Maybe it's just me, but the energy costs to hunt this thing down and kill it 30 times is absolutely friggin rediculous!
task 3 takes 45k energy on disabling the NPC alone, plus whats needed to find the 30 npcs.

Crap like this is the reason GL is losing it's player base with the increase GP costs for holiday artifacts, new LM with Extravigant Exotic Matter Costs, and now this crap with a hellacious Energy Sink, JUST for a mod that turns into a ship ally?! Which by the way you have to do this 6 times in a row JUST TO GET the damned thing?!

Dan, can i ask you if your on drugs man? I only ask cause the Insanity needs to stop.

took me around 80K energy to do the task
45K for the kills and 30 to 40K to find 30 of them

I dont think 80K energy pr run is bad when you factor in that it will become a new allie once you get it fully upgraded

it takes 135,825 energy to get the Sehrin, Bioship Ally
and 353,000 energy to get the Trovar Zane, Elite Tracer

so for me 5 * 80K energy = 400K energy sounds fair, when you compair it to what it cost to get the Trovar Zane, Elite Tracer



and you have all the info about the mission in viewtopic.php?f=7&t=40534
including the 45K energy kill cost for 30 drones, so if you dont like the energy cost for this one, just don't pick the task
it's optional, so doesnt increase the success chance of the mission after Dan fixed Things

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=40672

DarkMar, yes, but your not limited to just 3 days to spend the energy for those allies, dude. A lot of people just don't have the energy reserves to do that and complete it. I'M NOT A FOOL! The whole point of this task is to sucker people into having to buy GP for energy refills just to complete the thing. While i am not opposed to Dan doing things to generate capitol, i am however against him gouging the crap out of people. and this is a 2 fold! cause if you cant complete it in time, you have to spend the GP to extend it out.

It's really hard to say thank you when your "boys" are stuck in a vice grip over this. This caters to those that have a crap load of energy or a big wallet, plain and simple!

it Cost me 0 GP's to get this....

the trick is simply having enougth energy so you can keep autoraninking on NPC kills, even when you have to kill low exp/ energy npc like this one

a 14+ energy / rank ratio combined with high attack is enougth to do that, without using exp boosts
if you have that, theire isnt realy any limit to how mutch energy you can spendt

as I remember it, it took me 5 to 6 hours to get the task done, as I had to hunt Down 3 times the normal number of uncommon legion mission NPC's

so yes I agrey, the task is quite hardcore, but not imposible if you make it a priority to add enougth Engineers to your ship to get your energy/rank ratio up to a point where you can simply autorank


Engineers vs Tactical Officers for me is a build choice, just like you can choice to do a SSB or a large ship build
until around 100 ranks ago I had more Engineers then Tactical Officers on ship, becourse I made autoranking a priority

For the past 2 years this game has been introducing more ways to spend energy, if you have been playing the game for those 2 years, and you didn't add enough energy to reach a 15:1 ratio(or better), then that's your own fault. The days of being able to play this game on a 10:1 ratio are long gone, and have been, as i said above, for the past 2 years.

There's also the option of not doing a LM task if you know you don't have the energy to complete it, so nobody is being forced into buying GP.

Let's not kid ourselves here either, the reason why you want a change is probably so you can spend less time playing the game, i mean lets be honest, you haven't really played all that much for the last year and a half, so you should have been able to garner a good chunk of engineers, so i wonder what happened.

From the sounds of it, i'd love to see how you perform on bases, because if 45k energy across 3 days makes you post this, i wonder how you'd feel spending 45k energy on just one base....

there are things called:
energy cubes
silthion sacs
tri matrixes.

store them up for when the mission comes and be judicious in how you do it.

sorry to say, but if you need energy cubes/tri matrixes. for a NPC hunt, you are doing it wrong
depending on your rank, the "normal" Legion mission NPC hunts can easily take you 1 to 6 ranks to do = up to 6 refills/cubes/tri matrixes
and this one is 3 to 5 times harder then your normal NPC hunt due to the 45K energy kill cost and becourse you need to find 3 times the normal number of NPC's

what you realy need to save those Cubes and tri matrixes for are legion mission tasks, like The Tenebris Discovery (Main Timeline), Task 2 Investigate Tenebris System, and other tasks like it where you need to spendt 15K energy in artifact use gives you 0 exp

I think i would rather hear other opinions of this rather than people that are over rank 2000+ credit card commando's... As i am sure EOTS has no trouble at all with this mission, Kirk. I'm more interested in the rank 1000's-1500's opinions on this.

under rank 1k, all i ever bought was a dyson, one rift and FATHER.
The only NPC mission I ever had problem with is the use artifact on NPC ones, where a lot of energy goes poof (as opposed to this where you are still getting exp for the hits)
Quite frankly, if you can't auto rank NPC despite having those mission NPCs hovering around, you aren't ready for the mission. Don't take things for granted, just because it's there doesn't mean you are ready for it.
And remember, there is always NI and mem implant, I haven't used those in over a year but they'd help if you really have trouble.

I don't use a Credit Card nor own one so nice assumption that falls flat there, in assuming i'm a rank 2k+ CC commando.

In actuality i've bought far more things in this game using just CTP than i have spent actual money(i have 100k ctp atm and donated 500k to our base, just incase people think i'm bs'ing), and the same can be said for most of my legionmates too.

Also what difference does a persons rank make, when it comes to your max energy? Surely what matters is the persons time played, as that means they have a much longer time to collect things like rescued prisoners and such, and make their ship strong and their energy levels high. I've played for just over 3 years, how long have you played?

