Fortnite - A New Game by Epic

Still having a blast with this, and as slowly as I advance in games these days, it’ll be months before I hit that wall everyone talks about!

I’m having a lot of fun too. The angle of that wall really depends on how you approach and view the game. If you just want to log in, play some matches, and enjoy the gameplay, there really isn’t any. If you’re progression-oriented or a completionist, it can feel very grindy or frustrating. The tuning was actually quite a bit better in alpha in this regard, unfortunately. Hopefully they can whip it into shape.

Good news for me is that after I hit that major progression pothole near the start of Plankerton, things have stabilized. I’m getting good XP for missions again without having to play in maps far above my homebase power level. Now the bottleneck is just getting through the overly long Plankerton quest chain. Well, the quest chain isn’t really the problem I have, it’s the fact that the 3rd skill tree page is locked until you complete Plankerton, which I disagree with. Oh well, not really much of a problem, I’m just stocking up ludicrous amounts of skillpoints for when I hit Canny Valley.

I get a lot of the complaints about the game (and I’m not stranger to them myself), but for me this is just a log in and blast apart husks game with a progression system attached to it. I have a lot of fun playing this with my friend and his wife, the latter of whom has never played a videogame or shooter before.

Is there a way to reset your progress in the game. I’ve haven’t played in a while, and I would like to start again from the beginning and go through the tutorial parts .

There’s just so many systems in the game, it can be a little overwhelming at times.

Did you start playing in alpha or with the Early Access release? I’m not aware of any way to reset progress, but it was all wiped at the start of EA.

A quick summary:

  • Hero: The class you actively play
  • Hero Squad: Slots you can put other heroes in, which provide bonuses and 25% of their stats. Ex: A certain Outlander slotted as a support hero can increase your loot find chance.
  • Survivors: This is where your stats come from. Think of them like your armor/jewelry/attributes from a typical RPG.
  • Schematics: Blueprints to make weapons and traps.
  • EXP is split into Hero, Survivor, and Schematic, respectively

Just run around and blow shit up and find loot, though. The rest will re-explain itself as you go. Use Hero EXP to level up a particular hero, etc.

I cannot get other people to auto-join my required base defense missions and it is a huge pain in the ass. I can’t proceed. I guess I will be reduced to begging in global chat, which is shitty.

This auto-invite system worked for earlier lower level base defenses just fine… but Plankerton 3 and higher has been impossible.

I am adding to friends everyone that ask for help in the general channel. When I join, I ask if is ok to invite poeple, they say “yea!”, the invite people that is on the menus. So my list of “friends” is a every growing list of people playing the game, that I can pick to help do defenses. Some of then are even fun to talk and I may have made a few new friends this way.

I still think it would be better to have a option to search SSD missios specifically, but I fear it will come with a nerf to the SSD mission rewards.

I started at early access. Thanks for the breakdown, it helps.

so is chat comprised of random people +friends list?
I was thinking I’d like to tackle Stonewood SSD 8-10. But you need actually a full group to really do it with out stressing out :)
when I did 7 I ended up not getting any help and barely made it.

Yeah, there needs to be a MUCH better way to queue for Defense missions. Right now there’s just the generic “play with people” one, but it’ll throw you into any map. Have to resort to Global Chat, and global chat is segregated into separate chat channels too…

I’m Tubchops in-game, hit me up any time you’re on and we can knock out your defense mission.

chat is sharded, I believe, they probably have a limit of how many people a channel hold, and when it overflows they create other channel.

or perhaps is location based, or other convenient sharding, because on my “general chat” everyone speak in spanish, so maybe they shard using geoip

I have connected a keyboard to my PS4, and is super-convenient to chat with people this way, type GG at the end of a game, and be opinionate about building options (I don’t give my opinion on people building styles, except if are positive comments, except in one instance).

I want them to take the current progression system, throw it into a fire, and start over. The skill trees are boring, and the research tree is redundant and extremely boring. Leveling up survivors for stat slots seems to have only minor effects.

Loot Llamas are almost worthless. Unless you get an upgrade, especially a double to gold, you seem to be limited to blue level items. Other than my initial batch I got for buying the deluxe edition, I think I have gotten exactly one silver llama, and I have beaten down a lot of llamas.

I still love the idea of the game, but my progression has become a crawl. Now on level 40 missions, monsters are starting to feel like bullet sponges, and the amount of damage the output is ridiculous. Even though I have been focusing on damage and defense by buying those skills in talent / research trees, the thrower guys take out 75% of my shields in one hit. Nevermind the bees which last forever and can wreck you super fast or the lobbers or the sniper guys or the charging guys…

I am just saving my pennies and hoping for a super hero llama. However, I am not sure how much longer the game will hold my interest. I feel like I am doing a lot and not going anywhere with little in the way to actually improve my character beyond the RNG being nice to me and dropping something really good from a llama, which never seems to happen.

