The dumb ones immediately grind, yes. A few go onto going the EF and Pax missions for some easy levels. Then they grind.

my alternative would be that instead of going to grind in DGs, they grind in non-DG space, with other players, hunting roamer AI

tl;dr - the bad things about grinding, are the isolation, and the repetition. remove those two aspects and it isnt "grinding" anymore, its "gameplay"

I've just come back to the game so I thought I'd start at the start. At least initially.

Wow. Also ow. It's brutal at low level. You level very slowly and it takes loads of levels to upgrade your equipment. The problem is that quite a few of the quests are not soloable (and this is entry stuff, you can't expect people to be grouping up right off the bat, especially as it may be very quiet at the time they play) if you go for a balanced build and don't just stack certain stats. Or grind a few levels and go outside the areas you're sent to quest (and the latter is needed anyway, both that and unbalanced builds are things you'd assume low levels won't rush right at).

Seeing what others have said, this isn't so much hard as intake cripplingly bad. The missions are frustratingly hard. Spawning a bunch of drones who have such a high range they will snipe you in groups of 3 halfway accross the zone's "active" area isn't mean, it's super frustrating, and when it's not even your mission, that's actually plain nasty.

I can't talk about the technical side as I'm that rusty, but the start for C2 is utterly brutal and slow paced. Slow paced not being a huge issue compared to being able to be all around T3 in an hour as before, but when you couple it with being blown apart repeatedly by "short ranged" (according to the briefing) enemy base with missiles flying halfway accross the map (not to mention it's other weapons being longer ranged than most of the T1 gear an evenly built player will have) and other people's drones with better equipment with you spawning in 3s and shooting you as you try to take on an (already challenging) enemy. It's just bad.

Thats the point. Upgrading gear via TECH LEVEL is not a very easy way to do things. However, upgrading gear by TIER/META LEVEL, is encouraged. Less work for the same power. And it's cheaper to repair.

Of course, we want you to believe higher tech non modded gear is better....


So, you have a bunch of SP left over and don't like the idea of wasting it teching up, what do you do? Start cranking out the class skills. Thats what you do.



Until you start hitting the upper edges of Nexus missions, Infernal Tempest/Bonnet bosses, they're all soloable.

The IT/Bonnet stuff has always been hard for the levels intended, and so were intended to be the equivalence of a lower level UZ or Oly. You don't exactly go to do UZ as level 500's in entry level ships with T15 augs or lower, and low end T20 gear(or lower) and expect to kill emp(even for CSE, that could be a challenge).

As for the upper edge of nexus...umm, no official statement from jeff or caly so far.


As for classes, Engineer and FC still dominate the lower levels. Monkey and SD are average. The rest are...bad for a newbie. Sniper has pathetic range and dps, Zerk has poor sustainability and defense, Gunner requires a small prod to get its damage, and Seer has always sucked as a low level.

Ah see, I'm not talking about my stabled level 250ish FC. I haven't even looked at him yet. I'm just trying to relearn the basics. When I've got a handle on it I'll try to make things work again with that. I wonder if my pax drones are as OP as they used to be (speaking of meta tier upgrades).

I'm talking about the point in the game where you don't know class exists. Where if you're new the idea of connections you don't yet have giving you meta tier upgrades isn't even something you can comprehend. When you just blindly put points in because you have either had the notion to stack certain things or to be an all rounder. Whether you suceed or not as a brand new player is very much luck. A lot will get their first mission to take on a drone with T2 weapons, T2 shields, and unlimited energy and they'll have an 800 bank and run out of energy in about 15 seconds. Their puny weapons will then fail to even cancel out the regen, except they died 12 seconds ago because 3 drones are shooting them with magcannon from about 800 away.

What I'm saying is that a new player is probably going to give up within 2 hours. Let alone 2 weeks or 2 months. I've stuck with it thus far because I've seen the depth of the mid and endgame though. But I still feel that either some skills costs need to drop, or that early game needs to be made a little easier to compensate for how under powered you will be for a while.

I found that all the cadet-line of missions in the Nexus were soloable except for the mini bana one, and a few of the optional drone destruction missions (those high tech ones are badass!). Then again, the average new player would probably have a bit more trouble than I had.