Codex Enemy List necessary fixes

[AVSManfred]

@[DE]Rebecca

Well let me first say, i understand that issues I gonna describe it are probably somewhere near the bottom of of dev team priority list currently while incoming Mainline with Grendel and Melee 3.0 are close and we still have Railjack and Duviri Paradox under development but on the other hand some of these fixes might be very easy and possible to sneak them into a hotfix or as a portion of Mainline update.

 

So with this out of the way, I'm writing this down mainly because I'm bit of codex completionist, but some of the recent additions to enemy list felt almost like attempt on punishing such attitude or forcing grind into another aspect of this game, or both at once, and this also hurt the role of codex as our in-game source of knowledge about enemies if getting this knowledge feels like as much of a grind as getting some rare drops, and this pushes more and more people into this mindset of "who cares" making codex become slowly more and more irrelevant what shouldn't really be the case for feature that can be very helpful.

#1: Inconsistent scanning standards 

Well this is something that started way back with Alpha Ghouls needing 20 scans as "boss type" enemies during 1st appearance of this event, and even if this particular problem was solved then later we have way more of it 

 

here is list of Eximuses that have number of scans above standard of 3, and as much as I could pass on 5 scans then 20 is way too much for something that is supposed to be "rare" version of enemy also this list don't cover another group of enemies that have the same problem which are recently added Demolishers with Devourer, Expired, Kuva Guardian, Anti-Moa and Charger, needing 20 scans while other types of Demolishers need just 5

Fix to this would be to simply change the current numbers and set a standard for future additions, just keep it consistent

 

#2: Ridiculously hard to get or obscure enemy variants

So this is frustrating when you don't know what to do to get one specific entry completed and it demands to do some ridiculous things to encounter this variant of an enemy like Manic Bombard Eximus demanding to get a lockdown in the manic holding tile before releasing them or even better example 

 

And as much as the Manic one is something that has clear rules to how to cause it, the Jackal one having to perform something like this not even for a consistent spawn but for merely chance shouldn't be a thing, the chance of this Jackal variant should be higher and not demanding to cause basically double alert state, make the rules of how to cause this encounter clear and allow for something more than chance

 

Another thing from this category can be Vapos dropships which are hard to find and usually they fly out of the tile before a player has a chance to scan them

 

One more thing under this category might be Eximuses of Vapos Elite Rangers due to fact they are fairly scarce on the new Jupiter due to fact of them having a limited amount of tiles they can spawn on and also falling under the 1st problem

 

Next portion of this problem are areas with 2 tiers of enemies something that probably started with Orb Vallis and Elite Terra units but seriously became problem on new Jupiter with new Vapos units and fact that increasing levels of enemies don't increase chance of meeting some of the Eximuses, because they're getting rolled out of possible options in favor of higher-tier enemies and their Eximuses

 

Like situation when getting scans of Eximus of something that should be most baseline enemy is considered a rare find is simply not right, and my suggestion how to fix it is to allow regular and elite variants of these units to have wider range of levels when both can spawn, high enough that there is a decent chance for Eximuses of them during endless missions like Defense or Survival, before we reach levels of lower tier of enemies being rolled out of spawn table

 

#3 Conservation targets

So this is bit on the personal side of things but conservation targets scanning was quite annoying since this activity was added and so far there are still issues with it, addition of pheromones made for a weird situation that most common and rarest variants of species are easy to get to scan them but the middle rarity is still really hard to get it to spawn.

 

Fix for this would be the addition of specific pheromone for the middle rarity variant that would cost bit lest than pheromone for the rare variant, or make pheromone have 50/50 chance to spawn middle or rare variant

 

 #4: Missing or confusing entries

This one has quite a bit to unpack, starting with Mite Raknoid still not being in Codex even if other Raknoids including event-exclusive Coolant ones are present there, other things are confusing entries like Demolisher Nox being listed as just Nox, or new variant of Hyekka that supposed to show up only on Kuva disruption but seems like so far no one encountered it to get even one scan and provide graphic to Wiki, these are oversights that should be taken care of but seems like these are case-specific fixes so might need more consideration

 

 

#5: Concerns about future

So with these problems in mind there is also matter of potential problems coming up in future, one of them is continuing to handwave current problems while they do hurt Codex as feature and it's usefulness, future additions to Codex should be held to a specific standard and not treated like something that will be fixed later while some of the problems I mentioned haven't received fix for quite a while (Mite Raknoid being best example)

 

Another Concern is Railjack and fact that many of the potential new entries gonna be spacecraft, what means that as long as we don't get some sort of ship scanning device, only option to scan these will be to fly out of ship on archwing and scan them with hand scanner, or by killing them with arch-melee equipped with astral autopsy mod what might be very problematic

 

#6 Not enemies entries but still related to scanning

Left as last because it goes slightly off topic but there but these are still related to scanning mechanics, so one thing is... Orb Vallis Somacord tones and the absolute ridiculousness of how they work, seriously if you want to encourage players to play Orb Vallis more then add more content, the scannable collectibles like that on open maps shouldn't be based on RNG, just put them around map in similar fashion like the Data Hashes or Mem Fragments and this will be much better way to deal with these because having to search around enormous open area including its cave system for randomly spawning item is just ridiculous

 

Another thing I've noticed is new single fragment in "Cephalon" tab right after the 3 entries from Mask of Revenant and not sure where to search for it or what it contains, especially that seems no one has found it as there is no info on wiki either, so if this information isn't some sort of spoiler I would like to know where I can search for it

 

I hope that this feedback will be helpful in both solving these problems and preventing similar issues form happening in future.

