So my biggest beef with the core cycle of the game so far is that things take too many crafting materials to make. I love building my storm shield defenses. I've got a whole theme going. I've built these giant pyramids with walls around them. It's quite symmetrical and eye pleasing. But it takes a ton of materials to build this up. What this means is I find myself going into the other missions and just farming like crazy and then doing whatever I can to avoid using those materials in the actual mission I'm in so that I can save them for my homebase.
That's a bit of a flaw to me. Because building defenses in the actual mission is fun, but I can't help but feeling like I'm throwing resources away by doing so, because in 7 minutes they all get deleted.
That's a bit of a flaw to me. Because building defenses in the actual mission is fun, but I can't help but feeling like I'm throwing resources away by doing so, because in 7 minutes they all get deleted.
Yeah, considering the nuts'n'bolts required to craft traps, I make really sure the husks will actually get as far as reaching the point where I want a trap before I plonk it down mid-combat.
i don;t really like the base building and none of the husks have ever reached what little traps i bother to put up anyway so it's not a concern for me, personally.
but then i really like grinding for materials and wish i had more reason to do that
i don;t really like the base building and none of the husks have ever reached what little traps i bother to put up anyway so it's not a concern for me, personally.
but then i really like grinding for materials and wish i had more reason to do that
Yeah the missions I've done (few so far, just unlocked "play with others") the defenses seem kind of superfluous. We build up a mini base around the Atlas with a few traps, and by the end of the mission everyone is pressed half a mile up the level shooting zombies down the hill. I'm assuming this gets harder as time goes on, but I've definitely gotten stingier about traps.
yeah i kind of wish that you could maze the zombies, right now traps seem almost pointless, every mission I do right now I just put up some walls around whatever needs defending and then shoot everything
Is there a way to view your backpack contents outside of a mission? And can weapons be disassembled or recycled or whatever? Right now I can recycle schematics but not the actual weapons, unless I'm missing something.
Is there a way to view your backpack contents outside of a mission? And can weapons be disassembled or recycled or whatever? Right now I can recycle schematics but not the actual weapons, unless I'm missing something.
nope, have to be in a mission
yes, you should always recycle stuff before it breaks, you do it the same way as schematics it just has to be in a mission
I'm currently hovering at a power level of 21 in Planktown and it seems like the difficulty has escalated to a difficult yet fun level. It can still vary due to map RNG, but husk waves seem more populous and more diverse in composition . They also approach objectives from multiple vectors at the same time which makes focused kill lanes harder to maintain. A network of traps to deal with leakers can be worth the time and resource expense in such circumstances.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Law and Order ≠ Justice
i don;t really like the base building and none of the husks have ever reached what little traps i bother to put up anyway so it's not a concern for me, personally.
but then i really like grinding for materials and wish i had more reason to do that
This is what kind of turned me off of the game after watching lots of streams. Playing with other folks, the husks barely made it to the buildings. Let alone some well trapped corridor. They were all dispatched by the players 95% of the time.
I could be wrong, but I get the sense that the general missions are going to be pretty bare-bones defenses (for the most part) and your more intricate defenses should be reserved for the Storm Shield Defense stuff. Which makes sense, since it's permanent and you can get more invested.
i don;t really like the base building and none of the husks have ever reached what little traps i bother to put up anyway so it's not a concern for me, personally.
but then i really like grinding for materials and wish i had more reason to do that
This is what kind of turned me off of the game after watching lots of streams. Playing with other folks, the husks barely made it to the buildings. Let alone some well trapped corridor. They were all dispatched by the players 95% of the time.
all the streams i watched were right at the beginning tho and by area two the difficulty ranks up enough where you NEED traps. it's simple in the first area in order to let you learn the ropes i think
+1
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I was getting constantly chewed up by zombies last night, and I was not having a lot of fun.
And then I noticed my guns were level 10 on a 19 mission.
Whew! We had a weekend long Fortnite-fest at my house this weekend. Four players on four computers set up on our dining room table and all-day LANparty play! Whee!!
