Okkilor, Drannik Hub
Lazuli Refinery Center
Sha'din AI Matrix
Reynard, Lazuli Titan
Renegar, Lazuli Station

All of these disappear forever when you hit level 600. I'm at level 556, and the future for me holds losing more and more fun NPC's to kill. Korteth at 650, Megacomplexes at 750, and so on.

Even ignoring the artifacts and CTP sources that are gone once these guys disappear, it also takes away from much of the fun of the game - when a Reynard appears in our legion, it's a dogpile to catch it. It's a fun little thing to share with the legion and kill. The new NPC's are so rare (and solo only), so there's nothing to replace the brief hunt that these NPC's provide. And much of the new things like Warp Stations are ungodly powerful megabeasts.

Please preserve and add to the fun that 3-person NPC's provide, and keep them viable into later levels. I'm not even asking for fantastic new drops or anything. Hell, make Reynard shareable for all levels and I'm happy.

If you do add to them, please don't make them ungodly slogs through billions of points of hull. You don't have to build the *entire* endgame around slowing down high levelers!

Just please keep one of the more fun aspects of the game around for people that reach high levels - Leveling up shouldn't be a process of steady loss of game features!

i'm 557 , and i agree , raise the bar for these or introduce something more suited to such high ranks


+1

i completely agree. lol, theres not much more to say other than this is an excellent idea.

Definitely agree. All these NPC bosses provide planet attack and ship shields. So why not add some bosses after level 600 that provide planet defence and ship hull?

And thinking about it, why not add some more 4-player bosses? Korteth is the only 4-player boss that I know of. Why can't there be 5-player bosses, and 6-player, and so on, too? There could be a gradual increase until you reach the Warp Station.

+1

Im not as high as you guys, but its already gotten to the point where i resent ranking up, every increase in level brings me closer to the nerf point. Wish I was lvl 100 again (but with my current ship).

Whilst we are on the subject is there a list of what npcs disapear at what rank, it would be interesting to see which arti's Im missing, probably forever due to fast ranking (biggest mistake ever).

I disagree. I don't want more stuff clogging my battle tab. I actually ranked up to 600 on purpose to get rid of those a while back. The fewer flavours of NPC's you can see, the more matched ones you get. Not to mention that most of the NPC's you mention have their higher ranked counterparts in game. Xiloy, Fab Plants (these I'd like to see until rank 2000, true), Hypergrids, Rethions. Yes the ones you mentioned are easy kills, easy experience, easy CTP. Still, I'd like them to stay as they are.

@Matress Rethion is 4 players too.

one thing i wouldnt mind is seeing the drops from nexus, hypergrids, xiloy, etc. drop more complex tech than their previous versions. it seems silly to me that a hypergrid core is worth around 19 ctp, whereas an ai whatever is worth close to 39. i would think an entire hypergrid core would be worth at least double what one shadin computer is worth.

also, because these are space stations we are fighting, why are we getting as much experiance as fighting a 3 man ship at best? i would think a hypergrid, the center of shadin organization, or a dark command nexus, the mastermind behind the most notorious smugglers in the galaxy, would award AT LEAST 500 xp, if not closer to 750.

i'd like to see a trap drop from the Telarys... and higher CTP on the other telarys drops

we lose them and it has to be like that or they become way more efficent to farm than the lower npcs charger etc

e.g. a level 1000+ hitting a drannik hub will lock it in a drastically reduced amount of attacks compared to a level 200 which would set the exp gain of them to a ridiculous proportion...

Not to mention the amount of farming of ctp which would only create a greater divide between lower legions - players and the bigger legions.

The only viable option i see is bringing out new elites for the higher ranks which Dan has already introduced and we will probably see more eventually sooner or later.

BTW i lost stryll prison ship today, yes i loved farming them for a chance of prisioners so i know why people are unhappy losing elites but its neccesary for the games growth.

Fair enough, but killing an Okkilor doesn't affect me as much as a low-level, because I need more xp to level. It takes over 20k xp for me to rank up, so the 150 from an Okkilor isn't exactly going to rocket me up a whole lot faster.

And CTP is much the same - to reach level 5 on a base takes 5k CTP - Level 7, like the Unknown is going for, costs 150k! If you're a small legion with a couple big guys, the last thing you should want is your big guys suddenly being able to get less CTP because their NPC's dry up.

And notice in my post that I don't want to change the game balance - I'm not asking for more loot, I'm just saying that phasing out one of the funner parts of the game as you level up isn't a good way for the game to be set up, especially now that it's not like one or two nut-jobs that are really high level. A good-sized portion of the active player base is getting to these higher levels, and finding that some of the best parts of the game get sparser, rather than richer, as we excel. That seems like a shame to me.

