Primordial Longus

[Doer]

Habitat of the plongu (and Doer for half a year)​

The Long Dark Halftime of the Mission

When the clock ran out on the mission reward nerf clock, i was a bit burned out and on the whole unmotivated by the modified mission rewards. I got into the Primordial Longu mission during the hunt for the DNA parts when that mob was introduced, but only made it about 1/3 of the way through the mission body count before that event ended. The plongu rewards are a pretty typical example of the new, unimproved mission rewards: no whole attribute points, steep cuts to skill reward if you pick the attribute token option, and not even a single stamina token anywhere to be found.

So, i got busy with a new teaching opportunity irl and took a couple months off. In short, i was lacking purpose in Entropia. I logged in a couple times in January and found that Lootius gives...

And, Entropia being what it is, Lootius takes away (it's only limited, after all).

Joking aside, by March i was ready to take on the rest of the plongu mission, and found to my amazement that some positive changes had been made. I reported in some of my previous Iron Challenge blogs (in particular the Longtooth) how much peddage i blasted into the ground. No more snooze losing! The decision to only charge us for landed shots means i can finally go back to full FPS-style play, without feeling i'm at an unfair advantage. And it means i don't have to obsess over extra shots into the mob when i'm lagging and it suddenly dies.

On top of that, there was another rather unheralded change that i didn't even notice for the first few days until it was pointed out to me:
[wrap=right]http://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/gallery/files/3/8/6/7/entropia_2013-03-22_13-39-08-62_-_ha_change_242094.gif[/wrap]
The Great HA Change of '13

What a strange, random change, and what a boon to me! Without even unlocking Commando, i now have 8 HA and miss so few shots that using my imk2 no longer seems notably different than an opalo in misses. Of course, i know i still miss 2% more than with an opalo, but that's a lot better than 3.5% more.

What does ~1.5% more hits mean? It means ~1.5% better economy and ~1.5% better dps. In fact, this little improvement to the dpp of the amped imk2 boosts it to over 3 dmg/pec! While i don't claim that 3 dmg/pec is or was the exact payout rate of hunting loot, i have, since way back in 2006, thought of it as the "holy grail" of sorts: it makes a reasonably plausible round figure for a target average return rate in hunting loot. Time will tell just how close to the current average return rate i have come, but for now i'm just excited to suddenly achieve a goal i thought was months or even years away.

n.b. The CHA is unaffected by the changes, meaning it's still not cost effective for me to use accuracy enhancers.

The Mission[wrap=left]http://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/gallery/files/3/8/6/7/plongu_scene.jpg[/wrap]

The plongu is, not too surprisingly, like a longu on steroids. Longus were for a long time considered to be ideal farm bait for maxed imk2s (as witnessed by the infamous case of Nostrop, HunterZ, etc.). Much like their relatives, a small to medium plongu will drop before it reaches you if you target it at maximum range and back up as it approaches. After accumulating a relatively large amount of armor and FAP decay early on (during the event, when all the countryside was a-swarm), i decided to go with minimal xmas tree armor that had better eco than my FAP (H.E.A.R.T.) and risk dying in the case of a close respawn or bad chain of misses. And i did die quite a few times... but with few other hunters around, that's not much of a liability on this mob.

So the last two thirds of the mission saw the defensive costs much reduced. Unfortunately, the output amp drop rate was greatly reduced during the hiatus, so there wasn't much markup to be had from plongus when i returned. I did loot a few guns with nice markup, and a few chips with a little markup, but they were few and far between.

I made little attempt to use a finisher. That's in part due to the effect of a mob barreling down on you when you have light armor and low health, but also because it really wasn't that necessary. The plongus have about the right hp to make overkill from my weapon minimal, even amped. When it was obvious that a finisher would do the job and i wasn't in danger of immediate death, i used the trusty Breer P4a (L) w/ A104, the same one i've had for forever.

Other than that I did some healing with a Regen chip I (L) i looted. I came to the unexpected conclusion last summer, when looking at the way the healing tool market was shaping up, that regen chips might become a better option than FAPs for emergency healing. It seems like that is slowly becoming true, so i decided to burn off the regen chip (which has no meaningful markup), even though it represents about a 50% reduction in economy over the H.E.A.R.T.

