When the Mission Architect was first announced, folks were immediately worried about farming. And the Devs said, “Worry not, we have ways to keep that from happening.”
Ah … yeah.
So all those constant Broadcasts for “LF farm ae team” and “Lvl 50 boss farm lfm” are just folks being deluded.
I spent a little time at this today, just to see. There’s a sort of weirdness about the farming routine that’s almost fascinating for about 15 minutes, after which you need a shower.
I took Al, my Fire/Rad Troller, who had just turned 20. I joined up as the lowest person on a farm mission.
Target: a mission full of Rikti Communications Officers. Like, 20-person spawns of them.
It’s perfect. Comm Officers are (since they changed how they were awarding Portal spawns) pretty high XP, but they are, in and of themselves, pretty wimpy. You never see them alone in the wild, let alone in packs.
Bang. Instant farming. In two relatively short missions (the simple looping city map), I dinged Al over five levels.
Two missions. Forty-five minutes tops, more likely thirty. Five levels.
Now tell me about no farming?
I will be very curious to see how the Devs adjust this (and how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there is). The irony is that they just set things up, after a year and a half, so that PvP nerfs don’t affect PvE. How they will have AE nerfs that don’t affect normal mission play will be a real challenge.
As a postscript, I can see some value in “farming.” The pre-14 movement power gap is now gone, but pretty much everyone (no matter what the Devs claim is needed) is grinding from 14 to 20, just waiting for Stamina. Except for those folks who get Quick Recovery earlier, but that’s pretty few in number.
So I can see some value in doing farming missions at that level to jump over that hump to being “really” superheroic. I don’t see a lot of point in doing it at higher levels, and I seriously don’t understand people who farm their way up to 50 … so that they can … um … I have no idea. But that’s been the whole PL conundrum to me, too.
One thing I can say for the Farm League, at least at the moment — there’s always something hopping there. That beats a lot of the action sometimes, on some servers.