I'd assume so. Im wondering this as well.
Some say it's so bad, it's not even worth using it in VR if you have a Vive.
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Elite Dangerous: Horizons |OT| Just scratching the surface
- Thread starter Anton Sugar
- Start date
I'd assume so. Im wondering this as well.
Some say it's so bad, it's not even worth using it in VR if you have a Vive.
I haven't read anything that bad. Honestly that's a little surprising. Especially considering how they've been pretty good about supporting VR from the start. Not sure how much extra work it takes to go from Oculus to Vive. I wouldn't have imagined it's much considering there's no motion controller support.
Pretty much. Especially if you get the thermal mod on the huge multi and corrosive on one of the others. People with vanilla Elite are going to get wrecked.
On the one hand I like how the better weapons and thrusters make things more fast paced, but on the other it's really unfair and pay to win.
It does make the game a little faster, or will when they kill brave Sir Robin. Yeah I've thought about the P2W implication. It is and it isn't. I mean, people can still stick to Solo and Private Groups but even then, some NPCs allegedly will use the upgraded modules/weapons so they might still be screwed.
Personally I would have made Engineers for everyone but they have to do something to make Horizon owners happy. I think it's just the limitation of a small team, no time and not a lot of income. They really need to get better cosmetics in the store and get that cash flowing. The specific skin per ship model they have absolutely blows.
I'm torn on this. On the one hand, it seems like normal MMO progression - Addon releases, level cap is raised/new high level equipment specific to addon introduced, PvP meta adjusts around it. On the other hand, Horizons released only a year after the initial launch.
I mind paying for a season pass every year, especially if it contains such substantial feature additions as Horizons, much less than e.g. paying for premium coins/faster progression in other games (take War Thunder...). I also see it as the path that ensures Elite being developed further. But sure, it does have a whiff of pay2win.
You should see what you can bump the FSD range to. I'd be interested in those numbers. Cutter too. I'd love to make a Cutter explorer.
I agree with Burny that it feels more like your traditional MMO paid expansion content than P2W stuff. When you choose not to buy a MMO expansion you miss out on a lot of content and it's the same here. Imagine how upset Horizons owners would be if they decided to make the Engineers available to everyone. People would be pissed. They do a pretty good job of adding content to the "base" game while also making season pass holders happy. The moment they start adding the bigger content updates to the base game is the moment they piss off season pass holders. They have to make it feel like it's worth buying and right now with this update it does.
Yeah, it's in general a difficult problem to tackle. If I remember correctly, I think WoW consistently had this problem with every expansion. You maxed out in level and equipment in the base game/previous expansion, and go to the content in the new one and then a common item you find is better than everything you already have.
That said, I do like that every new expansion, it's going to be where buying an expansion gives you the previous ones, so if you were just starting, you should just buy Horizons since that gets you the original game.
I don't think that's been the case for a while now.
Really? I thought it was. Huh.
Edit: Yep, your'e right. I swear I thought at some point FD said they were going to do that.
Anton Sugar
Member
The $60 Deluxe Edition gets you both, plus a bunch of other visual stuff.
I expect that, a few months after each Season is released, they'll all be bundled into a Deluxe edition.
I expect that, a few months after each Season is released, they'll all be bundled into a Deluxe edition.
ColonelSkills
Member
Does anyone have any info on mods not directly to weapons, but stuff you'd otherwise jam into slots? Things like mining equipment, fuel scoops, limpet controllers, interdictors, and discovery scanners, or other utility items like wake/cargo/warrant scanners and such? Or are those not getting mods right away and it's only internal modules/weapons at the moment? (I could have sworn I saw mods to shield boosters, or maybe that was just talk of effects stacking with shield mods)
There are mods to frame shift interdictors like range or activation degree increases. Shield boosters can be overcharged and have specific resistances to thermal, kinetic and even blast I think. Pretty much the rest are pending.
Oh nice. They must have added that when they made Horizons standalone.
ColonelSkills
Member
Oh, ok.
Hopefully before too long, slight mods to things like one more limpet out in exchange for less range or something would be cool. I'm just looking forward to more tweaks.
Thanks!
