Thoughts on Xeno-Hunter Tier 3
25 Mar 2020Erlaed
After a lot of grinding, I got the third star for Xeno-Hunter this week. It was a pretty rewarding exercise. Soloing 50 Basilisks over a few weeks forced me to up my game with respect to flying FA off, to improve my aim, and to delve deeper into Interceptor/Swarm mechanics. The requirement for Cyclopses was also useful - repetition of basics in a low-stress environment helped me troubleshoot my techniques.The new skills transferred into other aspects of the game. I dipped my toes into LTD mining for the first time since the great nerf, and found to my surprise that the FA off training paid off in the asteroid rings in spades.
The Interceptor-fighting skills also translated well into bounty hunting. The FA off training, again, was significant. Also, fighting Interceptors forces you to learn a raft of new defensive skills. Before getting into Thargoid hunting, I rarely repaired the ship or subsystems in combat, because it's so rare to really bloodied in regular PVE. Better defense opens up many-on-one bounty hunting situations (primarily high threat Unidentified Signal Sources) and would probably pay off big in conflict zones.
I guess another upside of going into Thargoid hunting has been being forced to do the Guardian grind. The gameplay is what it is, but the equipment has its high points. Even as a pretty jaded player, I do have to admit some of the visuals are fantastic.
Now, what are the downsides? As many others have noted, flying around in supercruise with relative mouse is awful. Having been clobbered many times by how the game handles control schemes makes me very wary of turning off relative mouse. The result is that switching out of Thargoid mode for an evening of exploration or trading - or even a quick jaunt over to Shinrarta Dezhra - is more painful than it needs to be.
The biggest downside is the incredible number of scout kills required for each star. I snooped around to see which of the big names in Xeno hunting had Tier 3 or higher at Inara. None of the ones I checked did. Not only that, I think only one of them had the Tier 1 badge on this site. These players probably all have the 500 total interceptor kills, the 100 Basilisks, and the 50 Medusas required for 4 stars here. I'm sure the barrier is the thousands and thousands of required scout kills.
Now, say we had incursions every week. That means tons of scout massacre missions, which (a) pay well, (b) can be stacked, (c) are pretty stress free, and (d) are a reasonable way to spend a half hour. Over the course of months, I could see a reasonable person racking up thousands of scout kills. But we don't have incursions every week - we have about 3 weeks of incursion every six months. So, as things stand now, 5,000 scout kills pays 50M credits (1/4 of a good couple of hours mining) and requires travelling to, finding, and dropping in and out of about 1,000 nonhuman signal sources. And that 50M is gross - a significant chunk of that would be spent on repairs, refuelling, and restocking. Moreover, on the rare occasions we do have incursions, there are so many other ripe fruit to pick, going HAM on scouts full time probably isn't a very good use of one's time.
So, the reason I sat down to write this was to take stock and decide what I'm going to do regarding Xeno-Hunter Tier 4. I'm not going to chase it aggressively, and the reason is primarily the requirement of killing another 5,000 scouts. I really can't see ever spending the time to kill another 5,000 scouts, but stranger things have happened. I will probably kill some Cyclopses for kicks. I expect that I'll soon start a concerted effort to solo Medusae, and I expect it'll be - like the Basis - sort of fun, sort of painful, and instructive.