Anthem - BioWare's take on Destiny

True.

I guess at this point we’ll take anything.

Personally, I think I would enjoy a level 1 ranger with a legendary doing massive damage more than anything else in this game. Roaming around destroying everything > shooting a target 10000 times for a blue loot.

My son and I also tested this at mid level. No Storms, he was using his Ranger, I was either Colossus or Interceptor. We would intentionally mix gear scores, raising and lowering and mismatching each other by adding or removing the good bits, even have some of the early drop Legendaries, and of course the starter weapons. Then we’d test in Freeplay or a mission run (private to just us two).

You can tell, but not by much when we were controlling the mix.

After 1.0.3 though Freeplay does suddenly get much easier, even for us, when a well geared L30 drops in. The addition of that range scales us heavily. And it isn’t the 30 is killing for us, you see your own numbers change from before on bosses. This is different from before when we’d suddenly be one shotted when L30 dropped in. So better, but maybe too dramatic.

I think it is going in the right direction (and I say this from GW2 where I think the scaling works well), but clearly needs more tuning to give it a good feel. How hard that will be for them with what @KevinC says, I have no clue.

Looks like Anthem devs have confirmed the Million Damage Ranger problem will be fixed in 1.04. The fix will be to do scaling based on number of slots unlocked divided by your gear score. I’m sure this time there won’t be any unintended consequences. :)

I really wish they would just add melee and ultimate slots to the game. It would resolve a lot of these problems.

It isn’t just melee and ultimates, though. There’s also combo damage and item procs.besides, if it is tied to a slot, the ability of those things to change is limited. I like what they are trying to do here, they simply aren’t there yet.

I suspected this with the scaling done on the equipped iLevel only:

Already been posted and the fix has already been announced.

Yes but Ben Irving was the one who implemented Galactic Command in swtor which is possible the worst endgame progression system of any mmo I have played. I quit for the final time as a result and the population of the game, which was already poor at the time, declined even further as a result of that system. Looking at these 2 examples Irving does look out of his depth, the peter principle in action.

What’s Galactic Command?

The increased drop rate is very noticeable but it really highlights how total garbage the loot is. Nothing like getting 7 masterworks on a javelin with shit gear and finding absolutely nothing useful.

9% shotgun ammo, 4% machine pistol damage, 8% repair rate, and 3% damage? Fuck off.

My experience differed :) Four missions and one stronghold, luck past the hardcap, GM2 and… nothing, really. Two MW’s more than the guaranteed ones.

They’ve posted that something will be done with SH Boss loot, which is good. They cannot currently drop legendaries, which makes them a waste of time for some players.

Try backing that off a little and see if it changes. It may be superstition, but people claim overshooting the cap can cause problems.

Ran into a bug where I could spam Ice Shards on my Storm javelin without cooldown constantly. Puny damage but good for crowd control.

That’s fun. I decided to take my Storm out for a spin in Freeplay and multiple times hit a bug where I could not get my abilities to fire. It would start, but nothing would happen. Landing and taking off again seemed to fix it.

My understanding is you can legit do that with speed gear.

Ugh. So to unlock the purple recipes for each item slot, you need to complete 12 missions or events with the item equipped. But the masterwork variants don’t count towards that? FFS. I switch between javelins all the time, I’m not going to equip a crappy version of each ability I want to use and run 12 missions for each of them. What an awful system. Anyone know if that’s a bug or designed intentionally that way?

Have you hit level 30 yet? Because when you do you open up progression for masterwork gear and weapon mastery, they have their own separate from the existing ones.

You’re never going to need or use the purple recipes. I have 3000+ mats of each now and they’re not used for anything. MW recipes open up from doing weapon challenges (killing successive numbers of enemies) but I think weapon/ability challenges are bugged now and not counting if you use MW/Legendary and not purple/Epic.

OK, I’m “finished” equipping all available slots with Legendaries to get a final iLevel of 788 since Support has only Epic so far. Still odd to see people abbreviate it as “leg” and I keep thinking there’s a “lower body pants” item for the javelin. Didn’t bother figuring out intricacies of inscriptions to know if they’re any good so I’m not wasting my time by chasing after pointless GM2+ runs that drop me in front of The Monitor endlessly.

Masterwork weapons definitely make progress toward the epic version. If gear doesn’t work that way, I hadn’t realized it. But why on earth would you want to make an epic version if you have a masterwork? Unlock the masterwork recipe and make that. At any rate, it is missions or freeplay events. The latter is much quicker.

I assumed the masterwor recipe was behind that one because that’s how it’s worked thus far. Where do I see the masterwork recipe requirements in game?