Extermination missions

[MrDjinn]

I feel that they went from being too easy on release to being impossible in current version.

I was never a part those extermination farming parties, in fact I found those missions boring. As I was leveling and going through the difficulties. I generally avoided these missions throughout early levels where each op had 1 mission and then mid-levels where there are 2-mission ops.

Now I play a lot of 3-mission ops on difficulty 6 and rarely 7 (when I want to lose faith in humanity and democracy) and sometimes you just get one of those extermination mission in a set. Yesterday I played 2 of them vs bots on difficulty 6 and both times felt actually impossible. 2nd time the only reason we made it with the objective was because the only player who decided not to leave found a raised platform from which we could throw stratagems in relative safety - still there was no chance to extract as there were tanks and elites everywhere. No shot to get to the transport at all.

I consider cheesing as explained above to be unintended way to play and without the cheese we would stand no chance.

Let me be clear - I don't consider myself a great player and since I have 0 friends interested in playing this - I play in pugs. I tend to test everything myself and use what feels good to me, I don't get attached to current meta, frankly I don't even know what current meta is. But I feel like the amount of elite spawns is far overtuned in extermination missions especially. It's felt a bit in normal missions as well, where it's very difficult now to do anything outside main objectives and then immediately extract, but exterminations feel actually impossible to me.

[Pinhead Larry]

Yeah something about those missions feels scuffed. It's seemingly random though, like sometimes diff 7 feels like diff 5, and then you go and do a diff 5 and it's as bad if not worse than a diff 9. Arrowhead needs to normalize the spawn AI.

[Tiny Mute Lizard]

Yea, i also think there is some overcompensation going on, even if i wouldnt say impossible but i know this depends a lot on your approach on enjoying the game. Either way, this alarms me a bit, because this isn't really feeling like balance but like a revenge-fix because some dev got peeved.

The issue with this is, that this implies a "We must violate the players"-mentality and not in a playful way? I know im always early with this kind of doomerism but i also was rarely wrong with it... I just hope this is just them figuring it out a bit slower than we wont and that it will all find the right sweet spot between "lol afk farm" and "ball busting unit spam" rather soonish.

[Amaranth]

I play difficulty 7 with randoms. Before, they were really boring. Set a few sentries and wait, doing nothing. Now they are fun.

[Zaqq]

The new TCS missions only highlight the issues with Extermination missions.

In TCS missions you also defend against waves of enemies, but you are actually given time to prepare, the map is much bigger with room to maneuver, and there's breathing room between silos, while in Extermination there's an unstoppable barrage of enemies.