Shouldn't we wait with any more changes until we have a stable server again?
I think the developers have enough on their mind as it is, today comes first tomorrow is far in the future!

There are quiet a lot of soloable spawns now, and by soloing I mean a Heavy Mech + 2 Logistics to kill light bots.  This AI change does offset the risk for reqard factor of Beta, if you include AOE damage into the equation.

In doing so this will make research for the newer players that much harder to obtain...I'm talking extremely hard to obtain.

Now if said rewards were adjusted for more favorable kernel drop rates, I could see potential here.

Just Sayin
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Mine was obvious sarcasm.

Farming low end mobs got harder but not by much. The issue now is the old RR style does not work as well. The new style is kill them as they spawn. It was always the easiest but required the most man power. Now if you're farming you might as well take 2 combats and 1 RR rather than 1 combats and 2 RR.

If there is one thing I know well it's the different ways to farm NPC's (Because apparently I've never PVPed before according to a few people).

The new PVE REQUIRES players to fit similar to PVP now, and that change in mindset is probably the hurdle here; and it introduces a new learning curve, even for PVE players that have farmed for months.

If your going to solo, an ECCM is required, players are also going to have to fit a sensor amp and put more EP into sensor connection to improve relock; because even with ECCM the ewar will land an ECM and supression on you eventually.

This means giving up weapon tuners, reducing sustained dps, meaning your leg slots are going to have to be more defensive to allow you to tank too. Just kiting in/out of lock range doesn't work.

The plus side, is they have accumulator now, so again with PVP fits, you can add in nuets and drainers. But again this reduces DPS.

Maxing out DPS, as Alex points out with 1 combat/2 support, worked before when you could power the NPC's down. Now it takes more finnese; and a second combat bot to get your DPS back up to break the spawn; even with RSA.

But solo, just pure DPS won't win the day anymore. But, increasing the reward makes non-solo farming TOO much NIC/hour, unless you also decrease the spawn rate.

tl-dr; Only by making smaller spawns and decreasing the spawn rate, can you balance easier solo play without over-rewarding group play. And of course, they'll need to be a seperation between solo and group spawns, to keep the group spawns also challenging.

MMO does not mean you have to form groups of 40 players to kill a 1 star NPC. MMO means that you can interact with other players, and they help form the game world with you.

Solo content is still MMO content.

The main purposed of solo content, however, isn't for that guy that wants to farm bots forever. Its there, so when you log in there are already other players in your corp online.

Conceptually, when players log in and have nothing to do, they log out. This doesn't allow time for groups to form. Solo content gives players a reason to be online, so that enough people can get logged in at the same time, and THEN they can group up and do multi-player content.

I generally go out farming on my Artemis (soon to be Seth), and the tactic I use has been made a lot easier by the AI change.

With an optimal range of 430m, I am still hitting the bots I farm (Blue mechs/lights/assaults. 1-3 star mostly) from well outside their lock range. The only ones that have a chance of locking me are the ewar bots, but since they die in two salvos I don't really pay any attention to them.

Anyway before the AI changes, they would be pretty relentless and keep running towards me as I backed off, and eventually I would run out of room to shoot them and keep range, and would either have to get locked and take some damage (fine for non-darkstar mechs) or move to a nearby hilltop that has LoS of them and shoot them from there.

With the new AI change they get bored of chasing me back and turn around and walk back to their spawn location, allowing me to shoot any of the remaining bots in the back.

This has reduced the amount of reps I need almost to zero allowing me to focus on accumulator recharge instead.

Now I do use a support bot, but that is only because there are no accu stable Artemis fits (no bonus to accumulator) so either you bring charges with you (good luck doing that for an hours PvE grind) or get someone else to fill your accumulator for you (Gargoyle+Recharge NEXUS+Energy Transferer).