How is that possible? The landing pad always rotates toward the exit when you launch...
I'm sure they will get to it. Limpets are planned to be craftable via synthesis too. As well as chaff.
Anton Sugar
Member
Pretty sure they changed some element of taking off so we don't have to wait as long...something about not waiting for the blast shields anymore. Can't remember if that's landing or taking off though.
EDIT: NM, it's a client mismatch:
To be pedantic again: They did the opposit.
Horizons was a "standalone" product, meaning it could be purchased and played without the main game, because it invariably included the main game. This was changed and it became a season pass/addon that also requires purchasing the main game separately. It also became cheaper, which is good for those who already purchased the main game previously. The "deluxe edition" took the place of the previous Horizons offering as a bundle that includes the Horizons season pass and the the main game at about full price. No idea how they'll handle coming seasons. Will they all be separate season passes? How will they handle the features to which people are eligible when they have wild combinations of the main game and arbitrary season passes? Assuming for a moment that space legs are season 3, will people with only that season be able wall around in stations only in space, but not land on planet surfaces? Will they be open to have their ships entered by pirates, but not be able to form multi crews?
I literally groaned reading this. You knew what I meant.To be pedantic again: They did the opposit.
oh my god yes
I go to their store because I want to give them my monies to customize my shit, and they have, what...5 bobbleheads, some alphabet letters, and the shittiest selection of skins for such a beautiful game, it's just senseless.
After finally spending time rolling upgrades for the weapons I've come to the conclusion it's going to be really infuriating getting any kind of consistent build/specs. I knew it was going to be bad, but not this bad. Especially if you're rolling Grade 5 upgrades. It's just too much to roll all the stats together with the special effect roll. And that's not even considering the live material cost.
Honestly, I'm okay with variety in people's builds. Before it was generally all players of a certain ship for x purpose rolled with the same or similar loadout. Now we have a lot more options.
There will absolutely be variety in builds. I just don't want variety WITHIN my own build. It's hard to actually make a build that's consistent within your own ship because of how much is being determined by 1 roll. And you'll waste an extreme amount of mats trying to accomplish it. It's frustrating.
Beta 4 patch notes
- Adjusted the shield-down flee behaviour to be less frustrating
- Stop hitmen being sent after the player for no reason
- Ignore drones when pirates work out the value of cargo a player has; if players only have drones, pirates will let them go on their way
- To help players find crafting resources, UI's displaying Engineer recipes now have a 'tooltip' for each ingredient
- Added popup explaining where pinned recipes can be found
- Added text field to the level progress to describe the unlock condition e.g. "Buy Modifications"
- Improve the time it takes to generate avatar portraits
- Adjusted the shield-down flee behaviour to be less frustrating
- Stop hitmen being sent after the player for no reason
- Ignore drones when pirates work out the value of cargo a player has; if players only have drones, pirates will let them go on their way
- To help players find crafting resources, UI's displaying Engineer recipes now have a 'tooltip' for each ingredient
- Added popup explaining where pinned recipes can be found
- Added text field to the level progress to describe the unlock condition e.g. "Buy Modifications"
- Improve the time it takes to generate avatar portraits
You're bound by the class size (number) of each slot. There are further limitations to things like shields, thrusters as to supported mass. An analogy would be that you can't put a scooter engine on an SUV and expect it to run so they don't allow those purchases. Same with shields.
I figured that it would be like that, i just wanted to make sure before spending any more money on my explorer.
Typically you want to build for lowest mass possible if you're doing exploration. Although I'm not the best with theory crafting top optimal builds for exploration, might want to call in Mengy or someone else here that's a space tourist. That's assuming you're not just building a general asp explorer for something else. I think you also want to build for lowest power use possible because the way power plants work in the E
universe is that they burn fuel to power the ship. I know you can see a visible change in fuel consumption in supercruise when you power down non-essential modules but I'm not sure if that actually effects the hyperspace jump. I'd imagine it would.Highest class FSD is a must
Thrusters aren't that big of a deal (I could be wrong here, maybe they matter for drive strength when you need to land on a high G world to farm synthesis mats)
Bring an AFM to repair your modules
Maybe a heat sink?
