It's time for Rare to revisit ghost fleets; OOS quests in general

  • Dumpington9903
    Seafarer

    Vaults and the new Merchants Alliance quests:

    • Require no resources (or virtually no resources) to complete.

    • Can be done quickly (in the case of vaults, in under 30 minutes; in the case of the Merchant lost mariner voyages, in less than 20 minutes).

    • Raise emissary status very quickly.

    • Do not have any impact/passive area denial on the wider map for other players.

    • Result in big payoffs.

    Additionally, the MA lost mariner voyages:

    • Can be completed (100 percent) solo in a reasonable timeframe.

    By contrast, ghost fleets (and OOS quests in general):

    • Are long.

    • Have low payouts.

    • Cannot effectively be completed solo (yes, you can definitely whittle down the ghost ships one by one - is this a fast or practical money-earner? No).

    • Do not raise emissary quickly.

    • Require (in the case of ghost fleets) you to go around collecting a not-insubstantial amount of resources if you hope to complete them.

    • Deny large portions of the map to other players.

    Simply put: the ghost fleets (and OOS quests as a whole) feel tired; the payouts suck, the effort/time investment is stupid, and they're activities that really can't be completed efficiently without other players. The experience, as a whole, is dated and tedious. OOS should be high on Rare's priority list to revisit.

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  • shifty189
    Marauder

    @herlucideyes i actually agree with this! i love the OoS faction, but i find myself doing vaults just to make some cash. Maybe they can work something out.

  • Captain Coel
    Commander
    Insider

    @herlucideyes wait, you collect supplies before doing ghost fleets? I usually just grab a pocket and go. The event usually gives plenty of supplies and 2 ghost fleet voyages tend to get you to grade 5.

    The payout might be small compared to a vault or lost shipment but maybe those payouts are too large and should be reduced.

  • Limend
    Lord
    Insider

    @captain-coel said in It's time for Rare to revisit ghost fleets; OOS quests in general:

    The payout might be small compared to a vault or lost shipment but maybe those payouts are too large and should be reduced.

    I my self am fine with vault loot amount as it doesn't give you much emissary grade and forces you to stack if you want to sell with grade 5 where as merchant voyage that is way less risky awards you with grade 5 flag in one run.

  • CaliCorsairCat
    Legend
    Insider

    I can appreciate your logic here. Not enough people really present things relationally to one another in terms of risk/reward & time requirements.

    Overall, I agree that the OOS isn't really worth it or all that rewarding, even if you can solo it quickly, which many people can but still doesn't reward you proportionally for the skill and effort it takes to do so. I never run OOS emissary anymore.

    The introduction of the new merchant voyages makes the disparity painfully obvious from a gold & emissary ranking perspective.

    Fleets do reward a captain's skull for commendation purposes, but you are right that fleets are time consuming for the payout & emissary rank provided, and has the added cost of being very visible on the map & will distract you of any approaching enemy player ships.

    I think if they made the emissary go up quicker across the board for OOS that would be a start (maybe with each ship destroyed), but overall the faction isn't all that fun or rewarding because it is missing anything that makes it distinctive. You can already fight skeletons and ships while doing other things on the seas.

  • TheSevenTeas
    Marauder

    I think the normal bounty quests are fine, but totally agree about the ghost ships quest. I'm getting somewhat better at them but they do take a long time, burn quite a lot of resources, and drop fairly anaemic rewards. More subjectively, I find sailing circles around their pathfinding to be boring, boring, boring.

    A rework might look like: follow clues, which might involve fighting skellies on some islands and something similar to GH riddle maps, to locate a group of ghost ships that you then have to fight. Maybe a captain ship and 2-4 grunt ships. And make the rewards comparable to the MA lost shipments.

  • CallMeBackdrafT
    Vanguard
    Insider
    Founder

    @herlucideyes ghost fleets and even flameheart require 0 resources to get started

    They drop supplies by the boatload, when low on supplies and flameheart is up i go do him, or attack a skelly ship because they also drop supplies nowadays.

    I do OoS fleets solo in about 15 minutes, come out with more supplies then i started with and have loot to boot.

    In oos fleets (and flameheart for that matter) when the boss waves spawn, dont kill the supporting ships, just position yourself in front of one of the captain ships en unload ~10 cannonballs in them, they die and give at least 30 cannonballs back. And when they die the flanking support vessels in their formation despawn.

  • Leftypirate99
    Marauder

    @calicorsaircat i guess i need to youtube some videos of 'simple soloing' of ghost fleets. ghost sloops, yeah, fine no issue. But solo vs. ghost galleons only seems viable when using islands to your advantage (providing cover and getting them to get stuck on them). In the open sea it pretty tough sledding soloing 2 ghost galleons when they start barraging you then add in their cursed balls. Flameheart is much easier to solo than the ghost fleets.

  • CaliCorsairCat
    Legend
    Insider

    @leftypirate99 flameheart is a ghost fleet. I think you mean skeleton fleet.

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