for those wondering more about why the ammo skills are so stupid:
elite enemies tend to have 150% physical resistance, but only 15% odd anomaly resistance. (well checked this in the demo but assume is still true)
this means if u turn on an ammo skill that converts ur gun to anomaly damage u go from dealing 40% damage to about 90% damage without even thinking about resistance penetration
this also means that if ur a devastator doing a shooting build u absolutely 100% have to take the "15% resistance piercing per target hit by melee skill" in order for ur gun to deal damage because without an ammo skill ur eating that massive damage reduction vs elites
resistance penetration is the god stat for gun devastators
I thought I remembered reading that volcanic rounds doesn't scale off anomaly damage? The go to meta builds all see to use bonus weapon damage instead.
Overheat is hilariously enough a critical tool for Volcanic Rounds builds because it ashes anything on fire and the entire upper skill path gives you bonuses to damage on ashed enemies. Also there's a mod that lets do you absurd damage per critical shot to ashed enemies and a mod that lets you do bonus damage for 5 seconds after triggering Overheat. It's basically a boss nuker for Volcanic Rounds builds.
anomaly power doesnt buff it, which is why the numbers are funny - im literally not even specced for it and the numbers on the damage beat the skills. but it converts it to anomaly damage, which bypasses resistances
but ye u dont need overheat for that effect, because its just making use of "when burns end apply ash" in middle pyro. weirdly this includes when you refresh burns from different sources, so you can do that lots of different ways including shooting then
but the key point wasnt that overheat had no use at all (you can use it to scout, tag enemies for mark, as well etc), but that the theoretical "skill damage" use of overheat - cashing out burns - is comically useless. it triggering a status effect for more shooting is tangential
Ah yeah, really the only skills I've seen that do respectable damage without needing a windup like FASER are builds that revolve around using that volcano skill as a nuke. Someone on Reddit posted a setup for one that they were clearing high level content with easily.
EDIT: Also man, it sure is nice to have some sort of shooter to play again. The shooter landscape right now is dire
A lot of the skills suffer from additive % buffs on tiny base damage. Like the armour set bonus that gives +100% damage to cyclone blades. That sounds like it'll be great until you look at your stats and see you're already at ~1700% skill damage without it and all the +100% is doing is bumping that to ~1800%. 18 times a small number is pretty much just as shit as 17 times.
The biggest problem though for non-gun abilities is that the vast vast majority of available triggered buffs are on weapon hit/crit/kill not ability, and any damage buffs they apply pretty much just affect gun damage.
A lot of the skills suffer from additive % buffs on tiny base damage. Like the armour set bonus that gives +100% damage to cyclone blades. That sounds like it'll be great until you look at your stats and see you're already at ~1700% skill damage without it and all the +100% is doing is bumping that to ~1800%. 18 times a small number is pretty much just as shit as 17 times.
Yeah, this is a classic mechanic design problem lots of games ran into. You'd think it'd be considered a solved problem by now to avoid running into it yet again.
Anthem got around it somewhat by also making abilities slotted items you could find better versions of with higher base damage, but that brought a whole bunch of other problems. Also its gun/abilitry balance was completely out of whack too just in the opposite direction.
edit: although even then there was only a couple of raw damage abilities worth using, because they too were crushed by ult/combo/melee/dot scaling with average gear level.
evilbob on
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
As I expected, Wrath of Moloch is incredibly good on a standard variant AR. So much punch, plus the splash burn. Elites get shredded.
Hm. I decided to redo the early game as Trickster, because I hadn't played it in a bit and was thinking I wanted to just goof around redoing stuff instead of progressing.
I've been refighting this encounter in the First City right before
you find Zahedi.
for at least an hour at level 11 @ WT6, and don't know how to clear it because there doesn't seem to be a way I can improve through it. I just randomly catch on fire even if I'm around a corner and the only captain is dead. And then I finally manage to survive the captain and not die from fire by killing riflemen, but a wave hits with literally eight breachers at once and I get shotgunned to death instantly.
edit: The power of complaint has worked again. This time the breachers came out in twos, I can only assume they got stuck at the spawn point and piled up as I've seen happen at other times.
