What I did not expect was the majority of those low to mid grade troops having insanely high dodges, they hit just about every time or the fact that when they weren't blowing me up that majority of the fights actually timed out. In what world does a Nerio take down Torrents, Ignis, Dreadnoughts,and Regis mecha with consistency? Granted they poke you for minimal damage 18-20 something but every fifth poke like that will be a crit-kill, so you watch your finely groomed and tuned troops get destroyed by sub-par forces. Never mind you also have crit-kill weapons, your precision is in the high 70s or above, you just will not hit them, but be assured they will hit you and they will crit-kill you no matter how you are set up. If you do manage to make it through that, then you will most likely time out, and have to re-enter the fight to finish them off.
Now I know the game is skewed towards niode gear for advantages so I equipped accordingly. Most of my troops being niode mecha with niode weapon load outs and equipment to some degree. At worst half niode and half crystal, at best full niode everything on niode mecha. That got me the timing out fights. Seriously? I go in packing the stuff that clearly is designed to give an advantage and I get to time out the fight? Now there has been discussion upon discussion of this on the players page, and people were told this whole thing will be looked at and readdressed at some point in January. Which is fine, but that does little to nothing now for the people trying to slug their way through this mess. I am a level 92, on the second mission zone, and I had a hell of a time getting through this. Can you imagine what the higher zones are like for players who are lower leveled or even higher level who have slaughtered these mini bosses multiple times? It's got to be a nightmare.
Even though the difficulty has jumped tremendously on these bosses/mini-bosses the rewards and pay outs still are pretty crappy. It is still low level gear that at best is sold off for niodes at a much reduced price. If you are going to augment the difficulty to such a degree at least make the pay outs worth while according to level, or the ridiculous jump in difficulty. As is right now the missions are not really worth doing, at best you get higher and higher fights for minimal niodes, at worst you get a headache trying to kill bosses who are very obviously skewed towards making you time out, if not set to straight up obliterate you, with you landing only a handful of shots at best before they crit-kill you. That kind of fight for minimal rewards we are used to seeing in after CW raids, dare I say it almost expected and pretty well known. But for mission bosses, gimme a break. Oh but hey, they added a new background to Cogwerk for the fights so at least you can look at something new as frustration mounts.
Suggested fixes have been cap the mini-bosses/bosses at a certain point, increase the pay out according to difficulty/level, make drop rates higher according to level/difficulty, turn the fights back to how they were and go about your day, or just stop doing the missions after a certain point. We shall see if anything gets taken into consideration or how "fixed" this gets in January.
Submitted by Pat Willis#224534