Near-Impossible Bonus Objectives in Cetus Bounties (normal and Narmer)

[Hera.Ci]

I played Cetus on release, I thought it was great when DE went back and added Fortuna-style bonus objectives that can build up to an extra roll on the final stage's drop table. BUT I've been disappointed with the total lack of fine-tuning on these objectives in the time since the Plains remaster, and frankly a bit insulted by the decision to add a "new" bounty chain without looking at any of the player feedback on how punishing the bonus conditions in Cetus are. Fully half of the possible bounty stages come with a bonus objective that is either ridiculously hard to achieve, completely dependent on the whims of enemy spawns, or able to be outright griefed.

In rough descending order based on the amount of looming dread I experience on seeing them as the next stage:

• Capture the target: requires no kills before, during, OR AFTER the capture. Not only can an oblivious teammate ruin this one, but even a careful player can lose this bonus after it has been marked as completed. I completely disagree with this design decision to punish players for behaving the same way which is rewarded in every other part of the game and I hope that this entire concept gets rethought, but at the very least the game should not be able to cancel the bonus after ticking the box and playing the "objective complete" jingle!

• Liberate the camp: control ticks down quickly even with no visible enemies. It is easy to dip below the required 50% control if you are not actively looking for and spawnkilling enemies (and sometimes even that will not be enough!) The area is far too large to ask players to keep it completely 100% clear at all times and the tick-down rate is way too fast even with a full squad of Voidrigs sniping dropships out of the air. It honestly seems pretty reasonable solo, but in groups I have literally seen this stage fail because one player took 10 seconds to type "man this bonus objective is demanding" in chat.

• Assassinate the commander: Requires 10 kills plus 5 more per player in a single minute, and the commander must spawn and land within that time. Practically speaking you only have about 55 seconds. This one should definitely count as completed on killing the required number of enemies, not on the boss landing, and the either the spawns should be dramatically more aggressive or they should add a minute to the timer.

• Sabotage the supplies: You need to have killed at least 30 enemies before destroying the final supply drop. The timer is just short enough and the spawns just slow enough that you have to be really careful to kill as much as possible, BUT if you kill enemies too quickly you can bug out the beacon that spawns the next supply drop, ruining the entire run! I'm not sure what causes this but my hunch is that the beacon carrier bugs out if you kill him while he's riding in on a dropship. Would be great to see that investigated and maybe turn up the Grineer aggression or extended the timer a bit.

[Uhkretor]

You have two possible things happening that's forcing those objectives to be "near-impossible" to complete...

1) People trolling your face.

2) People not giving a s*** about optional objectives.

 

Those objectives are pretty easy to complete... If you go solo.

The one that might fail as a result of enemies spawning and not approaching is the 2nd one ("Liberate the Camp"), so I agree that this particular objective may either need a small adjustment somewhere or enemies need to be Pod Deployed into the mission area. Every single time that optional fails for me is because enemies spawn on dropships that suddenly decide not to show up.

[Merrcenary]

1 час назад, Hera.Ci сказал:

Capture the target: requires no kills before, during, OR AFTER the capture. Not only can an oblivious teammate ruin this one, but even a careful player can lose this bonus after it has been marked as completed. I completely disagree with this design decision to punish players for behaving the same way which is rewarded in every other part of the game and I hope that this entire concept gets rethought, but at the very least the game should not be able to cancel the bonus after ticking the box and playing the "objective complete" jingle!

if players doesn't bother to read conditions of the stage, then it is players problem. i had no problem with that

1 час назад, Hera.Ci сказал:

Liberate the camp: control ticks down quickly even with no visible enemies. It is easy to dip below the required 50% control if you are not actively looking for and spawnkilling enemies (and sometimes even that will not be enough!) The area is far too large to ask players to keep it completely 100% clear at all times and the tick-down rate is way too fast even with a full squad of Voidrigs sniping dropships out of the air. It honestly seems pretty reasonable solo, but in groups I have literally seen this stage fail because one player took 10 seconds to type "man this bonus objective is demanding" in chat.

technically possible (only some spots on the map may be impossible, like ostwan range )

 