 

[GmG-ITA]

Topic is hard to read with dark theme.

For Hyekka  on disruption event "Pack Hunters" let's destroy the terminal and they start to spawn.

 

 

[AVSManfred]

2 minutes ago, GmG-ITA said:

Topic is hard to read with dark theme.

For Hyekka  on disruption event "Pack Hunters" let's destroy the terminal and they start to spawn.

 

 

not sure how to make soemthing easier to read in dark theme really, just wnated to make sure the problems are pointed out in eaiest to understand way possible

and for this hyekka variant being exclusive to specific disruption event sounds like another not so great idea

[GmG-ITA]

1 minute ago, AVSManfred said:

not sure how to make soemthing easier to read in dark theme really, just wnated to make sure the problems are pointed out in eaiest to understand way possible

and for this hyekka variant being exclusive to specific disruption event sounds like another not so great idea

I think I didn't explain myself well.

Disruption event "Pack Hunters"  it means conduit effects (Not on Operation: Hostile Mergers) they can still be obtained now.

 

 

[Nichivo]

I'm bumping this because as a completionist myself, having things in the codex that can't be finished is annoying. 4.7k hours and over 16k missions and still have never seen a

 Reinforced Orokin Container. Everything in the codex should be in the game, or removed from the codex. If it is so rare you never see one, what is the point in it existing anyway?

[FenrisHowls]

For the additional hyekka entry, I can say they appear on kuva disruption, when the "Pack Hunters" conduit is active.
 And I absolutely support everything you wrote, especially the part about inconsistency with eximus units scans required.

Edited October 11, 2019 by FenrisHowls

[Duality52]

That reminds me, has anyone seen a Vapos Condor Dropship since the Hotfix back at Wednesday? I'm searching for the Vapos Elite Condor Dropships now, but nothing so far.

For anyone searching for the Vapos Aquila (Corpus dogfighter), try some of the open tiles with destroyed pathways. Capture guarantees several due to the special Capture target. You may need to wait for a bit.

[AVSManfred]

1 hour ago, Nichivo said:

I'm bumping this because as a completionist myself, having things in the codex that can't be finished is annoying. 4.7k hours and over 16k missions and still have never seen a

 Reinforced Orokin Container. Everything in the codex should be in the game, or removed from the codex. If it is so rare you never see one, what is the point in it existing anyway?

Well i haven't seen single one of these too but honestly they are rare to the rare, and Mantis or any other landing craft that can be unlockes isn't really neccessary to anything, but yeah would liek to have once this little bit of luck

[Bozakir]

I don't envy anyone trying to scan Vapos Elite Ranger Eximus now. I managed to scan those back when couple of spots in Jupiter spawned infinite flying enemies. Even with that I spent like hours to scan them, staying at the same spot. (those spots got hotfixed later).

On 2019-10-12 at 12:40 AM, Nichivo said:

I'm bumping this because as a completionist myself, having things in the codex that can't be finished is annoying. 4.7k hours and over 16k missions and still have never seen a

 Reinforced Orokin Container. Everything in the codex should be in the game, or removed from the codex. If it is so rare you never see one, what is the point in it existing anyway?

I have one scan of it in last year. I believe they are still in the game but really really rare.

 

 

 

 

 

[Bozakir]

On 2019-10-11 at 10:42 PM, AVSManfred said:

Another thing I've noticed is new single fragment in "Cephalon" tab right after the 3 entries from Mask of Revenant and not sure where to search for it or what it contains, especially that seems no one has found it as there is no info on wiki either, so if this information isn't some sort of spoiler I would like to know where I can search for it

That's an easter egg

Spoiler

After leveling Gauss to 30 go to Leverian (there is a button called leverian in market entries for Gauss and Gauss collection)

On right side of the Altra Syandana display wall there is a card you can get.

 

 

 

[Nichivo]

On 2019-10-11 at 6:16 PM, AVSManfred said:

Well i haven't seen single one of these too but honestly they are rare to the rare, and Mantis or any other landing craft that can be unlockes isn't really neccessary to anything, but yeah would liek to have once this little bit of luck

Luckily the mantis parts also drop from the normal rare orokin container, which is still a little more rare than needed IMO, but at least doable by full clearing Plato on Lua with a smidge of luck. While on Plato Lua you can also find caches, scan lunar pitcher, farm Battalysts, Conculysts, and drift mods. So it's not so bad. If you just want a mantis I have 4 or more left I have not given away yet.

The rare reinforced Orokin container however is entirely too rare, may as well be renamed mythical. 

[roxasivolain90]

This needs to be bumped all the way up.

[1nvincible]

On 2019-10-12 at 3:40 AM, Nichivo said:

I'm bumping this because as a completionist myself, having things in the codex that can't be finished is annoying. 4.7k hours and over 16k missions and still have never seen a

 Reinforced Orokin Container. Everything in the codex should be in the game, or removed from the codex. If it is so rare you never see one, what is the point in it existing anyway?

A simple fix for that would be a decrease in the amount of scans necessary to complete the entry. Considering that codex entries don't really grant any power that change would not hurt anyone.

[Nichivo]

On 2019-10-23 at 2:56 AM, 1nvincible said:

A simple fix for that would be a decrease in the amount of scans necessary to complete the entry. Considering that codex entries don't really grant any power that change would not hurt anyone.

I could completely understand making the rare reinforced Orokin container only take 1 scan, but to consider it a fix it would have to accompany an increase in the chance to have one spawn on a tile set. Because 1 scan needed still means nothing, if you never see one.