Strip Mining (Endless) Bounty needs a complete rework

[Voltage]

I recently finished getting two of each Xaku parts for Helminth + Mastery, and so I went to try the "Endless" Bounty for the new set mods I am missing. I tried to go in with an open mind as I just needed a few mods, but this mode is by far the worst mechanical mission in this entire update.

Here are the major issues at play:

• Reward Distribution
• Deimos Excavation
• General Excavation issues

Rewards in this mode are as follows:

Amber Star is not only Common, it is Uncommon, and not only is it Uncommon, it is Rare too. Not only is Amber Stars like this, Endo and Relics are too. Meaning, every single rotation is equally bloated as the previous. The bonus objective of keeping all excavators alive does not register for extra rewards and is simply a remnant of copy-pasting the Bounty code. Remove Amber Stars from the rewards table altogether. Remove Endo from Uncommon and Rare. Remove Relics from Common and Rare.

Deimos Excavation has a glaring mechanical flaw where a player must do one excavator at a time. This is annoying. Remove this restriction. Increase the Excavator amount to 3 and remove the squad scaling. Have each excavator pull from a different reward pool (Excavator 1: Common reward, Excavator 2: Uncommon reward, Excavator 3: Rare reward). Remove the mechanic where all power cells despawn between rounds. This is unnecessarily annoying and restricts players from preparing rounds due to low carrier spawns at times. Extracting also counts as a bounty failure because it is endless. This needs to be fixed too.

Excavation issues. This mainly translates to the classic drones having spawning issues.

So yeah, endless Excavation as a Bounty is endlessly bad, and the mode needs serious changes before anyone should bother putting time into it. Amber Stars being in each reward pool with a Relic and Endo is awful. My first run (and now my last) was 22 minutes long with 4/6 rewards being an Amber Star. This is the time equivalent of 4 Amber Stars from 8 zones of Elite Sanctuary Onslaught.

Please fix this mode.

[MaiNeym]

Noticed the Bonus reward not working as well (hence why google brought me here).  
And all those endo and ayatan rewards are demoralizing indeed.

[Pizzarugi]

15 hours ago, Voltage said:

Remove Amber Stars from the rewards table altogether.

No.

Amber stars aren't easy to get ahold of, I think they should be in the reward table somewhere. Maybe not in all 3 tiers at once, though.

[LuckyCharm]

Did a good half hours extractor farming, got 2 relics, a set of endo, and the rest all ayatan stars. They really are way too common. 

[C-60]

Not being able to do multiple excavators at once is the biggest turn-off for sure. Power cells despawning is also annoying, but probably intended to avoid cluttering the whole map with unused cells. 

Progression of the bounty rewards is also not made clear, is the reward pool supposed to progress like in excavation? So wave 1 rewards is taken from common, wave 2 from uncommon and so forth? I couldn't tell because these past 2 days most of the rewards are ayatan stars.

[Rantear]

1 минуту назад, Pizzarugi сказал:

Amber stars aren't easy to get ahold of, I think they should be in the reward table somewhere. Maybe not in all 3 tiers at once, though.

Neither are sculptures.
Also, they already are drops in requiem relics and the Arbitrations, here they're simply diluting the drop table
Hell, they drop from the high level bounties on Deimos as well, and from the vaults, that's more than enough.

[C-60]

8 minutes ago, Pizzarugi said:

No.

Amber stars aren't easy to get ahold of, I think they should be in the reward table somewhere. Maybe not in all 3 tiers at once, though.

Probably the intention for this mission, but the reward structuring is terrible.

Edit: on second thought, the stars replace credit caches so there goes the intention angle.

6 minutes ago, LuckyCharm said:

Did a good half hours extractor farming, got 2 relics, a set of endo, and the rest all ayatan stars. They really are way too common. 

Did 6 full waves solo today, 1 wave=6 extractors, so it takes 1 hour to do 6 waves assuming non-existent downtime between cell carrier spawn. 9 amber stars, 2 relics, 1 mod, rest are endo.

 

[Skaleek]

My buddy and I are on stage 6 right now and all we've gotten is a few amber stars and endo. What even are the mod drop chances for this?

