Void Cascade is Solo Unfriendly

[Drasiel]

Quick breakdown of how void cascade works if you are not familiar

Spoiler

Void cascade takes place predominantly in 3 large rooms with 2-3 small rooms connecting between. Basically a layout like
extraction - -1 - - 2 - - - 3. Each room has 4 spawn locations for exolizers in it. You need to purge each exolizer of the thrax controlling it and prevent additional thrax spawns from repossessing them. As corrupt exolizers spawn and thrax repossess them it increases a corruption meter if the meter fills up you risk failing the mission if you don't extract quick enough. Killing normal enemies in the radius of the purged exolizers lowers the corruption meter.

So there's a couple of reason that cause void cascade, a mission type I otherwise love, to be solo unfriendly: first up is the way exolizers spawn, Unlike say life support capsules in survival which cycle through the available locations in sequence exolizers can spawn at random in any of the 3 rooms. I have logged them trying to find a pattern and there just doesn't seem to be one. What this means is that if you are unlucky exolizers can spawn in room 1 and room 3 at the same time and vice versa. This is a problem solo because in the worst case I've had rooms 1 and 3 be about 900m apart. Which wouldn't be that hard to cover in a straight line but the zariman is anything but straight.

This wouldn't be a huge problem alone but by round 3 you're getting 2 extra thrax spawns and by round 4 you are getting up to 3. So you end up having to move back and forth across almost the entire map to keep the exolizers purged. This creates the second problem because spawns are lower and thus slower solo. if you have to travel farther than the next large room the spawns lag behind preventing you from lowering the corruption because you have no enemies to kill. Even worse is if you get that 1 and 3 spawn for exolizers the enemies end up crowding together in 2 because you have to travel back and forth between the locations to keep the exolizers purged.

I'd really like to see exolizers either use a spawning pattern or logic more like life support cannisters.

I think if when an exolizer spawned if it also spawned some enemies around it at the same time that would help massively with enemy travel issues.

Those are the two main issues but there are some minor ones that exacerbate the situation:

• You only get the kill marker on extra thrax if you are within one room of them.
  • I want this to be a universal marker like thralls and hounds, a thrax spawns and quin marks it for you no matter how far away you are.
• The warning for an exolizer being under attack only gives you enough time to react if you are already in the room with it.
  • this is probably fine to leave as is if you actually get a universal marker for thrax.
• The exolizers are not labelled so if you have multiple in another room or rooms it's hard to tell which one you need to actually save.
  • exolizers should be named A,B,C,D,etc and actually have their lettter on them like excavators, void flood rifts, void Armageddon exodampers etc.
• sometimes the timer to next exolizer just vanishes making it very hard to try to manage where you need to be to minimize travel between old and new exolizers.
  • fix the bug that causes this if it is a bug.

[Tyreaus]

In my experience, the distance / lack of a pattern is also a problem for groups if you're running for focus gain. It's affinity-range-limited. So there's incentive to group up, which means you're just four people experiencing the problems of solo.

I think there's a bit of a pattern like Orphix, where they have set locations from A -> B -> C -> D going in a direction through the map, which reverts to A once it loops through. That works alright for Orphix where you would go one node at a time, but for defending targets, that loop-around is what creates the spanning issue. So if it does follow that pattern, it should reverse and oscillate (going from C to D to C to B to A to B to C...) rather than loop.

Even if it doesn't, that's probably the smoother way to do things.

Side-note but isn't Quinn the one deploying the Exolizers? And he's got this genius idea to yeet the next Exolizer onto the other side of the map? What kinda twisted game is he playing? XD

[Drasiel]

3 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

In my experience, the distance / lack of a pattern is also a problem for groups if you're running for focus gain. It's affinity-range-limited. So there's incentive to group up, which means you're just four people experiencing the problems of solo.

I think there's a bit of a pattern like Orphix, where they have set locations from A -> B -> C -> D going in a direction through the map, which reverts to A once it loops through. That works alright for Orphix where you would go one node at a time, but for defending targets, that loop-around is what creates the spanning issue. So if it does follow that pattern, it should reverse and oscillate (going from C to D to C to B to A to B to C...) rather than loop.

Even if it doesn't, that's probably the smoother way to do things.

Side-note but isn't Quinn the one deploying the Exolizers? And he's got this genius idea to yeet the next Exolizer onto the other side of the map? What kinda twisted game is he playing? XD

That's a fair point, I didn't consider the focus gain since well when solo you always get it. That would be annoying as a group since you are clearly supposed to be splitting up to deal with exolizers.

I dunno I really don't think there is a pattern because you'll have spawns like 1111, 111, 11, 2, 333, 22 then when you start the mission next time get 11, 22, 3, 1 etc. There could be multiple patterns but at least as far as I've been running that doesn't seem the case.

hmm you are right, Quinn is picking the new ones, gonna have to have a chat with that lad lol.

[SpicyDinosaur]

1 hour ago, Tyreaus said:

In my experience, the distance / lack of a pattern is also a problem for groups if you're running for focus gain. It's affinity-range-limited. So there's incentive to group up, which means you're just four people experiencing the problems of solo.

I think there's a bit of a pattern like Orphix, where they have set locations from A -> B -> C -> D going in a direction through the map, which reverts to A once it loops through. That works alright for Orphix where you would go one node at a time, but for defending targets, that loop-around is what creates the spanning issue. So if it does follow that pattern, it should reverse and oscillate (going from C to D to C to B to A to B to C...) rather than loop.