One of my legionmates, Lord Arthos, just finished task 2 of the Late Timeline Tenebris Mission, which involves killing 30 Bralkir Warships, at a cost of 37500 energy, and he's only rank 1359, and he's almost at 3 years played.

We even got a rank 1721, who is at around 2 years 4 months played, who is also doing that same task.

So long as you invest in your ship in the correct manner, and don't disappear or go inactive for months or years, by the 2 year mark you should have a fairly decent ship build and a really good energy tank too. If you don't, then you did something wrong somewhere.

maby you should check your facts then

atm my ship is rank 1420'ish and been dooing LM mission NPC hunts since rank 500'ish without spending any GP's on energy refills to get them done

and no. I'm not a member of EOTS

and I didnt get this colection of LM and other NPC related upgraderble systems, by complaning about how hard it is to hunt Down NPC's or paying for them with GP's
what it took was the right ship build designed to hunt Down and kill NPC's and some hard work



got a few more Cerulean Autosync Beam + Strazi Oculix sitting in cargo, waiting for me to pick up more them before I install them
and done all the old NPC hunts 5+ times more then I needed to max the systems, just to make sure that we got as high a success chance as posible

LOL I dont use them to NPC. My point was he was complaining this was forcing him to spend GP which he feels was a ripoff. The reality is given the items mentioned, assuming you npc smartly to a minimal extent and are not just power ranking, you should never have to spend gp on refills.

his complaint was having to spendt GP on refills for a NPC hunt and after that spendt even more GP to extend the LM time as 3 days wouldnt be enougth to finish the hunt for 30 Darmos Drones

but think we agrey Fear
do it smartly, get the right build and you should NEVER have to spendt refills on doing a NPC hunt
a few silthion sacs is always a nice backup incase you fall a few 100 exp short of ranking becourse you found a lot of Clusters/Grivvs who ate your energy

i see a lot of complaining about the difficulties of LMs.
What do you people want? Easy LMs that everyone can complete every time?
LMs are supposed to be challenging...people "should" fail to complete sometimes.
Some LMs are meant to be harder than others.. Some are super easy some super hard.. this is a good thing.
I remember when the sniper drone mission came out, i couldnt complete the first few times i tried, then i got to a point where i could complete sometimes but not others. then I could always complete it, although it usually took steady NPCing through the entire time limit to do it. If you cant complete a task this time, suck it up and try again next time or try a different task. Be patient, you'll get it eventually.

Time to but in on the darmos drone... for anyone stating you spent zero GP... I started this LM with 200 GP, I have 110 Left, 90 GP, about 10 Sacs and an E Cube, I finished with 2 and a half hours on the clock, now It is one hell of an energy sink, what I think would be good is maybe an artifact that comes with the mission that you can use if your say... a Hacker gets something that reduces the darmos hull by 30% or something or an increase on the Damage cap would be hella nice maybe you know like a 3k cap that would ease it up a bit. Just my 2 pennies.

OR now that you know what that legion mission entails, you could CHOOSE to not do that particular task.

Not all legion missions are meant to be for everyone to complete, and even certain tasks fall into that same category.

Nobody is forced into spending GP, you choose to do so once you choose the task you want to do.

Your decision is your own.


I'd also like to weigh in with a few quotes, so that people fully understand how not everything is meant to be easy to complete or aimed at everyone;

Task 3 Name - Ring of "CHAMPIONS"

Task 3 Descriptor - Optional Objective


Now, lets look at the other 2 tasks;

Task 1 - 1:1 Planet structure for 15k energy.... Well that's a saving of 30k energy right there.

Task 2 - An artifact that allows secondary chances at base raids, and it only costs 1500 energy to complete. < You know what that screams to me, an easy task for people with low energy, or whom might not have the time to NPC.

true it is my choice to spend GP which I do on a regular bases but a little artifact here or a cap increase their goes along way

How about a compromise

We get a dmg cap raise on Darmos NPC, but Dan increases the Defense by 10x and the attack by 100x.

The attack and defenses(especially the defense) can be debuffed to hell so, its a win win surely.

Triple out the attack, 10x more defence and a cap increase would be awesome Make'em deal abit more damage BUT they take more then the bs 1k

ZeroEither, you do know you have to do that mission 5 times to turn the drone into an alley
if one run of the mission cost you 90 GP, you will end up spending 5 * 90 GP = 450 GP's

personaly I would NEVER spendt GP's to do a legion mission you would have no problem at all doing if you had enougth max energy to start with

what I would use those GP's on instead was to get a RIFT planet.......
the 10K AP pr hour you could get from a RIFT planet (if you find/buy the right planet to rift) will bring in a lot of Rescued Prisoners, Android Helmsman, Durtanium Brackets and XCharge Cells on a daily basis, that would help build up your ship so that a few months from now you wouldnt need to spendt GP's to do a mission like this one

but how you choice to spendt your $ is 100% up to you


all it took me to do this one was 80K energy = 4 ranks, 6 hours of killing NPC, and I was done without using any refills at all
and I dont even have a super strong ship with 100K Tactical Officers like some of the top ranking players do, instead I just made sure I always have enouth energy to autorank when I need it

when we get to the Late timeline in The Tenebris Discovery 2 days from now, I plane to hunt down Bralkir Warships
that one isnt mutch difrent from the Darmos Drone hunt



rank 400,
250.000 hull
1000 Damage Cap
=
1250 energy minimum to kill one, 100 exp gained per kill.
37,500 energy minimum for all 30.
and proberly another 30 to 40K energy to find them


why.... simply becourse I can do it, and like killing NPC's