[C-60]

Just now, Skaleek said:

My buddy and I are on stage 6 right now and all we've gotten is a few amber stars and endo. What even are the mod drop chances for this?

Deimos bounty drop table has not yet been made public so your guess is as good as mine.

[Skaleek]

ayatan amber stars are the equivlanet of getting nothing in my mind. I think theyre worth like 100 endo? DE has a hardon for giving you nothing and making you feel so bad you want to never play their content again. Definitely the feeling you want your players to have DE, definitely.

[Rantear]

4 минуты назад, Skaleek сказал:

ayatan amber stars are the equivlanet of getting nothing in my mind. I think theyre worth like 100 endo? DE has a hardon for giving you nothing and making you feel so bad you want to never play their content again. Definitely the feeling you want your players to have DE, definitely.

Not sure about the endo, but without the sculpture to put it in they only worth 500 credits.

[Voltage]

3 hours ago, Skaleek said:

My buddy and I are on stage 6 right now and all we've gotten is a few amber stars and endo. What even are the mod drop chances for this?

I got to stage 6 with 15 Amber Stars and the rest Endo. Literally the most wasteful hour of my entire weekend. I got more out of the nap I just took.

[Skaleek]

Just now, Voltage said:

I got to stage 6 with 15 Amber Stars and the rest Endo. Literally the most wasteful hour of my entire weekend. I got more out of the nap I just took.

So we did a total of about 40 rounds. We got 1 rare, the uncommons, and commons. Mostly the ayatan ambers though, and man are those a kick in the nuts.

[Zahnrad]

When I see endless that immedietly makes me not want to play it. I'm not a big fan of endurance run type missions. I don't mind endless existing as an alternative, but I'd say keep an endless and non-endless set of bounties both active at all times, so there is that choice.

[EyelessCoffee]

The drop table has been updated, but shows this bounty as having 4 stages; it only appears to have 3 in game. Does this mean the first stage of the second round rewards the stage 4 rewards? Because the 3rd stage of the first round doesn't seem to.

[Deminisis]

Excavations are the most time consuming stage in bounties. If we could at least rush the second set of excavators it would be tolerable. I would rather just have 1 per player to make it fair.

[Kamishawe]

Pretty sure the reward thing is broken anyway... my clan has run these a few times and all of our reward icons get downgraded from gold to blue though out the entire round progression. At the end of a set it's all blue with the Stars and Endo to match. Regardless that we were getting gold and everything perfectly, bonuses included. Wiether we run 1 round or 15 rounds, it was all the same.

[Akula_Rose]

Yeah the bonus objectives seem kind of pointless when all you get is Amber Stars. Seriously if the community wants amber stars just spam captures as a max range Limbo spamming 4 all the way to freedom. Amber stars aren't a bloody reward DE they're an insult to anyone who knows how to play the game and not suck their thumb at the same time. Seriously fix dat shiz.....

[EyelessCoffee]

I needed to level my necramech, so decided to do a long run and record the rewards. I've noted which reward pool(s) each reward is available in - pool 1 should be rewarded on "stage 1", p2 on "stage 2" and "stage 3", and p3 on "stage 4" according to the drop table:

250 endo - p1
ayatan amber star - any
ayatan amber star - any, previous run got 250 endo - p1

250 endo - p1
250 endo - p1
saxum carapace - p2/3

jugulus carapace - p2/3
ayatan amber star - any
jugulus spines - p3

ayatan amber star - any
ayatan amber star - any
carnis mandible - p1/2

ayatan amber star - any
ayatan amber star - any
carnis mandible - p1/2

lith k4 relic - p1
jugulus barbs - p1/2
ayatan amber star - any

So I knew something would be off because the drop table has 4 stages while the bounty has 3, but i still have no idea what's going on here. The third round rewarded a rare on the third stage, but then later rounds went back to rewarding a common reward on that stage. I'd be very interested in comparing against other people's rewards, amber stars seem to be polluting the results too much to draw firm conclusions without more data.

Anyway, that reward cycle looks completely borked as far as i can tell.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

Another issue with the set mods is that Carnis mods drop like candy from the enemies in comparison. I got the full Carnis set just by playing the regular bounties.

