eh, it got samey quick for me, nothing to do with the intensity or how the spawns work, just the maps and actual structure of the mode makes me wanna just run around and kill stuff and ignore all the objectives but that’s kinda griefing
Samey is walking through the same maps in auric QP with the singular flavoring of which color enemies will shoot guns at you and which bosses you’ll mog in 4 seconds, but OK. And yea doing nothing but running around without levering the tempo up is boring. Like I said its on the players to create.
but expeditions is the exact same except with just one objective type and just one map type
i make my own fun in aurics i just don’t see why i’d wanna play expeditions for it, it feels more limited
No, there’s a massive asset shuffle each of the 6 zones is a game board that places like 50 set pieces randomly. The exact same thing is actually true of adventure mode. I have literally not played one identical game.
elaborate?
everything that you see on the map falls into the asset layer besides obvious pieces that can’t move like the bridges and structures. this also includes tons of things that aren’t even objectives, like the various sections of debris and now these mechanicus artifacts like cog wheels, literal mountains, old fortifications, gully sections and the like.
some areas change completely because an area that you’d seen as a wide open vista has a giant mountain in it turning it into multiple lanes instead, or the mountain will have a clear section, there are many versions of things if you pay attention. I actually grew in appreciation for it after replaying, its literally like someone made a tabletop gameboard and just moved pre-built minis around. it also means that even if you had the same marked POI set up as a previous run, it is invariably going to be different in navigations and minor POIs used. there’s just too many variables for it to line up 1-1. even the odds of seeing the same POIs themselves are pretty low now with the additional Skitarius ones.
and because the main randomness factor on replaying is actually how objectives are rotated on their axis, that is where the actual variance in replay/difficulty beyond what the game can provide comes from. sometimes they will orient themselves in a way where getting into the vault basically means having to fight out of a one-way closet and into a choke.
that’s fair specifically the quoted part isn’t something i really thought about. the new stuff probably helps, release version where the only objectives to do were auspex, battery, koth made my eyes glaze over after a while so i feel it’s unfair to say people who didn’t enjoy that just can’t imagine an apple in their minds eye. the dynamic is prohibitive to the enjoyment of the gamemode for me. like if i can’t bring myself to care for doing any of the objectives then i can’t bring myself to actually walk to them and spawn the enemies either.
also not sure if this is fixed but when i played it on release spawns were bugged as hell, the director would only spawn stuff on one location if you split up and despawn specials all over the place in plain view. this may have shaped my opinion on the mode drastically because 50% of my playtime was as a result literally spent doing these lame ass objectives over and over while nothing spawned.
i’ll probably give it a shot again now that it has more and timerless maps and might change my opinion
I think 25,000 salvage and 250,000 tech remnants makes sense.
I was using radar mod and wasting ammo to spend as much salvage as possible and was nowhere near tech remnant 3. So lowering it for how average players would spend salvage to finish before/around the 250,000 makes sense to me.
the objectives are all turbo short vs. me being able to do any adventure level even at H40 with stealth and spend much of the time on an objective basically waiting to go to the next room since a lot of them are just ‘wait for the computer crash’ and 3 ish minutes. with mods skipping those the campaign levels honestly don’t even exist with speedrunning but whatever we can disagree there.
and the points of interest themselves have an action factor on players being nearby, there’s even a progress bar trying to hint it to players. normal capture time is about 80 seconds, but that can be reduced to around 20 in full coherency. it actually applies to the creaky elevator objective and all interrogations as well, just less crazy than the capture. I find the detpack more obnoxious than any singular capture or interrogation. they take 5s to plant and you have to do multiple on each objective, so solo clearing them without stealth or ogryn-style tanking is just a waste. you have to spend way more time looping back and placing additional detpacks. so no timer = more reasons to play for me
and yeah the timerless one is pretty merciless even on last alive, which is so nice to see vs. adventure where all you get to clutch is the handful of elites that filtered your strike team, maybe a boss and the usual gauntlet of specials. I was fighting a packmaster and scab captain last alive as an ogryn when another pack master terror spawned, literally 500 dogs and elites still trying to bop me and gunners everywhere and the usual poxburster push poxburster push every 5 seconds with non stop horde that has lots of Moebian 21st and shields. I haven’t had a clutch like that outside havoc in forever.
A few million
I’ll preface this with saying I was one of the folks who’d hoped they’d ~half it with the Skittles patch. I (am seemingly one of the few who) enjoy expeditions as a concept, and can respect what it is currently while still wishing it was more. Before the patch, I was at around 16k Salvage traded.
I spent the better part of a week non-stop farming for this nightly after Skittles dropped (knocking out the 100 missions + 500 barrel-ectile disfunctions etc. penances at the same time). Here’s a time-stamped screenshot I sent my mate on discord to prove it.
I’m glad they dropped the number.