Friday night I opened my 15 "loyalty" pinatas and the game bugged out. Instead of showing the pinata getting beaten and opened, I was left staring at the neutral blue background that the game uses when it shows non-pinata rewards. That was fine because I could still click/swing and the audio from the pinata breaking would play... I just had no idea what I was getting. I even heard on pinata turn silver and get smashed. Fine, right? Until I got a "choice" card where I had to choose one of two things. I couldn't see the choices, I couldn't click on them (or maybe I could but didn't know what they were or even where my mouse pointer was on the screen) and the only way out was to kill the program. And so I lost all of the built up stuff that had been collected... I know it was lost because my founder point total only increased by 60 (10 for each pinata that I opened after the reset) and not by 150 (which should have been how much I got). So much for "loyalty" :bigfrown:
Saturday and Sunday we played round-robin style, passing the group lead and helping each other complete main storyline quests. One of our group was much higher level than the rest of us (he played a LOT during the first week) and he finished some of my side-quests without me even being aware of what I was supposed to be doing! Of course, with three of us needing to do stuff (sometimes multiple times) and having to do all of the stormshield defense missions three times consecutively, progress in the main story tree was really slow. The flip side of that is that we ended up with a LOT of excess of skill points. Without any exaggeration I have literally filled in every single node in the first skill tree (that are not locked), plus I'm sitting on six more skill points, and have not yet unblocked the second skilltree! We're still in Stonewood and with four players the difficulty is somewhere between facerolling and pitifully easy. Which is good because...
My main hero (Jonesy) is maxed at two stars, level 20. Both of the supporting squad heroes are two-stars as well. I'm alternating leveling them up: Ramirez (for the ammo use reduction) is up to level 12, and Hawk (for faster reloading times) is level 11. I chose them because my main weapon is a 2-star level-20 1496 DPS light machine gun that I'm ready to upgrade to three stars as soon as I unlock the node that allows it. I already have nearly 30 silver ore so I should be able to bump it up a level or three right away. Of course, everything is blue/Rare level, because....
I have the worst luck ever. In any kind of "gambling" game, I will break the statistics. Every. Single. Time. If there is a 5% chance to win, it will take me 500 tries to get a winner. Guaranteed. I never win. Over the entire weekend, I managed to pull a single silver pinata (that I was able to keep - I did lose one silver in the "loyalty" fiasco). Every one else at the table hit at least two golds and several silvers. (My wife's gold pinata count is up to five now!) I have exactly one orange/Legendary survivor (came from the silver pinata) and nearly everything else is blue/Rare or worse. I do have the freebie purple/Epic people and schematics that came in the Super Deluxe package, but that's literally the only items I have that are better than blue/Rare. I keep hoping that it will turn around eventually, but past experience tells me that's unlikely. Luck of the draw, and I don't have that.
I've got one quest ("use the bull rush ability" one time) that is basically stuck since I don't have a BASE Kyle card. (I slotted the one that came with my founders pack into my collection book before I knew I was going to need that one specific character to complete this quest.) In fact, aside from my one "lucky" pull - my Legendary Lead Survivor that also happens to be a Marksman and is permaslotted in the Leader role of Fire Team Alpha for more DPS boost - I didn't see a single playable hero pull over the entire weekend!
I'm up to Storm Shield 6 now and two storyline quests away from Van or AstroVan, which is , I believe, the gate to the next area. I'm actually looking forward to it!
Gonna probably do another write up about starter materials, what you should trash after one stack and what you should never get rid of. It will be amended when i actually get to plankerton.
Also, might talk about the economy/efficiency of weapons as well since crafting and durability play big parts in maintaining fighting power and ammo consumption.
Yea, the 2nd area quickly reverses the whole gun/trap situation. I still pick off important targets, but traps are doing the majority of the work. The amount of enemies they throw at you gets pretty crazy. Sometimes the waves get specialized too, like it will change to non stop lobbers. Which is a complete pain in the ass, because suddenly the ceilings you have been standing on start breaking. It is to the point where we just assume that our outer layer of defense is going to break or get run over, and we have to scramble to fix it, replace the traps, or just back off to the last wall.
Gonna probably do another write up about starter materials, what you should trash after one stack and what you should never get rid of. It will be amended when i actually get to plankerton.
Also, might talk about the economy/efficiency of weapons as well since crafting and durability play big parts in maintaining fighting power and ammo consumption.
But it is a pain to write a thesis on a phone.
I'm down for reading that! You should collate the info on a blog somewhere.