1 час назад, Hera.Ci сказал:

Assassinate the commander: Requires 10 kills plus 5 more per player in a single minute, and the commander must spawn and land within that time. Practically speaking you only have about 55 seconds. This one should definitely count as completed on killing the required number of enemies, not on the boss landing, and the either the spawns should be dramatically more aggressive or they should add a minute to the timer.

never had problems with it

 

1 час назад, Hera.Ci сказал:

Sabotage the supplies: You need to have killed at least 30 enemies before destroying the final supply drop. The timer is just short enough and the spawns just slow enough that you have to be really careful to kill as much as possible, BUT if you kill enemies too quickly you can bug out the beacon that spawns the next supply drop, ruining the entire run! I'm not sure what causes this but my hunch is that the beacon carrier bugs out if you kill him while he's riding in on a dropship. Would be great to see that investigated and maybe turn up the Grineer aggression or extended the timer a bit.

also never had problems with it

[Quimoth]

Actually the only slightly bothering one is the assassination bonus. I often do not lack the damage to complete it, be it solo or in a public squad, it is finding sufficient grineer to smack down in a single minute that sometimes makes me miss out on the bonus.

The other 3 I rarely even come close to struggling with.

[(PSN)Maunstre]

Cetus' bounty bonuses (and some bounty stages in general) have been broken for a long, long time. Since the bounties were made prior to the bonus system, the bonuses are tacked on without consideration for how the bounties themselves operate. What's frustrating is that these bounties, if you want the bonuses, are best done solo, but even then you're likely to have a rough time thanks to the Plains' really, really bad spawning behaviour. Any bonus that requires killing within a time limit is a legitimate crap-shoot due to the meandering spawn speed of Grineer dropships and "get off the ship" wait time. I've spent more time waiting for Grineer to get off of their ships than killing them thanks to this. You can shoot them off, but if the ship is a Boltor you're a little out of luck in that regard (in higher bounty tiers these ships become a little more common, or I'm just very unlucky with the frequency I've had with their spawn rates). Overall, it's best to just not care about Cetus bounty bonuses, it'll make the experience more bearable until the bounties themselves are fixed (optimistic, I know).

In the meantime; a few suggestions in the event that they are at all helpful in working around the bonuses:

Camp Liberation: For KPS, the best in-arsenal fix to this is to frankly just equip Mesa and let her Regulators do the work for you. She's a decent alternative if you're anything like me and have remarkable trouble pinpointing Grineer among the colouration and visual obfuscation of the Plains (Headphones help, but depending on the terrain it's not enough at times).  Mesa will spot enemies when you can't because it's literal line-of-sight in the computer sense; if it doesn't have physics (ie: grass and foliage, things that can trick us but not AI) it doesn't count as a barrier insofar as Peacemaker is concerned. This bounty's biggest problem is that the counter ticks down in two ways: one being a consistent background decrease regardless of enemy presence, and second is that any enemy that is spawned out of the bounty ring but is spawned specifically for this bounty (ie: any dropship headed your way) will drain control the second they spawn, even if they are way the heck out of reach and will take several seconds to make the enemies actually available for you to pick off. An extra wrinkle is that if a patrol party spawned before the bounty starts wanders into the bounty ring, killing them will not count towards restoring control. Thankfully these enemies don't count towards losing control, but this is a cold comfort because there is no way to distinguish "doesn't count" parties of enemies from the rabble you actually want.

Capture the Target: For the capture bonus - if this one pops up it's best to just not care. Anything dying during this bounty - animal (I've heard that a Kuaka burrowing into the ground will count as a kill but I don't have a concrete source on this; Grineer will shoot wildlife on-sight as well, which will trigger a failure), latcher, or anything else, will count towards failing the bounty. If you have a companion armed with a weapon or any kind of attack precept, you will fail this bounty guaranteed unless you're bringing a Limbo and staying in the Rift (companions enter the Rift with you).

