sure about PC.

1 Like
#15

I’m not sure, after awhile of trying (The last 2 levels are impossible, seemingly) I just play the Algorithm alone all the time now to lvl. I can say this though, always protect the objective. 90% of the time the team is all over the place and the mission ends in 5 minutes.

I’m US based, xone.

#16

No, you haven’t. I’ve been playing aince day 1, play mostly PvE, love the combos of characters. You can catch 3-4 teams. 5 mans are easier to find on the weekends.
2 mans are regular, but I usually just quit and requeue and we immediately catch a 3-4, sometimes 5.

#17

I didn’t meant them to drop in during a running mission, but in between.

#18

Just make all the bosses drop their legendaries so there’s a reason to play the level.

#19

I oppose this notion.

#20

Then players will drop out even faster.

#21

Sidebar - am I crazy person or do co-op missions not scale to the number of people in them? I solo most of the time, but I’ve done a few group missions as well. I remember handful of sentinel runs with 5 players, and another run at 3. All seemed very easily doable, even with groups with sub optimal command rankings.

#22

They do scale with the number of players. The problem with the Sentinel in particular seems to be just that first area where the elevator is. There are multiple “camps” already in place, but it is oh so easy to aggro the one next to the one you’re targetting. I suspect that there’s also a higher % of the higher level enemies with more players; certainly seem to be more of the summoner types on that first section with 5 players.

1 Like
#23

…Look at my Steam account, I’m 55 years old and am not crying ‘Help me Mommy’, plus I have a ton of hours into this game.

In this screen shot, early this morning, Helio Advanced, everything you see walking away from me spawned on me when I landed. It was beyond possible even for Galilea to survive that. And all the while you are being laughed at. (Text shown)

image
heliodown.jpg900×632 196 KB

2 Likes
#24

[quote=“wisecarver, post:23, topic:1540059, full:true”]…Look at my Steam account, I’m 55 years old and am not crying ‘Help me Mommy’, plus I have a ton of hours into this game.
[/quote]

And yet people, myself included, have still completed Helio Advanced (multiple times, in fact). I’m pretty sure some 5 man groups have actually done Helio Advanced Hardcore.

Yes, if you stand around when a massive elite Thrall spawn descends upon you, you’re gonna die. But they are no random occurrences (they always happen at specific boss hp percent), nor do they occur in random places. Rendain even screams out something right before the massive Thrall spawn occurs, telling you it’s gonna happen. When the Brute spawn is about to occur, you gtfo to one of the safer areas (the “throne” area is always a good one; in my experience, it has the fewest enemies on it, by far) with the rest of your group (requires corrdination) and let one of the ranged characters poke the boss down the rest of the way.

Just because you can’t do it does not mean that it cannot be done, especially if you don’t know the fight, aren’t coordinating with your team, and are expecting the “just stab it til it dies” strat to work effectively.

Also, are you seriously complaining about a single death in a non-hardcore run?

Helio Advanced is hard; the hardest piece of content in the game, by far, and the closest thing to an MMO-style endgame raid that BB has (and actually captures the feel of, pretty effectively, except for Helio giving out shit for loot). That’s fine.

The very fact that it’s so much harder and so much longer than any other piece of PvE content is why it shouldn’t be mixed in with the other Advanced options. You need to go into it willingly and with your eyes open.

#25

…Want a screen shot of how many times I’ve done Helio advanced?
As I stated it was clear when I landed, they spawned instantly, trapped me.
Yes I very often try and get the team to clear the grassy area, which we did but as Galilea I had to make my charge.

1 Like
#26

It’s not something that happens randomly. You can plan for it and you need to. You started moving to the safe places too late and/or your group burned the boss down too early (while you were still in transit). You got taken out by an incredibly unforgiving mechanic. That does not mean that it’s impossible or broken. It might be impossible to survive the elite Thrall spawn if it happens on top of your head, but you can avoid having it spawn on top of your head by paying attention and working together.