This might have been said, but what is the scaling of enemies and rewards based on?
I thought it was just pure home base level, so i removed all of my survivors squads (trying to be smart), bringing me below the level of a mission that was previously green. The mission remained green but now said i was underleveled?
As far as I know, your level with regard to missions / xp earned is purely based on how many skill points you have earned so far. Note, that I said earned, not spent. All the other stuff about leveling is borked. IE: You are underpowered because you are level 25 and the mission is level 28 is meaningless. That is based on your home base power, which is based on your actual home base to a small degree, skill/ research points, and the numbers and quality of survivors slotted.
It is just all meaningless, and its best to ignore it all. If level X monsters are bullet sponges, then just avoid maps on that level.
That is pretty dumb.
Skill points generally don’t skill your power that much…
I guess that means i should abandon my attempts to game the system. I just remember running in to some problems in very late first area where monsters suddenly become huge bullet sponges and walked over my walls like it was nothing.
They have another dev update up, mostly just talking about the new event.
One thing they mentioned that I like and think they need to do more of is it sounds like there are ways to get specific items without relying on RNG. The Legendary Hydra weapon can be obtained by beating the event in Stonewood, a Mythic survivor can be obtained by beating it in Plankerton, etc. You’ll also have be able to get a Legendary hero of choice (in terms of the base class at least), but supposedly that will be pretty difficult to do.
They’re also reducing the costs of evolution on Survivors and increasing Survivor XP given, which I think is a direct response to those progression pot holes I’ve been endlessly complaining about. Things like Drops of Rain will drop in higher quantities as well, so in combination I think those will result in a boost across the board to Homebase power for players.
They’ll also be boosting everyone’s inventory by 10 slots and granting everyone a free People and Weapon llama. Full patch notes (14 pages of them, apparently) will be coming out next week.
Yay, easier to levelup survivors!, that sounds sweet.
maybe I should hold on to my XP… I just dropped a bunch yesterday
Drops of rain is the #1 limited resource for me, it is not even close. It’s two orders of magnitude more rare than anything else I have… it’s a pain to scrape up 15 of the things, and you need like 40 of them to evolve anything past L2!
Yeah, drops of rain are hell.
I hope they do something about defenders too. Maybe making them take survivor experience and lowering the amount they need. The defender system needs a lot of work right now.
After watching the video, the multiple mentions of missions requiring a good group of friends has me concerned. I really hope they have some fixes for soloers/defenders in these 14 pages of patch notes.
Just did plankerton defense 7 and even with 4 people it was… hectic. It didn’t help that the guy built a damn MC Escher maze out of his base structures. I got lost a few times!
PROTIP: for the long term, heavily favor finding / upgrading weapons that do area damage! Eventually you’re dealing with so many husks at once that even a super powerful weapon that can only hit one husk at a time ends up being kind of a liability.
Heavy snipers are okay against groups, but not great. The rate of fire is usually fairly slow and to get the most out of the penetration you need to be level with the horde. I usually prefer to have some elevation when I’m sniping. Still, they’re pretty sweet. I have a legendary one that got 3 headshot damage rolls that pairs REALLY well with my headshot-oriented Urban Assault soldier.
Those mobs of husks really do become a problem, but that’s where I love a Dragon ninja. Nothing clears out those hordes better than a Dragon Slash (it has such a short cooldown too). Not even soldier grenades can compare, although the grenades that leave behind the AOE field do pretty decent. Better hope you didn’t skimp on Resist or Tech though, otherwise you might splat at the end of the Slash. :)
Some day I’ll get more than a blue Dragon ninja, it at least the legendary Dim Mak I had back in alpha. 😍
What they need are explosive bullets that do a small AoE damage around the mob you are shooting. I am using my rocket launcher more and more in place of my main weapon and the resource cost is starting to get quite high. I am leveling up a legendary pistol that does AoE, Ill have to see how that works out.
They sort of have that with the flare gun though, its just not good. :p
The energy pistol does okay, but unfortunately the one I got had some truly bad rolls. I’m leveling up a firecracker pistol now, which is a lot harder to use but does a lot more damage. If I can get a second Deadeye outlander for the squad support bonus it will be lethal.
I am not too happy with my energy pistol. It uses a lot of ammo, and fires slow and takes like 2 shots to kill low lever level 40 guys. If silver would drop in place if copper in Plankerton, I could keep using my rocket launchers.
So the firecracker pistol does more damage than the energy one? I think I have a purple one of those, but I would need to recycle my energy schematic to afford to level it up. My energy one is legendary too which kind of sucks.
I wouldn’t sacrifice the energy pistol, you never know if it gets buffed in an update or something. They feel underwhelming to me, but I thought that was due to the bad rolls. Sounds like they’re probably just undertuned. My firecracker pistol does a lot more DPS but it’s harder to land shots too.
I’m getting a good chunk of silver by running expeditions (medium crates mostly). I’m not burning through it nearly the rate you would be, though, with those rocket launchers. Other than that, I prioritize missions with Silver rewards, especially those in rural areas. They usually have a few silver mines per map as well as a storm chest, the latter of which usually nets me 5 silver or so if I break down the weapon it drops.
I have the pistol outlander and wanted to use the energy pistol since it was the only one i had that had high critical chance. It seemed absolutely terrible. You could use it for quasi AOE, but it is not going to work very well compared to something which is actually AOE.
I actually just have the blue firecracker pistol. Does it have a low rate of fire? Why is it hard to use?
Edit: I just built one. It bounces… they need to fix that.
Are wooden floor spikes worth leveling up? I find ones from trash that have like 100+ damage, which is good. However, I have some blue ones, and level 1 does 15pts and level 2 does 15.7, which makes me think they are worthless to level up.
They’re not as good damage as the metal spikes, but they make good stagger/snare traps. I like them on the outer areas where I can slow the approach of husks. They’re super cheap to build.
I think the blue spikes are worth it. Super low cost to make (IE no nuts/bolts). If you have a good blue set take them to lvl 20. Use them as filler, real spikes for important parts/intersections, slow spikes elsewhere.
Works fine in plankerton 34+ anyway.