Steel Birds

[Doer]

Alright, my sympathetic neck pain from looking straight up is still fading and i'm going to keep this short, in part because i didn't try to do as many tests during this mission, and in part because it was such a frustrating experience that i don't have much positive to say.

A vertical global

Let me get the negative out of the way up front: loot was atrocious during this mission, and MA doesn't really care about bugs that cost us money. My total cost for the mission was 8112 PEDs, and my total loot was 6590 PEDs. That's a return of 81%. That was in spite of me dragging out the mission over several weeks instead of doing it in less than one as i had planned, in my perhaps vain attempt to wait out the really awful dive loot took after the first 300 birds. By way of example, a friend looted 3 SK-50s and a small ESI on this mission, and had a more reasonable tt return. I looted 1 SK-50 and have not yet looted an ESI in solo hunting this year.

[wrap=right]http://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/gallery/files/3/8/6/7/unreachable_flying_mob.jpg[/wrap]Exacerbating the problem was the crappy spawn and the tendency of the birds to spawn invisibly skewered on palm trees, which they rotate around... whereupon you start shooting, only to have them go unreachable and stay stuck. These flying mobs even manage to get stuck behind two other flying mobs...

Worse was the magical disappearing ammo bug, wherein you shoot up at a flying mob, and you neither hit it nor MISS: the shot simply is lost. This seems to happen when the mob crosses the vertical, and the bug has been around for a very long time. In spite of my best efforts once i noticed it, i couldn't help losing a few shots here and there. Nevertheless, my untargeted shots/mob for this mission decreased to about 0.25, a marked improvement over the LT mission: there was no dozing during this one (31 s per mob instead of 94 s makes a big difference)!

Loot

After 24 globals during the hunt, I ended up with the following goodies: 1 SK-50, 11 Lacerating VIII & 4 Combustive I chips, 6 P-40 launchers, 195 Cumbriz, 395 Blau, and a few kPEDs of robot parts to try to sell later.

Skills

Choosing the reward was a bit of a challenge:
30 PEDs Rifle (7845 -> 7902): sniper 64.57-64.79 (+0.22)
30 PEDs CR (5147 -> 5409): sniper (+0.08), evader 39.33-39.62 (+0.29), HP 171.25-171.42 (+0.17)
30 PEDs Aim (4736 -> 5016): sniper (+0.11)

I'm not sure why MA even includes Aim as an option, at least at equal volumes. It's just not competitive. I was tempted to take the CR, but after reviewing the Argo mission options (60 Perception or 60 CR), i found that CR is the more worthy of those two options, so i'll be getting my CR from the Argos: i took the Rifle.

I used the results from the last three missions i did to make a comparison of skill gain here. It's an interesting result, but limited.

Steel bird stats

Here's the parser analysis:
Out of a total of 40857 attacks, 35449 were hits (640 or 0.0181 crits) and 5408 were misses, for a total hit rate of 0.8676
You did 2325323 damage and took 2443 hits, with 15.7 min & 65.3 max armor crits and a high crit of 102.9 out of 22 total.

Filtered 522 mobs by hp (1620), 721 remaining. Average hp 1718.1 and average kill time 31 s.
Mob average hit rate (1068 hits in 7259 seconds) was 0.397.

The mob hp and kill time indicate a regen rate of 0.2%/second (4%/regen). The Steel birds' hit rate is over-estimated due to the mobs that didn't land a hit to start the timer. They really have a hard time hitting me, even with a lowly level 28 Dodger profession. As a result, defensive costs were just 0.7% of the total.

I continue to use scope and sight attachments and the results still suggest they just balance their decay with increased hit rate

Overall dmg/pec was 2.87, but that's a bit artificially low because of the omission of some melee and small gun usage for the damage tally.

 

[MartinXVI]

Gratz to finishing the mission, but i wonder, what weapon(s) did you use ?

 

[Doer]

Sorry, I missed your post. I used Imk2 + A204.