Yea this is a major problem, and my one complaint with the mission. It’s also why I have special handling for this mission in Hardtide. The timer makes drop-ins pretty much a lost cause, and I hope they disable joining timed missions after they start.
The mission is nice but only as a change of pace, similar to Karnak Twins here in Darktide and Chaos Wastes in VT2. Sure, I like to play it from time to time, but the way it operates is way too different from the base game mode for me to ever launch it randomly. Gotta be in the mood for it.
The design of the mission is questionable though. There isn’t just one issue with it, there’s a few design choices compounding to create the overarching problem of hopeless drop-ins and different focus. It also heavily favours builds with large amount of Crowd Control, more than any standard mission (without modifiers).
It’s not bad, in fact it is pretty cool, but just like Karnak Twins it does require a different approach than most other missions and as such should be clearly kept separate.
Yup, these two actually requires me to bring a certain loadout and build if i am actually trying to succeed. I tend to bring more team oriented abilities like Chorus/Smite etc
The long intro adds to this being really terrible. Your team needs you but they get to enjoy a bot for 3 minutes because you have to listen to Morrow rambling about trains first, even if you crashed and are rejoining and already heard it.
The more I think about rolling steel the more I feel that the mission intro system needs to be overhauled. I mean, we know how long the load times are if you disable those because you can disable those. It’ll take 3 seconds to load in. It’s crazy that we get a forced loadscreen for like a minute or more, which is for rejoiners is literally an eight of the mission being wasted for no reason.
Rework the mission selection. I don’t even see Rolling Steel 99% of the time when I play because of the RNG, meaning that I can’t play it even if I wanted to.