Heroic Space Missions

[Saeten]

Anyone have a good suggestion for the easiest and/or fastest Heroic Space Mission?

I've tried a few with the highest gear (lvl 7) gear and they just kick my arse. Can't tell if I'm just hampered by my potato computer or if these are horribly designed to decimate you. Not sure I've ever done a Heroic Space Mission. I'm 100% on all the other achievements in Space Missions.

Think I saw a post a while back on how badly they are scaled against the player.

So just throwing this out there to see what others experienced. Also looking at this for Galactic Seasons and wondering if these are even worth the effort.

 

[Stradlin]

Lorta Escort/ Hypori Escort is the easiest, followed by  Far Cradle/Ragnant Station.

Both of these are very manageable once you get used to it suddenly being much more unforgiving environment when compared to the non heroics. Finding the somewhat optimal moment  to use the abilities behind  1-4 is the key.  Duration of each heroic mission is such that you can pop both of your big cooldowns twice if your 1st activation comes early enough.

 

Edited April 16 by Stradlin

[SteveTheCynic]

The other thing to bear in mind is that *all* the railshooter space missions are fully deterministic - the enemies always appear in that order and in those places and times - and the more demanding (i.e. higher-level) missions are more demanding because they require progressively more and more precision and accuracy in terms of where and when you shoot what.   The Heroic ones are even more demanding.

[Saeten]

I don't want to run this 10-20 times to learn them. It's not worth my time. Too bad. I wouldn't mind them if I felt like I could learn them in 4-5 tries instead of being decimated half way through with no recourse or fight ability.

[Advocatis]

The heroic missions still have the same issues  as the normal space missions - combinations of ship and mission that have your laser weapons with the same color as the enemy ion trails so you wind up targeting your own shots, fires and smoke that hugely obscure target areas (which are like pinpoints on the screen sometimes anyway), the targeting reticule vanishes into the background colors, proton torpedoes that take a long time to lock but break lock in a millisecond, etc.  There just isn’t any room for error in the heroics.  

[PianoMatt]

When I came back to the game in 2022, this was one of my first challenges I gave myself: complete every space mission in the game and all of their bonuses.  It was a quite the challenge for me at the time, but has since become easier.

How are your PC specs?...if you're on an outdated machine, that might be part of your problem.  With a fully upgraded ship, I had a heck of a time beating some of them and also completeing the bonus missions when I was on an old rig.  When I upgraded my PC there was a huge difference.  It seemed like the frame rate was also being tracked by the game and the on-rails inputs.   With the same exact character with the same ship, on my new rig I could suddenly take out things with my guns instead of only missles.  I was seeing many more shots come from my ship and comparing my older rig to it, it felt like I was getting 50% or less of my shots on it.

If you're trying them, someone already mentioned some of these but here are my observations:

 

You have to know and understand each course and timing your EMP Blast (4 minute cooldown) and Electromagnetic Warfare Pod (2.5 minute cooldown) are essential to not only accomplishing some of the objectives, but also surviving some of the massive incoming damage spikes.   If you're just trying to complete it, there are pretty clear spots where those should be used.  If you can't destroy something, you should try and EMP blast it when you pass by it.  You hit everything in a radius, not just what you are looking at on the screen.  If you are constantly dying at a certain point, use your electronic warfare pod in that window of damage.  Once you do that, look at your cooldown and mission timers and see if you could have used either of them earlier in the mission and had them back up and ready by the time you needed them.  For me, completing some of the bonus objectives meant I needed to most likely use them in different places than I would to just complete the mission at it's base.  If the mission is longer than 4 minutes, you should aim to use an EMP right at the start if there are big groups or large targets near you.  

 

You absolutely need to be utilizing your power conversion module.  It should never be set to neutral.  It's either set to blaster mode or shield mode at all times.   Don't shoot when you are in shield mode and don't keep it in blaster mode when you are taking a huge damage spike. 

 

Learn to take your finger off of your mouse and stop firing when you don't need to be and regen any bit of shields you can.  Use missles when you are regening shields to accomplish some of your lost dps.  

 

Use your space bar.  It's essentially a dodge.  I don't think you get i-frames from it, but it can help you avoid some of the shots when tons of ships are firing at you.

 

Go all out on any elite ships that start engaging you and get them out of the way as soon as possible.  They hurt, have a lot of HP, and usually a small guantlet that goes with them while they engage you.  But, once you are able to take them out quickly, you'll usually have a large window to regen shields and focus on the next target in a relatively damage free gauntlet section.  

