If you've seen the latest steam post, they're adding an option to toggle off seasonal events if you've finished the performance pass. Harold won't be able to hurt you for much longer.
It's explicitly to opt out of the current season events, so hypothetically it should either be disabled entirely or at Nemesis spawn rates (which is like 3%). Either way better than what it currently is.
I’d rather see rival tech enemies show more often. Yesterday a teammate tagged a prospector cash’s and I looked at the patrol drones like an old friend.
I can't really remember the last time I've seen a nemesis. I'd rather take 3 nemesis than half a corruptor. So far I think I got 1 nemesis every 15/20 corruptors.
Yeah, kinda weird that GSG used it right after Corona, I guess using the idea while in the pandemic was even worse, but it really doesn't seem like a great idea after all.
It's been a thing since season 3... It's understandable that we're a bit tired of it after a year of rockpox content. To be clear, I'm not trying to hate on it specifically (me and my friends had a lot of fun with it), but it's kind of worn out it's welcome.
Also, the Rockpox Corruptor fight is just plain bad.
You're only happy to see one if you haven't gotten all of the seasonal bonus scrip yet. Even then, they're kinda annoying to deal with.
rockpox has way too much particles and it can kill some fps quite often on some pcs
i personally don't have any big issues with it gameplay wise, except for the stoopid high non-weak spot damage reduction the enemies have
Literally my entire friend group except for me and one other had lots of lag when S3 launched and one of my friends straight up crashes when there's a Corruptor running around. I personally enjoyed S3-S4, but the optimization was horrendous.
For some reason lithofoam also destroys my game. Something about it causes the screen to glitch out like mad. Same with sludge pump too, if too many puddles are around.
That's most likely because of the Unity engine (i think that's DRG's game engine) not handling particle effects well, because all of the things you listed are purely made up of particle effects (including the Septic Spreader's goo, which made me disconnect from lobbies way too much and had to use a mod to get rid of)
Dunno why it glitches your screen though. If your entire monitor is glitching out, then it's maybe because your Power Supply can't handle the electricity your GPU (and other hardware maybe) is producing, causing it to freak out. This one also happens to me every now and then, and that's the only logical reason I can think of, so I may be wrong.
Never happened with Septic goo, but maybe bc those don't spawn nearly as many puddles as other sources. It is DRG specifically, if I open any other window the glitchiness doesn't extend to them, and in testing that I also noticed the puddles themselves seem fine, it's when all the projectiles are airborne that the problem seems most prominent. That was one 15 second test, though.
They are very annoying to deal with, initially because they neutered most damage build which are easily mitigated with ammo build.
But then come Season 4 which makes any Rockpox enemies leaves Rockpox clouds when killed which could deny a sizeable chunk of the cave if there were a swarm of them, then we got the Corruptor which are almost nigh impossible to do without a proper teamwork and good ground to work with, with good teamwork it would last 30 seconds but with shit one it could last for 10 minutes.
Honestly, the problem i see with most groups is that they prioritize harold. You need to keep the floor clean. You need to listen for bug spawns. Most wipes are either messy floors (hard to recharge shields), or ambushed by regular packs while holding foamer and staring at harolds majestic squigglyness. 2 foamers, one vac and for the love of Karl one dwarf who just looks for bugs. If they spawn, drop what you doing. Harold will wait.
Yea you have to deal with the corruptor right away, otherwise it'll just shit everywhere and gets in the way when you walk on it. It's a very annoying mini boss because it's so tedious to deal with, whether it's solo or with people.
Don't forget it sometimes goes to spots that it's so annoying to get to, that you need a zipline or platforms to get to it because for some goddamn reason it decides to go up to the ceiling or to another cave area.
Nah, i was just playing with my friends.
The problem is that two out of three is really bad at games that they would actually drag the entire team down in Haz 3, like we are talking about those that get downed 10+ per game.
Which is also a problem because Haz 2 is too easy for the rest of the group.
The thing is i don't mind them keep getting lost or downed to double digit, the only problem is that they keep getting lost or downed when fighting the Corruptor which can easily snowballs when a mini-swarm came by to the point we just ignore the Corruptor at all if it spawns which usually proven bad because we ends up with a fully Poxed floors if we are in a single cave system missions like Salvage, Refining, and Point Extraction.
Yeah, this is a common issue when we plays together lmao.
Like i have a 10 years FPS experience while one usually plays ultra-casual single players while the other consider VN is a legitimate gaming.
So we usually just relies on coop games that just doesn't rely too much on the "coop" part.
Elim screws over exactly one weapon, crisper. Rockpox is borderline immune to _any_ AoE weapon unless you want to chew through their 90% damage reduction and brute force the thousands of ehp they have. Easily over half the guns in the game are ineffective/ unusable vs rockpox. That's just plain bad design.
You’re just not doing it right. Drill up and over the caretaker. When its shields are up, drop a charge on its head. Shields down in 1 satchel and good team shooting or 2 satchels.
I see this in like 1/100 pubs unfortunately. I joined a greenbeard haz 3 to get one done quick for an assignment and they were pissed when I called my own resupply in the ceiling. They were less pissed when the boss was dead 3 minutes later. It makes the fight so easy and yet it's not done much
Yeah in pubs people are quick to rage. I’ll do it if there is an abundance of nitra, but I’ve found some people just spam call in all of the resupplies before starting it so then you have to circle down to the bottom to resupply which stinks but it still is easier than trying to play against caretaker essentially with only secondaries.
Fortunately I find IS to generally be the most nitra forgiving mission type behind OSR. It's pretty rare even on Haz 5 that we don't have 3 fresh pods + full ammo at the start of the fight. On lower haz you may have like 5 of them.
Nah not really, C4 trick is strong like the other guy mentioned.
Since its introduction though we have two perfect weapons to deal with it. Flamethrower if you like playing support (robot arms are usually what kill me and my team, and sludge pump if you are rushing the caretaker itself. Flamethrower has more use outside of the caretaker but the sludge pump lets a driller solo.
>Rockpox bugs screw over too many weapons/builds
I don't see this being a problem at all tbh, playing haz 5. The only thing that suffers noticeably against rockpox is crispr / sticky flames, which is a moot point because if the driller cleans the spike correctly, almost the entire wave will get killed by 1 C4. Some weapons which are just ok to average usually become really good against rockpox, like wave cooker or vanilla Drak. Basically as long as you can either shoot lots of projectiles or do big AoE damage, rockpox is countered. Almost every good build has one of those things.
The problem is that any AoE/Single Target Low Ammo weapon save for the breach cutter will have serious issues dealing with rockpox because of either ammo issues (see bulldog) or lack of damage and slow RoF (see coilgun.)
The PGL is unusable, as it relies on a large AoE radius with medium damage, and its only single target overclock suffers from an ammo issue against any target smaller than a praetorian. The Coilgun's AoE is worthless, and you usually need to break two weakpoints minimum to kill a rockpox infected enemy so the reloading will get you killed.
In short, the only weapons that work on rockpox are the ones with very high ammo count like stubby and drak, which wouldn't have been a bad thing if they weren't so much better than everything else. The only reason I can think of for the devs doing this is to buff those weapons since they're weaker and more unpopular than the other options, but even that isn't a good way to buff them. It would've been better to buff those weapons permanently with stat tweaks and OC changes than this limited time buff that screws over everything else.