Kamar on
0
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
for those wondering more about why the ammo skills are so stupid:
elite enemies tend to have 150% physical resistance, but only 15% odd anomaly resistance. (well checked this in the demo but assume is still true)
this means if u turn on an ammo skill that converts ur gun to anomaly damage u go from dealing 40% damage to about 90% damage without even thinking about resistance penetration
this also means that if ur a devastator doing a shooting build u absolutely 100% have to take the "15% resistance piercing per target hit by melee skill" in order for ur gun to deal damage because without an ammo skill ur eating that massive damage reduction vs elites
resistance penetration is the god stat for gun devastators
I thought I remembered reading that volcanic rounds doesn't scale off anomaly damage? The go to meta builds all see to use bonus weapon damage instead.
Overheat is hilariously enough a critical tool for Volcanic Rounds builds because it ashes anything on fire and the entire upper skill path gives you bonuses to damage on ashed enemies. Also there's a mod that lets do you absurd damage per critical shot to ashed enemies and a mod that lets you do bonus damage for 5 seconds after triggering Overheat. It's basically a boss nuker for Volcanic Rounds builds.
anomaly power doesnt buff it, which is why the numbers are funny - im literally not even specced for it and the numbers on the damage beat the skills. but it converts it to anomaly damage, which bypasses resistances
but ye u dont need overheat for that effect, because its just making use of "when burns end apply ash" in middle pyro. weirdly this includes when you refresh burns from different sources, so you can do that lots of different ways including shooting then
but the key point wasnt that overheat had no use at all (you can use it to scout, tag enemies for mark, as well etc), but that the theoretical "skill damage" use of overheat - cashing out burns - is comically useless. it triggering a status effect for more shooting is tangential
Ah yeah, really the only skills I've seen that do respectable damage without needing a windup like FASER are builds that revolve around using that volcano skill as a nuke. Someone on Reddit posted a setup for one that they were clearing high level content with easily.
EDIT: Also man, it sure is nice to have some sort of shooter to play again. The shooter landscape right now is dire
yes i think the disappointing thing about the skills as a pyro is that they have no interplay. in me3 or andromeda they added the combo system and the skill projectile idea to add interest to both the use of skills as actions and the sequence; in outriders theres nothing really like that and it makes the skills feel very atomised. i dont feel the effect of skill a and b together because they do not interact and thus you lose the combinatorial sense of having a loadout. the skills themselves also feel clunky to use: theres no mechanical pleasure in using most of them because they are animation locked, clunky to aim (see eg the weirdness you get with faser) and have zero finesse - you just dump your shit. the contextual uses, mainly interrupts, are also annoyingly clunky because eg thermal bomb has a travel time...
its just weirdly undercooked vs the gun stuff.
i assume the trickster ones having secondary effects, especially movement, partly mitigates this
These arenas in the second desert zone are booty. Just multiple huge areas without a checkpoint and waves of the shieldy guys covered by snipers. Cranked my WT down line 4 notches just so I can blow through them
Hm. I decided to redo the early game as Trickster, because I hadn't played it in a bit and was thinking I wanted to just goof around redoing stuff instead of progressing.
I've been refighting this encounter in the First City right before
you find Zahedi.
for at least an hour at level 11 @ WT6, and don't know how to clear it because there doesn't seem to be a way I can improve through it. I just randomly catch on fire even if I'm around a corner and the only captain is dead. And then I finally manage to survive the captain and not die from fire by killing riflemen, but a wave hits with literally eight breachers at once and I get shotgunned to death instantly.
edit: The power of complaint has worked again. This time the breachers came out in twos, I can only assume they got stuck at the spawn point and piled up as I've seen happen at other times.
this sounds dumb but you know you can roll to put out fire right
Hm. I decided to redo the early game as Trickster, because I hadn't played it in a bit and was thinking I wanted to just goof around redoing stuff instead of progressing.
I've been refighting this encounter in the First City right before
you find Zahedi.
for at least an hour at level 11 @ WT6, and don't know how to clear it because there doesn't seem to be a way I can improve through it. I just randomly catch on fire even if I'm around a corner and the only captain is dead. And then I finally manage to survive the captain and not die from fire by killing riflemen, but a wave hits with literally eight breachers at once and I get shotgunned to death instantly.
edit: The power of complaint has worked again. This time the breachers came out in twos, I can only assume they got stuck at the spawn point and piled up as I've seen happen at other times.
this sounds dumb but you know you can roll to put out fire right
Yeah. It was more the distraction/frustration of getting chunked by fire and having no clue why. I'm still not sure why. The captain does fire shots, but he'd been dead for a while the last time I got chunked by fire, so who knows.