The whole idea is a hub has 5k hull and 3k shields atm i'm 699 with almost 12k attack i'd imagine id lock it with 4 maybe 5 hits dependant on the hit cap on it + or - for 20-25 energy getting 165 reward with a buff on in an npc run to auto level it gives u 10-15 exp x 5 plus the reward bonus at max for 25 energy u could get 240 a 10:1 exp return off it is ridiculously unbalanced if 2 or 3 of them come up it makes the energy requirement to level drop so low in auto ranking requirement we'd se players like frail twice the rank he is now.

Makes the game to unbalanced especially the fact that with multiple elites like the hub still appearing.

A new design in a different direction released recently by dan for all viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5207&p=138188#p138188 that will help people catch up to higher players or choose to defend more.

okkilor is rank 200, means 500 damage cap
7000 shield + 5000 hull = 12000 total
3 drop slots means you need 4k dmg to lock
someone hitting damage cap locks in 8 hits, no less

tnaks for the info too tired to go throught hte wiki for it but at 8 hits still miles above the required 4:1 ratio to auto rank

I totally agree to the scrap value issue. OK, we got it, we rank up too fast. Keep the diminished experience. However, it's extremely contra-intuitive to have a better version of "insert here module name" yield half (or less) the CTP when scrapped vs a low ranked version. Seriously.

@ lionheart
thats assuming you can generate enough okkilors or similar npcs to manage to get enough xp to autorank.

considering i get on average 12xp per hit
and 150xp for the disable
thats approx 250 xp per okkilor.
I need about 17000 xp to rank.

thats SIXTY EIGHT okkilors i need to have available to autorank. and, although NPCs are bountiful in The Unknown, i gotta say it would probably take 2 weeks to see 68 okkilors, and thats IF i locked on every single one. imo, this is not a viable method to autorank, as by autoranking through a chance occurance of rare NPCs, along with having to rely on other players to NPC hunt specifically for you to rank, it seems that this method would require approx 2 or 3 days to level. Which, is NOT the autorankers objective. If your asking 'can' someone autorank off these NPCs, then yes. I have tried saving my energy specifically for NPCs, and i got about 1 rank out of one bar of energy. it took me 5 days tho. So because of that, i see no harm in extending the life of these NPCs to higher ranks, because the xp cost is only going to go up from there (i'm just over rank 430 btw). I would be MORE worried about players around rank 200-300 who are able to get in on these, because they require much less xp to rank, and can easily lock on these NPCs with 10 hits if theyve build their ship right. To me, that is more of an autoranking recipie.

I can autorank on NPC's if I have an RSL implant, but why would I want to? If I rank too quickly I'll have the ShaneBetten Ship Made-O'-Glass(tm) due to not getting artifacts. And of course, more NPC's will go away! Plus, PvP just gets harder as you level, with fewer targets.

My main point is that six months ago, Dan could have the world end at level 600 because there were only a couple super-levelers that were there. But 600 is no longer staggering, and a larger bulk of active players are in the 500's and up. It's not just one or two hardcore folks any more, so the world needs to extend a bit further!

I'm happy that there's new missions for high-level folks like Caelon and the Silthion Larva - that's great and exactly what the game needs. I'm just asking that he *not* take away the some of the existing things that make the game fun.

agreed toaster a module say 20 in size that would allow u to them lower npcs at a reduced exp return might be one possible solution

regarding the auto rank some people go for decks some ppl pump up engineers i did engineers so i have a whole 1 -2k total xp to level unless i slow leveling by dumping the energy into the base

it all goes back to your early leveling experience whether to take engineers or how many decks u need e.g. a person who builds up decks from ap alone will ofc be weaker than a person who sets off same day as a guy using rp to decks for modules but after a certain points as he can rank faster and produce more production he becomes stronger at an uncatchable rate.

Okkilor, Drannik Hub
Lazuli Refinery Center
Sha'din AI Matrix
Reynard, Lazuli Titan
Renegar, Lazuli Station

The thing is each of those already has a higher level replacement, for Okkilor there is the Encephalon Core, the centers get replaced by the plants(which I feel passive def and cloak are more important than att), the hypergrid for the AI and the superhauler for the lazuli. Now I do wish we could find a Stryll Supermax prison ship to replace that one but everything else already has a higher form. I would be surprised to see new npcs for even later like the XRP Warp Station to further replace these and annoy the heck out of many high level players as npcs become much like mid to high ranked bases.

+1