SPAAAAAAAAAACE! Combat

[Sky]

Truly the best xp grind in the game. 

That's actually why I've been staying away. I'm having a hard time finishing quest chains before they grey out. Two of the Balmorra heroics I finally cleaned off my list were grey by the time I got around to doing them.

[trias_e]

Someone made a comment that they enjoyed space combat, and I replied thinking they must be being sarcastic.  That's how bad I thought it was after the first mission (which was horrible.)

I admit that I had only played the first mission at the time, however.  I tried again, and the missions past the first one have been better.  I still hate how you basically play with one hand and that you just hold the left mouse button down for the entire mission. And my default, unintentional posture is to rest my head on my hand, elbow propped up on my desk, I've noticed, (not a sign of great excitement).  But they've been a bit more interesting, taking out capital ship defenses and whatnot is much better than just holding your mouse over fighters as they enter your vision one by one in a row for the entire mission.  And dodging the environment has a good starfox feel to it, although it would be nice if you could do something about enemy attacks as well.  All in all I will continue doing my one a day and not being too miserable about it.

[luckton]

Someone made a comment that they enjoyed space combat, and I replied thinking they must be being sarcastic.  That's how bad I thought it was after the first mission (which was horrible.)

I admit that I had only played the first mission at the time, however.  I tried again, and the missions past the first one have been better.  I still hate how you basically play with one hand and that you just hold the left mouse button down for the entire mission. And my default, unintentional posture is to rest my head on my hand, elbow propped up on my desk, I've noticed, (not a sign of great excitement).  But they've been a bit more interesting, taking out capital ship defenses and whatnot is much better than just holding your mouse over fighters as they enter your vision one by one in a row for the entire mission.  And dodging the environment has a good starfox feel to it, although it would be nice if you could do something about enemy attacks as well.  All in all I will continue doing my one a day and not being too miserable about it.

The only problem with your logic is that your shields won't regenerate while you're firing your weapons. While it's generally safe to just 'spray and pray' for those first early level missions, once you start getting into the grade 2+ stuff, you'll need to start thinking about those shields 

[Draegan]

Space Missions need some crazy achievements like blowing up capitol ships.

[CmdrSlack]

Someone made a comment that they enjoyed space combat, and I replied thinking they must be being sarcastic.  That's how bad I thought it was after the first mission (which was horrible.)

I admit that I had only played the first mission at the time, however.  I tried again, and the missions past the first one have been better.  I still hate how you basically play with one hand and that you just hold the left mouse button down for the entire mission. And my default, unintentional posture is to rest my head on my hand, elbow propped up on my desk, I've noticed, (not a sign of great excitement).  But they've been a bit more interesting, taking out capital ship defenses and whatnot is much better than just holding your mouse over fighters as they enter your vision one by one in a row for the entire mission.  And dodging the environment has a good starfox feel to it, although it would be nice if you could do something about enemy attacks as well.  All in all I will continue doing my one a day and not being too miserable about it.

That was me who said that the combat was enjoyable. I did the first few missions without ship mods because I hadn't even thought to look for a ship mod vendor. I found it way more clicky and pew pew than you did, apparently. With the default missile bay, that first mission was tough -- you don't have anywhere near enough missiles to take out all of the objectives, so you have to prioritize the toughest to hit targets, etc. Normally, I'd have ragequit a mission that took me eleventyhundred tries. The pew pew and whatnot was enough to see me through to victory. Now I just have to get me some damn ship mods.

[kildorn]

There's one that looks like it would involve blowing up a cap ship, but I didn't have the weapon needed to hurt the last hardpoint from what I could see.

They gave me a huge clear run at it as the last 20 seconds of the mission, so I'm sure SOMETHING can actually break it's final shields.

[Threash]

You can get photon torpedoes as an upgrade.  Has to be that.

[luckton]

You can get photon torpedoes as an upgrade.  Has to be that.

At level 50 

[01101010]

You can get photon torpedoes as an upgrade.  Has to be that.

erm... 

[Lantyssa]

No worries.  You get multi-phasic lasers, too.

[Ghambit]

Do we get to fight the Borg?

[Lantyssa]

If you're an Inquisitor you do...

[Sky]

Nobody expects that.

[eldaec]

Holy shit the xp from this is going to get nerfed so fucking hard.

[Surlyboi]

Get your XP from it while you can.

I'd never actually done this in beta because I thought it would distract from the story.

While it certainly doesn't add to the story, it is a hell of a lot of fun, more fun than it has any right to be.

[Venkman]

Holy shit the xp from this is going to get nerfed so fucking hard.

It's a way to level fast; however, I'm not sure it instills the same omg-players-are-capping-too-soon fear that an XP exploit or imbalance would have. Your character still needs to quest and make dialog choices to unlock various things like companions, factional gear, planet locations and so on (tl;dr: what Surlyboi said). Maybe you can race to 50, but you'll be bored going back through level after level of grey-con story quests :)

Doesn't mean they won't nerf the shit out of it. But they may not be worried.

[caladein]

Holy shit the xp from this is going to get nerfed so fucking hard.

I don't believe so.  There are plenty of ways to gain really good experience and loot outside of the main class+planet storyline, Space being one of them.  Flashpoints, Heroic Quests (and maybe Areas, only ran into one so far), Warzones, and Bonus Series are all good too.

[Threash]

Yeah warzone exp and gold is better than questing.  The space exp is only good for the dailies so its not like you can farm it to 50 in a day if you want too, it's just a nice half level before you set out on your adventures for the day.