My big thing at the moment is it's really hard to find where you can see the crafting ingredients for schematics. I have a "main" blue assault rifle that's heavily upgraded that I've never used because I've never had the mats to make one and I don't know what they are.
Few things I've noted over the course of the release week:
Number 1 - the difficulty ramps way too slowly. This game is definitely the most fun when it's most difficult and chaotic, and it takes a fairly long time to get to that point. However, early-mid Plankerton is really, really fun. Stormshield defenses are solid, although kind of dependent on the player. In our group, we have 1 player who has a gigantic home base built with tons of traps and such everywhere, and his defenses are pretty easy. We have my base, which has some spots heavily fortified, and others just kind of haphazardly, and those missions can be fun. And the most fun place to defend is the least heavily defended.
Number 2 - This game is the most fun when you have multiple game breaking things happening at once. Flingers being highly resistant to anything but melee damage is great. Lobbers requiring people to actively hunt them down (most of the time?) is great. Propane guys sneaking up to your defenses are great. However, I definitely feel like these things should be cranked higher and harder. Base zombies should be mostly handled by smart base design / traps (with propane guys being the thing to watch for in the hordes), and then the big bad Mist Monsters should be coming out fast and repeatedly.
Number 3 - Nuts and Bolts, man. The key, I've found, is that you have to find some traps that don't require nuts and bolts to build on less important objective defenses. Even now, we're still able to mostly kill the husks with guns/abilities, so traps are really just for catching stragglers. In that vein, Wall Darts are pretty great. They fire from 3-4 tiles away, do reasonable amounts of damage, reload fairly quickly, and, best of all, don't require any Nuts and Bolts to create.
Number 4 - Silver and Gold llama rates need to be doubled, if not more. It would incentive buying loot llamas, because you would know that you have better chances of getting the things you want. And it's not really short cutting progression, because even once you have the things you want, there is still an extremely long grind involved in leveling, upgrading, and evolving all your stuff. Particularly, they need to turn up the rate at which you get Heroes out of loot llamas. I had a blue Pathfinder who I did not realize the power of when I first played her. So I slotted her in the collection book. Of course, now, the best I've been able to grab has been a green Pathfinder, despite opening tons and tons of llamas.
Finally - Elemental weapons. I think it's very neat that there's an added layer of damage / strategy. Could lead to having to run with multiple elements on different guns, and due to the cost in materials to leveling those different guns, you would probably want to cover a range of weapon types as well. However...if you're going to do a Rock Paper Scissor of Water > Fire > Nature > Water....why then introduce Energy which is good against all of them? Then it's not an interesting choice, it's merely a case of optimal vs sub optimal. And of course tied into ever more RNG...
Diagnosed with AML on 6/1/12. Read about it: www.effleukemia.com
I'm not having a problem with the difficulty. If they made it harder i don't think I'd keep playing.
I also think the llama rates are fine and I've been getting fucked over by it on the regular. I also have gotten a LOT of heroes out of mine so that's just RNG.
As for elemental damage, I think the overall elemental bonus you get for Energy is very small compared to the actual bigger bonus you get for an actual dominant element.
Well managed to get my bloody siphon done. If your looking to farm mats I recommend grabbing a outlander, go into a private instance and quit it when you gathered what you need as you keep the loot.
Having great difficulty in finding APC,s killed gnomes and looted chests and not found one yet in my last three runs.
I'm not having a problem with the difficulty. If they made it harder i don't think I'd keep playing.
I also think the llama rates are fine and I've been getting fucked over by it on the regular. I also have gotten a LOT of heroes out of mine so that's just RNG.
As for elemental damage, I think the overall elemental bonus you get for Energy is very small compared to the actual bigger bonus you get for an actual dominant element.
Well, all the elemental mods are +10% base damage. Fire/Water/Nature then get a bonus vs 1 elemental, which is nice, but major penalties against another. If it wasn't such a pain to level multiple guns (mainly, pure drops of rain / manuals / lightning in a bottles), this might not be an issue. Or, if you *absolutely* had to have at least 2 elements in the rock paper scissor game, you'd at least know. However, you can make do with 1 main weapon to level and upgrade, but if and only if your best weapon rolls with energy damage.
Additionally, I mainly mean the fact that throughout area 1 you can put a box around the objective and easily win all defenses kind of disappointed me, and has led to a few of my friends bailing on the game before it really got interesting.