 

I hope you find more success on your next attempts.  

[ThanderSnB]

You might already know this, but you can use WASD to move the ship slightly independently of what you are targeting with the mouse. This can help dodge lasers while still attacking something. Enemies don't lead their shots. They fire at your ship's current location. You can move the ship in a circle while firing and avoid quite a lot of enemy lasers.

The only downside is for A and D, I normally change those to Strafe Left and Right, but for space missions they have to be Turn (or Rotate) Left and Right. The same binding is used for both space missions and the normal character controls. If they are set to Strafe, those two keys won't function, you can only move the ship up and down, and this dodging technique won't work.

[SteveTheCynic]

10 hours ago, Advocatis said:

the targeting reticule vanishes into the background colors

One thing that might help here if you're on WIndows 10/11 is to use the accessibility settings to enlarge the Windows mouse pointer - SWTOR obeys this setting(1) so you can make the crosshair easier to see.

(1) Some other MMORPGs don't, notably GW2 which has a decent-sized pointer regardless, and ESO whose pointer is and remains tiny, no matter what Windows says.

[SteveTheCynic]

2 hours ago, ThanderSnB said:

You might already know this, but you can use WASD to move the ship slightly independently of what you are targeting with the mouse.

W doesn't do anything useful, since your ship moves *up* in the box at full rate even if you aren't pressing it.

2 hours ago, ThanderSnB said:

The only downside is for A and D, I normally change those to Strafe Left and Right, but for space missions they have to be Turn (or Rotate) Left and Right. The same binding is used for both space missions and the normal character controls. If they are set to Strafe, those two keys won't function, you can only move the ship up and down, and this dodging technique won't work.

Do you bind Q/E to Turn Left/Right instead?  If so, use them (so it's QSE rather than ASD).

Of course, writing that sprained my brain, since I use ZQSD rather than WASD, seeing as how I have an AZERTY keyboard.

[ThanderSnB]

7 hours ago, SteveTheCynic said:

W doesn't do anything useful, since your ship moves *up* in the box at full rate even if you aren't pressing it.

Do you bind Q/E to Turn Left/Right instead?  If so, use them (so it's QSE rather than ASD).

Of course, writing that sprained my brain, since I use ZQSD rather than WASD, seeing as how I have an AZERTY keyboard.

I don't use W for speed. I use it to move the ship up while pointing down with the mouse.

Yeah, you can use the rebound keys, but I find it annoying. I can easily rotate through WASD constantly while pointing with the mouse, but I have trouble with WQSE. I'd have to develop muscle memory for that when I can just rebind the keys and use what I already know.

Edit: On second thought, Q and E won't work for me because I don't bind them to Turn Left/Right. I use them for quickbar buttons. I leave Turn Left/Right unbound and use the right mouse button for turning. So yeah, I did have to rebind every time I do space, but I just read that the numpad might work. I might test that the next time I do space missions.

Edited April 21 by ThanderSnB

[SteveTheCynic]

On 4/21/2024 at 10:02 PM, ThanderSnB said:

I don't use W for speed. I use it to move the ship up while pointing down with the mouse

I've found that the ship won't move above the mouse *ever*, and it migrates naturally upwards to where the mouse is height-wise if I'm not pressing S to make it move down.

[ThanderSnB]

10 minutes ago, SteveTheCynic said:

I've found that the ship won't move above the mouse *ever*, and it migrates naturally upwards to where the mouse is height-wise if I'm not pressing S to make it move down.

I think it's based on where the mouse is pointing. If pointing towards the top of the screen, that's probably true, but I think if pointing towards the bottom, the W key will work. I will have to test the next time I do space missions.

[Darev]

I use the analog "stick" on the g13 to steer while doing these missions.  For me, it helps a LOT.  Unfortunately, they're old, logitech doesn't make them, or anything like it (with an analog stick) anymore and buying these used can be very expensive.

WASD, for steering, does help, but if you have them bound to other commands, you're stuck with just the mouse.  Doing the heroic missions with ONLY the mouse doesn't seem all that feasible.

 

Also, as I recently discovered on the SV server, your connection (PING) matter on these.   The lag time from when you click buttons to when the game sees the command needs to be as short as possible.  it's probably as important for these missions as it is for PVP.
 

Edited April 24 by Darev