What works for me is ignoring the leveling part of the game, and do the missions based on the difficulty and the rewards.

When I get a new weapon or a new interesting hero I want to levelup that character. So I want pure drops and maybe hero XP. So I do missions based on these rewards. Maybe missions that show as green in the map, maybe show as gray.

SImply increasing your level don’t make you more powerful, because enemies will too be more powerful. But leveling weapons and heroes make you more powerful without making the content harder.

Agreed Teiman, I play the same way. Survivors are a huge impact on feeling more powerful as well, IMO.

Ok, let me ask this. I have a purple that only gets statistical benefits from leveling now. There are no more tiers as far as abilities on it. Should I keep leveling it?

I also play random missions and frequently get thrown into the level 40 missions which are very difficult. As far as survivors, I have spent xp on them, but spending a lot gives me something like +4 resistance or whatever and that does not seem to have much effect. Is it better to have a purple survivor with an incompatible personality type vs a green / blue with the same personality type?

Should I level my blue hero up even more? IT seems the small stat gains per huge amount of hero xp spent is kind of worthless.

I would love to get a higher tier to the hero I like, but until the super-hero llama becomes available, it seems that isn’t going to happen. Normal upgrade llamas are worthless (or the random chance is ridiculously low to get anything good).

I just feel that I am doing the same things over and over without much gain. I am running in place.

You guys are making me want to play this DESPITE its bad endgame monetization.

I think everyone feels this way to a degree. Canny Valley (the area after Plankerton) isn’t finished content-wise, from what I understand. About half of it is placeholder stuff from Plankerton, so I wouldn’t at all be surprised if the “grind” to get there is steep. That ties into issues I have with the skill tree and whatnot, considering I can’t get to the 3rd page until I get to Canny Valley. I’m sitting on something like 28 skill points, but I still have something like 5 quest pages left to complete in Plankerton.

I don’t play random missions past Stonewood, the system for it sucks. As you say, you’ll often get thrown into power 40 missions or something way too low. It’s unfortunate, but that 20% extra bonus you get from running them is in no way worth it. I would highly recommend you run missions targeted at what you want. Pure drops of rain, lightning in a bottle, silver, or the EXP you’re looking for the most (schematic, survivor, or hero). Look at the rewards, hit the mission. Don’t worry if it’s green or whatever, it’s the rewards you’re after more than skill points anyway. I only very rarely run a yellow, and that’s because I has something I really want.

I think it’s worth it leveling schematics past the point you get the perks/bonuses. The base stat increase on weapons/traps is worth it. As far as your Blue hero goes? If that’s the main character you play, I would say yes (EDIT: It may not be worth it to EVOLVE him further, just because drops of rain / lightning in a bottle is always in short supply). Do you have anything else pressing to spend the Hero XP on? If you get a better Hero you want to switch to after a Super Hero Llama pops, you get the majority of the invested XP back when you retire him/her.

Running for a goal also feel better. You finish the mission, you know you will get something out of it. “Ok, some drops of pure water, I can now evolve this pistol”.

So far, its not the monetization that the issue unless your expected to buy 100 llamas to get anywhere. Its the progression system that’s just beyond terrible. The resource grind is bad if you are trying to win missions AND upgrade your home base. Its not so bad if your home base has no real upgrades needed.

The loot chests you find in missions are also 98% worthless. Only the rare resource like spinning gizmos are worth anything. The rest is garbage. And why am I still getting stacks of copper when I am well into plankerton?

100% agree. I think they’re related, in that new people thought that you were supposed to / were forced to power through the grind by buying herds of llamas to scrap/retire everything you found in them. That’s not really the case at all, that hero/schematic/survivor EXP is awarded from missions and that’s where you should be getting them. But they really messed up how everything progresses/scales between when I played in the alpha and now and it’s left some really big pot holes. Progression felt much, much, smoother previously (it still wasn’t great mind you, but it didn’t feel nearly this bad). Those are the kind of things I expect to get worked on in early access / beta. If they don’t, I’m going to be pretty disappointed.

And who knows, this is their… I don’t know… 5th or 6th entire revamp of the skill tree since I started playing? It’s a big step up from the abysmal first couple they had, but also feels like a step back in a lot of ways from the next 3-4. I also felt the Survivors made a lot more sense when you were actually building a town. You’d build a hospital, and then you’d staff that hospital with a Doctor and assign that doctor workers, etc. IIRC, I think the buildings also gave options to produce resources or something? I think maybe that was replaced with Expeditions…

That sounds 1000% better than what you have now. This was actually a suggestion of mine I made. That survivors would be put to work gathering resources and doing stuff. It would be really cool to build a custom town that actually did useful things rather than defending that storm shield.