What if we went with … metal level?
KevinC
1945
With EA’s agreement to include in-game advertising in Anthem, I’m betting it will be Pepsi Points or Doritos Score.
It’s Gear Score. Though I read right past what you had said without noticing.
I think Outcast was the first in 3D environment. But it had a Voxel engine, so maybe it shouldn’t count.
Teiman
1948
PETA sponsored kill quests.
KevinC
1950
It ain’t so. Fake news joke. :)
What’s funny is I read it didn’t bat and eyelash.
That’s how broken I am.
It’s remarkable to me how the game changes completely when entering into GM1. I guess it shouldn’t be, given the same is true for games like Diablo. More specifically, because you have access to masterwork weapons only in hard difficulty or below, you suddenly become extremely gun dependent in the early stages of Grandmaster, even if you were barely using them before, like I was.
Fortunately, some of the weapons available below gm difficulty are quite strong. I’m currently rocking thunderbolt of Avenia, which has a chance to do quite a bit of electrical damage, to take down shields. Then I switch to Ralnar’s Blaze which sets things on fire, setting up combos for either a railgun shot or melee.
Just did my third legendary contract on gm1 difficulty. The third section was absolutely bonkers. A veritable horde of outlaws, with so many effects going off I couldn’t tell what the hell I was hitting at times. Then things got crazy. A whole platoon of legendary outcast heavies (the ones with the big shields, don’t remember the name) and a luminary, with plenty of other backup fodder. What a fight that was. I do feel kinda bad for the one dude who died right next to the luminary and had to wait like ten minutes, but…don’t die right next to the boss, k?
GM is definitely where it’s at. I was skeptical after having watched a lot of complaint videos about unseen mobs and one-shots. But I think those players were either undergeared, or unprepared for the difficulty spike.
I wrote about this a bit upthread, but yeah, the gear feedback loop isn’t meaningless! Masterworks let you compete in GM and more masterworks enable you to flourish in GM.
Hey Freelancers,
This morning we will be deploying a patch with the following changes:
- The tethering timer for missions has been increased. Players should now have more time to catch up to their Squad before seeing a countdown timer.
- The Swarm Tyrant encounter in the Tyrant Mine Stronghold can no longer be reset by the entire Squad exiting to the main menu and rejoining the session in progress.
- Players are no longer able to reopen chests that have already been looted in Strongholds.
Woohoo on the tethering issue.
Yeah that’s a big one for me since I always seem to be the caboose on these mission trains.
Yeah, the tethering feels dramaticallly different. I got well behind the group on a mission and nothing happened. Didn’t even have the countdown show up and I was at least half a minute behind, if not more.
@Scott_Dobros exactly. People are wandering in completely undergeared, then complaining about how their chosen javelin sucks or all enemies are bullet sponges, etc. bullet sponginess may be a problem, but you don’t get to make that call when you are woefully undergeared. I look at it like walking into torment on Diablo. When fodder stops dying when you breath on it, you are undergeared.
Part of the problem here is we don’t have a stats page, and I think a lot of people are just slotting in random components without much thought. The amount of shield/armor increase with GM components is dramatic, as is the stacking weapon/ability damage.
Those components are so important, kinda like decos in Monster Hunter. I cannot imagine slotting in decorations or swapping armor pieces in MH without a freaking stats page, lol.
Not to mention sigils/consumables…which I’ve just now started to look into.
I’ve played so much MH that my brain sees components as decos and sigils as meals.
Totally agree. Hoping that a stat page will be part of the QoL stuff due in March.
Think I am going to stick to mostly blue sigils for now. No other real use for rare embers anyway.
I’m both surprised and delighted that the endgame is not as boring as was advertised.
There is sooo much space for customized builds. Wasn’t expecting this and I’m super happy.
Well, I like it so far in terms of the gameplay. The people complaining largely blitzed to the end and were grinding the strongholds to death almost immediately (or geared up with exploits then had nothing else to do). The amount of new content at endgame isn’t large, but that’s not a concern of mine in the short term.
People say legendary contracts are boring because of lack of variety, but that was fun as hell and I would gladly do the same fight again.
I guess I’m just extremely slow at stuff like this but I’m still having f- uh, upping my enjoyment quotient, taking my time. I like the little story and world-building they do in missions and conversations. I like that missions build on each other, that I was doing work for Yarrow to help find and repair a busted strider, then finding out it never made it home, then finding it again and discovering it had suffered a bandit attack, then discovering that one of its assigned freelancers was a bandit in a stolen javelin, so now I’m hunting him down. It feels nicely organic.