I don't understand why equipped items would scale down with a lowered world tier.
Doesn't that entirely defeat the purpose of having the world tiers? If lowering them weakens both the enemies and the character then the player is just in the same spot, difficulty-wise.
It's still significantly easier. It's just the damage drop is excessive and fucken weird. I think it does it in brackets? So you end up with some specific difficulty tiers where enemies take more to kill than at max tier.
I see. Still seems harder to balance than just keeping the player at the strength they are and adjusting the world around them. Maybe it's tied to the level scaling for cooperative play?
0
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
pretty sure whats happening is that when u drop world tier u drop ur "max wearable item level". this means it just reduces ur average item level to whatever the max is for the wt - and that means u lose a huge amount of base stats
+1
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
pretty sure whats happening is that when u drop world tier u drop ur "max wearable item level". this means it just reduces ur average item level to whatever the max is for the wt - and that means u lose a huge amount of base stats
The maximum wearable item level should be a permanent buff for gaining the WT level. It shouldn't work this way, and in my testing it doesn't. If people are seeing it work this way it's likely a bug.
e: The UI reinforces this, with the wearable item level being listed under "Permanent Unlocks".
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited April 2021
huh, then i wonder what its doing. i suppose it makes sense it wouldnt drop the character stat but perhaps it scales it down behind the scenes anyway so u cant just hold w
Yeah, there's definitely some downscaling, I joined my level 22 buddy with level 35-37 equipment and definitely didn't just breeze through it.
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Could be mods as well. I have some mods that give me quite a bit of bonus FP which would cause me to seem less powerful if I changed them out, even if the new item was higher IL and better overall stats.
Could be mods as well. I have some mods that give me quite a bit of bonus FP which would cause me to seem less powerful if I changed them out, even if the new item was higher IL and better overall stats.
No, it's absolutely scaling. My twisted rounds auto-shotty trickster crits for like 3k on low enough tiers. Identical build.
They added scaling if the host is lower level back in the demo
I have a podcast now. It's about video games and anime!Find it here.
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Oh fun, there is apparently an inventory and progression wipe bug out in the wild. The list of activities that seem to be able to cause it right now are...everything.
They added scaling if the host is lower level back in the demo
Why does it scale for me if I'm only one playing then?
edit: oh people playing single player have been wiped too? fucking great. guess I'll just ditch the game for the time being then.
evilbob on
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited April 2021
Equally fun, they say it could possibly take weeks to restore if you do lose your stuff.
I would love a post mortem of this launch someday, and how much of this is PCF make some really bad decisions and how much is Squeenix forcing their corporate game infrastructure on them. For a game I'm actually quiet enjoying, so much of the infrastructure around it is a trash fire.
I mean isn't every developers first mmo/game as service infastructure garbage the first time
Sure, but PCF twisted themselves in to pretzels telling us how this wasn't a GaaS game. So it lacks the few things that make a GaaS fun (social areas, random people out in the world), but keeps the absolute worst parts (always online, server issues, progress loss etc.)
It just makes me wonder how they got here. Did they start as a purely single player experience with optional networking and a lot of this service stuff got pushed on them by Squeenix, or is this how it was always meant to be and they were basically full of crap during development? Knowing what we know about developer/publisher relationships it's a complete toss up.
Awww, yeah, I realized today I was not utilizing the item level up feature and am just blowing through shit now. Being able to scale good gear up makes the farm a lot easier cause I have a couple pieces that are basically perfect and now I don't have to worry about replacing them. I like how you can totally scale up the stuff you find and then make it more powerful with raise attributes. PCF might have bungled some other aspects of this game but they really nailed the gear farming/crafting experience. I normally find stuff like this to be a slog but it's so easy breazy here that I'm really really enjoying it.
In related news I'm up to Expedition Tier 9 and finally hit and blew right through World Tier 15.
+2
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Yeah I've been keeping my primary AR and some boots I have with a perfect secondary mod up-leveled. You get enough titanium through breaking stuff down and doing content that it's generally easy enough to keep a few pieces up leveled.
Ok going to try some of your tips surreality for my devestator.
So with hit by melee skill does that include like earthquake and such or does it literally mean I have to punch to get penetration of resistances? And basically going for a gun build you’re modding for resistance penetration not really skill damage? Does this mean I have to go into warden or seismic shifter rather than vanquisher?