Also, the rate of progression in area 1 is great. It's around mid level 20s in Plankerton that the game really starts to slow down. Missions don't give you skill points 100% of the time. Daily Quest rewards drop from 50 vcoins down to 30 vcoins. Main story quests stop being able to be completed in 1 mission, and start to take 2 to 3. Your base power level rises significantly slower, so that you start to get progression locked by evolving survivors (which requires tons of pure drops of rain, which are much rarer rewards than almost anything else). Then you realize that the main way to get survivor training manuals is through getting blue survivors, which really only come in loot llamas, and now you're only gaining a llama every day or so (if you're even able to cap out your daily quests every day), and then you start to lament the loot llama reward/drop rate.
Diagnosed with AML on 6/1/12. Read about it: www.effleukemia.com
I'm not having a problem with the difficulty. If they made it harder i don't think I'd keep playing.
I also think the llama rates are fine and I've been getting fucked over by it on the regular. I also have gotten a LOT of heroes out of mine so that's just RNG.
As for elemental damage, I think the overall elemental bonus you get for Energy is very small compared to the actual bigger bonus you get for an actual dominant element.
Well, all the elemental mods are +10% base damage. Fire/Water/Nature then get a bonus vs 1 elemental, which is nice, but major penalties against another. If it wasn't such a pain to level multiple guns (mainly, pure drops of rain / manuals / lightning in a bottles), this might not be an issue. Or, if you *absolutely* had to have at least 2 elements in the rock paper scissor game, you'd at least know. However, you can make do with 1 main weapon to level and upgrade, but if and only if your best weapon rolls with energy damage.
Additionally, I mainly mean the fact that throughout area 1 you can put a box around the objective and easily win all defenses kind of disappointed me, and has led to a few of my friends bailing on the game before it really got interesting.
Also, the rate of progression in area 1 is great. It's around mid level 20s in Plankerton that the game really starts to slow down. Missions don't give you skill points 100% of the time. Daily Quest rewards drop from 50 vcoins down to 30 vcoins. Main story quests stop being able to be completed in 1 mission, and start to take 2 to 3. Your base power level rises significantly slower, so that you start to get progression locked by evolving survivors (which requires tons of pure drops of rain, which are much rarer rewards than almost anything else). Then you realize that the main way to get survivor training manuals is through getting blue survivors, which really only come in loot llamas, and now you're only gaining a llama every day or so (if you're even able to cap out your daily quests every day), and then you start to lament the loot llama reward/drop rate.
Yeah, the base building stuff in area one is just not worth it. I get that they maybe wanted it easy before they hit you with the hard stuff in Plankerton, but it's just not working out that way..
And I have heard that rewards drop quite a bit Area 2 and on but that's possibly by design since area 4 isn't finished and they want to slow you down right now.
What should I be doing with excess crafting materials? I seem to end up with a ton of gray crafting mats from trees and rocks, not quite sure if I should be tossing it to avoid clogging up inventory or what.
For those wondering if there is a reason to keep certain rarity weapons/heroes/anything transforms are used to combine up to 5 schematics to a higher rarity. Like you throw 5 grey/green ones to get a random blue or a specific category, weapon/survivor/hero etc. You can also find these in consumable form which makes me think that is where you will find epic+ version. Keep in mind early on it eats huge amounts of research for the cost.
I've been tossing stacks of stones and planks away. Unless later iterations of traps require significantly more of them, I expect that trend to continue.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Law and Order ≠ Justice
If they are going to have durability in then I wish they would make guns that dropped useful like in BotW. Faster breaking weapons but each of them actually useful. I'm already at the point where I don't even bother looking at the weapons that drop, regardless of rarity.
They are useful, they have tons of ammo you don't need to craft, if you can use a less than optimal weapon when things are going easy you have a mission or two's worth of shooting. I'd even consider levelling some seeing as refunds are a thing. But then I have a three second 5 shot skill (throwing stars) and an epic repeat shotgun.
If they are going to have durability in then I wish they would make guns that dropped useful like in BotW. Faster breaking weapons but each of them actually useful. I'm already at the point where I don't even bother looking at the weapons that drop, regardless of rarity.
