Bah. I guess I need to make sure that I click on the right part of the thing then. This quest sucks because it often means players don’t want to help or you have some kind of timed event going on.
Yeah, I really don’t like the structure of this particular quest for just this reason. It doesn’t mesh, even with the more flexible map missions like rescue the survivor, and it doesn’t offer good rewards, like the storm chests. It’s just base defense in a map that most likely already has a central base defense objective.
I have this legendary ninja chick, and had a daily quest to kill 500 husks with a ninja. I also had a legendary sword. So I level the sword and the ninja up to tier 2 (terrible waste of resources) and decided to play her. I had never played one, but she throws stars and has smoke bombs.
I have never died so much, so fast. I just do not get the whole ninja thing. How are you supposed to survive in a group of monsters? I ended up going to a very low level area to farm husks just to get my 500 kills in. I think I am done with ninjas unless there is some kind of tactic I am supposed to be using that I am unaware of.
Depends on what Ninja you have. Dim Mak gets some extra durability from Shadow Stance, and Smoke Bomb + Slow Field combos can mitigate a lot of damage. I don’t know about their current state, but in one of the later Alpha updates the Shuriken ninja was so absurdly strong it was almost cheesy.
The ninja definitely isn’t a brawler, I still use guns a fair amount. Dragon slash to clear a wave of husks or reposition myself, double jump onto a roof and clear out some nasties, etc. Ninja is mostly focused on shields, so you really need good Resistance to take advantage of them.
With that being said, the game in it’s current state has a lot of scaling problems right now and I think that’s especially hard on melee characters, since you’re getting punched in the face even more. They completely revamped the scaling of the game (pretty dramatically too. I mean the intended homebase power levels for Plankerton used to go from 1500 to 4500 or so. Now the differenceof 2-3 homebase power is pretty huge) and they’ve really fucked some things up. I think they’ll get it right because this isn’t the first time they’ve tried to rescale everything and left things in an awkward state, but it tends to take them a little while to get there.
Ninja is a glass canon*. Is satisfying to play against lower level enemies, so you could have choosen a gray mission that give you water drops and you would have enjoyed the ninja. It helps if the people constructing put some defenses that makes sense.
* YMMV
What exactly does home base power actually do?
It’s a culmination of your core stats, basically (I’m talking things like Offense, Resistance, Tech, and Fortitude). It’s mostly derived from your Survivor squads, but you also get those +stat nodes in the skill and research trees. Guns and heroes are important, but that homebase power is critical as it’s a 1% boost per point. So my offense right now is around 260, which means +260% damage on all my weapons.
(EDIT: Kind of going off on a tangent at this point, you can stop reading if you just wanted to know about home base power :))
What they tried to do was condense something that used to be scaled in the thousands (You were typically around 5000 homebase power when you finished plankerton, if I remember correctly) to double digits. They then compounded the resulting scaling issues by making the inexplicable decision to base the color-coded difficulty of the mission (which determines how much EXP you’re going to get) at least in part on how many skill points you’ve earned.
This has left people (myself included) in an awkward situation once they hit Plankerton where missions are listed as Green/easy, thus reducing EXP rewards, while the game simultaneously warns you that you’re underpowered for the mission. The color coding / EXP rewards is based off skillpoints, but the actual difficulty is determined by your homebase stats, and homebase power is a little out of wack due to their entire rescaling of the system.
I think this is what has led several people to accuse them of forcing you to shell out a bunch of cash so you could retire llama-loads of survivors to get your Homebase power up to where the game is telling you it should be. I don’t actually think this is the case, though, because I saw them royally screw up like this once before in the alpha. It was later fixed, but then they had to go rebalance the whole system again. :) The solution isn’t supposed to be buying tons of llamas, you’re intended to be running mission to earn Survivor (and other EXP) to level up your existing cards. This still works, and is what I’m doing, but there’s like a giant pothole in Plankerton right now where the skillpoints come in way too fast while the Survivor exp comes in too slow. I feel like I’m finally climbing out of that, but we’ll see if that happens yet again in Canny Valley.
The solution to all this is real simple, in my opinion: the color-coded difficulty of a mission should be tied to your Homebase power and have nothing to do with skillpoints. It’s absolutely absurd that I get a smaller amount of EXP than I should for a mission that the game is telling me I’m woefully underpowered for. :)
There’s a lot of things like that that are just off right now in the game. Some of it I know was better previously, so I expect it to be temporary. I have other complaints that are also the type of things that can be addressed in Early Access, like numbers just being off. The devs just seem terrified of people finding some loophole/exploit that they’ve tangled themselves up in spaghetti balancing. Here’s an example: You know how you level up your harvesting pick? Cool, right? Well, if you go to an earlier area (Going from Plankerton to Stonewood for example), your Pick gets de-leveled to the best version available in Stonewood. They do this so that players don’t feel like they need to run Stonewood missions to fill up on wood/stone/metal (which was the case previously). Fine, I guess. But here’s the problem: as you progress through areas, the HP on objects like cars, rocks, etc increases. The numbers are off to the point where it actually takes more swings in later areas to break a car or a rock. Granted, they give you more resources, but the end result is that harvesting can actually be a little slower. Clearly this isn’t intentional, but it’s just a byproduct of them being so paranoid that they end up creating problems for themselves. It’s my major complaint with this dev team. They tend to get it right eventually, but these issues didn’t need to exist to begin with.
