Okay, its an awkward sort of argument to make, but...
The Vaadwaur are
Lightning Bruisers. On the base level of difficulty, their ships should not be fast, iron-skinned AND heavy-hitting. No other race is like that in the game, and its starting to get really annoying. Either that, or we should actually be given the proper idea that there are so few of them in action (a.k.a. fighting 1 or 2 groups of ships instead of the standard 5 in a mission). It took me 8 minutes to destroy 2 battleship-level Vaadwaur ships the other day, on NORMAL in a considerably well-equipped ship and with the assistance of several alliance friendlies.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightningBruiser
Comments
This they will show up in Advanced too, not just normal, they have about 1.2Million HP, and typically are dishing out a good 10k DPS with their canons, with spike damage at well over 110k..... they are basically like doing PvP against a 10k member lol. Ran an advanced where one of them one-shot me and saw that it did a spike on me of about 150k damage so has just tore through my shield and hull. Brutal.... evne had one where it spawned 2 of those f*ckers.
the are follow up story missions and although most ships are alright
to fight its the Heavy Artillery that is totally OP i am playing on normal
and found that the hull points for these things where set to over 1 million.
it took me 15 minuts to take down just 1 of these and it was just single player
story misson / patrol.
i encountered 3 in the same mission the first 2 where both set at 1 million points
and the 3th one was set to a little over 150k wich was alot quicker to deal with
Bullet sponge is no challenge nor fun seriously 30 to 45 minutes for a patrol is too long.
Please take a look at the Heavy Artillery Vaadwaur Ships in these missions and on normal
setting because 1 million in my opinion is just crazy.
the artilary ships aren't fast, but they do hit hard and soak up damage
while tough I don't find the vadwaar unbalanced at all
Not sure where you read that , i dont think normal is to much i just think
that 1 particulair ship in those story missions are a bit to much i can still beat them
and the faster ships are not difficult at all the rest of the vaadwaur on normal
is fine with me i have no problems fighting them the heavy artillery ship on the
other hand is a bullet sponge so to speak the ones i encountered had 1 mill
hitpoints i used all my skills including the photonic fleet with reduced cooldown
and it just took forever to take that thing down for a normal patrol i think
thats a bit to much and like i said the 3th artillery ship has it hitpoints set to 150k
iam just wondering if this might be a bug as for my equipment its not the best
iam using mark 12 fleet stuff but i think that should be alright for normal i dont
think my ship is too weak eventhough its a science vessel so dps is not through the roof.
Fix your build, learn to fly, and quit griping just because something's hard. And as long as you're on TV Tropes, look up Gameplay and Story Segregation.
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No, I didn't read it wrong. Something on normal is too much, that it doesn't get destroyed on the first pass, and is too difficult.
Also having elite level enemies in normal level missions does not make sense, especially if the same ships will spawn in other locations with correct stats for normal difficulty setting. This is probably a bug.
That's not really the problem here.... the problem is that there is currently a known bug which causes elite level vaaduar Heavy Artillery Vessels to spawn at normal difficulty. In Normal these vessels should be spawning with about 120-200k HP.... instead they are spawning with 900k-1million HP. So the issue here is not that "normal" is too difficult, but that elite level vessels spawning at normal setting is too difficult for people who play normal. This also is seen happening in Advanced with Elite difficulty Vaaduarr Heaby Artillery spawning..... seen it with my own eyes too. While it's not quite as drastic working in Advanced, in Normal it's effectively causing a vessel to spawn which is 10 times as strong as it should be for that difficulty setting. This doesn't happen all the time either, sometimes they spawn correctly. But this is a known spotted issue which has appeared since the last patch.
I recently ran a patrol on advanced whereupon I came across Vaadwuar Heavy Artillery Vehicles (HAV). They are TOUGH but beatable, even with low DPS (although I strongly urge you to up your DPS for Delta Rising. Killing them quickly is the only way to ensure your own survivability)
The first one was a cat-and-mouse game for about 10 minutes, but I defeated it. Then I came across a squadron of 3 assault ships and 2 scout ships (hint take the scout ships out first). Another good fight, but I won. At this point, no deaths.
Then I came across a second HAV. I used the same tactics as before could barely scratch its hull. After about 15 minutes and at ;least a half dozen deaths I gave up. The lowest I was able to get its hull was about 65%, and by the time I respawned and got back into the fray it had already healed to over 80%.
I walked away for a time then came back, switched the difficulty to normal, and went back in. It was ridiculously easy. Like cutting though butter with a laser. I felt ashamed for having to lower the setting at all.
The level of difficulty between advanced and elite feels right, but between normal and advanced feels idiotic. WAY too spaced out. Id suggest either scaling Normal UP or getting rid of it altogether, to be honest.
Now that you mention it, not just tha but I noticed my damage scroll against that HAV. Usually I see numbers between 500 - 1500 per attack. On this one, 22-55.
That HAS to be a bug... I am no DPS machine but sitll, that's rediculous.
I'd encourage everyone to keep an eye on their damage output. If you notice it drop into the ludicrous, report it....
Support 90 degree arc limitation on BFaW! Save our ships from looking like flying disco balls of dumb!
