Thoughts on Elite

[Zed-F]

I've played my Elite marksman up to clvl 10, she's at Oxford Circus at the moment. I've been skipping side quests in an effort to speed through the game a bit faster, and possibly have some quest XP to fall back on once she's done grinding to the point where it's odious to continue doing so. Right now she's fighting monsters 2-3 levels above her, and doing ok. Act bosses might be anohter matter.

I haven't noticed that there are all that many more monsters than normal mode, with a couple of exceptions: namely, fellbore packs. These popups normally come in groups of 3-6 in normal, whereas in Elite they tend to show up in packs of 5-10, maybe more later. Definitely bring some AoE! The monsters in Elite do move faster than the monsters in normal; this coupled with the lack of inhibitor bots and drone for tanking makes my marksman feel squishy at times. However, sniper stance is a plus when she can use it, and I anticipate the power of ricochet/reflect/rapid fire making itself felt later on.

Item-wise, I have been finding a lot more legendary items than I did in normal, despite not having a lot of +luck gear yet (though I plan to collect +luck on my gear for this char.) Partly this is due to there being more rare/epic bosses, but also there seem to be more legendary drops from regular monsters. If you play an Epic character, plan to equip your character pretty much entirely on what you find; everything sells for half what it did in normal, which also affects how much materials you get out of things you scrap. A lot of white items scrap for 1 gold even well into act 2, and paying for heal injectors actually puts a significant dent in your character's budget. (I seem to be finding fewer of them too, but that could just be a perception bias.)

Anyway, things seem about as fun overall as normal, though obviously the above differences make for a different experience in some respects.

[Thecla]

I like elite -- it's a bit like a classic diablo mod for HG:L, though no doubt not as well-informed about the real game mechanics as the best ones of those.

The main difference I see with elite is that monsters do a lot more damage (so it's much easier to die -- I wouldn't want to play hardcore elite, myself) but they're not that much harder to kill, which is definitely in the right direction. Apart from that, as you mention, gold and scraps are harder to come by (also good), and since you have to restart in the station on death, and respawn rates are a lot faster than in the normal game, setting Diablo-style backup portals is a very good idea (and hopefully you can actually use them to return to where you died). Unfortunately, there seem to be no portals that work with the "network error" death.

It's hard to tell about drop rates from a random sample -- I'd guess they're about the same. The one thing that does seem obvious is that rare/elite mobs spawn more often than in the normal game.