Best Of

Personally, I'm waiting for clarification on how xenoslayer mobs are intended to spawn before offering my feedback on them. First impression: awesome direction, relatively tough mobs, need more info about how they're spawning or how they're intended to spawn (or both). Also might need some kind of toughness scaling to deal with bringing too many people. Will wait.

Talents
1) Progression  - feels quite fast in terms of acquiring talents as it is now. It shouldn't be possible to complete 1 or 2 complete branches of talents in a weekend (JMHO). By contrast, learning complete modding is a much harder endeavor. I would imagine talents should be much more difficult to acquire and incremental progress should be harder and harder. 

2) Scavenging - scavenging is a bit confusing. Does scavenging increase the base rate of 'valuable' drops? Or do they keep the base rate of drops constant but adjust the relative drop rates of various things? If so, maxing mods and droploots would be 'racing' against each other? 

Xenoslayers

1) I haven't found a single alpha or betarch creature thus far. I'm not sure whether this is a product of not getting there fast enough or the chance being truly random. More consistency in finding mobs please.

2) Rather than have a single escaped mob, an area of high level creatures would be preferable as an end-game high level hunting area. PvP or PvE is a matter of admin choices but this feels more PvE vs PvP. These could potentially spawn as 'cache-type' shared instances. 

3) Honor lines/ titles for slaying different types of xenohunters. 

4) Daily credits for slaying a xenohunt creature

I'm not nearly close to ready to jump into xeno-hunts I don't think, but when I read it would be PvP around them I more or less immediately wrote them off.

This sounds awesome though. Having to do more interactive things than just setup and hit repeatedly would be fun for boss-style mobs. Also, I'd love to have a good laugh reminiscing about the time no one freed me from the ice so everyone died. (Or similar)

Also as someone who is a fair bit slower on the leveling end, the I love the talent system. It's something to look forward to me without throwing up more walls to make me feel like I'll never catch up to be effective in PvP. Really looking forward to getting them some time!

Seconding the idea of conflict channel announcing when the mob dies.

My biggest problem with xenoslaying is that I have so much trouble actually participating in it. The lack of wilderness map makes it very difficult, for starters. Why is it unavailable in Wilderness, but available in caches, when they are almost the exact same thing? Currently, I can check conflict channel and try a few places where *maybe* there is a mob (if it hasn't been killed already) that *maybe* I can find in my wilderness (if it even spawned there, unlikely), though without a map I am bound to waste tons of time and likely miss some rooms. Might miss it entirely even if it's there. 

On a related note, some clarity on how the spawn happens would go a long way. Is it possible that the mob spawns in a random person's wilderness and stays there, completely inaccessible to everybody else?

The mobs themselves are fantastic! It's just a shame that in all this time I've only been able to find a single one, from the original batch right when they released, and nothing else. It can be pretty frustrating to have an amazing new mechanic so inaccessible.

And to end on a positive note, thank you **so much** for trying this out. I know it's breaking new ground for IRE and I have been hoping for PvE content like this for a long time. It has the potential to be one of my favorite things about Starmourn. 

Talents

My feedback for Talents is that I really enjoy the extra bit of progression. It is nice to have that PvE grind back and I like how they are mostly exclusive for improving your PvE capabilities, with the increase to resistances as the only exception. This has the bonus of still making the entry to PvP still easily obtainable, as hitting level 75 and getting the first 10 talent points does come swiftly. I can imagine it will be pretty easy to bolt on extra things onto the Talents system to continue to reward those who are obsessed with the grind (Ata and Necerursh). I do not think there needs to be any changes to this current implementation and now that the double experience buff has ended, the talent points seem to be appropriately grindy to acquire, even with the speed increase to bashing that criticals grant us.

Xenoslayers

I enjoy the story around them, genetics research lab has had a few breakouts and now there are freakishly large beasties around with bounties for those who end them. What I don't enjoy is this forced mixture of PvP and PvE surrounding them. To me, trying to cater to both in the same mechanic merely cheapens the experience of both. If you allow people to PvP during them, it leads to cheese tactics such as attacking the one getting hit by the monster, leading to them dying. This did not take any skill to accomplish, you were just an opportunist, akin to a griefer.

On the other hand, the PvE encounter feels lessened because the mechanics of the battles just aren't in place. It is a bullet sponge, a tank of a mob, with no real way of interacting with the fight. You beat them through sheer numbers and smashing your bashing macro repeatedly. This is not engaging gameplay and if you have to draw people away to deal with a PvP fight as well, it likely means these PvE encounters will never have meaningful mechanics because nobody will have the numbers to field two teams. It also means anyone engaging in the PvP side misses out on the kill participation.

My take is, we have systems in place that cater to PvP and cater to PvE. Cache fights are frequent and encourage team based ground warfare. Cosmpiercers are a mix of ship PvE, ship PvP, ground PvP and Hacking. That's a lot going on, but nobody engages in this at the moment due to how the numbers are balanced, everyone has their portion of Cosmpiercers and there's no need for conflict. I'd like to see tweaks to Cosmpiercers to make ownership relevant again and I'd like Xenoslayers to become the new PvE group experience, akin to raid encounters from MMOs. I gave an example on Discord lately, which I will share again:

Imagine an escaped specimen had been infused with ice powers. While fighting it, it encases a random player in ice. If that player is not freed by their allies, the Xeno will shatter the ice block, dealing significant damage to everyone in the room and instantly slaying the one encased.

As for Cosmpiercers, remove the ability for them to fight back and make them tankier. This allows the occupiers time to get to their ships and turn it into a true ship PvP. Reduce the number of Cosmpiercers across the game and tweak the numbers so you need to hold a number of them to keep significant progress. Make it so a successful capture of one, or a successful defence, puts it into a lengthy lockout timer so people aren't fatigued over these grand battles.

Tl;dr

Firmly establish PvE content and PvP content, make each fully engaging without gimmicky stuff attached. Have rewards to entice participation.

Xeno-slayers: This shouldn't in any way be tied to pvp. Like, at all. Game needs more end-game content that isn't trying to force Pvp. 
Also, I don't know that it should be tied to the wilderness. UNLESS you go about making it pop something similar to a cache when it happens.
Also also, the conflict channel should record when the monster get's killed or despawned.

Talents: This needs a supported gmcp channel, or to have current xp tracking convert directly over. Pretty please