Everything else I would minimize for least mass possible/lowest power
Do the jump ranges differ a lot between the smaller and bigger ships? I'm currently at 33 ly jump range with my explorer, waiting for the engineers update to drop.
Pretty much but more importantly ship role. Explorers and mult-role ships have the best ranges while combat ships are lacking. Your max ranges will be in an Asp Explorer or an Anaconda.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Mine did too a few days ago. There was a small update and it's been orange ever since for me. Still works fine though.
Dreams-Visions
Member
Beta 4 combat feels just right. Well pleased.
But...gonna take like a year ofgrinding work to get my ships modded out like I'd want them to be...
I've only pimped 2 ships in the beta. My Cutter and my Conda. I'd say it took me on average about 20 rolls to get a reasonably good roll (not great, definitely nothing perfect) with the special affix I wanted.
20 rolls in the Beta right now is 20 fish. But in the actual release, that's going to be 3 regular mats + 1 special mat. In other words, we're talking about 80 mats PER MOUNT OR INTERNAL PART. For a ship like a Cutter, you're going to want to mod:
- 7 hardpoints
- 3-4 utility mounts
- shields
- fsd
- engine
- armor
That's ~15 modded parts x ~20 rolls each to get them right x ~4 mats per roll. By my count, that's ~1200 mats. FOR ONE SHIP.
Most ships have fewer mounts, but a similar number of internals and utility mounts you'll probably want to modify. ~800-1000 mats might be the average and we haven't even discussed farming time for the mats. That's a lot of fucking play time, people.
Get ready to *NOT* upgrade most of your ships significantly before this time next year.
But...gonna take like a year of
I've only pimped 2 ships in the beta. My Cutter and my Conda. I'd say it took me on average about 20 rolls to get a reasonably good roll (not great, definitely nothing perfect) with the special affix I wanted.
20 rolls in the Beta right now is 20 fish. But in the actual release, that's going to be 3 regular mats + 1 special mat. In other words, we're talking about 80 mats PER MOUNT OR INTERNAL PART. For a ship like a Cutter, you're going to want to mod:
- 7 hardpoints
- 3-4 utility mounts
- shields
- fsd
- engine
- armor
That's ~15 modded parts x ~20 rolls each to get them right x ~4 mats per roll. By my count, that's ~1200 mats. FOR ONE SHIP.
Most ships have fewer mounts, but a similar number of internals and utility mounts you'll probably want to modify. ~800-1000 mats might be the average and we haven't even discussed farming time for the mats. That's a lot of fucking play time, people.
Get ready to *NOT* upgrade most of your ships significantly before this time next year.
That's about in line with what I feared Engineers would become. I haven't got the time to bother with such a life crushing grind. 10 hours of mildly interesting, yet repetitive game time and at the end is a... module downgrade? No thanks.
Happy for all the other fixes and improvements, but I really wonder what the designers of Elite consider a compelling gameplay loop. The game is so full of mind numbing time wasters, it's sometimes pitiful. Donation grind, previously random USS generation, interdiction harassment while smuggling, traversing the bubble in low range combat ships (20 minute loading screen loop galore)...
That's about in line with what I feared Engineers would become. I haven't got the time to bother with such a life crushing grind. 10 hours of mildly interesting, yet repetitive game time and at the end is a... module downgrade? No thanks.
Happy for all the other fixes and improvements, but I really wonder what the designers of Elite consider a compelling gameplay loop. The game is so full of mind numbing time wasters, it's sometimes pitiful. Donation grind, previously random USS generation, interdiction harassment while smuggling, traversing the bubble in low range combat ships (20 minute loading screen loop galore)...
Yeah, it's not good. Even with fish as the only material I stopped rolling dice on outfitting a Cutter. Just a painful experience. The worst part is that FD seems uninterested in what people think of the grind considering how little time they spent outside of mayhem phase. Even less interested in having a dialogue about it.
What needs to happen is to just have a credit fee to feel re-roll. I understand the right materials not exactly being easy to come by, mainly because Frontier doesn't want all the Corvettes to go get impenetrable shields, upgraded railguns, and every other module they could ever want in 5 minutes. There is a video of Kornelius with an upgraded shield on his Corvette against a STATION! Spoilers: He can tank the station and all the cops around it, fly into it, and back out with barely a dent in his shield.