Even if it doesn't, that's probably the smoother way to do things.

Side-note but isn't Quinn the one deploying the Exolizers? And he's got this genius idea to yeet the next Exolizer onto the other side of the map? What kinda twisted game is he playing? XD

you can use the affinity range flares (and they stack with each other) to alleviate the problem for groups

[taiiat]

yeah, for long runs of the Gamemode i can see it being less than ideal when Solo.
one quick thing that could help is being told where the new Exolizer is going to Spawn before it does. like say 20 Seconds of lead time. so that you can probably be there by the time it does.

 

the reference to Orphix has a point, that order does indeed go well to keep you moving through areas without having to cross one Corner of the Map to the other.

[Drasiel]

1 hour ago, taiiat said:

yeah, for long runs of the Gamemode i can see it being less than ideal when Solo.
one quick thing that could help is being told where the new Exolizer is going to Spawn before it does. like say 20 Seconds of lead time. so that you can probably be there by the time it does.

 

the reference to Orphix has a point, that order does indeed go well to keep you moving through areas without having to cross one Corner of the Map to the other.

Like how air support towers show up as blue holograms before hand, that would certainly help.

[(PSN)iuvenilis]

10 hours ago, Drasiel said:

the way exolizers spawn

While this doesn't really solve the issue, if you make sure you always have 2, you can typically stay ahead. Even if you're in a room trying to finish off 1, but there's 2 or more in another room, just bail on it and go for the other room.

I treat this mode as a sort of mobile interception.

Sure would be nice if they upped the bonus you get for kills in the "dome".

[Drasiel]

6 hours ago, (PSN)iuvenilis said:

While this doesn't really solve the issue, if you make sure you always have 2, you can typically stay ahead. Even if you're in a room trying to finish off 1, but there's 2 or more in another room, just bail on it and go for the other room.

I treat this mode as a sort of mobile interception.

Sure would be nice if they upped the bonus you get for kills in the "dome".

I already do that. Staying ahead isn't the big issue. Having to play far better, move much faster, and work way harder than if there is even 1 other person is though. Like playing solo is almost always more difficult but cascades take it to a level too far. 

[--END--Rikutatis]

11 hours ago, (PSN)iuvenilis said:

While this doesn't really solve the issue, if you make sure you always have 2, you can typically stay ahead. Even if you're in a room trying to finish off 1, but there's 2 or more in another room, just bail on it and go for the other room.

☝️ This.

I don't think this is in the wiki, and it doesn't seem to be 100% of the time, but I've done a TON of solo cascade and in solo mode specifically, for the vast majority of the time, there'll be 3 exos in one room and 1 in another. So if you accept the fact you'll always be missing 1 exo per round and thus progress slower, you can more or less just protect one area and not have to run around so much, and it's generally a lot more chill solo. There's only been a few scarce times for me when this didn't happen in solo mode (group appears to be different? I haven't done many group runs so far). I mean, I know this may sound like anecdotal evidence, but it should be extremely easy for you to try this, just run 20 exos or so to see for yourself if it works. 

[Drasiel]

1 hour ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

☝️ This.

I don't think this is in the wiki, and it doesn't seem to be 100% of the time, but I've done a TON of solo cascade and in solo mode specifically, for the vast majority of the time, there'll be 3 exos in one room and 1 in another. So if you accept the fact you'll always be missing 1 exo per round and thus progress slower, you can more or less just protect one area and not have to run around so much, and it's generally a lot more chill solo. There's only been a few scarce times for me when this didn't happen in solo mode (group appears to be different? I haven't done many group runs so far). I mean, I know this may sound like anecdotal evidence, but it should be extremely easy for you to try this, just run 20 exos or so to see for yourself if it works. 

Like I said in the post right after the one you quoted I've already been doing that. It often doesn't help. Sounds like you've been fairly lucky or I've just been cursed. I've had 5 exolizers active split between the three rooms. When you have good luck it's easy not to spend the time running all over hell's half acre but when you've got two in room 1, one in room 2, and two in room 3 you don't have a lot of choice about ignoring them.

[--END--Rikutatis]

2 hours ago, Drasiel said:

I've had 5 exolizers active split between the three rooms. When you have good luck it's easy not to spend the time running all over hell's half acre but when you've got two in room 1, one in room 2, and two in room 3 you don't have a lot of choice about ignoring them.

There's only a maximum of 4 active at the same time though? It's 4 per round. I don"t know, as I said it's usually 3-1 most of the time for me, maybe 2-2 when rotating. 

[Xylena_Lazarow]

My main problem was not having enough enemies spawning to fill the meters fast enough, Many also stop outside the radius, on purpose?

[Drasiel]

2 hours ago, --END--Rikutatis said:

There's only a maximum of 4 active at the same time though? It's 4 per round. I don"t know, as I said it's usually 3-1 most of the time for me, maybe 2-2 when rotating. 

5 can occur for a brief time if too many get repossessed at once because it prevents them from counting down and clearing until you drive off the thrax again. It doesn't last very long as normally one or two are have to be very close to completion for it to happen at all. It does mean that you can have an exolizer seconds away from completion and have to cross the entire map to de-thrax it so it will finish which sucks.

19 minutes ago, Xylena_Lazarow said:

My main problem was not having enough enemies spawning to fill the meters fast enough, Many also stop outside the radius, on purpose?

Yeah enemies like to sit just at the very edge of an exolizers kill zone which doesn't help either.