Doer
Marauder
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2005
- Posts
- 7,004
- Location
- Muddlin' Through
- Society
- Rangers
- Avatar Name
- David "Doer" Falkayn
Inception
Following the Longu mission chain, i signed on with Narfi's THING crew for something completely different, and used the opportunity to see Rocktropia and its seedy denizens. I've not found a higher concentration of obnoxious jackasses than among its vixen gear farmers, but i also met some nice new people. When migration started, and i was getting a bit tired of dying after more than 1200 deaths by THINGs, i put together a spreadsheet to evaluate the feasibility of doing the longtooth mission. Some of the parameters i explored were the cost of using amped vs. unamped imk2, scope and sight attachments, and accuracy enhancers, as well as rascal (L) (15 impact) or phantom (25 impact) armor. Some of these things were hypothetical, because the actual effects are not known, and I would use the mission as a chance to test the accuracy of the predictions to improve my efficiency in subsequent activities.
One thing the spreadsheet showed was that i should recoup the slight decrease in economy of adding the A204 to my gun by decreased defense cost, nevermind the decrease in killtime and consequential regen. Another was that if my shiny new Headshot 1 scope (which pretty much obsoletes the oldskool RS1900 i've had for years) and 600SE sights could get me around 3-4 levels effective (Hit) profession increase, about what Sachi had found in her tests, it would be sufficient to compensate for the extra decay--any additional skills from the dubious "skill increase" would be a bonus.
The spreadsheet estimated an offensive cost to kill of 16.62-16.76 PEDs per longtooth, over 114 (unamped) or ~89 (amped) seconds, with an additional 0.95 PED defense cost using phantom&5B (and a much higher 1.21 PEDs unamped, as mentioned) or 0.61 PED using rascal & 5B, not counting FAP costs. The difference between the phantom and rascal cost made learning which would be needed an important issue.
Defensive Economy Revolution
I had intended to bring a stack of medkits from RT to use for healing between mobs, saving some PEDs with the 24 heal/pec efficiency, but i forgot. The advent of the new S.I. H.E.A.R.T. FAP on Cyrene gave me a reasonable alternative (~15 heal/pec -- would have saved only ~25 PEDs with the medkit for this mission), and changes the economics of hunting by making fapping (between mobs) more economical than moderate to heavy armor. For example, the phantom & 5B protection, which i was sure would be enough to avoid emergency fapping, has an economy of 11.7 hp/pec. If i could get by instead with the 10 points less protection that Rascal (L) & 5B offer (at the somewhat optimistic cost of 109% i credited myself as being able to manufacture it at), it would provide that protection at an economy of 14.4 hp/pec, comparable with the FAP. By the same token, hiring a fapper at decay cost, who is maxed on HEART, can increase economy if decreasing armor when wearing more than ~26 total protection against a mob. I did try that route, hiring a few different fappers. The problem is i inevitably feel the need to tip them, having spent hours fapping for hire when i had the imp FAP, and that defeats the purpose of hiring the HEART fapper in the first place. In particular, after a 50+ PED tip (promised 1% of globals) following my uber to a fapper of a few hours, more than i ever got beyond decay on a job with the imp FAP, i was done with that expensive "economy" option. Perhaps i'll be able to hire a fapper at truly decay only now after the silliness of that experience. Anyway.... the HEART is also interesting in that it's not a SIB FAP and maxes oldskool style around level 15. That gives fappers with some experience a real advantage -- i estimate that it requires around level 5 or 6 to be more economical with the HEART.
Of course, for the Rascal (L) eco option to work, i'd have to avoid emergency fapping. In a worst case, average damage, situation i'd take ~350 damage during one longtooth kill wearing the rascal. The "safe" phantom option would only lead to 138 hp damage. I don't have 350 hp, so the question of longtooth hitrate became important. I adapted as the mission progressed, and found that by mixing in intermediate (~19 impact) bear and boar (L) pieces, at theft prices of < 107% on auction, i could generally avoid fapping.
But i'm getting ahead of myself. Using a HEART to make up the residual damage not protected by armor, i estimated an additional defensive cost of ~0.05 per mob. Now i could estimate the percentage of costs spent on defense, an important factor in deciding whether a hunt is good economical sense. With phantom i'd have ~5.5% defense costs, and with rascal ~4.9%. 5% is about as high as i like to go, so that was marginally "go" for the mission. Finally, i checked the total cost: ~23.9k for phantom or 23.8k for rascal. I felt i had enough PEDs on hand to swing that, recognizing up front that i'd probably end up tting things i would normally try to sell and chalking it up to a reasonable sacrifice for a nice mission reward.
Go!
In an interesting twist, the main thing i ended up tting was the unlimited Kilic Vass i looted the first mission day. Ironically, at around 4k PEDs tt and no takers for +100 PEDs on PCF (i.e. < 102.5%), it became less potentially valuable than most everything else that was looted. I can't complain about a new 4630 PED personal all time high, and i won't, but i do think the Calypso design team should refresh the uberloot table for their mission mobs. Next Island's disruptively economical swords make the Vass and other old Calypso SIB melee weapons completely obsolete. Change the loot to an improved version or something, hey?
