Yesterday we finally gathered the courage, means and people to attempt the Gamma version of the King Titan.
Sadly, it also meant mostly the end of Ark for us.
We're a small tribe, 3 people online on average, 5 or 6 if we call in all friends and actually plan things properly in advance to get something done.
We've been playing like this on our private server since Ark entered early access on Steam. We've played through all the expansions as they came out, turned our server into a cluster even to experiment with the transfers and evolve our tribe as we cleared once DLC after another, sticking as close as we could to the original server settings.
We honestly think that Aberration was the best expansion for Ark. We thoroughly enjoyed playing on that map, collecting all the new dino's, preparing for the boss fights and ultimately clearing it on alpha difficulty using our reaper kings, rock drakes and ascended gear. It took a lot of effort and work from the tribe, but we pulled it off, preparing everyone for Extinction just a few weeks before it's launch.
And sadly, we feel as if Extinction has taken a wrong turn somewhere. All the content is gated behind group content. Sure, we can do the blue drops and easy element veins. Even the yellow ones are doable now with our newly bread Giga's, but it's a risky undertaking. The red ones are manageable if we get lucky with the wyverns, and they swoop in low allowing us to bite them with the giga's without taking too many breaths. But the titan fights are a pain to do with small groups like ourselves.
Not because the fights are hard or complex, but the insane amount of materials you need to simply prepare for these encounters. The sheer amount of metal that goes into constructing MEKs for just the basic models alone takes us pretty much a whole day of collecting to build a single unit. Let alone constructing up to 6 of them, or even going for the higher quality ones. Add the materials needed for canon shells, weapons and the element to keep them running through the fight, we need weeks of preparation just to do the titan fights. This compared to the previous expansions is simply too much.
Then we finally got the King fight. It started out good.
We had MEKs to deal with the crystals and spawns of the boss.
We had the Forest Titan for tanking the boss
We had the Ice Titan for damaging the boss
It all went great till the meteors came in and randomly started killing us. We could soak several meteors without any problem, no damage against the players, but the next one would randomly kill you. This randomness screwed us over so badly that we simply threw in the towel right there.
I don't mind executing mechanics, I don't mind the farming as preparation for the fight, but to get screwed over by a seemingly random mechanic that can't make up it's mind whether to kill you or ignore you is too much.
Ark was fun, even with the bugs and issues that made me beat the keyboard numerous times, it was overal fun.
But our patience has finally run out to keep dealing with this.