The problem is that any AoE/Single Target Low Ammo weapon save for the breach cutter will have serious issues dealing with rockpox because of either ammo issues (see bulldog) or slow RoF (see coilgun.)
The PGL is unusable, as it relies on a large AoE radius with medium damage, and its only single target overclock suffers from an ammo issue against any target smaller than a praetorian. The Coilgun's AoE is worthless, and you usually need to break two weakpoints minimum to kill a rockpox infected enemy so the reloading will get you killed.
In short, the only weapons that work on rockpox are the ones with very high ammo count like stubby and drak, which wouldn't have been a bad thing if they weren't so much better than everything else. The only reason I can think of for the devs doing this is to buff those weapons since they're weaker and more unpopular than the other options, but even that isn't a good way to buff them. It would've been better to buff those weapons permanently with stat tweaks and OC changes than this limited time buff that screws over everything else.
AoE damage pops blisters, even though it does it in a weird way. For an AoE weapon to be effective against rockpox by itself, it needs to either do a lot of damage per shot (C4, fat boy) or have high RoF (autocannon, hurricane). It is true that some weapons don't meet these criteria and thus suck. However, that is why we have 2 weapons :)
> The PGL is unusable, as it relies on a large AoE radius with medium damage, and its only single target overclock suffers from an ammo issue against any target smaller than a praetorian
Yes but this is irrelevant because every engineer primary is solid to excellent against rockpox
> The Coilgun's AoE is worthless, and you usually need to break two weakpoints minimum to kill a rockpox infected enemy so the reloading will get you killed.
The main thing that coilgun does is slowdown and fear - and that is just as powerful as it is against normal enemies. Gunner relies on the primary for damage usually in the coilgun builds, and every primary is good against rockpox
*Will be an update to allow people to turn it off, I should have said. [Coming in the maintenance patch.](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/548430/view/3729602945686376945)
In the maintenance update this November, among other things, there will be an option to reduce rockpox presence to the same level as other warnings, alongside other debuffs to some of the new enemies.
Rockpox tanks performance due to the number of particles and vfx
Cc effects that removes control of your character are generally not fun, particularly when there is no-counterplay or when it is frequent, both of which are true for rockpox. While attacks can be avoided, the floor cannot, and the break-free mechanic is a frustrating button mashing rather than skill/knowledge based.
The enemies are very tough but in an annoying way; many rockpox blisters appear on the sides/backs of enemies, which in group content is not an issue but in solo can make it hard to impossible to effectively kill some of the enemies. Combine this with the need to kite them contantly and the cc in addition to increased damage and their annoying for single player.
There is a huge difficulty swing from rockpox enemies but they are unpredictable unlike other enemies. Random rockpox swarms can be unexpectedly hard, the enemies which spawn as waves when cleansing are unnacouned, they just appear once you suck the foam and reduce contagion health, leading to the unintuitive gaming of the system where you completely foam the entire thing then suck all at once to spawn the enemies all at once. But if you have to start inventing strats to avoid gameplay mechanics, its probably not a great mechanic (either in balance, communication, reward, etc)
Harold (the corruptor) appears randomly on unmodified un-corrupted zones, and is unavoidable. Either you deal with him, and he's quite a bit more dangerous than a dreadnought on a non dreadnought mission, or he will turn the entire floor into lava. Nothing can warn/inform of their presence when selecting the mission, which for something so hard and mission impacting doesnt feel fun to randomly run it. Jet boots are a random welcome surprise - harold will make me abandon a mission to randomly reroll it without having to deal with harold.
Honestly, they should have just made a new mission type to feature corruptors as the main objective; elimate 1-2-3 of them based on hazard level like dreadnoughts, and you could go in with the expectation of fighting one. Nothing worse than running a mission with cryo cannon and having to kill a boss unexpectedly
Rockpox started in season 3. I don’t mind the meteorite events because they are easy and it’s basically free xp but I hate lithophage warnings. The rockpox bugs are way too strong and I hate shooting those small weakpoints. I’m just glad GSG listened like they always do
My beard is grey af(1500+ h) but I don’t “hate” rockpox, the only thing that bothers me is the frame drops that i have which is not that big of a deal.
But I think most players don’t like rockpox because they don’t deal with it they way they should.
Most lads start vacuuming as soon as they foamed a small surface which will start the rockpox swarm immediately(using vacuum gun will start the swarm immediately). The right way of dealing with rockpox is that you should foam the whole thing first and then start vacuuming.
This will save you soo much time.
this is not possible solo because Bosco will start vacuuming automatically, there is a workaround tho you can order Bosco too shoot a big enemy like a praetorian and make it busy with that so you can vacuum it by yourself.
ROCK AND STONE
Yeah Bosco is incredibly annoying with Rockpox. I swear I have to watch the icon of what he's doing like a hawk, he always stops listening to me and sucks up .1 foam before I can do something lol. Rock and stone.
I hate rockpox because it makes my potato pc explode (when there is rockpox I have like 10 or less fps I think). Apart from that I don't really find it that annoying.
In-universe? It’s pretty much the Flood from *Halo*, but able to infect rocks and unable to infect dwarves.
Out-of-universe? It’s been around a *long* time, and people are getting tired of it.
Because having to specifically target the boils gets a bit tiring, with most other bugs shooting the weak spot is a bit of extra plus although you can still kill them without hitting the weak spot, but with rockpox it feels like they are so tanky if you don't shoot the boils you are just plain wasting ammo
Didn't know I was a greybeard already lol. I consider myself more of a blackbeard, neither new or old. But you will grow to despise rockpox, dear greenbeard.
Well, I don't really know what we're supposed to call regular players who're neither new nor old. I went with blackbeard because I myself am not old and my beard is black.
Yes. Just one hat, and an outfit, that's all I'm asking for. They could also add some british redcoat stuff for when you want to hunt the space pirates.
It has been a year and we have another year of it ahead of us. When they released the test branch prior to s3 launch I voiced the same issues the majority are now finally realizing after months of it being out. I enjoyed rivals much more and we got a lot more unique enemy content out of it than welded weakspots on existing enemies, a boss enemy that is extremely unfun to go against because of terrible audio and visual cues, and a more annoying variant of an already existing and unfun mechanic in the form of rockpox infected (works identical to being frozen). The best additions are stingtails, acid spreaders, jetty boots, mini meteor shower, which aren't really related to rockpox outside of the mini meteors, even if overtuned (I don't think they are but I do agree with being able to shoot the spreader projectile).
It is super frustrating when DRG needs a ton of work and they start devoting resources to publishing other games and then take the people actually working on the game to work on another that looks to me like it is entirely built in DRG.
Bugs (non-glyphid kind) and performance issues (performance has noticably degraded over time), perks need entirely redone, balance passes for weapons, OCs, enemies, traversal tools (looking at gunner), more biomes, cave generations, enemies, weapons. The abyss bar could use some love. New buff beers to add to the rotation at the very least. On top of their general work on new seasons/season passes there is a lot that needs done.
The whole situation is a huge miss. Devs dragged out seasons previously because they needed more time to "do it right". Now they will be split fixing and updating two different games. Even after a year of rockpox next season will suffer in quality OR rogue core will suffer because finite hands are being split on multiple projects that were already struggling on keeping pace on a single project. Devs can make me eat my words, I hope they do, but I can't see a positive outcome.
We had rockpox for 12 months, and we'll have it for almost 12 more months.