[Velorath]

I agree that space combat xp is really only good when doing dailies and even a lot of this involve running two missions.  I usually do one space combat mission a day, as well as getting the daily warzone quest done (although I'll typically do additional warzones just because I like it).

[DraconianOne]

It's a way to level fast; however, I'm not sure it instills the same omg-players-are-capping-too-soon fear that an XP exploit or imbalance would have. Your character still needs to quest and make dialog choices to unlock various things like companions, factional gear, planet locations and so on (tl;dr: what Surlyboi said). Maybe you can race to 50, but you'll be bored going back through level after level of grey-con story quests :)

Doesn't mean they won't nerf the shit out of it. But they may not be worried.

I am (will be) quite happy to level a lot in Space Combat and/or PvP and just go through doing mostly story missions as it'll add to the replayability of my alts if I know there's a large amount of quests I haven't done. As they seem to be encouraging alts with the legacy system, they don't care that people might get to 50 by skipping lots of world quests.

On the other hand, I am surprised at how tricksy I found Space Combat to be without any ship parts. 

[Merusk]

The whole "only four missiles" was the worst part of space combat without mods.  I only did one mission that way but man did it suck.

[Cyrrex]

The whole "only four missiles" was the worst part of space combat without mods.  I only did one mission that way but man did it suck.

Eh?  I have only done like three missions, but I think I had at least 16 missiles each time, and I have upgraded nothing.  The rack refreshes after you use the first four.

On space combat in general...I think it looks pretty, but I am not sure about the fun factor yet.  Can you gamepad/flightstick this thing?  That might increase the lulz for me.  The rails bug me...and they could have easily done without them with just a bit more work.  Also needs a first person (first spaceship?) view.

[Venkman]

I don't mind the rails, but yea, first person would be great. First person with one of my companions on a turret, or heck, another player on a turret, that'd be huge.

[Cyrrex]

It isn't the rails themselves that bother me per se...it's more like...in pops a capital ship on the right edge of the screen.  You start taking aim at it's turrets, but before you get a chance to do much damage, and before it can do much to you, the rails start veering you off to the left.  Make me go past that motherfucker, jinking and juking.  And let me do some barrel rolls (maybe you can, I don't know). 

Just seems a little too easy (with outcome depending mostly on your gear), and a little more on rails than it needs to be.  Maybe subsequent missions will change my mind.

[luckton]

It isn't the rails themselves that bother me per se...it's more like...in pops a capital ship on the right edge of the screen.  You start taking aim at it's turrets, but before you get a chance to do much damage, and before it can do much to you, the rails start veering you off to the left.  Make me go past that motherfucker, jinking and juking.

Those capital ships are just noise.  Even if you pop their turrents off, they can still shoot at you, although it's just less pew-pew.  I generally ignore them if I still haven't met my x-wing fighter kill quota.

And let me do some barrel rolls (maybe you can, I don't know).

Space bar.

[Merusk]

The whole "only four missiles" was the worst part of space combat without mods.  I only did one mission that way but man did it suck.

Eh?  I have only done like three missions, but I think I had at least 16 missiles each time, and I have upgraded nothing.  The rack refreshes after you use the first four.

Yeah I know it reloads but I only had 4.. I thought.  Maybe I had more and didn't realize it.  It's far too easy to shoot off more than one volley.  Even with a rack of 50 I find I fire them off too quickly while trying to sweep more targets.

[Fordel]

As you go higher in levels, you'll get more and more objectives. Like you'll not only get "kill 50 fighters" but you'll also get "kill 20 turrets" and "kill 8 engines" etc. It's why the first few missions seem to last 2-3 minutes longer then they should.


Also if you want to strafe capital ships, do Makem Te Assault.

[Threash]

The whole "only four missiles" was the worst part of space combat without mods.  I only did one mission that way but man did it suck.

Eh?  I have only done like three missions, but I think I had at least 16 missiles each time, and I have upgraded nothing.  The rack refreshes after you use the first four.

Yeah I know it reloads but I only had 4.. I thought.  Maybe I had more and didn't realize it.  It's far too easy to shoot off more than one volley.  Even with a rack of 50 I find I fire them off too quickly while trying to sweep more targets.

Your starting ship has 20 missiles, four loaded and ready to go and 16 in reserve.  You can upgrade that to 40 before you do a single mission.

[Lantyssa]

Also if you want to strafe capital ships, do Makem Te Assault.

Is that the one in the atmosphere?  That one really surprised me with how awesome it felt.

[Fordel]

Also if you want to strafe capital ships, do Makem Te Assault.

Is that the one in the atmosphere?  That one really surprised me with how awesome it felt.

Yea, when your chasing down a Imperial Dreadnaught thing, and your own Cruisers are swooping in to help you take it down, while Empire cruisers are swooping in to stop you all the while plummeting towards a planet. Good times!

[Merusk]

Huh.. so they just reskin the same mission between sides then?  I was hoping as a Rebel you'd be trying to save the ship instead of helping to shoot it down as well.

[Fordel]

Rebel? 

[Miasma]

So can you just do them over and over or is it a daily?

[luckton]

So can you just do them over and over or is it a daily?

Both, though it's more worth my time to do them when I have the daily quests.

[Fordel]

So can you just do them over and over or is it a daily?

You can do the actual missions as many times as you'd like for a little bit of XP and Tokens, but the big payoff comes from the daily quests associated with the missions.