Or can I rely on certain mods?
Prohass on
0
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
melee includes ground pound which is the key thing for hitting multiple targets as dev i suspect, so hitting 3 = 45% pen which is nice
but also ur melee scales off anomaly so with 50% lowered cooldown, increased damage sub x% hp and the double damage node on ur tree u should be able to clap some cheeks
Wouldn’t the best class be seismic shifter then since it increase anomaly power? Man I’m so bad at this kind of stuff, my eyes just glaze over when it comes to percentages and trying to figure stuff like this out
+1
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
well it depends do you wish to be PUNCH WIZARD or GUN SHOOTERS
I wish to be gun shooters, gonna experiment a bit and see if I can figure something out
Ok first experiment is abysmal failure haha. I’ll keep trying. It’s mainly the mods I’m confused about. Not sure which ones to use alongside vanquisher class tree with earthquake, golem and gravity leap. I have a double gun that feeds me my health and is my main gun, and a autoshotty for emergencies since it kills fast but doesn’t give me health on shot
17 hours in, and I've hit the peak of the mountain.
Yes, I have gotten enough random drops to give me a complete matching armor set. All Praetorian, all the time. Finally, I don't look like a mis-matched weirdo with a shotgun! Now I'm a matching weirdo with a shotgun.
edit: Oops, forgot a screenshot.
Your inventory is disturbing.
What, because it's empty, or there's green arrows not equipped?
It's empty because I break down everything I get pretty quickly, and the guns are because I'm not quite done modding them yet.
17 hours in, and I've hit the peak of the mountain.
Yes, I have gotten enough random drops to give me a complete matching armor set. All Praetorian, all the time. Finally, I don't look like a mis-matched weirdo with a shotgun! Now I'm a matching weirdo with a shotgun.
edit: Oops, forgot a screenshot.
Your inventory is disturbing.
What, because it's empty, or there's green arrows not equipped?
It's empty because I break down everything I get pretty quickly, and the guns are because I'm not quite done modding them yet.
It's too clean. TOO CLEAN.
edit: game just crashed on me. *sigh*
tastydonuts on
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
I may have a soft spot for punch wizards because of this.
Punch Wizard could also be the Vanguard from Mass Effect.
I've wanted to make one to play in a ttrpg for a while but few systems my group wants to use support the idea.
Aistan on
0
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
I think I'm coming around to the idea of speccing hard in to gun ninja stats as my Devastator and using my skills mostly for defense and mobility. I'm already basically there, I do probably 90% of my DPS with guns.
Top tree nets you 35% reduced damage from elites and then enough leech and armor pen that I can just stand in the open and 1v1 any captain.
Yeah, this is what I'm thinking. I'm middle tree right now, and it has advantages (the final talent is really good)...but I may try top tree. What skills are you running?
Top tree nets you 35% reduced damage from elites and then enough leech and armor pen that I can just stand in the open and 1v1 any captain.
Yeah, this is what I'm thinking. I'm middle tree right now, and it has advantages (the final talent is really good)...but I may try top tree. What skills are you running?
Tremors , earthquake(armor talents), and leap (heal). I'm probably gonna swap tremor out for something else though, I'm doing too much at range to get good use out of it. Maybe go the black hole skill to make proccing the final talent a little easier.
Posts
Ah yeah, really the only skills I've seen that do respectable damage without needing a windup like FASER are builds that revolve around using that volcano skill as a nuke. Someone on Reddit posted a setup for one that they were clearing high level content with easily.
EDIT: Also man, it sure is nice to have some sort of shooter to play again. The shooter landscape right now is dire
The biggest problem though for non-gun abilities is that the vast vast majority of available triggered buffs are on weapon hit/crit/kill not ability, and any damage buffs they apply pretty much just affect gun damage.
Yeah, this is a classic mechanic design problem lots of games ran into. You'd think it'd be considered a solved problem by now to avoid running into it yet again.
edit: although even then there was only a couple of raw damage abilities worth using, because they too were crushed by ult/combo/melee/dot scaling with average gear level.
