Agents and missions

[______________Kyuss9]

How’s the life of an agent in AO? Not very nice since the 12.6 patch…
Just to give you an idea, here are some of our daily problems:

- Our only special attack is a joke (I know, I know…you’re going to fix it). Aimed shot is useless.
- We don’t have any kind of special attack to get us out of a tight situation (Aimed shot can only be used in the beginning of the fight).
- Our regular damage is too low and/or slow for missions. Powerfull riffles (Tsak and Flechette) are too slow for missions. Faster ones like Stigmas, can’t be bought in stores…
- One of our main skills – concealment - is totally broken – Using Ruse of Taren and the Pronouncement of greatness nano (under Adventurer FP) with the concealment skill my agent has, I get almost 700 in concealment and I still get spoted by green NPCs all the time.
- We can only solo missions up to 30 – 35% difficulty. Beyhond that we get wasted most of the time. When trying the concealment approach, we get spoted in a matter of seconds. When that happens “half” the NPCs in that mission will be after you (even if they are two rooms away…). When trying the “fighting” approach (i.e. trying to kill all the NPCs) no use considering any mission above 35% difficulty. Beyhond that difficulty lvl, most of the time I’m not able to get further than the 2nd room…Just yesterday I got killed by 2 green NPCs in no more than 10 seconds…

Funcom, are you aware that:

1 –The actual state of the Agent profession, makes it impossible to solo missions above the mentioned difficulty lvl?
2- Agents are being forced to: either play low lvl missions or to overequip to be successful in missions?
3 – Is almost impossible for agents to get Tokens (low lvl missions don’t give Tokens since most of the mosnters are grey. 50% difficulty and above are impossible to finish.
4 – Agents have to spend much more time in missions than Soldiers and other professions, since we are forced to do lower lvl missions with poorer loot and smaller money prize. This also allows other professions to lvl faster since they can spend more time hunting.
5 – All these problems encourage people with Agent chars to overequip, so that they can keep the pace with other professions.


Just to clarify, my agent is lvl 71, using armour around QL 70, implants with an average QL of 30, using a QL 95 Riffle…an average player I think.
I play since Beta 4 so I think I have some notion how the game works…the only solution I see (from the player side) to this situation is overequipping, which is something I don’t like to do, and something I think Funcom doesn’t want to keep spreading through the game…
Where’s the fun in this Funcom?
Missions shouldn’t be a punishment…they should be, at least, as fun as hunting is. Right now, agents aren’t having any fun doing missions…it’s not fun dying over and over again, having to spend endless hours doing low lvl missions, getting crappy prizes to buy a new pair of armor gloves, when other players get money to buy a whole new armor doing 2 or 3 missions!

Is the dev team aware of this issues? Are they going to be adressed soon? Any info. on how this issues will be handled?

[Elsid]

I have a 108 Agent with a unbuffed conceal of over 600. With Ruse2, leet form (aka uber-gerbil) and a cloak my conceal is easily around 1600. This allows me to sneak just about 0 quality missions post 13.0. Most of the time mobs in the main room will agro before I can even hit conceal while entering a mission area. Before 13.0 I was able to sneak mission/run with a cloak with some degree of danger, it was a challenge and it was fun. Now, an agent's core defining skill is useless. Furthermore, the reduction in the conceal skill's effectiveness lowers the propensity of getting an aimed shot. So in 13.0 aimed shot was addressed and then nerfed again with a conceal fix.

What is worse is funcom continues to "stealth" nerf conceal (the irony is partially humorous). In other words just about every time conceal is "improved or "balanced," Funcom does not indicate what the change is in advance. Given, the horrible record Funcom has demonstrated in testing before a patch is released to a live server, how are these nerfs ever tested for effect before they are applied? They are not, so don’t give us the official line- aka Lie that they have been fully tested.

So fix conceal, It would also be nice to provide an eta on the fix. But I will not hold my breath. Now on, a positive level the game is in general getting better, but Funcom stop playing with conceal. Just fix it.

Sid