Profit-Taker is a parade of design failures

[Nneevor]

Completed the Proft-Taker bounty chain yesterday, and, sadly, I'm disappointed. Whole seems to be rushed, unfinished and not tested properly, especially the Orb fifgt itself, but going step by step:

#1: unskippable cutscenes: that's a major failure, breaks pacing, breaks players ability to start another mission quickly, slow voice acting becomes annoying on 3rd-4th repetition, and all around wastes everybodys time. That's a Game Design 101 issuse that shouldn't ever appear at all.

#2: lack of clear delineation between phase 1 and 2: as one completes 1st phase in plains and receives bounty reward Little Duck comes out to allow player to start 2nd phase, she is however marked with yellow "mission objective" marker, where there should be none (phase 1 is complete, 2nd not started yet). It suggests that player is still continuing phase 1 and can be confusing if you want to run only phase 1. Little duck should be marked with blue Solaris Agent marker when outside.

#3: Profit-Taker fight itself tries to mix two incompatible approaches to boss fights. First is what I'd call "sponge" boss - one that has lots of HP, small to medium DPS output, but only needs enough firepower, and sone proper timing, to be taken down, examples are Vor, Vay Hek, Lephantis. In this case spawning random mobs in numbers is justified as distraction from shooting the same spot all the time. Second is what I'd call "puzzle" boss - high-DPS, invulnerable ones you can't make a dent in no matter how much DPS you bring until you figure out the right sequence of actions to make it vulnerable, examples are Razorback, Jackal, Eidolons. For this boss the challenge is in staying alive until its vulnerable and dosen't need hordes of support.

Profit-Taker is clearly a puzzle boss, use the right weapon at the right time, remove shield chargers, avoid boss' DPS... but it's accompanied by a detachment of endlessly-respawning mobs form "sponge" type fight. Not only they're completely unnccessary (archwing ammo can be provided in other ways, or just work the same as in space), they're actually bigger threat than the boss itself, and that completely breaks the point of boss fight!

All in all I've done the chain once, last phase was not fun, not a challenge, it was a chore, boring, tiring and too long. I know im not doing it a single time more, running other phases is better both time- and reward-wise. Profit-Taker in its current iteration has already overstayed its welcome after 1 day.

[Nneevor]

Just read patchnotes about Profit-Taker changes, and I see nothing really changed. It's a half-hearted attempt to put band-aid on an inherently broken product. Promising players guaranteed drops is an attempt to bribe them ito playing content that otherwise isn't worth the time and effort, and I see it as a silent admission of guilt, that, yes, that boss fight was proven to be broken.

Not only that the promised rewards dosen't even make the slog of a fight any more enticing.

Articula is irrelevant for anyone who isn't  a collector.

Debt-bonds can be obtained quicker and in greater amount from Ticker or Bounties.

Credits can be farmed far more efficiently (and less annoyingly) in index or high-level endless missions (especially with booster).

 

Theses changes fix nothing on underlying problems with the content, it's still not worth mine or anyone else's time or attention.

[Alejandrokek]

Not even 1m credits for all that process, meh.....

[Dark_RRiderr]

Well they did fix the part with cutscenes not beeing able to be skipped, so one point less to worry about.

You get like i think 25k (now 50k with double credit weekend and even more with booster) so thats at least something i would say, specially since you get money but in real also farm for something very much else this is not so bad then. (except for Index you would need to do 5 waves on a dark sector defense offering this for example and wont special items from that usually)

The Boss DPS is not so bad, even 10k Armor of Iron skin can be gone pretty fast if you dont dodge it good enouth. The spawning groups of enemys? Yeah they are actually really annoying and first i didnt liked that, still... i have to say it makes things at least a little more difficult (which is good) so i dont got a problem with that. We maybe just expected more, like an ENTIRELY new way to fight a boss, that was our fault of expecting to much maybe? Its still a decent boss fight BUT.... YES they should have bug tested it more (there where still way to many bugs left JUST like on the Eidolon hunt.......!) so there is in fact a point i do agree with very much and that was disappointing.

What is more annoying is the way you farm the Gyro systems.... there should be better ways to get this and more options to get this recource, i dont really need relics from doing this bountys and would rather have an higher drop chance for the Gyros and other things you can only get in bountys then getting Relics to be very honest.

[YoungZ17]

You get 25k for 1 extractor on heiracon.