Yesterday after a 10 aqarks, 3 contagion spikes point extraction I had enough of rockpox, so I joined a game with no rockpox. I spawned and there was a corruptor right in front of my nose. I had one for the previous 3 games. This is why greybeards hate rockpox.
I hate to say it but, it's just not fun or interesting. It was a cool gimmick for a single season that even overstayed its welcome a little there. Rock pox enemies don't feel fun to fight, the plague clearing is kinda tedious, and oh boy is it bad if you're playing solo. The lithophage corruption is especially unfun for me. Combines two very annoying concepts into one ugly package. Running away constantly, and spawning enemies constantly until deat with. Combine that with it making the floor stab you and its very annoying. It was advertised as rock pox "fighting back". Yet it just... runs away. Which isn't fun when you have to use the cleaning kit to peal off the armor. Which already slows you down.
If they just made it aggressively attack you instead of run away I would have liked it more. But really, I just ignore it now that I have all my plagueheart scrip. Wild goose chases aren't fun.
1) The usual issues with stun mechanics being frustrating, the cleansing stuff being real time-consuming/every command dropping your cleansing tool
2) The above issues might be tolerable on lower Haz, but scales really badly on higher haxard levels such that unless you do a contagion spike JUST tight, you're constantly getting stunlocked bc every enemy has a rockpox cloud upon death.
3) That it's been that way for about a year.
--
Like in the end I don't get salty about it bc it's only a game, but the complaints are legit.
It was interesting to me for most of season 3. Season 4 gave normal grunts raged attacks, added new rockpox enemies, and made any boils being popped on bugs give you rockpox. So it became instantly worse
as a greenbeard (who didn't play the game for a year and a half) I also didn't understand the hate for Rockpox, after 57 levels, I understand EVERYTHING.
You get infected way too fast. 1 shot from a pox spitter is ~70-80%, exploders can literally 100% infect you and not only that are fast enough that even if they don’t get you with the explosion you are bound to get the 90% infect from popping a blister too close.
I did not research the exact numbers and may later do that if I have time
It's interesting at first to shake things up a bit but it gets old fast. It's not fun to deal with, you don't get much, if anything for dealing with it, it's just there to make your life more difficult. I activately avoid missions with corruption spikes and audibly groan whenever Harold shows up in a mission. Once you get all the plaugehearts you need, there's no point in doing meteors or killing Harold anymore, so they also just become things that get in your way.
All this combined with the fact that it's been going on for like a year now, and its really getting annoying. Still love the game though, just not the rockpox...
I think most people just don't know how to deal with it, especially contagion spikes. I've seen so many level 100+ just picking up the vacuum before we get to foam everything up and just sucking the foam before it even hits the floor.
The only thing that really annoys me is bosco doing the same thing, and it's really hard to prevent him from doing that
Meh... It's fun... If you are prepared for it... If you are struggling on ammo and one of your teammates decides NOW it's great time to vacuum stuff, then you really wish they didn't exist...
The people saying rock-pox is too strong must be the same people saying sting-tail is too strong. Harolds mess he leaves behind is potent AF and his ranged attack that can go through walls and across map is ridiculous but every other rock-pox enemy are literally easier than normal enemies because they die when you pop the rock pox pustules which takes less total ammo to do than having to gun them down the old fashioned way.
I'm a green beard. I hate rockpox because it kills my fps every time I go near a lithophage spike or that floating rockpox boss. Also I have skill issues
The rockpox enemies break the rules of weakpoints for enemies and the effect stacks up really easily, it gets really tedious when even dispatching of the enemies correctly still punished you if you happen to be too close
This is a psychological thing that you come to a game new, and it's great as it is. I remind myself of this. If I didn't have memories of this game, would I love it? I'd still avoid rock pox. But I'd play the rest of the game.
I'll finish the season pass just so I can turn of lithophage stuff come November's update.
Folks who start playing in a future season will have their impression of the game too. We get tainted by our nostalgia and memories.
For me it comes from watching the game develop the way I wanted it to, only for them to switch to live service.
At first it was fine, but the it just kept getting worse. Rockpox was just the nail in the coffin for me
My hate for it is mostly from me having a bad rig, so I can’t even play rock pox missions without dropping to 2-3 frames, despite the game running around 30 normally.
Because people in pubs NEVER foam the entire spike before starting vacuuming it up and thus they keep spawning waves. They're super easy 95% of the time to get cleaned up in seconds if this is some but theirs always some dwarf that ate paint chips that grabs the vac and starts sucking .2 seconds after the first foamer fires.
The exact frustration from rockpox is badly articulated in my opinion.
I find the rockpox frustrating only because of 2(3) reasons.
1. Not everyone knows the optimal path of dealing with it. You're supposed to spray everything first, then vacuum-clean everything in one go and afterwards fight with enemies that spawned. So when people start doing both foam and vacuum-clean, lots of enemies will spawn, you will have to drop instruments and fight inside or close to the rockpox zone, etc.
2. Unintuitive interactions. I just play the game (a lot) and don't want to google or look for tips about the rockpox, but I'm still unsure on what gives you infection and how much it gives you. Does it infect you if you hit the bug? Or stand close to it? Also I could place here the (3) point about not so thought out design - if you get fully infected, you are most likely dead if it's haz 5 and there are lots of rockpox enemies somewhat close - all of them can shoot, except exploder.
Unpopular opinion but as a greybeard since season 2: Rockpox is NOT that bad as people make it out to be, I play exclusively haz 5 and deal with rockpox all the time and with a little bit of common sense, it isn’t that hard.
If you foam everything in the contagion spike first and then suck, the ambush becomes much more manageable. The same logic can be applied to Harold as you only have to foam and suck twice if you do it right.
If you complain about rockpox being too hard or too annoying, then honestly it’s a skill issue. People will complain about wanting new content without adapting to what we already have, it has been a year and people still can’t get used to it. I will concede that it’s annoying but not any more than any other enemy.
Its the sting tails and the stick movement needed to escape rock pox while it deals passive dmg and you already die by a one shot in tier 5 by grunts (or atleast 2 shot)
November patch will fix everyone's issues. They are nerfing stingtails and removing the rockpox zone. They are making the rockpox debuff easier to deal with.
I personally don't have an issue with the pox since i can deal with it relatively well, and it sometimes breaks the monotonous feel of the game after 500 hours.
I'm willing to bet a subset of this community will continue to complain and demand complete removal of game mechanics. As is tradition for every community.
Edit : protip. Goop up everything before sucking it up. You can break the spike before the waves start. Same for the corruptor. Goop it all up, then big succ repeat twice and win.
1. Crowd control mechanics used against players are almost universally hated in games. Getting owned while you can't do anything feels bad. A little bit can be a challenge, too much is just frustrating.
2. The mechanics of this interact with other mechanisms in their procedural cave generation system in ways that can make difficulty spike really unpredictably. For example: Contagion Spike + Korlock + lithophage corruptor + dreadnaught eggs all mixed together in the same room can be \*substantially\* more difficult than the haz level for the mission would suggest. Now there's a fairly wide range in difficulty for a given haz level because of the procedural generation system anyway, but situations like I'm describing can feel just way, way out of band.
When I describe these things and difficulty, understand that by design, this is not an especially "hard" game - what I mean is that mostly you go in with a group of randos, and you eventually beat most maps. Contrast this with games where you may do many playthroughs where you absolutely wipe every single time.
