Several issues with the Return to Eden raid

1

There are several issues with the Return to Eden raid that I want to address, as well as provide some recommendations.

 

  • Having to push the spheres manually into the Dreadnought bay is bad design, and is far too clumsy, especially for people with lag, ping issues or packet loss. You should be able to latch them to the front of your ship like in Spaceball, making it much easier to load up the Dreadnought for firing. If needed, require the player to channel on it for a few seconds to latch the sphere (like picking up a bomb in Detonation or something like that). In fact, go further with it by requiring the player to press their “Interact” key (like with picking up a container in OS) so they can start channeling so that players don’t unintentionally pick one up.

 

  • When taking out the enemy shield projectors early on, the requirement of long range isn’t a good thing. If you can’t fire over 3KM, you will always go out-of-bounds if trying to fire on them. Again, not good gameplay design. Maybe the limits of the map should be extended slightly to allow close-range Gunships to contribute if they wish to.

 

  • The Energy Pillars have an unclear hitbox, meaning you can’t actually be sure whether you’re about to collide with it or not. This can be really important for players who are trying to time things like a Combat Reboot to avoid/mitigate the damage. This needs to be addressed, and it should be clearer from a visual standpoint.

 

  • The Dreadnought cannon aiming appears to be buggy. While I wasn’t the one charging/aiming the cannons during my team’s attempts, they were being continually frustrated by how it wasn’t working as they wanted, even if it appeared to be aimed properly. We all came to the conclusion that the system was bugged, so this needs to be looked at (unfortunately, there’s no Bug Report section for PvE).

 

I will not say that the mission is bad; its intended design is very good compared to Defiler or Destroyer in that it doesn’t favor playing a destroyer. However, due to a number of gameplay issues, it has to be given a series of changes to make it actually winnable by more than just 0.1% of the playerbase (I exaggerate, but you get what I mean).

2

I would like to have the spheres be collectible like bombs, they can even considerably slow down your ship to make up for it, as in phase 1, they likely don’t allow people to get close to them due to them moving so wildly across the map they might have a hitbox that could ram people and instantly kill them, a range of 4k should be enough, lasers are recommended.

As for the radiation walls in phase 2 they will likely be tweaked in time, as for main caliber aiming, it seems to aim depending on your ship position relative to the cannon, you face the Devourer and you stay on the left side of the cannon, it will aim right, you stay on the middle it will aim on the middle, you stay on right it will aim left, altough the place where it aims doesn’t matter, all you have to do is land 5 shots, shots with the 5 spheres delivered count as two, if you don’t manage to deliver 5 in one stage, the remaining will carry to the next, you only deliver 4, next time you have to deliver them you will only have to deliver one, hope this cleared up some things for the time being.