Thankfully for our collective sanities I’ve seen mostly positive responses to this from people who also already grinded it out, but the handful who are trying to ladder-pull and whinge? Womp womp. I thought the same back when the red skulls frame was 1 mil and they brought it down (really, does that mean anything at all with all the AoE-slop plaguing the game?), and I had the old 250 missions frames, most egregiously the Investigation and Repair frames back when the only ways to get them were 250 Hab Dreykos and 250 Power Matrices respectively! They brought those frame requirements down to 100, and I can’t remember anyone batting an eye really, and I was just as happy then as I am now over this change!
None of this matters. You’ll get it all by just playing, why are folks trying to gatekeep this kind of kark 
Play the game! Use whatever titles or frames or insignias you think are cool! And now, more people can use Salvage Lord without going completely mental with grinding a mode they don’t like.
Good! 
Remember: the only goal for anyone of us (imo) is to have fun, and hope to better yourself with each run! 
Perhaps the title could be “The Miserable”? XD Not mocking, it’d just be kinda funny.
Personally, I barely had touched the mode. Been trying again a little bit. Without a timer the mode is much more tolerable, but it’s still not a good mode. Cool maps, though; if only they’d been used for a normal level instead of this waste of time.
i’ve been playing some today and the added objectives and timerless missiosn really add a lot to the gamemode, timerless should genuinely just be the default, the timer is just pointless and makes the mode feel bad.
not sure if i’ve gotten the new map yet though, i forgot if it’s tied to the node or not, don’t think i played a new one yet
i think if they actually add a bunch more objectives/setpieces and maybe some very different maps (like one inside of a crashed ship or something) it would stand on its own very well. also the spawn jank still kinda happens and i hope they address that at some point
also, skitarii being able to automate the auspex makes expeditions in particular way more fun. they should consider just removing the auspex minigames from it in the first place because it just gets way overbearing and overplays the entire rest of the gamemode for me
It added to the builder toolkit of experiences you can make (imagination is the key). when I saw ‘players respawn in sanctuary when the gate is called’ I immediately thought ‘elimination game mode is finally a thing’. No more pick up in 20s is a level of brutal punish that exists no where else as a modifier; Permanent Death.
And under the hood I get where they were going with the timer, getting every clear state was supposed to be an achievement. Problem is it just breeds speedrunning and encouraged nothing else. It could have been OK if like similar systems you got more time for clearing things (getting a game over to the timer in Helldivers is a choice) but the game isn’t and shouldn’t be for that. It should kill you with a tide of enemies. Hopefully the next board has a timerless zone and more points of interest option for even more control over the crazy. Should be attempting to empty the wastes of heretics every game, I love getting panic spawn bosses but they need to be more frequent. And spawn the ones that patrol closer, some maps have only 3 potential spawns which can put it 150m or more away when it appears. 3 roaming cap on the endless version would also be great, a packmaster should be roaming at the start of the game every time.
this is the big problem with it yeah, especially it encourages you to split up to get the map done quicker which in turn breaks spawns and forces you to do more boring auspex skulls on your own
without the timer the dynamic is instantly cured, there’s still spots where you still SOMETIMES split up but don’t feel too encouraged to
also, just to cycle back to the topic of the thread: i played another like 5 missions and got like 1.5k salvage for the penance out of it. 100k was genuinely stupid. 20k is still very high. op your ass did not get 20k “for free” that took effort and you can be happy with getting the penance even if it’s changed like this
the worst part is that it bred two long term grinds that could only be chipped at together on the 30m board. and 2 times the board had the 30m on night time, which is dull as rocks since night modifier has a hidden lower intensity modifier. people would quit on the last sector because they couldn’t spend any more salvage, which farked over anyone who actually wanted to play. anyone who defended it was insane.
now getting extra salvage is just so you can grab heal stims and ammo crates when they spawn (you can place an ammo crate in the room leaving the sanctuary so you can access it during the next sector and then buy another item to bring, big brain play). WHENEVER THEY FIX THE GUNSHIP we can stack up some salvage to buy that (crashing is fixed but the AI is still bork unless its regular daytime)
dawn and the new modifiers and mechanics to reduce stealth cheese (increase the range on this check even more and make it a global change for stealth, bam 75% of its cheese is fixed) are huge improvements. that went totally unmentioned in the update post! that was the real crime, dawn is just normal daytime intensity with the nerfed engagement from night modifier. plus it looks cool. how could they not mention that and the timer removal, from their own infographs they made Reaper was the deadliest enemy in this mode. well he definitely ain’t in dawn mode.
To be fair, once you have all the penances, I don’t feel encouraged anymore either except just to add challenge. What do I care about getting tech remnants for with ever grid unlocked?
I grinded the 100k in the 2 months. Think I would have been understanding if they changed it to 40k(for obvious reasons) but 20k is the easiest gold title in the game now
Per zone you can get 400 salvage. So ±800 a game. You can do that under 20 minutes and restart. That 25 games if you get 400 per zone. Some spots are bugged though
you average way less than that in games unless you play with friends who full clear every zone, it’s more like 40-50 games
the title is just as meaningless now as it was for you btw. 20k or 100k, it’s still just filling a bar by doing things you would be doing anyways. unless you consider dumping all your salvage into ammo an achievement worth rewarding, it’s just a bad penance