They are useful, they have tons of ammo you don't need to craft, if you can use a less than optimal weapon when things are going easy you have a mission or two's worth of shooting. I'd even consider levelling some seeing as refunds are a thing. But then I have a three second 5 shot skill (throwing stars) and an epic repeat shotgun.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wait what? The dropped guns (I'm assuming the ones that go straight to your inventory) come with their own ammo?
They absolutely don't. They are most likely drawing from an ammunition type your main crafted guns aren't.
The reality is that they aren't viable or even remotely close in power level to what you are bringing in the missions they drop in, meaning that any gun of any rarity that falls ends up automatically recycled.
They would be much better off being stronger and breaking quickly so you can have a moment of fun with them and then you fall back to your reliable crafted weapons.
I'm not having a problem with the difficulty. If they made it harder i don't think I'd keep playing.
I also think the llama rates are fine and I've been getting fucked over by it on the regular. I also have gotten a LOT of heroes out of mine so that's just RNG.
As for elemental damage, I think the overall elemental bonus you get for Energy is very small compared to the actual bigger bonus you get for an actual dominant element.
Well, all the elemental mods are +10% base damage. Fire/Water/Nature then get a bonus vs 1 elemental, which is nice, but major penalties against another. If it wasn't such a pain to level multiple guns (mainly, pure drops of rain / manuals / lightning in a bottles), this might not be an issue. Or, if you *absolutely* had to have at least 2 elements in the rock paper scissor game, you'd at least know. However, you can make do with 1 main weapon to level and upgrade, but if and only if your best weapon rolls with energy damage.
Additionally, I mainly mean the fact that throughout area 1 you can put a box around the objective and easily win all defenses kind of disappointed me, and has led to a few of my friends bailing on the game before it really got interesting.
Also, the rate of progression in area 1 is great. It's around mid level 20s in Plankerton that the game really starts to slow down. Missions don't give you skill points 100% of the time. Daily Quest rewards drop from 50 vcoins down to 30 vcoins. Main story quests stop being able to be completed in 1 mission, and start to take 2 to 3. Your base power level rises significantly slower, so that you start to get progression locked by evolving survivors (which requires tons of pure drops of rain, which are much rarer rewards than almost anything else). Then you realize that the main way to get survivor training manuals is through getting blue survivors, which really only come in loot llamas, and now you're only gaining a llama every day or so (if you're even able to cap out your daily quests every day), and then you start to lament the loot llama reward/drop rate.
Yeah, the base building stuff in area one is just not worth it. I get that they maybe wanted it easy before they hit you with the hard stuff in Plankerton, but it's just not working out that way..
And I have heard that rewards drop quite a bit Area 2 and on but that's possibly by design since area 4 isn't finished and they want to slow you down right now.
Area 3 isnt finished, let alone area 4. Area 3 has no quests that are not "do 3 missions in X+ level" and has no voice overs at all. Area 4 has a new design for their stormshield, but every other mission is just the same suburbs/city stuff as the last one and doesn't look like the stormshield area at all.
CorriganX on Steam and just about everywhere else.
I'm not having a problem with the difficulty. If they made it harder i don't think I'd keep playing.
I also think the llama rates are fine and I've been getting fucked over by it on the regular. I also have gotten a LOT of heroes out of mine so that's just RNG.
As for elemental damage, I think the overall elemental bonus you get for Energy is very small compared to the actual bigger bonus you get for an actual dominant element.
Well, all the elemental mods are +10% base damage. Fire/Water/Nature then get a bonus vs 1 elemental, which is nice, but major penalties against another. If it wasn't such a pain to level multiple guns (mainly, pure drops of rain / manuals / lightning in a bottles), this might not be an issue. Or, if you *absolutely* had to have at least 2 elements in the rock paper scissor game, you'd at least know. However, you can make do with 1 main weapon to level and upgrade, but if and only if your best weapon rolls with energy damage.
Additionally, I mainly mean the fact that throughout area 1 you can put a box around the objective and easily win all defenses kind of disappointed me, and has led to a few of my friends bailing on the game before it really got interesting.
