Let’s say you’re thumping with a couple of friends. You’re managing a medium personal just fine when someone wanders by and offers to help. Should you continue to run a medium personal or try for something bigger?
This calculator will help you quickly decide if it’s worth the risk to change thumpers when you change squad sizes.
Notes:
- The crystite figure does not include refining the Sifted Earth – add 1% for that.
- The game does not current report your resource bonus in the post-thump report or /tab 2 loot message, but the amount added to your inventory is correct.
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Is…this accurate as of today?
No Offense, but I was led to believe that Personal Thumpers supposedly split up the gained resources up to all parties, where Squad Thumpers give up their full capacity to each player.
Off course my own gut said that Personal Thumpers were generally more manageable but gave similar amounts of resources even when you took capacity into account.
According to this calculator an Heavy Personal thumper with 5 people has the same return as a Light Squad with 5 people
Lowering the number of people on the Heavy Personal does seem to increase the return of resources…but when a Light Squad does not give more than a heavy personal, and considering the -spam- of enemies that Squad thumpers entail, it is still more feasible to use Heavy Personals for me.
Personal Thumpers do indeed split their gained resources between each squadmember, whereas Squad Thumpers don’t. However, the 100% completion bonus is not split, so that somewhat mitigates the impact of splitting the thumper yield. If you change the calculator numbers to, say, 95% completion, you’ll see the rewards change radically.
To use your example: a Heavy Personal Thumper has a capacity of 1000, so in a 5-man squad, everyone gets 200. But the bonus for 100%ing it is not split, so everyone then gets an extra 1000 resources each for a total return of 1200 resources per person. A Light Squad Thumper has a capacity of 600, which isn’t split, so at 100% everyone gets 1200 resources again.
However, if you run both of those thumpers to 95%, the Light Squad Thumper gives 570 resources to each squadmember, whereas the Heavy Personal Thumper gives 950 split 5 ways, or 190 resources per person.
So you can see that the apparent similarity between the Personal and Squad Thumper yields is actually due to the effect of not splitting the 100% completion bonus, and if you lose that bonus the rewards differ wildly.
Seems to me that squad thumpers aren’t worth placing anymore, unless you have 5 people in your squad and have heavy squad.
The way squad thumpers pull out resources make them dry any node in one thump (at least I haven’t found a node that wasn’t dried in one thump), while for heavy personal you can thump 2-3 times, making it effectively give more resources per person.
Well, unless you somehow manage to screw it up so bad that you have to send it earlier.
With any less than 5 people, personal thumpers are better for the returns and the node lifespan, yes.
Recent patches have shifted the thumper spawns back and forth, and it’s heavily dependent on the classes you have with you what is doable and the positioning of said thumper. With a full squad I would definitely call down the Squad II Thumper as it returns -more- than the personal one and should be a manageable difficulty, admittedly, you’ll want your squad to be T2 geared at least.
As always, it depends on your level of preferred challenge.
Looking at the numbers it seems to me that it’s better to thump twice with Personal 3 than once with Squad 2. At least when not considering extraction speed (racing with other squad to finish first, etc).
Checked the calculator for 60% resource (which seem all too common lately) of P3 vs S2 for full 5-player squad and 100% completion. P3 gives 720 per thump, and in normal circumstances you will be able to thump twice as it should only pull 1000x resource per thump, which totals to 1440 resource per player. S2 on the other hand gives 1080 with no chance to thump again, as it pulls 4500x resource from the node (5×900).
Maybe I’m missing something or my math is all wrong. I guess I’ll take it to the forums.
You are correct. It’s a meta game tactic but it works as long as you are alone on the vein.