Sabotage the Supplies: This is the only bounty bonus I haven't had personal issues with, but I do think you are correct in that shooting a key-carrier while they are on a dropship bugs the bounty out, as it honestly appears that the key carrier is given the key after they land by some quirk of coding. If you're low on kills and nothing is spawning, the only solution is to look in the distance and see if there are any patrol parties outside the bounty ring. If there are, go get them - they will count towards the kill bonus and any patrol party you can reasonably spot from within the bounty ring you should be able to reach and run back before the ABANDONING OBJECTIVE timer runs out.

Assassinate the Commander: I second Quimoth above in that this bounty is usually not too bad if the Grineer actually spawn in. Mesa is your best bet in overcoming this roadblock for similar reasons as Camp Liberation.

If you don't have Mesa, a Lanka may help. A Lanka can tear the dropships apart if the shot multiplier is high. If you kill the dropship fast enough all Grineer on it will die with it.

[Lutesque]

2 hours ago, Uhkretor said:

Those objectives are pretty easy to complete... If you go solo.

The issue has nothing to do with Difficulty at all....

The issue has to do with Flawed Designs like how a Latcher Killing itself can ruin the bonus Objective for Capturing the Commander... Or how the game simply doesn't Spawn Enemies at all for Area Control yet the Progress bar continues to tick down...

 

[Uhkretor]

1 hour ago, Lutesque said:

The issue has to do with Flawed Designs

.... I don't think I said the designs were perfect though...

 

Its less likely to fail those when going solo than in a group... Because when someone goes in a group, the number of factors outside of his/her control increase exponentially.

.... Besides, you know the rest of my previous post so~ I'm not going to repeat myself about "Liberate the Camp" objective...

[SimulatedKnave]

"Well, if you solo the multiplayer game the problem disappears" is not a great solution.  

 

Personally, I mostly like playing with other people.  But for optional objectives it really would be nice if a random moron with a Kuva Bramma (or an animal getting itself killed, for that matter) didn't ruin it for the people with functioning brain cells. That "don't kill anyone else one" is ridiculous. 

[PrimeEnLightenedShadow]

Don't listen to those first three repliers, you're FAR from the only one that knows that every criticism you shared is COMPLETELY CORRECT!!!  And even when those repliers disagreed with you, they STILL had to admit that there is something wrong with the PoE bounty bonuses.

I've even got a new criticism to add to Sabotage the supplies: The bonus is MOSTLY INDEPENDENT OF THE MAIN OBJECTIVE!  What the hell do the extra enemies have to do with the sabotage?!  NOTHING!  If they don't want the bonus for that one to be yet another speed bonus, that's fine... as long as the bonus in it's place makes sense!  No joke, every time I do that one, if I want the bonus (which I actually don't sometimes, because Nightwave) I have to STOP SABOTAGING THE SUPPLIES to get those kills.  Bonuses should be "the difficulty of this content is SO FAR BELOW YOU that we're going to SPEED UP YOUR GRINDING" when this objective goes against that by trying to slow your grinding down!

Despite being plenty well equipped for these bounties, despite years of experience, I am STILL "failing" these objectives because of the game's bad design!  ESPECIALLY that Liberate the camp one, where the game taking too much control away too soon, has even caused the entire bounty to fail DESPITE ME NUKING THE DROPSHIPS WITH MY VOIDRIG'S 4!!!  CONTROL SHOULDN'T DROP IF NO ENEMIES ARE FIGHTING!!! NO EXCEPTIONS, NO EXCUSES!!!

If DE is going to outright reuse old content, THEY SHOULD #*!%ING FIX IT FIRST!!!

[pook-pook]

These bounties are so broken! Super frustrating for the new player I've just introduced to the game to run into such bad design :(

[Els236]

by far the worst one is for Kill The Commander, as the enemies just do not spawn fast enough in that minute to be able to complete the bonus. 

[(PSN)SandroTheDude]

Completely agree. Never had any problem with Sabotage, and most of the time the Capture is just annoying, but whenever enemy spawn is pivotal you can just hope that enough bad boys arrive in time. 

Many times the timer was already around 50% when the first ship arrived to the defense area. It's been like that for a while now. 

BTW, this makes farming for Eidolon lens even more frustrating. As a long time player I don't need anything else from the drop table and the bounty is long. When I fail a secondary objective like that I lose much of my will to play.