Another example is how they are so afraid of you going down to lower-level content. I gave a friend a code for the game over the weekend. As I go back to Stonewood to help him, all my stats (combat and harvesting pick) get capped. It actually takes me more shots with my pistol to kill a husk in Stonewood than it does in Plankerton. Once again, their absolute terror at some potential exploit (oh noes, a friend helped powerlevel someone!) ends up creating a problem where none should exist. Because now my gun takes more shots to kill things, which causes it to degrade faster. I can’t get the parts to replace it in Stonewood (I get copper there, not silver, etc) which I’m okay with, but I can’t even harvest wood/stone/metal there faster because it de-levels my pick. And to top it all off? I get 0 exp for doing any of it. It really is silly how punishing it is to go back and play with lower-level people!
EDIT: Sorry if that sounded ranty, that wasn’t really my tone when writing it. I haven’t played any game at initial Early Access release that doesn’t have issues like that, but a lot of it is just silly stuff that makes me shake me head.
Go ahead and rant. I could bitch a while myself. Just last night I sent in a complaint about the increased HP of stuff in Plankerton. In Stonewood a car has 400hp. In Plankerton they have 680. That is a 70% increase. Oh, you thought you got a better pickaxe? Muhahaha!!!
Another thing I sent it was that it is nearly impossible to dodge charging enemies, although truthfully its nearly impossible to dodge anything at all. When you see the hulk guy charging or that aerial thing, it is almost guaranteed that they will hit you for a shit-ton of damage no matter what you do. You can even run around a corner and they will still hit you. The same for those jumping fuckers. You can see them run up and get ready to jump. You can run anywhere you want and they will still land on you for a bunch of damage.
I think there is just some kind of flat roll, like you have a 5% chance to not be hit. Sometimes you can dodge them, but most of the time it is a no go.
One I am going to put in tonight is a complaint about those women with the flaming hair that lob those AoE balls at you. They totally do not need line of site AND they have an insane range. Yesterday our base was being decimated by a few who were far down a cliff, maybe 100 feet away. These things would have no idea where anything is to bomb.
There are a tremendous amount of problems with this game as it stands. At its core , it is a great idea, but its just a long laundry list of wrongness.
I sure hope the fix it. I plan on putting it down as soon as some other game comes out that I want to play.
FWIW, I do feel like the dev team does get it right, eventually. They’re not the fastest team, and they sometimes introduce sloppy problems, but they have a great track record of responding to feedback. I think you’ll see harvesting sped up and/or the resource requirements reduced. In this sort of survival game, being able to harvest a lot faster is a fun form of progression outside of “My numbers got bigger”. I don’t know why they’re so scared of it, they should embrace it. Sure, early on you struggle to get some metal walls together, but later in the game where you have this crazy amazing pickaxe? Yeah, let you slice through cars like butter. Or make it give 3x metal per swipe or whatever. That’s fun because you get to build more cool structures!
I do think the Lobbers will stay as they are, though. Lobbers and especially Flingers are the job for your Ninjas and other combat guys. Your constructor (whether class or just self-assigned role) should be at the base with melee, shotguns, etc and repairing walls, But in harder difficulties you need a fast-moving guy out there taking out the bullet-resistant Flingers and lobber artillery. Deadeyes and ninjas perform this role really well because of their mobility.
I dunno. I do not think its fair that an enemy can target you and the stuff you have built while remaining totally hidden. I think something has to see you in order to attack you. Its fine if they are far away. I play a soldier that uses a machine gun, and at far ranges, it kind of sucks. I am ok with that. However, I do not want to have to run across a field, then down a cliff to just get LOS on these lobbers.
Are things that are resistant to bullets also resistant to energy weapons or is it melee vs not melee?
For sure, they’re the counter to you (and to me as well, I’m mostly playing the soldier right now due to llama RNG). The soldier’s lack of mobility makes them a less than ideal choice to deal with them - constructors are even worse because they’re slow! A phase shifting outlander or mantis-leaping, dragon-slashing ninja doesn’t have nearly the problem with them. That’s where they excel during the base defense, whereas the soldier tends to be better against the other 90% of enemies.
Flingers are resistant to everything but melee, IIRC. You can wear them down, but they only take 10% or so damage from ranged weapons.
I am not sure if that is good design. So what do you do if the RNG says there are no ninja’s on a team? I think having an enemy immune to the most common damage type is fine, but immune to everything but a single type is not fine. IE: Explosive damage or Tech Damage (any damage from a power ).
They can still be dealt with just fine without a ninja. I just have to run up and chop them to bits with my sword. It forces you out of your comfort zone where you excel, though, which is up on the walls and mowing things over with machine guns and grenades… which is the 90% of the fight where the ninja is asking himself why he didn’t just play a soldier instead. :)
Troll stash llama today, 500 vbucks. Gives a big stack of rares, epics, and some legendaries.
I thought about that one, but I am saving my Vbucks for the hero one. Its quite slow to accumulate them, esp when the daily quests take several days to complete, like that smash 6 arcade machines one.
*puts on evil hat*
This is a way to cheat on survivor missions. Use a charge attack to push the survivor away from the vehicle. The survivor is unvulnerable until the vehicle is destroyed, but the mobs will target the survivor and not the vehicle. So they will leave the vehicle alone. Smoke a cigar while the timer end, or just drop a grenade or two.
I heard from other player that theres a way to stop the smasher charge: charge yourself against him.
How do you charge attack? Just sprint into him? Also kind of hard if he is ON the vehicle.
Class skill. Constructor have the bull attack. I believe ninjas can do it too. I don’t know if outlanders can. Soldiers probably don’t have anything to push.
Also, about 99.99% of all outlanders don’t know how to use the anti-material punch to turn cars into mats. I have a outlaner that can do the anti-material punch every 13 seconds, so I can build a huge stack of iron in no time.
The Ninja’s dragon slash travels through mobs, so I don’t think it can be used to push a survivor. It’s probably unique to Bull Rush.
Strongly recommend against this. I did it once and he knocked me inside of the world. I had to abandon the mission.