Now that Hunt the THING is back online, i'll have to go pick up a boatload of Medkits (Adj nanofaps) again.

The small plongu spawn is conveniently located near a TP, but inconveniently mixed with atrax, which are, of course, obnoxiously aggressive. On the bright side, i was able to bag a couple hundred toward the atrax iron challenge. The same was true for hiryu, which is especially good because i can't fathom setting out to deliberately hunt hiryu for days on end.

Outcome

Output (PEDs):

• P4a+A104 (decay): 46.5
• imk2 (decay): 332.25
• Total offensive: 25,390 (includes scope and sights)
• Armor decay: 45.6
• FAP: 25.4 + 19.5 (Regen I)
• Total defensive: 90.5 (0.36% total lol)
• TOTAL: 25,481 PEDs

Loot: 25,537 (+56)
Return: 100% (tt)

Markup: TBA, but low. I still have some things on auction and am hoping to wait out the dip on some commodity prices. And speaking of waiting out market dips, i have been selling off my CB24s from Longtooth at really good prices: it's too bad i didn't hold on to more of them.

These figures include a few detours, including a team prot hunt that netted one of the few ESIs i've seen in years, completing some of the East Island missions, and a brief spree to shoot the vanguards and purifiers. Even so, this is a long mission chain. Much bigger than the Steel Bird Iron Challenge and even a bit bigger than the Longtooth Iron Challenge. No wonder those mission rewards were so severely nerfed! Interestingly, I did have a slightly larger output on the Longu Iron Challenge. It's how close the two values are that is remarkable.

I have to confess that I may have doubly counted one of my 1k PED ammo purchases. Between the gap in time and less than perfect notes, when i saw a profit of 1k PEDs tt on the mission, i second guessed my results and added 1k PED expense. So this may have been a 104% tt return hunt instead of 100%.

Why? Well this may have helped:

I had 35 plongu globals and one atrax alpha global, 14 in the last week alone, and one of those was that 971 PED HOF, to my great surprise. That was enough to get me the weekly highest loot and weekly highest total on plongu.

[wrap=left]http://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/gallery/files/3/8/6/7/entropia_2013-03-31_22-50-30-17-hof.gif[/wrap]Skill Reward

I took 4.19 Rifle @ Stage 2,
5.4 Athletics @ Stage 3,
13.49 PEDs Alertness on Stage 4,
which gave a nice boost to Evader (39.96 -> 40.13 (+0.17)). I had a bit of a conundrum deciding on a reward for the final stage:

Evade (8.94 PED + 0.5 Agility):
Evader: 40.35 -> 40.50 (+0.15)

or

LWT (41.88 PED):
Laser Sniper (Hit): 65.96 -> 66.03 (+0.07)
Ranged Laser (Dmg): 63.18 -> 63.31 (+0.13)

There are very few mission rewards that increase the damage professions, so the LWT would have been a nice option if it came with half an agility point. The Evade is harder to gain, though. For example, i increased (Hit) and (Dmg) far more by doing the mission than the reward would add. Throw in the crappy half an Agility for this mission -- and IMO this should have been a full Agility point -- and the 9 PED Evade was the more compelling option. Alas, the guaranteed Stamina reward for completing an Iron challenge is no longer with us. R.I.P.

The problem is that most of the damage modifying skills are unlocked skills. Missions should offer locked skills (probably a constraint of the reward system that they can't to avoid problems), so that RDA could be a mission reward, or even MMS. A nice big chunk of either of those would be a welcome addition. Since the Great HA Change of '13, i'm not worried about (Hit) beyond Commando.

Now what?

Now to find a new purpose in EU. I'm tempted to finally pay CP a visit. Aurli is still listed as my "Favorite Mob" by Entropia Life, but i haven't been to CP since we were betrayed and it was sold and turned into a taxed LA. However, the chance of eventually looting something to upgrade my 5Bs (however unlikely) is powerful incentive, and the mission rewards aren't too shabby, either. I'm going to have to sell off a lot of loot and cross my fingers if i want to go to CP, because my bankroll is less than 10k PEDs. I guess I'll look through the mission lists again and see if there are any not hopelessly nerfed.