Carnis Rex are common spawns, Saxum Rex spawns only in Assassination bounties and Jugulus Rex doesn't exist. So much for dropping from their respective enemies. Still missing the Puncture and Impact 90/60 pistol mods.

Got quite a few copies of Condition Overload from the new enemies though.

DE might put this issue in the backburner since the player base bags on Puncture and Impact anyways.

[(PSN)chris1pat8twins]

On 2020-08-28 at 8:56 PM, Voltage said:

I recently finished getting two of each Xaku parts for Helminth + Mastery, and so I went to try the "Endless" Bounty for the new set mods I am missing. I tried to go in with an open mind as I just needed a few mods, but this mode is by far the worst mechanical mission in this entire update.

Here are the major issues at play:

• Reward Distribution
• Deimos Excavation
• General Excavation issues

Rewards in this mode are as follows:

Amber Star is not only Common, it is Uncommon, and not only is it Uncommon, it is Rare too. Not only is Amber Stars like this, Endo and Relics are too. Meaning, every single rotation is equally bloated as the previous. The bonus objective of keeping all excavators alive does not register for extra rewards and is simply a remnant of copy-pasting the Bounty code. Remove Amber Stars from the rewards table altogether. Remove Endo from Uncommon and Rare. Remove Relics from Common and Rare.

Deimos Excavation has a glaring mechanical flaw where a player must do one excavator at a time. This is annoying. Remove this restriction. Increase the Excavator amount to 3 and remove the squad scaling. Have each excavator pull from a different reward pool (Excavator 1: Common reward, Excavator 2: Uncommon reward, Excavator 3: Rare reward). Remove the mechanic where all power cells despawn between rounds. This is unnecessarily annoying and restricts players from preparing rounds due to low carrier spawns at times. Extracting also counts as a bounty failure because it is endless. This needs to be fixed too.

Excavation issues. This mainly translates to the classic drones having spawning issues.

So yeah, endless Excavation as a Bounty is endlessly bad, and the mode needs serious changes before anyone should bother putting time into it. Amber Stars being in each reward pool with a Relic and Endo is awful. My first run (and now my last) was 22 minutes long with 4/6 rewards being an Amber Star. This is the time equivalent of 4 Amber Stars from 8 zones of Elite Sanctuary Onslaught.

Please fix this mode.

I’ve been running a revenant to damage all kinds of infested even from a distance. And I hate how long excavation takes. They are each about 2:20 minutes long. Then there’s the enemies slowly approaching with power cells which can take longer. Then there is more to come after the first ones to appear. The whole mission be taking almost 20 minutes with uncoordinated players/AFKers. 
 

All that just to get slapped with amber stars. Smh

[DrakeWurrum]

I wouldn't say to remove Amber Stars, Endo, and Relics completely... but maybe make Stars only the Common drop? I'm absolutely fed up with getting Amber Star as the reward, 3, 4, even 5 times in a row, but I am glad to know there's a way to farm them if really needed... just tired of them getting in the way of the mods!

And for that matter, maybe boost the chance for the mods to actually drop. I feel like I only have a 2% chance to get them or something.

They could at least let all these mods drop from the Deimos enemies they're named after. I got 2 of the 3 Carnis mods this way, but the 3rd only drops from this bounty, while the other 2 sets also only drop from this bounty entirely (not dropping from the appropriate enemies at all).

[SergeantNathan]

Yah, this drop table is NOT working as stated/intended... the amber star seems to have a 90%+ chance of being the reward.

[(XBOX)Tucker D Dawg]

strip mining should be renamed skip mining - just skip the bounty. its not even close to worth doing. and its the slowest bounty type of all. If i see that bounty type, i know for the next x minutes i'm not doing any endless deimos mission.

 

[Pakon3ds]

Well, Today i declare the endless bounty dead to me. 

I have been running it pretty much every day for a while, 4, 6 rounds each time. All I have to show for it are amber stars... for all i have played, only 1 mod from the new sets have dropped... so... thats enough.

Something needs to change, ideas have been given in this thread, I only hope DE actually reads the thread and realizes how bad the drop table/rates are.