Also, the rate of progression in area 1 is great. It's around mid level 20s in Plankerton that the game really starts to slow down. Missions don't give you skill points 100% of the time. Daily Quest rewards drop from 50 vcoins down to 30 vcoins. Main story quests stop being able to be completed in 1 mission, and start to take 2 to 3. Your base power level rises significantly slower, so that you start to get progression locked by evolving survivors (which requires tons of pure drops of rain, which are much rarer rewards than almost anything else). Then you realize that the main way to get survivor training manuals is through getting blue survivors, which really only come in loot llamas, and now you're only gaining a llama every day or so (if you're even able to cap out your daily quests every day), and then you start to lament the loot llama reward/drop rate.
Yeah, the base building stuff in area one is just not worth it. I get that they maybe wanted it easy before they hit you with the hard stuff in Plankerton, but it's just not working out that way..
And I have heard that rewards drop quite a bit Area 2 and on but that's possibly by design since area 4 isn't finished and they want to slow you down right now.
Area 3 isnt finished, let alone area 4. Area 3 has no quests that are not "do 3 missions in X+ level" and has no voice overs at all. Area 4 has a new design for their stormshield, but every other mission is just the same suburbs/city stuff as the last one and doesn't look like the stormshield area at all.
They really weren't kidding about it being early access then.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Law and Order ≠ Justice
They absolutely don't. They are most likely drawing from an ammunition type your main crafted guns aren't.
The reality is that they aren't viable or even remotely close in power level to what you are bringing in the missions they drop in, meaning that any gun of any rarity that falls ends up automatically recycled.
They would be much better off being stronger and breaking quickly so you can have a moment of fun with them and then you fall back to your reliable crafted weapons.
I've had a few that were as strong as what I was using, or provided utility I needed (aoe blast laser pistol), but they certainly need a boost.
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Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
That's a bit of a flaw to me. Because building defenses in the actual mission is fun, but I can't help but feeling like I'm throwing resources away by doing so, because in 7 minutes they all get deleted.
Yeah, considering the nuts'n'bolts required to craft traps, I make really sure the husks will actually get as far as reaching the point where I want a trap before I plonk it down mid-combat.
but then i really like grinding for materials and wish i had more reason to do that
Yeah the missions I've done (few so far, just unlocked "play with others") the defenses seem kind of superfluous. We build up a mini base around the Atlas with a few traps, and by the end of the mission everyone is pressed half a mile up the level shooting zombies down the hill. I'm assuming this gets harder as time goes on, but I've definitely gotten stingier about traps.
Steam: adamjnet
nope, have to be in a mission
yes, you should always recycle stuff before it breaks, you do it the same way as schematics it just has to be in a mission
Law and Order ≠ Justice
Like, with a chainsaw.
just grab some utensils from the nearest drawer
I could be wrong, but I get the sense that the general missions are going to be pretty bare-bones defenses (for the most part) and your more intricate defenses should be reserved for the Storm Shield Defense stuff. Which makes sense, since it's permanent and you can get more invested.
all the streams i watched were right at the beginning tho and by area two the difficulty ranks up enough where you NEED traps. it's simple in the first area in order to let you learn the ropes i think
And then I noticed my guns were level 10 on a 19 mission.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Friday night I opened my 15 "loyalty" pinatas and the game bugged out. Instead of showing the pinata getting beaten and opened, I was left staring at the neutral blue background that the game uses when it shows non-pinata rewards. That was fine because I could still click/swing and the audio from the pinata breaking would play... I just had no idea what I was getting. I even heard on pinata turn silver and get smashed. Fine, right? Until I got a "choice" card where I had to choose one of two things. I couldn't see the choices, I couldn't click on them (or maybe I could but didn't know what they were or even where my mouse pointer was on the screen) and the only way out was to kill the program. And so I lost all of the built up stuff that had been collected... I know it was lost because my founder point total only increased by 60 (10 for each pinata that I opened after the reset) and not by 150 (which should have been how much I got). So much for "loyalty" :bigfrown:
Saturday and Sunday we played round-robin style, passing the group lead and helping each other complete main storyline quests. One of our group was much higher level than the rest of us (he played a LOT during the first week) and he finished some of my side-quests without me even being aware of what I was supposed to be doing! Of course, with three of us needing to do stuff (sometimes multiple times) and having to do all of the stormshield defense missions three times consecutively, progress in the main story tree was really slow. The flip side of that is that we ended up with a LOT of excess of skill points. Without any exaggeration I have literally filled in every single node in the first skill tree (that are not locked), plus I'm sitting on six more skill points, and have not yet unblocked the second skilltree! We're still in Stonewood and with four players the difficulty is somewhere between facerolling and pitifully easy. Which is good because...