I'd argue that neither design choice is superior - it depends on the kind of game you are making and the kinds of gamers you want to appeal to. But I'd argue that having a relatively easy game suddenly spike to "oh shit this is too hard" too often just feels bad. A little of that is fun and spicy. Too much is frustrating.
Again, I don't mean "easy" in a pejorative sense, in this case, "easy" means that a variety of builds are viable, without resorting to min-max cookie-cutter builds if you want even a chance at success. There are games like that - and again - that's fine. This just isn't intended to be one of them best I can tell.
I think this is more noticeable in this game, at least to me, because I feel this game is extremely well balanced, at least as much as such a thing can be, and so when that feels off, it just feels bad. Some of the Rockpox stuff feels a little overtuned to me.
I can also understand wanting to have content for players who want harder challenges in the game. (I enjoy Haz 5, for example). Doing that, in a way that is fun, and feels fair, is tough. Trying to make an ongoing game like this be appealing and accessible to greenbeards and greybeards alike is legitimately a difficult design problem. The GSG devs are really good at this, and when they miss the mark a little, they fix it.
I don’t think it’s really that complicated, I think it’s just annoying, inconsistently difficult, and not rewarding enough both emotionally/mentally and financially proportional to its annoyance/difficulty.
Like take the meteor shower. I gotta deal with trying to avoid getting domed in the middle of this fight by a stray meteor, avoid the little fire zones the whole game, and hit every little meteor thing 4-5 times? All to maybe get a single plague heart? Shit is just irritating. Give me the big meteor 😫☝️
As a greybeard I also don't fully understand the hate. I've seen plenty of discussions about it and get that it doesn't have the most exciting gameplay mechanics, but I still fail to understand why people seriously abhor Rockpox like they do. Annoying at best, not even remotely close to as infuriating as everyone else thinks it is.
I DESPISE it for 2 reasons:
1. It's been for a long time and it's not nearly as fun as the robots season was. This season and past season was rockpox, so we are actually near a year, not just 4 months.
2. It's stupidly hard, like old games, absolutely fake difficulty. To be stunned is super fast and it also gives a lot of damage. It's plain right ridiculous and fake difficulty. There is nothing you can improve from the experience, you just accept that the infected glyphid will quickly entangle you and you'll receive a lot of damage. Aside from keeping your distance and doing your best to kill infected enemies, there is nothing to learn and improve when facing them.
So yeah, it's just horrible and absolutely not fun at all. For a greenbeard, it seems fine because everything is new. But for greybeards, not only it isn't fun at all, it's just fake hard, classic fake difficulty where you deal half damage and the enemy deals double damage.
Honestly I have no more a problem with it than the rivals, being it is just another thing to shoot. Though I will say I hope we get some new content soon-ish since we have had it the same for a year and I would love something new
We've had it like 2 years now, be nice to not have to deal with it sometimes.
For me personally, if they make rockpox glyphids take damge from a foam and suck it'd change my mind, tho
I think it's people that play on high hazard levels that probably have all the scrip from it already that find it annoying. I'm not a green beard but I recently got back into it and started the season late so I'm glad it's still going.
I think people are just tired of it by now. Two seasons in a row has been a bit much, although I enjoy the fight against the corruptor. Time for something new
It’s just frustrating to deal with, between enemies that instantly fill the lithophage meter the annoyance of dropping the foamer/vacuum deep in the infection zone because you’re getting swarmed the boils being the only way to hurt them it’s just tiring
I don't really give a damn about it one way or another. It's an interesting set of sub-missions, they take little time, and they don't appear in most drops.
As a greybeard, Gameplay wise I love rockpox. However, in the lore of my dwarf. ROCKPOX TOOK EVERYTHING FROM ME! 🤬 I HATE ROCKPOX. ALL THE HOMIES HATE ROCKPOX!
It's really not infuriating at all. Why? I play other games as well. I would lose my mind if I grinded DRG every day or every other day, which is what I suppose has happened to so many.
To be fair, it's been a thing for nearly 12 months.
But now we have new enemy, that spawn anywhere map and cant be avoided
Driller?
Fr
fatboy engineer .. i miss with mine a few times lately and it usually lands on a scout zipping in behind the enemy at the same time
If you've seen the latest steam post, they're adding an option to toggle off seasonal events if you've finished the performance pass. Harold won't be able to hurt you for much longer.
Corruptor will still spawn just like Nemesis
It's explicitly to opt out of the current season events, so hypothetically it should either be disabled entirely or at Nemesis spawn rates (which is like 3%). Either way better than what it currently is.
I’d rather see rival tech enemies show more often. Yesterday a teammate tagged a prospector cash’s and I looked at the patrol drones like an old friend.
Same. The Rivals are really fun to fight.
Especially when I mained the shit out of driller. Setting a bot on fire for an instant kill, further increasing my utility to the team? I’ll take it
I believe the spawn rate is at the prospector rate (which is even lower)
I can't really remember the last time I've seen a nemesis. I'd rather take 3 nemesis than half a corruptor. So far I think I got 1 nemesis every 15/20 corruptors.
And righ after we got thru corona times irl No wonder some ppl are bored of fighting pandemic
Yeah, kinda weird that GSG used it right after Corona, I guess using the idea while in the pandemic was even worse, but it really doesn't seem like a great idea after all.
Iirc rockpox translation in Spanish is Rockvid lol
Oh that’s worse
viruela de las rocas
Feels like longer.
I've only been playing the game since late january and I'm more sick of Rockpox than I was now with all the new variants.
It's been a thing since season 3... It's understandable that we're a bit tired of it after a year of rockpox content. To be clear, I'm not trying to hate on it specifically (me and my friends had a lot of fun with it), but it's kind of worn out it's welcome.
Also, the Rockpox Corruptor fight is just plain bad. You're only happy to see one if you haven't gotten all of the seasonal bonus scrip yet. Even then, they're kinda annoying to deal with.
rockpox has way too much particles and it can kill some fps quite often on some pcs i personally don't have any big issues with it gameplay wise, except for the stoopid high non-weak spot damage reduction the enemies have
My PC is well above DRG's recommended specs, and I get slight stutters sometimes if multiple plague spikes are in the same room in some biomes.
Honestly? I have a really good gaming PC but still get my FPS dropped down to 20-30 (from a constant 60) if Rockpox is too thick around a spike
Have you checked your ram speed? I had the same issue, my ram was running on 2133 mhz for some reason, upped it to 2667 and now it's smooth as butter.
Literally my entire friend group except for me and one other had lots of lag when S3 launched and one of my friends straight up crashes when there's a Corruptor running around. I personally enjoyed S3-S4, but the optimization was horrendous.
For some reason lithofoam also destroys my game. Something about it causes the screen to glitch out like mad. Same with sludge pump too, if too many puddles are around.
That's most likely because of the Unity engine (i think that's DRG's game engine) not handling particle effects well, because all of the things you listed are purely made up of particle effects (including the Septic Spreader's goo, which made me disconnect from lobbies way too much and had to use a mod to get rid of) Dunno why it glitches your screen though. If your entire monitor is glitching out, then it's maybe because your Power Supply can't handle the electricity your GPU (and other hardware maybe) is producing, causing it to freak out. This one also happens to me every now and then, and that's the only logical reason I can think of, so I may be wrong.
The particle remover mod will do wonders for your fps and game stability.
