Freak Farm

So today I accepted a random pickup blind invite, and ended up on an unannounced farming mission. It was the freaks in warehouse, lvl 31-ish, 10 firebombs mission, and the first inkling that I had it was a farming mission was when all the chars sat politely and waited for me to gather up a spawn or two.

Then the leader warned the new incoming scrapper not to defuse any bombs. And I was thinking, hrm, yes, I think this is it, the 'unspoken' thing.

So for the heck of it, since I was the only tank and the one being the shepherd, I decided to play at herding for a bit and see just how profitable it really was. They were considerably more well-behaved at it than my evil twin's group. I didn't have to tell them to wait anywhere or stop or go, I just herded as per normal, they kept out of my way, and when it was nicely clumped, I just hit F7, and they came over, laid down a whole lot of (actually useless) damage mitigation controlers, and let the two poor blasters shoot away painstakingly at tank swipers.

Unfortunately, I could only sit through oh, two resets at most. Or one. I think one. So two times going through the mission. We're talking like possibly a hundred fifty tanks, do you know how long it takes to kill 'em? For like 200-400 xp a piece, and 170ish on the other freaks. I watched my xp bar most carefully. It went up by at most, one bar, per mission round.

I'd have to do this TEN TIMES to gain a level? *faints*

Farmers have my respect. For being able to sit through sheer boredom. I was the herder, you know, the only one actually using their brains to play with the mobs and gather them up, and I WAS BORED after the second round. :P

I solo'ed a train mission of devouring earth/freaks, and that got me 3/4 bar and was infinitely more amusing as there were no insanely high hp bosses. Just a lot of dying minions. (And I was actually scared of taking DE missions for fear of the swarms incapacitating me, but I suddenly realized that solo = no bosses, and very few lts., which meant very few swarms and emantors = one very happy tank playing alone.)

And even normal missions is about 1/4 to 3/8 of a bar.

I can see why fire tanks decide to go solo by themselves. (especially fire/fire tanks.)

Of course, this could have been a newbie attempt at farming. They had no clue what to do with a shadow cyst. We didn't have a high damage kheldian anymore, and were basically relying on two normal blasters to kill stuff. Even the dumb spines scrapper just killed stuff at the edges, dunno where his spine burst was.

It might have been more profitable, and thus more interesting had it taken a faster time. But hrm, I'm not one for repetition without story. At least doing various missions allows you to actually pretend to be a superhero and immerse a bit in character.