So the first day was an unquestionable success, with a huge #4 HOF and a smaller 4xx PED global. Three days later i hit HOF #99, 593 PEDs. Things went steadily downhill after that, and what had been planned as a one-week mission turned into two weeks to try to avoid the worst loot periods. Tracker tells the tale clearly in the 66 globals: in the first week, 100-200 PED globals were most common, with several over 200 PEDs. By the last few days, it was rare to see anything over 100 PEDs, and globals at all were rare. Furthermore, the loot on Longtooths is something strange, with nothing over kill cost possible unless it's a global. There's a gap from about 17 PEDs to ~50 PEDs, and a strange lack of uberloots above 5-6k PEDs. If you aren't globaling regularly, you're hemorrhaging PEDs -- and fragments, "no looters" with lipstick, do show up now and then. Only one higher loot dropped the entire first two weeks they were massacred wholesale.
Outcome Observations
As for my experiments, the first thing i found is that Longtooth do miss pretty regularly at level 38 Evader. I added the ability to extract mob hit rate to my chat parser and found that their hit rate is just 0.63, assuming an attack rate of 2.7^-1 s. That, combined with a 10-15 shot lead-in with careful hunting and ~100 meter range, meant my actual defensive cost was only 0.42 pecs per mob, or a bit less than half what i expected. Instead of the worst-case prediction of 33 hits/mob, i only took 17. As mentioned above, that meant i could get by with a mix of 15-19 protection armor plated with the 5B. I also discovered that the LT damage is 49, not 50. I also discovered that regen makes a bigger difference on kill cost, even on something as slow as the LT, than i had anticipated. The actual offensive cost per mob came out to be 17.4 PEDs (vs. 16.62-16.76 PEDs naive estimate above) and time per mob 94 s instead of 89 s.
All told, the mission costs were 22.6 kPEDs offensive and 0.6 kPEDs defensive (defense costs just 2.5% total) to do 6.58 MHP damage and take 23,850 hits. My effective dmg/pec was 2.84 considering all costs, 2.9 when considering offensive costs, and ~2.93 when considering just shots that i targeted properly. Yes, user error was responsible for almost 1 missed shot/mob on average, or 230 PEDs total. Much of this was from a drowsy final night. It only takes one good snooze to rack up a couple dozen autofire misses... eek! Lesson learned?
What that amounted to was an overall tt profit of 960 PEDs for the mission, a disturbing result when considering the 4.6k HOF. In my spreadsheet analysis, i had predicted a tt loss of ~1-2k based on typical tt returns. When disregarding the uberhof, i had a loss of about twice that! But, one could argue that it should not be disregarded, and for my sanity i'm going to do that. Nevertheless, thank God i'm done with longtooths!
There will be some markup from the hunt, of course. I've secured 61 PEDs so far and was able to avoid tting 8k PEDs of loot that can yet be sold off, including most of the 10 CB24 (L)s and 2 HL6 (L)s i looted, 3 cryo V (L) chips, 2 regen V (L) chips, and a lot of thyroid and adrenal oil. Of course, now we've been thrown a spawn of steelbirds, so i might have to go do those and end up tting a lot of things. It will be relaxing when the newly-postponed October mission change date roles around.
Rewards
There were only two tempting skill reward options at the conclusion of this mission: 80 PEDs athletics or 50 PEDs First Aid. The FA would bump me to 31.x paramedic, making the UR125 an option for me. But that's all it would do, and it seems lately that Biotropy might be a better and easier route to go for a rescue FAP, with there being no reason to not use HEART or medkit outside of combat. Those, i already have maxed. The GYRO FAPs from Arkadia have opened up inexpensive options at my level, too.
The athletics chip, on the other hand, would bring me about 800 levels, good for 1.14 levels Evader and 1.5 HP.
I took the athletics. I now have 14 Stamina.
In terms of less direct rewards, i increased my Laser Sniper (Hit) profession 0.5 levels in the course of this mission, my Ranged Laser Damage 0.36 levels, Health by 2.07 (including athletics gain), Evader by 1.44 (ditto), and Paramedic by 0.25. I was hoping to reach tier 0.9 with the H.E.A.R.T. i brought back from Cyrene at the commencement of the mission, but the blasted thing is stuck at 0.8.
Experimental Outcomes
I split the mission into three parts, with attachments and accuracy enhancers being the parameters to explore. These are summarized in the Hit Rate in 2012 thread and the Accuracy Enh thread:
HA 6.4x CHA 8/11.2 (w/ 2 enh.)
LT p 1 (attachments): 86.8% 1.60%
LT p 2 (att & 2xAcc.): 86.7% 2.16%
LT p 3 (2xAccu enh.): 86.5% 2.45%
I'm largely satisfied now that the formula i've been using for crit hit rate per hit (=0.002*CHA) is correct and that accuracy enhancers can increase economy with sufficiently low markup. In my case (current unmaxed CHA), that's around 125%, which is below market. But, it's good to know. What is still uncertain is whether the attachments are worthwhile or not. My arch-nemesis has yet to be vanquished! It sure would be nice to see a dev note on that topic.
I also determined that LT give a bit less than half as much offensive skill gain per PED output than the longu/argo hunt brought per PED output. I didn't quantitatively compare Evader gains, but they seemed quite high with LT and i was able to finally break the 5k Evade barrier, a long-time goal.
