Back 4 Blood

What does it even mean that “stat tracking is disabled”. Am I missing a stat screen somewhere?

-Tom

Last week I played with a friend on stream on the easiest difficulty, having started previous on normal, and it’s almost night and day in terms of the difficulty. I wonder if it was designed that way to force you to go up card unlocks first to get ones that give you more damage, weak point multiplier etc, just due to the number of spawns they throw at you.

I’ve been sticking with the starting characters, but I may start taking that one that auto highlights traps and specials and try to be the special killer on the team.

@fishpockets might have changed my mind re: Doc.

Last night we ran a few missions on the middle difficulty and had a noticeably easier time than when I’ve run these same missions with 4 damage dealing builds.

The passive combined with between combat healing abilities did make a difference.

I’m still a bit torn on Doc vs. Mom. I think Doc gets the edge on a long slog as that combined chip trauma adds up, but the extra revive on the boss levels favors Mom perhaps?

Either way, it’s never a bad thing to have someone running one of them.

How does the trauma mechanic work?

Trauma is damage which reduces your max health and can only be restored by a few limited means.

Trauma trauma trauma trauma trauma chameleon. Sorry, I have Tourette’s. In my fingers.

I’m still not entirely sure what causes trauma damage. Is it just a percentage of all damage? Is it strictly a product of special attacks? And I’m assuming it scales based on difficulty level?

Also, someone break down for me the difference between mobility and handling for weapons.

-Tom

Mobility vs Handling
Mobility is the impact on your movement speed. Handling is how quickly you can manipulate the gun, it supposedly impacts reload, swap, and aim settling speed.

Anyone playing tonight?

I just grabbed this off Gamepass earlier this evening. I’ve only played the first two bits solo so far so I’m likely to suck and not know what I’m supposed to do other than shoot zombies.

Thrag#7841

Ditto, grabbed it last night from PC GamePass. Ran through a few levels solo just to see what’s up. May be on tonight if anyone needs to be TK’ed

Scharmers#3000

(that is a kick-ass random handle)

yeah thats a pretty cool number to get

mebbe

Ouch! At least for a new player on solo the “Pain Train” mission lives up to its name.

Gave this a shot as well tonight. Wasn’t really feeling it with a PUG, but would be open to trying again if the opportunity presents itself (I’m Thraeg on Xbox, and generally on around 10pm to midnight pacific)

Playing with people who communicate (and who aren’t total idiots) is absolutely the difference between this game being horrible and great.

Good lord, the Evangelo bot is a special kind of terrible. He glitches out on geometry, gets in the way and kills… well, nothing as far as I can tell.

This is more or less my experience so far with friends. I’ve watched him just stand there while I get dragged away.

My guess is all the bots are that bad.

The bots are minimally viable, and that’s about it.

Bot kills aren’t tracked. They will always show as zero even though the bots are definitely getting kills. I have no idea why the developers insisted on showing zero kills, though, because it reinforces the perception that these bots are useless.

Which isn’t true, by the way. The bots are weird. As near as I can tell, they’ve got cooldown timers that let them heal you or heck a grenade every now and then. But they’re effective in that they stay with you*, they’ll serve as willing ammo mules, they’ll revive you, and they’ll do their fair share of killing stuff. But the trade-off is that you’re opting out of the card play for each slot you fill with a bot. And the card play is the foundation for playing at harder difficulty levels.

In other words, as is the case with similar games, the bots are fine for getting you through the game at the easiest difficulty level. They’re a good way to explore the levels and especially to learn the effects of the corruption cards. But they’re never going to replicate how gratifying these games are with human players who are communicating with each other.

-Tom

* This is what makes them more useful than the average rando human player.