Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeh, I pretty regularly find umbraphage (i.e. the best light qua actually lighting things up in the game) or the lightbringer wand (a faintly disgustingly powerful summoning artifact that can largely carry you through the tail end of the west and a chunk of the east) before I hit voratun crap. Burning star, too, though that's more quality of life upgrade than power up. There's some stuff, basically.  Occasionally find d-steel or stralite stuff that sticks around past the tier 5, too. Admittedly it's usually a 30% global slow or somethin' non-weapon randart or rare, but it's there.

So far as the early game stuff goes, skipping is totally fine. The only thing of the tier one dungeons I'd recommend as required would be trollmire, kor'pul, and the crystal caves (and I want to say heart if you're a dwarf?), to get their backup guardians to spawn later on.

Still, if it's still too much (and I totes wouldn't blame you if it is), you might check out addons. Know there's some kind of quick tome thing, and I think there's a handful of others aimed at squelching some of that early game tour. Pretty regularly play the campaign uncapper, ferex, which accelerates XP gain enough you can comfortably skip about half the t1s (and probably a t2 or two) if you don't want to bother with them.

Also find ember's campaign to be a fair bit less painful on that front. Helps that there's only 2-4 tier one dungeons (depending on what you consider dead cow land and the outpost) there, heh.

... and yeah, adventurer is fine. If you want the permadeath feel, you can always just tell the respawn critter to off you. It doesn't take something away, just gives you a bit more choice in whether you want to keep playing or not.

Huh. Don't actually play, cause my comp can't run the thing worth a damn, but can't you still buy most/all things with whatever is that pops out from recycled duplicates? Do watch a streamer or two that play HotS, and from what I can tell the store mostly just ended up with more ways to get free shit, with not terribly much impact on direct purchase of (at least most) stuff. Net result of it being better for both free folk and dosh dropping critters, so far as raw loot acquisition goes.

... not that I don't understand the pathos about the loot boxes, mind you. Just that, from what I understand, the shift didn't really take away much so far as being able to buy skins. Worst of it so far as that particular complaint goes seems to be putting another step in the process of wallet to transient data acquisition.

Least seeing it from the outside, it's one of the less painful gacha type systems I've seen. Which puts it fairly high up so far as F2P monetization goes... though that may say significantly more about the other examples than it does about HotS, ha.

Amusingly enough, it turns out corvus is apparently one of the worst systems so far as increased activity goes. Particularly since I'm running mods and one of them sticks another faction in there, but even without, with hegemony, independents, and a pirate base all in the same system it seems to draw in an unusual amount of nastiness when everyone can by and large see everyone else. No more passing in the infinite night, errybody party on pirate planet~

Interesting thing is after the starting system, I think I'm actually feeling the increase in concurrent bounty missions I slipped in there more than most things. Turns out when you quadruple the number of potential bounty missions running at any one time, you run into more bounty fleets when you're out and about. Been running into systems with two or three of the buggers loitering around... often. Whereas with the default settings it's pretty rare. Which makes for extra fun considering they like to chill in remnant systems, ehehe.

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Anyway, anyone happen to know if there's a setting or something to flip that makes lay-in-course stop aiming for stars (if possible, anyway) when you point it at a system? Go for actual jump points or somethin'. Kinda' irritating to have to do it manually or else suck up a supply and repair hit (small, usually, but still) because autopilot felt like dropping you in the middle of a corona was a good idea.

E: Oh wow. Hung around in a neutron star system long enough to see the pulsar shtick. That's pretty impressive. Couldn't bring myself to actually drive into it to see what happens, heh.

Eh smj, for what it's worth the firing letter is apparently floating around, if it hasn't been linked already. It's... fairly obvious the firing was about investigations (which specific ones, eh, hell if I know). Somehow the bugger couldn't even manage to reign it in enough to make the letter something that wasn't more than just shy of outright explicit.

Wouldn't know how even if I wanted to, heh, and it wouldn't particularly help, either. Go dark just reduces the amount you add to other folks sensor range, and even a 1k or something reduction (it's probably less, mind) isn't going to do much for you when everyone's sensors have a 4k distance boost

Recovery means hiding in/near a larger battle group, basically, or running for a station. Reminds me of earlier versions (pre-emergency/sustain burn), really. If you can't do one of those, well... run as long as you can, hopefully you'll buy enough time to fix yourself up enough to survive the fight, ehehe.

... oh, neat. Finally found where you can adjust the difficulty values (settings.json, a bit down the file). That's... nice. Actually been poking around the last day or so trying to figure out how to do that, 'cause I wanted to play an easy that has normal damage but massively increased sensor values (i.e. +4k instead of +500, as sensor bursting every few minutes if you're trying to find things to do was becoming significantly irritating). Upped the salvage multiplier a little too because why not, eh? Forget what else I poked at, save turning off that goddamn whiteout and sinking the number of procurement missions to something like a fourth the original value, probably upping the number of concurrent bounties, too. Things are nicer, now. Doesn't look like I could reload old saves with the new values, but... I'm okay with that if it means never having to slow down for that bloody active sensor again.

E:... though it does mean everything else can see me from that far out, too. I... I'll take it. I'll take it. It certainly makes systems a lot more... active.

It can definitely pay for itself, if nothing else, eventually. It can take a bit to run across class 4 or 5 data, but even the smaller stuff is usually at least a few thousand. If you're surveying as you explore (particularly if you're doing it on top of bounty hunting, checking nearby systems after hitting one, or similar stuff for probe drop missions), you can end up raking in a good fair amount.

Currently doing a new mod-enabled run, but my other one (the legion/paragon monstrosity) cleared over a million on two separate distant-system runabouts. Primary reason I could take those two in when I found 'em, since affording it was totally a thing. Few class IV and/or V survey datas, couple of alpha AI cores,* the smattering of <other stuff>, start your exploration on a multi-week out bounty so you can guarantee a couple dozen k when you get back, it can add up pretty quick. You definitely need good support ships if you're going for that, though, and/or be willing to pick up derelicts as you go along to net more cargo/fuel space. Plenty of cargo space and fuel, lots of crew (more for scavenging than surveying, though you need hundreds for the biggest stuff regardless).

Incidentally, small exploration tip -- if you don't need to be moving hyper quick (and even if you might, since you can easily eject the excess) going over weight with supplies (specifically the supply item) is basically without downside. It massively inflates your maintenance supply costs, but all that really means is the problem is self-solving and in the interim you can often enough fix up stuff while they're draining back down to equilibrium. Kinda' useful if you're hitting ships or debris fields along the way.

... though that said, unless you're using tugs, I would probably recommend avoiding the biggest fuel/crew/cargo transport ships. Their burn limit is a total nuisance otherwise. Think they're better off if you are using tugs, but probably don't bother otherwise.

* Give them to tri-tach if you can and you're after cash, by the by. Assuming it's not random per game, they apparently give double bounty for AI cores (i.e. 300k for a single alpha), which can rapidly become hella' bank if you're faffing around the outer systems hitting drone fleets and stations.