Came across one in a patrol today, that one where you get nuked with solar flares every 30 seconds. Killed it eventually but it took a while. I had to run off and regroup at one point as it just wore me down until i ran out of shields and heals.
They are not too difficult to fight if you are fast moving yourself but the huge HP's makes it one dull ,looooong and very tedious fight. It's even worse that every patrol seems to have 5 waves, 3 would have been fine!
Otherwise, normal is good.
I thought this was the long grind people were complaining about when I came across one of those ships. Then I thought it was by design since the maps those HP whales showed up on had several friendly NPCs to help you out.
Here I was hoping it was a testing ground of sorts for personal player fleets. You know, of the use one of our old ships as an awesome pet variety. Alas it is but a bug.
Sure is FUN getting my TRIBBLE handed to me every few minutes.
I enjoy to play my wells and several other flavor ships in normal story mission, since they are close to useless in queued content, with everything being about DPS those days. And yes, I know my wells can be turned in killing machine, but I'm far from being lvl15 in science R&D, which award a key trait for it.
Other than that, they are fine. The other ships drop fast enough and don't DPS too much.
UPDATE, TL/DR : Not all the ships spawn with the same farcical amounts of HP in the same mission.
To respond to my own quote :
Eventually gave up and ragequit the first attempt, returning to the mission landed me in the same place with the same 1.2mil HP arty ships. Had to quit the mission and start from scratch, at which point fleet 1/2 contained a 1.2 mil arty ship :rolleyes:
After about three days of epic fun me and the Hirogen NPCs killed it. Paused the game, shaved off the beard I'd grown, returned to the fray and hunted down fleet 2/2
Much to my surprise the two Vaaaaaaadwaaaaaaar Heavy Arty ships in the next group spawned with normal amounts of HP and only took a few hours to kill off.
If you're playing Elite, then having an Elite vessel show up is not a bug.
I've defeated elite level Vaaduar Heavy Artillery ships in my T5U Gal-X (solo) in my Lvl 58 Fed eng, and that is not exactly the king of DPS there and it ragged on quite a bit. If you're geared for Elite taking out a 1+ million hull is not impossible, I mean, seriously.... that is only a fraction of the hull of an elite Tac Cube. This thread is dealing with NORMAL level difficulty settings, not Elite... and the bug discussed here is one of an issue with ELITE level vessels showing up in NORMAL and ADVANCED queues. If you're in a team playing Elite level and encounter some of these and can't take it out. you should not be playing at Elite settings until you are properly geared.
I actually like playing against the Vaaduar compared to other enemy NPC's..... they tend to use their abilities far more intelligently that other NPC's and present an ACTUAL challenge. Parked mindless pew-pew-pewing isn't as effective against them as it is with many other NPC's.
But it's very unfair to have normal level players getting stuck with elite level NPC's to take down to complete missions... that is a bug that needs to get addressed. which is the problem the OP is encountering.
Tiny little assault vessels are taking as much heat as level-2 regular enemies (if not, more) and zipping around the map with pretty considerable armament. I'm not saying they should be nerfed into powerlessness, but there's a reason that ridiculous picture of a tank doing a wheelie is the cover photo for Lightning Bruisers.
"Typically, it's done to try and make a more interesting game, since simply getting a One-Hit Kill all the time like in that cutscene would be utterly boring, while having a person who can't open doors like in that last cutscene would make the game needlessly frustrating. Accordingly, it's sometimes excused by Acceptable Breaks from Reality, but by no stretch does that justification cover all of the flat-out weird mismatches perpetrated by game makers over the years."
I love TV Tropes
If you can implement new content that satisfies the highlighted condition, Segregation of Story and Gameplay is acceptable. As clearly stated, it is designed to fix lapses in content where following the basic laws of the storyline would make for inconvenient gameplay. Right now, the reverse is true, and the Story's mechanics are being compromised to make the game unnecessarily more grindy.
should get your eyes checked
I've always encountered the first artillery ship with around 150K hull. The second one always has 758K hull.
I did the mission with a rom tactical in a scimitar, a fed tactical in a fleet avenger, and a fed engineer in a risian cruiser (all T5U) all nicely equipped, but not super crazy dps.
scimitar had the easiest time, followed by the avenger, but they were all long drawn out fights.
I feel bad for someone who hasn't devoted a ridicules a amount of hours to this game, as I have.
Hopefully this will get fixed with this week's patch.
By the way, my T5U Odyssey seems like a dinosaur in the DQ, hence my flying around in a luxury cruiser...
I did yesterday took me forever to kill it lol. I thought I was never going to complete it. I like a challenge but it was like shooting spit balls at a tank lol.
The fact that literally 70% of all the DR missions are boring, dull tedious patrols where you have to fight of endless wave of NPCs just shows to me that no real though went into this expansion.
There are some good missions where you actually do something different (e.g. Dragon's Deceit) but most are eye-bleedingly grindy and boring.
Honestly, the last 3-4 missions in the chain are pretty much all excessively drawn out patrol grind-fests and I was loosing the will to live after that...
Note to dev's: There is nothing fun about fighting off wave after wave after wave after wave of NPCs in every mission. Come up with some decent content next time, this is just lazy.
But even the Elite ships are relatively easy to bring down if you remember evasive maneuvers for the barrage and don't loiter into its wake and minefield.