I've been refighting this encounter in the First City right before
edit: The power of complaint has worked again. This time the breachers came out in twos, I can only assume they got stuck at the spawn point and piled up as I've seen happen at other times.
yes i think the disappointing thing about the skills as a pyro is that they have no interplay. in me3 or andromeda they added the combo system and the skill projectile idea to add interest to both the use of skills as actions and the sequence; in outriders theres nothing really like that and it makes the skills feel very atomised. i dont feel the effect of skill a and b together because they do not interact and thus you lose the combinatorial sense of having a loadout. the skills themselves also feel clunky to use: theres no mechanical pleasure in using most of them because they are animation locked, clunky to aim (see eg the weirdness you get with faser) and have zero finesse - you just dump your shit. the contextual uses, mainly interrupts, are also annoyingly clunky because eg thermal bomb has a travel time...
its just weirdly undercooked vs the gun stuff.
i assume the trickster ones having secondary effects, especially movement, partly mitigates this
this sounds dumb but you know you can roll to put out fire right
Yeah. It was more the distraction/frustration of getting chunked by fire and having no clue why. I'm still not sure why. The captain does fire shots, but he'd been dead for a while the last time I got chunked by fire, so who knows.
I see. Still seems harder to balance than just keeping the player at the strength they are and adjusting the world around them. Maybe it's tied to the level scaling for cooperative play?
The maximum wearable item level should be a permanent buff for gaining the WT level. It shouldn't work this way, and in my testing it doesn't. If people are seeing it work this way it's likely a bug.
e: The UI reinforces this, with the wearable item level being listed under "Permanent Unlocks".
never messed with wt
No, it's absolutely scaling. My twisted rounds auto-shotty trickster crits for like 3k on low enough tiers. Identical build.
I just happened to go to reddit to ask about how WT interacts with quest rewards (e.g. is the reward set at quest completion, or when you turn it in)...and saw this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/outriders/comments/moelv8/inventory_wipe_gather_thread/
Why does it scale for me if I'm only one playing then?
edit: oh people playing single player have been wiped too? fucking great. guess I'll just ditch the game for the time being then.
I would love a post mortem of this launch someday, and how much of this is PCF make some really bad decisions and how much is Squeenix forcing their corporate game infrastructure on them. For a game I'm actually quiet enjoying, so much of the infrastructure around it is a trash fire.
Sure, but PCF twisted themselves in to pretzels telling us how this wasn't a GaaS game. So it lacks the few things that make a GaaS fun (social areas, random people out in the world), but keeps the absolute worst parts (always online, server issues, progress loss etc.)
It just makes me wonder how they got here. Did they start as a purely single player experience with optional networking and a lot of this service stuff got pushed on them by Squeenix, or is this how it was always meant to be and they were basically full of crap during development? Knowing what we know about developer/publisher relationships it's a complete toss up.
In related news I'm up to Expedition Tier 9 and finally hit and blew right through World Tier 15.
So with hit by melee skill does that include like earthquake and such or does it literally mean I have to punch to get penetration of resistances? And basically going for a gun build you’re modding for resistance penetration not really skill damage? Does this mean I have to go into warden or seismic shifter rather than vanquisher?
Or can I rely on certain mods?
but also ur melee scales off anomaly so with 50% lowered cooldown, increased damage sub x% hp and the double damage node on ur tree u should be able to clap some cheeks
Ok first experiment is abysmal failure haha. I’ll keep trying. It’s mainly the mods I’m confused about. Not sure which ones to use alongside vanquisher class tree with earthquake, golem and gravity leap. I have a double gun that feeds me my health and is my main gun, and a autoshotty for emergencies since it kills fast but doesn’t give me health on shot
Keeping your fashion up to date with your level is Very Important.. :O
Punch wizard = https://shadowrun-series.fandom.com/wiki/Physical_adept
I may have a soft spot for punch wizards because of this.
It's empty because I break down everything I get pretty quickly, and the guns are because I'm not quite done modding them yet.
It's too clean. TOO CLEAN.
edit: game just crashed on me. *sigh*
Punch Wizard could also be the Vanguard from Mass Effect.
I've wanted to make one to play in a ttrpg for a while but few systems my group wants to use support the idea.
Yeah, this is what I'm thinking. I'm middle tree right now, and it has advantages (the final talent is really good)...but I may try top tree. What skills are you running?
Tremors , earthquake(armor talents), and leap (heal). I'm probably gonna swap tremor out for something else though, I'm doing too much at range to get good use out of it. Maybe go the black hole skill to make proccing the final talent a little easier.