Got the game a few weeks ago, never been able to get a full team for the last 2 missions. Getting a full team is usually a rare thing in any map tbh. US here.
If only…we could pick the map we actually want to play, then find others who also want to play that map…
Also if someone leaves intentionally they could be penalized somehow since no one can rejoin if a team member leaves (except that team member).
Heh. I think it’s how PvE players are frustrated with being second class citizens, always being a distant concern versus PvP. I tried to warn them about this, I saw this coming ages ago.
PvE needs a lot of QoL attention to be worth it to people again.
I’d like two changes for PvE.
1 - Add Normal Heliophage to the normal queue.
2 - Don’t start a story mission without a full team. I don’t want to go in with 2,3, or 4. I am willing to wait extra time for a full 5 man team. If people leave after it starts, no problem, but I want to at least go in with 5.
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).
I say
You can always do private missions and invite friends. Plenty of people still love playing PvE raids. If nothing else, it’s a gear farm.
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.
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.
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.
…Absolute truth! All the groups I play with are ticked at Gbox for only listening to the PvP players.
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.
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?
[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).
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.
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.
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.
I didn’t meant them to drop in during a running mission, but in between.
Just make all the bosses drop their legendaries so there’s a reason to play the level.
I oppose this notion.
Then players will drop out even faster.
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.