This is still in beta, and usually these betas run for a good amount of time. Frontier listened on doubling the material inventory, which was a step in the right direction. Now I will be sorely disappointed if they don't address the ridiculous cost of re-rolling in some form. I know there are a lot of gribds in this game, but if this stays as is, this beats all of them. You could get rating 5 in Powerplay, farm to buy one of the 3 C's (Corvette, Conda, Cutter), and do smuggling missions all faster than getting a few custom modules with a positive effect. I certainly hope Frontier sees this and fixes it, because this update could be a real detriment if they don't.
I haven't tried fighting anything in the beta since the most recent update. Do wanted ships still flee as soon as their shields drop? That was kind of irritating. Smarter AI wasn't a bad idea, just don't have them do stupid stuff like repeatedly flying into an asteroid, or going into that weird "I give up" state where they just kind of sit there without ever firing.
This is still in beta, and usually these betas run for a good amount of time. Frontier listened on doubling the material inventory, which was a step in the right direction. Now I will be sorely disappointed if they don't address the ridiculous cost of re-rolling in some form. I know there are a lot of gribds in this game, but if this stays as is, this beats all of them. You could get rating 5 in Powerplay, farm to buy one of the 3 C's (Corvette, Conda, Cutter), and do smuggling missions all faster than getting a few custom modules with a positive effect. I certainly hope Frontier sees this and fixes it, because this update could be a real detriment if they don't.
I haven't tried fighting anything in the beta since the most recent update. Do wanted ships still flee as soon as their shields drop? That was kind of irritating. Smarter AI wasn't a bad idea, just don't have them do stupid stuff like repeatedly flying into an asteroid, or going into that weird "I give up" state where they just kind of sit there without ever firing.
Dreams-Visions
Member
That's about in line with what I feared Engineers would become. I haven't got the time to bother with such a life crushing grind. 10 hours of mildly interesting, yet repetitive game time and at the end is a... module downgrade? No thanks.
Happy for all the other fixes and improvements, but I really wonder what the designers of Elite consider a compelling gameplay loop. The game is so full of mind numbing time wasters, it's sometimes pitiful. Donation grind, previously random USS generation, interdiction harassment while smuggling, traversing the bubble in low range combat ships (20 minute loading screen loop galore)...
By my math, we're looking about somewhere between 50-75 hours per ship to get good (but not the best) rolls on every upgradeable component.
So people will very much have to choose (a) a favorite ship or (b) a specific component or two that they want to see upgraded on all their ships. It could mean people really locking into their chosen ship builds and spending almost all their time in some specific ship as opposed to hopping around into random ships in their fleet.
Considering the videos Hylian showed me of commanders tanking shield-taking Ports (which without mods can kill a CMDRs ship in < 5 seconds), it strikes me that anyone playing in Open should mod:
- Shield mods
- Powerplant mods
- Shield booster mods
- Power distributor mods
- Thruster mods
- FSD mods (if flying a Fed ship or small ship)
- Weapons mods last
In that order, I think. Explorers would want to roll FSD range and anything that reduces weight.
Oh also, don't leave home without Point Defense anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWKeHsHdyAw
Anton Sugar
Member
I hope certain factions and groups eventually have "profiles" related to their tech. I mean, pirates and independent ships should just be an amalgam, but if you are planning on going up against the military, it would be cool to do some research to understand what sort of hardpoints the military is equipped with, if there are any special units that have specialized/crafted weapons you should prepare for, etc.
Luckily it's already being changed. Current warhead activation time is 0.5 seconds, allowing unavoidable hits from the front. It's being changed to 2.5 seconds so if it hits the target before it's armed, it's harmless. Average to kill one via 1 point defense is 23 seconds, and yes there is a multiplicative reduction. Might be time to actually equip an ECM now.
Anton Sugar
Member
Awww they're listening! From today's newsletter:
ColonelSkills
Member
I hope rails get more than the three effects I've read about, most other weapons have 5 or so modification ideas, and I've been looking at synergizing these hammers on this Python with other upgrades.