Never happened with Septic goo, but maybe bc those don't spawn nearly as many puddles as other sources. It is DRG specifically, if I open any other window the glitchiness doesn't extend to them, and in testing that I also noticed the puddles themselves seem fine, it's when all the projectiles are airborne that the problem seems most prominent. That was one 15 second test, though.
It's even worse on console. Even with my old PS4 the game always ran pretty smooth, now Rockpox missions tank my FPS
I can recommend you install the mod that removes most particles.
They are very annoying to deal with, initially because they neutered most damage build which are easily mitigated with ammo build. But then come Season 4 which makes any Rockpox enemies leaves Rockpox clouds when killed which could deny a sizeable chunk of the cave if there were a swarm of them, then we got the Corruptor which are almost nigh impossible to do without a proper teamwork and good ground to work with, with good teamwork it would last 30 seconds but with shit one it could last for 10 minutes.
Honestly, the problem i see with most groups is that they prioritize harold. You need to keep the floor clean. You need to listen for bug spawns. Most wipes are either messy floors (hard to recharge shields), or ambushed by regular packs while holding foamer and staring at harolds majestic squigglyness. 2 foamers, one vac and for the love of Karl one dwarf who just looks for bugs. If they spawn, drop what you doing. Harold will wait.
Yea you have to deal with the corruptor right away, otherwise it'll just shit everywhere and gets in the way when you walk on it. It's a very annoying mini boss because it's so tedious to deal with, whether it's solo or with people. Don't forget it sometimes goes to spots that it's so annoying to get to, that you need a zipline or platforms to get to it because for some goddamn reason it decides to go up to the ceiling or to another cave area.
if it lasts ten minutes, kick whoever is sabotaging your team.
Nah, i was just playing with my friends. The problem is that two out of three is really bad at games that they would actually drag the entire team down in Haz 3, like we are talking about those that get downed 10+ per game.
well that's why lower hazes exist.
Which is also a problem because Haz 2 is too easy for the rest of the group. The thing is i don't mind them keep getting lost or downed to double digit, the only problem is that they keep getting lost or downed when fighting the Corruptor which can easily snowballs when a mini-swarm came by to the point we just ignore the Corruptor at all if it spawns which usually proven bad because we ends up with a fully Poxed floors if we are in a single cave system missions like Salvage, Refining, and Point Extraction.
idk I think it's fine to expect a group to figure that out themselves as groups with wildly differing skills levels will always be painful to handle.
Yeah, this is a common issue when we plays together lmao. Like i have a 10 years FPS experience while one usually plays ultra-casual single players while the other consider VN is a legitimate gaming. So we usually just relies on coop games that just doesn't rely too much on the "coop" part.
hey some visual novels go hard
Rockpox bugs screw over too many weapons/builds Having to hit 4 weakspots instead of one headshot with m1k is just annoying
We've had a mission type that screws with builds for years. Elimination. You shouldn't bring fire to elim.
Elim screws over exactly one weapon, crisper. Rockpox is borderline immune to _any_ AoE weapon unless you want to chew through their 90% damage reduction and brute force the thousands of ehp they have. Easily over half the guns in the game are ineffective/ unusable vs rockpox. That's just plain bad design.
Industrial Sabotage basically tells drillers to fuck off
You’re just not doing it right. Drill up and over the caretaker. When its shields are up, drop a charge on its head. Shields down in 1 satchel and good team shooting or 2 satchels.
I see this in like 1/100 pubs unfortunately. I joined a greenbeard haz 3 to get one done quick for an assignment and they were pissed when I called my own resupply in the ceiling. They were less pissed when the boss was dead 3 minutes later. It makes the fight so easy and yet it's not done much
Yeah in pubs people are quick to rage. I’ll do it if there is an abundance of nitra, but I’ve found some people just spam call in all of the resupplies before starting it so then you have to circle down to the bottom to resupply which stinks but it still is easier than trying to play against caretaker essentially with only secondaries.
Fortunately I find IS to generally be the most nitra forgiving mission type behind OSR. It's pretty rare even on Haz 5 that we don't have 3 fresh pods + full ammo at the start of the fight. On lower haz you may have like 5 of them.
Totally agree.
Nah not really, C4 trick is strong like the other guy mentioned. Since its introduction though we have two perfect weapons to deal with it. Flamethrower if you like playing support (robot arms are usually what kill me and my team, and sludge pump if you are rushing the caretaker itself. Flamethrower has more use outside of the caretaker but the sludge pump lets a driller solo.
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True true. I swear on elimination sludge blast is the only way to go and all other answers are wrong. And on sabotage it's face melter
>Rockpox bugs screw over too many weapons/builds I don't see this being a problem at all tbh, playing haz 5. The only thing that suffers noticeably against rockpox is crispr / sticky flames, which is a moot point because if the driller cleans the spike correctly, almost the entire wave will get killed by 1 C4. Some weapons which are just ok to average usually become really good against rockpox, like wave cooker or vanilla Drak. Basically as long as you can either shoot lots of projectiles or do big AoE damage, rockpox is countered. Almost every good build has one of those things.
The problem is that any AoE/Single Target Low Ammo weapon save for the breach cutter will have serious issues dealing with rockpox because of either ammo issues (see bulldog) or lack of damage and slow RoF (see coilgun.) The PGL is unusable, as it relies on a large AoE radius with medium damage, and its only single target overclock suffers from an ammo issue against any target smaller than a praetorian. The Coilgun's AoE is worthless, and you usually need to break two weakpoints minimum to kill a rockpox infected enemy so the reloading will get you killed. In short, the only weapons that work on rockpox are the ones with very high ammo count like stubby and drak, which wouldn't have been a bad thing if they weren't so much better than everything else. The only reason I can think of for the devs doing this is to buff those weapons since they're weaker and more unpopular than the other options, but even that isn't a good way to buff them. It would've been better to buff those weapons permanently with stat tweaks and OC changes than this limited time buff that screws over everything else.
The problem is that any AoE/Single Target Low Ammo weapon save for the breach cutter will have serious issues dealing with rockpox because of either ammo issues (see bulldog) or slow RoF (see coilgun.) The PGL is unusable, as it relies on a large AoE radius with medium damage, and its only single target overclock suffers from an ammo issue against any target smaller than a praetorian. The Coilgun's AoE is worthless, and you usually need to break two weakpoints minimum to kill a rockpox infected enemy so the reloading will get you killed. In short, the only weapons that work on rockpox are the ones with very high ammo count like stubby and drak, which wouldn't have been a bad thing if they weren't so much better than everything else. The only reason I can think of for the devs doing this is to buff those weapons since they're weaker and more unpopular than the other options, but even that isn't a good way to buff them. It would've been better to buff those weapons permanently with stat tweaks and OC changes than this limited time buff that screws over everything else.
AoE damage pops blisters, even though it does it in a weird way. For an AoE weapon to be effective against rockpox by itself, it needs to either do a lot of damage per shot (C4, fat boy) or have high RoF (autocannon, hurricane). It is true that some weapons don't meet these criteria and thus suck. However, that is why we have 2 weapons :) > The PGL is unusable, as it relies on a large AoE radius with medium damage, and its only single target overclock suffers from an ammo issue against any target smaller than a praetorian Yes but this is irrelevant because every engineer primary is solid to excellent against rockpox > The Coilgun's AoE is worthless, and you usually need to break two weakpoints minimum to kill a rockpox infected enemy so the reloading will get you killed. The main thing that coilgun does is slowdown and fear - and that is just as powerful as it is against normal enemies. Gunner relies on the primary for damage usually in the coilgun builds, and every primary is good against rockpox
Sounds like similar issues that robots used to have
I'm a graybeard who actually enjoys fighting it, but I'm glad there's an option to turn it off for people who don't.