My main hero (Jonesy) is maxed at two stars, level 20. Both of the supporting squad heroes are two-stars as well. I'm alternating leveling them up: Ramirez (for the ammo use reduction) is up to level 12, and Hawk (for faster reloading times) is level 11. I chose them because my main weapon is a 2-star level-20 1496 DPS light machine gun that I'm ready to upgrade to three stars as soon as I unlock the node that allows it. I already have nearly 30 silver ore so I should be able to bump it up a level or three right away. Of course, everything is blue/Rare level, because....
I have the worst luck ever. In any kind of "gambling" game, I will break the statistics. Every. Single. Time. If there is a 5% chance to win, it will take me 500 tries to get a winner. Guaranteed. I never win. Over the entire weekend, I managed to pull a single silver pinata (that I was able to keep - I did lose one silver in the "loyalty" fiasco). Every one else at the table hit at least two golds and several silvers. (My wife's gold pinata count is up to five now!) I have exactly one orange/Legendary survivor (came from the silver pinata) and nearly everything else is blue/Rare or worse. I do have the freebie purple/Epic people and schematics that came in the Super Deluxe package, but that's literally the only items I have that are better than blue/Rare. I keep hoping that it will turn around eventually, but past experience tells me that's unlikely. Luck of the draw, and I don't have that.
I've got one quest ("use the bull rush ability" one time) that is basically stuck since I don't have a BASE Kyle card. (I slotted the one that came with my founders pack into my collection book before I knew I was going to need that one specific character to complete this quest.) In fact, aside from my one "lucky" pull - my Legendary Lead Survivor that also happens to be a Marksman and is permaslotted in the Leader role of Fire Team Alpha for more DPS boost - I didn't see a single playable hero pull over the entire weekend!
I'm up to Storm Shield 6 now and two storyline quests away from Van or AstroVan, which is , I believe, the gate to the next area. I'm actually looking forward to it!
Also, might talk about the economy/efficiency of weapons as well since crafting and durability play big parts in maintaining fighting power and ammo consumption.
But it is a pain to write a thesis on a phone.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Edit:
Unfortunately, the pitcher projectiles cannot be batted back
Law and Order ≠ Justice
I'm down for reading that! You should collate the info on a blog somewhere.
My big thing at the moment is it's really hard to find where you can see the crafting ingredients for schematics. I have a "main" blue assault rifle that's heavily upgraded that I've never used because I've never had the mats to make one and I don't know what they are.
Steam: adamjnet
Stacks of the same trap can't go up to 99?
Law and Order ≠ Justice
Number 1 - the difficulty ramps way too slowly. This game is definitely the most fun when it's most difficult and chaotic, and it takes a fairly long time to get to that point. However, early-mid Plankerton is really, really fun. Stormshield defenses are solid, although kind of dependent on the player. In our group, we have 1 player who has a gigantic home base built with tons of traps and such everywhere, and his defenses are pretty easy. We have my base, which has some spots heavily fortified, and others just kind of haphazardly, and those missions can be fun. And the most fun place to defend is the least heavily defended.
Number 2 - This game is the most fun when you have multiple game breaking things happening at once. Flingers being highly resistant to anything but melee damage is great. Lobbers requiring people to actively hunt them down (most of the time?) is great. Propane guys sneaking up to your defenses are great. However, I definitely feel like these things should be cranked higher and harder. Base zombies should be mostly handled by smart base design / traps (with propane guys being the thing to watch for in the hordes), and then the big bad Mist Monsters should be coming out fast and repeatedly.
Number 3 - Nuts and Bolts, man. The key, I've found, is that you have to find some traps that don't require nuts and bolts to build on less important objective defenses. Even now, we're still able to mostly kill the husks with guns/abilities, so traps are really just for catching stragglers. In that vein, Wall Darts are pretty great. They fire from 3-4 tiles away, do reasonable amounts of damage, reload fairly quickly, and, best of all, don't require any Nuts and Bolts to create.
