Cetus bonuses must be reviewed

[(NSW)Belaptir]

I like the idea of adding a bonus to the bounties, getting a double reward at the end by completing additional challenges is fun. However, I don't like how the cetus ones are managed. They, in many cases, are nearly impossible to complete.

Let's see the ones I believe are troublesome and their problematics:

Capture the target: In this one, you need to capture it without killing anyone during the capture. It would be fine... if it didn't consider any kills wherever they are done in the whole map. I've been chasing the target to kill it with Ivara and then, one party member kills a kuaka 1000m away by bullet jumping and the bonus is gone. Some times it's almost impossible to not kill anything. If this bonus has to stay, you should make it something like "don't kill anything in the mission area". It would still offer a challenge but in a fairer way.

Control the area: This mission sucks. Not only the bonus, the whole mission is awful. The areas are huge, the amount of enemies that spawn is ok, but they spawn in such a wide area (and without being marked) that sometimes it's literally impossible to see where they spawned (and if they did behind a rock...) so most of the times keeping the control of the area over 50% is a matter of luck not of skill. Either mark the dropships that are arriving or reduce the size of the area to defend. Even when the party is full, the area is hardly defendable, let alone if you want to do it alone or in a smaller party.

Find the caches: This mission ok... most of the times. There's a very high RNG component on it (once a cache spawned on top of one of the grineer huge buildings so nobody could even hear it), but more or less is doable. Maybe review where the caches spawn so they won't spawn in impossible places, but overall is not bad.

The other missions can be done and the bonuses are archievable and fun to do, but these three in particular should be reviewed in my opinion.

[-AoN-CanoLathra-]

15 minutes ago, (NSW)Belaptir said:

Capture the target: In this one, you need to capture it without killing anyone during the capture. It would be fine... if it didn't consider any kills wherever they are done in the whole map. I've been chasing the target to kill it with Ivara and then, one party member kills a kuaka 1000m away by bullet jumping and the bonus is gone. Some times it's almost impossible to not kill anything. If this bonus has to stay, you should make it something like "don't kill anything in the mission area". It would still offer a challenge but in a fairer way.

It's actually worse than that: the last time I had one of these, I was solo, but a Grineer managed to walk into a fire blast and kill himself. Bonus failed.

I have also had it fail because some Grineer, somewhere, killed a kuaka.

So even if it is going to be a case of 'Don't kill anything, anywhere", it still needs to at least make sure the the Tenno are the ones doing the killing. A Grineer killing wildlife or committing suicide should not make this fail.

And it is downright impossible at night, thanks to the Vomvolysts attacking Grineer camps and either dying to the Eidolon Lure or killing the Eidolon Lure, both of which count as a death, and neither of which can be prevented.

[kapn655321]

27 minutes ago, (NSW)Belaptir said:

Control the area:

THE WORST.

Oh man do I hate when this mission spawns near cave openings.

DE, I would very much love if you removed that mission from the mouth or cave openings.
I have never once won that, or understood which side of the cave you want us on.


Find the caches isn't bad when you're more used to some of the spawn points.
I like that one, but I'm totally with you on the other 2.

Edited December 7, 2019 by kapn655321

[TheLexiConArtist]

Find the Caches ceases to be a problem once you have a little experience. Not only because you know the likely spawn points, but because once you find one, or two, you get a fairly good intuition of where the others generally are. It's vaguely triangulated across the valid mission area, so finding any cache narrows down the others a lot, even if they are up in the sniper towers.

Capture is mostly stupid because of the delay after capturing, and the fact that dropping the target causes immediate unit spawns around him which you have to worry about in addition to the previous poster comments about indirect unit deaths.

 

From a solo player perspective though, several more bonus objectives are terrible and unlikely-to-impossible.

Liberate the Camp is not only oppressive to bonus, but sometimes outright fail-stated since you can't be everywhere finding those hidden extras causing 3% loss per second. Since enemies on dropships count from ship spawn, you better hope you can pop the ships and you don't just get silent orbital-drop-squads. Keeping the bonus is practically luck-based. Enemies not in the immediate area, on foot, doing something to contest the outpost should not be affecting control level. The worst thing? This objective is almost always present in every single bounty. It's the most problematic, the slowest, and yet the most common. I hate it.

Exterminate, Assassination and Sabotage - all of these suffer heavily for the solo experience due to reduced spawns. If you're extra unlucky, Sabotage can be literally impossible to score bonus on. You can get fewer than 30 enemies spawning, and if you're in a remote enough location, you can't go top up with other spawns without going into the abandon-zone. Time limitations for Assassination and Exterminate can also be oppressive if your target camp happens to be a wide area and/or have too few initial spawns.

 

Rescue, Drone Escort and APC Mob-Defense objectives are all reasonable.

[Grey_Star_Rival_Defender]

Worst part about how the capture target bonus counts pet / sentinel kills. It's either take a disarmed pet just for one bounty type to get one bonus reward for a reward that might end up being a BP dupe. Or have a pet around, using the Hunter mods you like with them.

And then the control the areas one, if it dips below the 50% mark, even raising it back to 100% doesn't revert the failure.

[Harutomata]

Yep. Capture target bonus overall needs changing because your teammate deciding to yeet some enemy shouldn't punish the entire squad plus other reasons mentioned in the topic already. Especially since I doubt anyone does Cetus bounties premade.
The control one is iffy too. Not enough enemies spawning? Boom you're punished even though it's again not your fault.

[DeltaPangaea]

Capture Location steps need to just be removed, they're flawed on so many levels.

Y'know what's fun? Killing people TOO QUICK and wasting the control recovery since anything over 100% is so much fart in the wind.