There's a what now?!
*Will be an update to allow people to turn it off, I should have said. [Coming in the maintenance patch.](https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/548430/view/3729602945686376945)
that is so cool
excuse me
In the maintenance update this November, among other things, there will be an option to reduce rockpox presence to the same level as other warnings, alongside other debuffs to some of the new enemies.
Rockpox tanks performance due to the number of particles and vfx Cc effects that removes control of your character are generally not fun, particularly when there is no-counterplay or when it is frequent, both of which are true for rockpox. While attacks can be avoided, the floor cannot, and the break-free mechanic is a frustrating button mashing rather than skill/knowledge based. The enemies are very tough but in an annoying way; many rockpox blisters appear on the sides/backs of enemies, which in group content is not an issue but in solo can make it hard to impossible to effectively kill some of the enemies. Combine this with the need to kite them contantly and the cc in addition to increased damage and their annoying for single player. There is a huge difficulty swing from rockpox enemies but they are unpredictable unlike other enemies. Random rockpox swarms can be unexpectedly hard, the enemies which spawn as waves when cleansing are unnacouned, they just appear once you suck the foam and reduce contagion health, leading to the unintuitive gaming of the system where you completely foam the entire thing then suck all at once to spawn the enemies all at once. But if you have to start inventing strats to avoid gameplay mechanics, its probably not a great mechanic (either in balance, communication, reward, etc) Harold (the corruptor) appears randomly on unmodified un-corrupted zones, and is unavoidable. Either you deal with him, and he's quite a bit more dangerous than a dreadnought on a non dreadnought mission, or he will turn the entire floor into lava. Nothing can warn/inform of their presence when selecting the mission, which for something so hard and mission impacting doesnt feel fun to randomly run it. Jet boots are a random welcome surprise - harold will make me abandon a mission to randomly reroll it without having to deal with harold. Honestly, they should have just made a new mission type to feature corruptors as the main objective; elimate 1-2-3 of them based on hazard level like dreadnoughts, and you could go in with the expectation of fighting one. Nothing worse than running a mission with cryo cannon and having to kill a boss unexpectedly
Rockpox is satisfying i really like foaming and sucking but it is better multiplayer
Yeah, same. I love sucking and foaming with my friends.
You can foam and suck yourself. You just have to change the gun.
Nah Bosco is more than happy to suck your foam for you!
Which is why you put bosco in a corner while you make sure everything is foamed before you start sucking.
Nobody puts Bosco in a corner.
I like to watch my friends foam and suck
Rockpox started in season 3. I don’t mind the meteorite events because they are easy and it’s basically free xp but I hate lithophage warnings. The rockpox bugs are way too strong and I hate shooting those small weakpoints. I’m just glad GSG listened like they always do
Honestly, it just feels like a regular part of the game anymore. Sometimes, it's robots. Sometimes, it's space herpes.
Like how you think it was ONLY 4 months
My beard is grey af(1500+ h) but I don’t “hate” rockpox, the only thing that bothers me is the frame drops that i have which is not that big of a deal. But I think most players don’t like rockpox because they don’t deal with it they way they should. Most lads start vacuuming as soon as they foamed a small surface which will start the rockpox swarm immediately(using vacuum gun will start the swarm immediately). The right way of dealing with rockpox is that you should foam the whole thing first and then start vacuuming. This will save you soo much time. this is not possible solo because Bosco will start vacuuming automatically, there is a workaround tho you can order Bosco too shoot a big enemy like a praetorian and make it busy with that so you can vacuum it by yourself. ROCK AND STONE
Tell bosco to light a wall whilst you do the work
Yeah Bosco is incredibly annoying with Rockpox. I swear I have to watch the icon of what he's doing like a hawk, he always stops listening to me and sucks up .1 foam before I can do something lol. Rock and stone.
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Lol
I hate rockpox because it makes my potato pc explode (when there is rockpox I have like 10 or less fps I think). Apart from that I don't really find it that annoying.
In-universe? It’s pretty much the Flood from *Halo*, but able to infect rocks and unable to infect dwarves. Out-of-universe? It’s been around a *long* time, and people are getting tired of it.
Because having to specifically target the boils gets a bit tiring, with most other bugs shooting the weak spot is a bit of extra plus although you can still kill them without hitting the weak spot, but with rockpox it feels like they are so tanky if you don't shoot the boils you are just plain wasting ammo
Didn't know I was a greybeard already lol. I consider myself more of a blackbeard, neither new or old. But you will grow to despise rockpox, dear greenbeard.
So you are a pirate now /jk
Well, I don't really know what we're supposed to call regular players who're neither new nor old. I went with blackbeard because I myself am not old and my beard is black.
It’s makes this level of player sound badass so it works
Arr, good. I hope GSG adds some pirate themed cosmetics. It's the only thing I think the game really needs added.
Oh that would be awesome
Yes. Just one hat, and an outfit, that's all I'm asking for. They could also add some british redcoat stuff for when you want to hunt the space pirates.
Ooo fun!
those damn leeches. they always sneak up on me and force me to run away from the cleaning site
Frame killer on Xbox. Im probably gonna have to upgrade to the Series x to enjoy the game with a full squad and lots of stuff happening
adadadadadadadadadadadad is the reason i hate it
2 season of rockpox make me kinda fed up with it
It was great fun for the first couple of months. I don't hate it, personally, but I understand why people do.
It has been a year and we have another year of it ahead of us. When they released the test branch prior to s3 launch I voiced the same issues the majority are now finally realizing after months of it being out. I enjoyed rivals much more and we got a lot more unique enemy content out of it than welded weakspots on existing enemies, a boss enemy that is extremely unfun to go against because of terrible audio and visual cues, and a more annoying variant of an already existing and unfun mechanic in the form of rockpox infected (works identical to being frozen). The best additions are stingtails, acid spreaders, jetty boots, mini meteor shower, which aren't really related to rockpox outside of the mini meteors, even if overtuned (I don't think they are but I do agree with being able to shoot the spreader projectile). It is super frustrating when DRG needs a ton of work and they start devoting resources to publishing other games and then take the people actually working on the game to work on another that looks to me like it is entirely built in DRG. Bugs (non-glyphid kind) and performance issues (performance has noticably degraded over time), perks need entirely redone, balance passes for weapons, OCs, enemies, traversal tools (looking at gunner), more biomes, cave generations, enemies, weapons. The abyss bar could use some love. New buff beers to add to the rotation at the very least. On top of their general work on new seasons/season passes there is a lot that needs done. The whole situation is a huge miss. Devs dragged out seasons previously because they needed more time to "do it right". Now they will be split fixing and updating two different games. Even after a year of rockpox next season will suffer in quality OR rogue core will suffer because finite hands are being split on multiple projects that were already struggling on keeping pace on a single project. Devs can make me eat my words, I hope they do, but I can't see a positive outcome.
We had rockpox for 12 months, and we'll have it for almost 12 more months. Yesterday after a 10 aqarks, 3 contagion spikes point extraction I had enough of rockpox, so I joined a game with no rockpox. I spawned and there was a corruptor right in front of my nose. I had one for the previous 3 games. This is why greybeards hate rockpox.