Number 4 - Silver and Gold llama rates need to be doubled, if not more. It would incentive buying loot llamas, because you would know that you have better chances of getting the things you want. And it's not really short cutting progression, because even once you have the things you want, there is still an extremely long grind involved in leveling, upgrading, and evolving all your stuff. Particularly, they need to turn up the rate at which you get Heroes out of loot llamas. I had a blue Pathfinder who I did not realize the power of when I first played her. So I slotted her in the collection book. Of course, now, the best I've been able to grab has been a green Pathfinder, despite opening tons and tons of llamas.
Finally - Elemental weapons. I think it's very neat that there's an added layer of damage / strategy. Could lead to having to run with multiple elements on different guns, and due to the cost in materials to leveling those different guns, you would probably want to cover a range of weapon types as well. However...if you're going to do a Rock Paper Scissor of Water > Fire > Nature > Water....why then introduce Energy which is good against all of them? Then it's not an interesting choice, it's merely a case of optimal vs sub optimal. And of course tied into ever more RNG...
I also think the llama rates are fine and I've been getting fucked over by it on the regular. I also have gotten a LOT of heroes out of mine so that's just RNG.
As for elemental damage, I think the overall elemental bonus you get for Energy is very small compared to the actual bigger bonus you get for an actual dominant element.
Having great difficulty in finding APC,s killed gnomes and looted chests and not found one yet in my last three runs.
Even then, heroes are only worth investing in at blue. Greens are pretty garbage and you wont use them after one week of play.
Edit** unless im missing something with transformations... havent unlocked any of that mess yet.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
Well, all the elemental mods are +10% base damage. Fire/Water/Nature then get a bonus vs 1 elemental, which is nice, but major penalties against another. If it wasn't such a pain to level multiple guns (mainly, pure drops of rain / manuals / lightning in a bottles), this might not be an issue. Or, if you *absolutely* had to have at least 2 elements in the rock paper scissor game, you'd at least know. However, you can make do with 1 main weapon to level and upgrade, but if and only if your best weapon rolls with energy damage.
Additionally, I mainly mean the fact that throughout area 1 you can put a box around the objective and easily win all defenses kind of disappointed me, and has led to a few of my friends bailing on the game before it really got interesting.
Also, the rate of progression in area 1 is great. It's around mid level 20s in Plankerton that the game really starts to slow down. Missions don't give you skill points 100% of the time. Daily Quest rewards drop from 50 vcoins down to 30 vcoins. Main story quests stop being able to be completed in 1 mission, and start to take 2 to 3. Your base power level rises significantly slower, so that you start to get progression locked by evolving survivors (which requires tons of pure drops of rain, which are much rarer rewards than almost anything else). Then you realize that the main way to get survivor training manuals is through getting blue survivors, which really only come in loot llamas, and now you're only gaining a llama every day or so (if you're even able to cap out your daily quests every day), and then you start to lament the loot llama reward/drop rate.
Yeah, the base building stuff in area one is just not worth it. I get that they maybe wanted it easy before they hit you with the hard stuff in Plankerton, but it's just not working out that way..
And I have heard that rewards drop quite a bit Area 2 and on but that's possibly by design since area 4 isn't finished and they want to slow you down right now.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
They are useful, they have tons of ammo you don't need to craft, if you can use a less than optimal weapon when things are going easy you have a mission or two's worth of shooting. I'd even consider levelling some seeing as refunds are a thing. But then I have a three second 5 shot skill (throwing stars) and an epic repeat shotgun.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wait what? The dropped guns (I'm assuming the ones that go straight to your inventory) come with their own ammo?
The reality is that they aren't viable or even remotely close in power level to what you are bringing in the missions they drop in, meaning that any gun of any rarity that falls ends up automatically recycled.
They would be much better off being stronger and breaking quickly so you can have a moment of fun with them and then you fall back to your reliable crafted weapons.
Area 3 isnt finished, let alone area 4. Area 3 has no quests that are not "do 3 missions in X+ level" and has no voice overs at all. Area 4 has a new design for their stormshield, but every other mission is just the same suburbs/city stuff as the last one and doesn't look like the stormshield area at all.
CorriganX on Steam and just about everywhere else.
They really weren't kidding about it being early access then.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
I've had a few that were as strong as what I was using, or provided utility I needed (aoe blast laser pistol), but they certainly need a boost.