Preview?

A look through the fence...

By: George Argyropoulos

a/k/a Dragon_Bane  

As most of you know, today we got a preview peek at the level 84 and 100 targets for the next Raid. The ever-present caveat is that nothing we have seen is set in stone and is subject to change between today and the start of the Raid next week. As we saw last month, that potential for change can be a substantial one indeed. So - what did we see?

Level 84 :

The 84 was a bit bigger and a little more complex. Someone decided that bringing back the Shrouding mechanic sounded good, so we have that now. The range of the Coldsnaps has increased so that you can no longer out range them. In order to mitigate damage, you now have to approach the target a little differently. You need to come at the Turret Platforms from an angle which will keep you out of the Coldsnap range, like so:

All in all, not too bad a target. I actually liked it. While I can see this getting monotonous after a day or two, this is a target I actually liked. I do wonder how this will translate into the FM - but we'll get to that later,  I'm generally not a fan of complexity in my chores. This is what the target looked like:

As you can see, there are a few new things in this target. The line of shrouded rockets are a new trick. Thankfully, you can outrun these with Icebreakers or Monoliths (stacked).

Level 100 : 

Ok. I have to be honest. I'm not exactly a fan. As most of you know, I abhor large targets, particularly for the Elite level targets. I still feel these targets are the ones that were supposed to save us seat time. The larger the target, the longer it takes. Add in the level of complexity surrounding this target and it didn't hit my Top 15. I mean - just look at the damn size of the thing.

I will say the novelty of the target was fun, however, even in the short time of the preview, I was already rolling my eyes at hitting these. I think my perspective may be skewed because in the back of my mind I keep thinking Forsaken Mission... Forsaken Mission....[1]

Much like the level 84 target, approach was everything. There is a shrouding mechanic again along with a line of shrouded rockets. Fun. A rather large amount of fleets are sitting just off waiting for you as well. I had some trouble with connectivity during the Preview so I had only two recordings of this target. One was full of flames and death, so you get to see the one where I get slapped around a bit. Note where the Coldsnaps fire etc.

And? : 

So what did we learn? We learned that we didn't need as much splash as previously thought. The stacking idea works well. Increasing the damage output helped. MX-3 seemed to be the choice for this Mono build. The adjustment? Removing Viscosity Regulator and swapping in an Explosive Upgrade. Adding a bunch of Charged Armors. A bit of advice... this build is for those that are lazy, but good drivers. It is a skill build on a skill hull. I'm sure I'll find more to tweak, but for now... the DPS build looked like this:

This is the full build here!!

You can read up on the theory behind the build here.

Final note: I am a little aggravated with Kixeye at the moment. The change to the Charged Armors has precluded me from finishing this fleet, so once again, I will not have a full fleet to participate in the raid. 2 out of 3 sucks. That said... Good luck in the raid folks!!

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[1] A serious issue that has yet to be addressed with this new transitional rotation of old targets to chore targets, is a very basic one in this game, that revolves around power creep. In the past, we may have had a target for a chore like the Forsaken Mission release with a difficulty level that precluded any thought of 'fun' or 'easy'. This slowly transitioned into fun and then ease as time went on and we got newer and more powerful weapons and ships. With this new set-up, that will not happen. The difficulty we are presented after the transition is what we will see for the next year. It remains static. Remember the tweaking of the Reaver Armadas? The difficulty certainly was not adjusted towards the 'easy' dial. This is an area that needs to be addressed because I find it hard to believe that I will be doing my FM in 40 min for a couple hours damage when this transitions...