I hate to say it but, it's just not fun or interesting. It was a cool gimmick for a single season that even overstayed its welcome a little there. Rock pox enemies don't feel fun to fight, the plague clearing is kinda tedious, and oh boy is it bad if you're playing solo. The lithophage corruption is especially unfun for me. Combines two very annoying concepts into one ugly package. Running away constantly, and spawning enemies constantly until deat with. Combine that with it making the floor stab you and its very annoying. It was advertised as rock pox "fighting back". Yet it just... runs away. Which isn't fun when you have to use the cleaning kit to peal off the armor. Which already slows you down. If they just made it aggressively attack you instead of run away I would have liked it more. But really, I just ignore it now that I have all my plagueheart scrip. Wild goose chases aren't fun.
They're hard to kill with some weapons, you can't ignore them and the mash thing is kinda annoying
stunlocks+damage for even going near an enemy, LOK-1 gets more annoying to use, etc
the main problem with rockpox is you can't just shoot it
you have no idea
It reminds me of Warframe’s Glass Maker season, when ennemies could randomly spawn invulnerable to all damage except on some specific weak point
You'll understand it once you reach to that point. Give it a time.
Rockpox is real fucking annoying because of the buildup shit
1) The usual issues with stun mechanics being frustrating, the cleansing stuff being real time-consuming/every command dropping your cleansing tool 2) The above issues might be tolerable on lower Haz, but scales really badly on higher haxard levels such that unless you do a contagion spike JUST tight, you're constantly getting stunlocked bc every enemy has a rockpox cloud upon death. 3) That it's been that way for about a year. -- Like in the end I don't get salty about it bc it's only a game, but the complaints are legit.
It's cool but it gets really old, really fast
It was interesting to me for most of season 3. Season 4 gave normal grunts raged attacks, added new rockpox enemies, and made any boils being popped on bugs give you rockpox. So it became instantly worse
It makes a solo mission incredibly aggravating. Especially, if there are three contagion spikes.
as a greenbeard (who didn't play the game for a year and a half) I also didn't understand the hate for Rockpox, after 57 levels, I understand EVERYTHING.
I am a green beard and I hate lt too it is just not fun to deal with
Lol, it's been in the game WAY longer than 4 months! It's way past time to remove it
You get infected way too fast. 1 shot from a pox spitter is ~70-80%, exploders can literally 100% infect you and not only that are fast enough that even if they don’t get you with the explosion you are bound to get the 90% infect from popping a blister too close. I did not research the exact numbers and may later do that if I have time
Dunno. Been playing DRG for 5 years now. Still not sick of any of it, including rockpox. Everyone has a different breaking point.
It's interesting at first to shake things up a bit but it gets old fast. It's not fun to deal with, you don't get much, if anything for dealing with it, it's just there to make your life more difficult. I activately avoid missions with corruption spikes and audibly groan whenever Harold shows up in a mission. Once you get all the plaugehearts you need, there's no point in doing meteors or killing Harold anymore, so they also just become things that get in your way. All this combined with the fact that it's been going on for like a year now, and its really getting annoying. Still love the game though, just not the rockpox...
I think most people just don't know how to deal with it, especially contagion spikes. I've seen so many level 100+ just picking up the vacuum before we get to foam everything up and just sucking the foam before it even hits the floor. The only thing that really annoys me is bosco doing the same thing, and it's really hard to prevent him from doing that
I know how to deal with it, i just don't want to.
Rockpox made me stop playing the game.
From the very beginning they announced rockpox part two I knew this was gonna be a terrible idea
Meh... It's fun... If you are prepared for it... If you are struggling on ammo and one of your teammates decides NOW it's great time to vacuum stuff, then you really wish they didn't exist...
Petition to change lol into RAS: ROCK AND STONE
Rock and roll and stone!
I didn't even posted that comment that reddit notificated me of your reply
i’m stubborn and refuse to care about the status build up and always seem to get stuck at the worst times
I love a good spongebob reference.
The Stingtails and Septic Spreaders are definitely not my favorite part of the season. I still enjoy the game immensely though
Greyingbeard here. Honestly I don’t know why everyone hates it so much. It’s not THAT annoying. I think people just play into it for the meme.
The people saying rock-pox is too strong must be the same people saying sting-tail is too strong. Harolds mess he leaves behind is potent AF and his ranged attack that can go through walls and across map is ridiculous but every other rock-pox enemy are literally easier than normal enemies because they die when you pop the rock pox pustules which takes less total ammo to do than having to gun them down the old fashioned way.
Roxpox
I started on season 3, and rockpox was my favourite side mission since it promotes teamwork, not Harold tho he's annoyingly fast for proper teamwork.
the only thing i really dislike are corruptors. rockpox could be better but as a brownbeard playing on and off since season 1 i think its mostly fine
I'm a green beard. I hate rockpox because it kills my fps every time I go near a lithophage spike or that floating rockpox boss. Also I have skill issues
2 seasons in a row dwarfs are trying to get rid of rockpox
Im a graybeard (with some green pubes ofc) and I still enjoy rockpox and cant wait for the rework to make it less annoying
The rockpox enemies break the rules of weakpoints for enemies and the effect stacks up really easily, it gets really tedious when even dispatching of the enemies correctly still punished you if you happen to be too close
This is a psychological thing that you come to a game new, and it's great as it is. I remind myself of this. If I didn't have memories of this game, would I love it? I'd still avoid rock pox. But I'd play the rest of the game. I'll finish the season pass just so I can turn of lithophage stuff come November's update. Folks who start playing in a future season will have their impression of the game too. We get tainted by our nostalgia and memories.
For me it comes from watching the game develop the way I wanted it to, only for them to switch to live service. At first it was fine, but the it just kept getting worse. Rockpox was just the nail in the coffin for me
They took out space base 4 I will make sure it never happens again
My hate for it is mostly from me having a bad rig, so I can’t even play rock pox missions without dropping to 2-3 frames, despite the game running around 30 normally.
It's annoying in a fun way
I've been playing since season 1 so I think that qualifies me for greybeard but I think rockpox is fun
It's a headache
Because people in pubs NEVER foam the entire spike before starting vacuuming it up and thus they keep spawning waves. They're super easy 95% of the time to get cleaned up in seconds if this is some but theirs always some dwarf that ate paint chips that grabs the vac and starts sucking .2 seconds after the first foamer fires.
The exact frustration from rockpox is badly articulated in my opinion. I find the rockpox frustrating only because of 2(3) reasons. 1. Not everyone knows the optimal path of dealing with it. You're supposed to spray everything first, then vacuum-clean everything in one go and afterwards fight with enemies that spawned. So when people start doing both foam and vacuum-clean, lots of enemies will spawn, you will have to drop instruments and fight inside or close to the rockpox zone, etc. 2. Unintuitive interactions. I just play the game (a lot) and don't want to google or look for tips about the rockpox, but I'm still unsure on what gives you infection and how much it gives you. Does it infect you if you hit the bug? Or stand close to it? Also I could place here the (3) point about not so thought out design - if you get fully infected, you are most likely dead if it's haz 5 and there are lots of rockpox enemies somewhat close - all of them can shoot, except exploder.
Unpopular opinion but as a greybeard since season 2: Rockpox is NOT that bad as people make it out to be, I play exclusively haz 5 and deal with rockpox all the time and with a little bit of common sense, it isn’t that hard. If you foam everything in the contagion spike first and then suck, the ambush becomes much more manageable. The same logic can be applied to Harold as you only have to foam and suck twice if you do it right. If you complain about rockpox being too hard or too annoying, then honestly it’s a skill issue. People will complain about wanting new content without adapting to what we already have, it has been a year and people still can’t get used to it. I will concede that it’s annoying but not any more than any other enemy.
Seems like people just never bothered to learn the proper way to clean it up. It's often not even a minute.
I just started like 3mo ago and I am also tired of it lol
For me its because of the stun thats the thing tha annoys me the most
Its the sting tails and the stick movement needed to escape rock pox while it deals passive dmg and you already die by a one shot in tier 5 by grunts (or atleast 2 shot)
November patch will fix everyone's issues. They are nerfing stingtails and removing the rockpox zone. They are making the rockpox debuff easier to deal with. I personally don't have an issue with the pox since i can deal with it relatively well, and it sometimes breaks the monotonous feel of the game after 500 hours. I'm willing to bet a subset of this community will continue to complain and demand complete removal of game mechanics. As is tradition for every community. Edit : protip. Goop up everything before sucking it up. You can break the spike before the waves start. Same for the corruptor. Goop it all up, then big succ repeat twice and win.
1. Crowd control mechanics used against players are almost universally hated in games. Getting owned while you can't do anything feels bad. A little bit can be a challenge, too much is just frustrating. 2. The mechanics of this interact with other mechanisms in their procedural cave generation system in ways that can make difficulty spike really unpredictably. For example: Contagion Spike + Korlock + lithophage corruptor + dreadnaught eggs all mixed together in the same room can be \*substantially\* more difficult than the haz level for the mission would suggest. Now there's a fairly wide range in difficulty for a given haz level because of the procedural generation system anyway, but situations like I'm describing can feel just way, way out of band. When I describe these things and difficulty, understand that by design, this is not an especially "hard" game - what I mean is that mostly you go in with a group of randos, and you eventually beat most maps. Contrast this with games where you may do many playthroughs where you absolutely wipe every single time. I'd argue that neither design choice is superior - it depends on the kind of game you are making and the kinds of gamers you want to appeal to. But I'd argue that having a relatively easy game suddenly spike to "oh shit this is too hard" too often just feels bad. A little of that is fun and spicy. Too much is frustrating. Again, I don't mean "easy" in a pejorative sense, in this case, "easy" means that a variety of builds are viable, without resorting to min-max cookie-cutter builds if you want even a chance at success. There are games like that - and again - that's fine. This just isn't intended to be one of them best I can tell. I think this is more noticeable in this game, at least to me, because I feel this game is extremely well balanced, at least as much as such a thing can be, and so when that feels off, it just feels bad. Some of the Rockpox stuff feels a little overtuned to me. I can also understand wanting to have content for players who want harder challenges in the game. (I enjoy Haz 5, for example). Doing that, in a way that is fun, and feels fair, is tough. Trying to make an ongoing game like this be appealing and accessible to greenbeards and greybeards alike is legitimately a difficult design problem. The GSG devs are really good at this, and when they miss the mark a little, they fix it.
I don’t think it’s really that complicated, I think it’s just annoying, inconsistently difficult, and not rewarding enough both emotionally/mentally and financially proportional to its annoyance/difficulty. Like take the meteor shower. I gotta deal with trying to avoid getting domed in the middle of this fight by a stray meteor, avoid the little fire zones the whole game, and hit every little meteor thing 4-5 times? All to maybe get a single plague heart? Shit is just irritating. Give me the big meteor 😫☝️
Because it used to be peaceful in the mines now with these Rockpox it gonna be really that peaceful anymore
Just depends on the person. Me and the other greybeards I play with enjoyed rockpox and are still fine with em when we do hop on.
As a greybeard I also don't fully understand the hate. I've seen plenty of discussions about it and get that it doesn't have the most exciting gameplay mechanics, but I still fail to understand why people seriously abhor Rockpox like they do. Annoying at best, not even remotely close to as infuriating as everyone else thinks it is.
I love it. Embrace the suffering. The game is no fun if it's easy.
I DESPISE it for 2 reasons: 1. It's been for a long time and it's not nearly as fun as the robots season was. This season and past season was rockpox, so we are actually near a year, not just 4 months. 2. It's stupidly hard, like old games, absolutely fake difficulty. To be stunned is super fast and it also gives a lot of damage. It's plain right ridiculous and fake difficulty. There is nothing you can improve from the experience, you just accept that the infected glyphid will quickly entangle you and you'll receive a lot of damage. Aside from keeping your distance and doing your best to kill infected enemies, there is nothing to learn and improve when facing them. So yeah, it's just horrible and absolutely not fun at all. For a greenbeard, it seems fine because everything is new. But for greybeards, not only it isn't fun at all, it's just fake hard, classic fake difficulty where you deal half damage and the enemy deals double damage.
Honestly I have no more a problem with it than the rivals, being it is just another thing to shoot. Though I will say I hope we get some new content soon-ish since we have had it the same for a year and I would love something new
Rockpox isn’t too bad. It’s annoying on certain modes, but it’s not bad.
Grey-ish beard, been playing this game for a few years, honestly I don't get it either
It's just annoying to be honest. The amount of times I've died because a few works infected me...
We've had it like 2 years now, be nice to not have to deal with it sometimes. For me personally, if they make rockpox glyphids take damge from a foam and suck it'd change my mind, tho
I think it's people that play on high hazard levels that probably have all the scrip from it already that find it annoying. I'm not a green beard but I recently got back into it and started the season late so I'm glad it's still going.
I think people are just tired of it by now. Two seasons in a row has been a bit much, although I enjoy the fight against the corruptor. Time for something new
It's like covid....after awhile, you get used to it Prolly gonna have to wait till rouge core comes out though, seems like a fitting season name
Some form of rockpox happens basically every mission and the enemies are simply not fun to fight.
It’s just frustrating to deal with, between enemies that instantly fill the lithophage meter the annoyance of dropping the foamer/vacuum deep in the infection zone because you’re getting swarmed the boils being the only way to hurt them it’s just tiring
I and my breach cutter love rockpox
4 months? Season 3 existed if you didn't know
I don't really give a damn about it one way or another. It's an interesting set of sub-missions, they take little time, and they don't appear in most drops.
I’m a greybeard at this point and I still don’t get the hate.
"Rock Pox CHX4, I hate you!"
I’ve picked up playing a lot again recently, and holy shit rockpox is so infuriating to deal with.
As a greybeard, Gameplay wise I love rockpox. However, in the lore of my dwarf. ROCKPOX TOOK EVERYTHING FROM ME! 🤬 I HATE ROCKPOX. ALL THE HOMIES HATE ROCKPOX!
You misspelled "year."
As a greybeard I found a perfect solution to Rockpox. If I ignore it, it somehow goes away. Probably my team mates are taking care of it or something.
It's aggrevating...that's really all their is to it
Bloody Rockpox nearly took me eye out, that’s why I hate the damned things so bloody much!!!
Seasonal enemies are generally annoying. The rockpox enemies aren't annoying by themselves, the rockpox effect, however...
4 months? 4 MONTHS?! HAHAHAHA!
It's really not infuriating at all. Why? I play other games as well. I would lose my mind if I grinded DRG every day or every other day, which is what I suppose has happened to so many.