Outriders - Square Enix colonizes space

I dunno, I feel like at WT3, it’d be far too easy. WT8 is quite hard though, so it’s kind of crazy to think what happens at max WT.

But ultimately, I think the way they handle difficulty is great, as it let’s you adjust it to whatever you feel like.

You won’t be missing anything.

For giggles, I actually played a bunch of my technomancer by turning off all the interface elements, setting the world tier to 1, and just playing it like a goofy shooter. No minimap, no ammo counter, no cooldown timers, no hit point bars or status icons. Just a bunch of over-the-top gunplay and spell powers.

This was also a great way to learn the AI behaviors of the different enemies.

Well, it’s called “normal” for a reason! It’s not like the difficulty doesn’t scale when everything is the same level as you. It’s a perfectly viable way to get through to the expeditions. And really, there’s no reason to push world tier because all you’re doing is chasing loot you’re not even going to keep. It’s all going to get rendered down into components. Basically, you’re stocking up on scrap, shards, and your mod collection, and you’re going to earn this stuff regardless of world tier.

As I think @stusser said upthread, there’s no point turning everything into a bullet sponge that takes a long time to kill. It’s all about setting a reasonable TTK while you get to the level cap, at which point a whole other endgame system takes over for the expeditions.

That said, pushing world tier up is a really cool way to play the game as well. I’ve really enjoyed it, but I’m glad I didn’t let it get in the way of seeing what Outriders has to offer in the end. Ultimately, I think Outriders is about the expeditions. The storyline, side quests, and 30 character levels are just the way you get you there.

-Tom

I did the giant volcano spider at WT4 and it wasn’t too terribly hard, so you may have a point. Argh, I don’t know.

None of the giant boss monsters are. The volcano spider is just one of a couple of cinematic gimmicks.

-Tom

Difficulty off bosses depends a lot on your build and your dexterity, largely your ability to not get hung up on level geometry and either get swarmed or slapped in the face repeatedly by the big baddie. Often running forward and around the boss is better than the instinctual backpedaling.

I’m at WT 10 and feel no real need to push it any more. Most stuff drops like flies to Blight/Toxic anyhow, and it’s only a few types of bosses that are annoying. I’m 26 or so I think, and have done all the assassination quests and nearly all of the critter quests, and I still have a bit to go to the so-called end game.

Blight/Toxic + large capacity weapon + the right mods + Perpetuum Mobile = mass death machine.

Played this on XSX with two friends on PC and PS - and it worked surprisingly well! There is a warning message that cross play is bugged - but we lucked out and it seemed to work fine most of the time. We played on WT11 or something that one of my friends had unlocked - and that was a totally meaningless experience for me - I did virtually no damage to the enemies, and most of them one-shotted me. Managed to convince the 3rd friend we should go down a few tiers so we could, you know, play the game, instead of being down constantly, just waiting for loot (we wont even keep, as mentioned above). It did not seem to change how much XP we got either?

Pretty sure WT doesn’t affect XP, at least not directly. It’s conceivable higher level enemies give more XP, but it’s not a big thing if so. I played almost all the game at WT 5 or below and was nearly fully levelled at the end of the campaign.

I think the auto-adjusting world tier was almost perfectly balanced for two skilled players with complementary builds going through in coop. There were wipes, and therefore tactics and strategies, so things were great. A couple of weird spikes here and there but nothing we didn’t get through without getting so exacerbated as to lower the WT. Other than in one exceptional circumstance when a crash during a boss fight coupled with the inability to join a game with a boss fight in progress meant we each lowered it for the purposes of essentially skipping it.

My co-op partner is busy now some I’m rolling out solo on expeditions. I’m managing challenge tier 11 golds reasonably comfortably, but this is a coop experience at its heart. I find the inability to self-revive in solo play bizarre. You get to do this once in coop, per ‘arena’. Fairness would suggest you should get to do this twice when solo. Perhaps with some additional time penalties in expeditions to keep things balanced.

I can’t help but feel that if you’re schlepping through this on your lonesome, you are missing out. Though perhaps if the matchmaking wasn’t so incompetently implemented I’d have a stronger argument there. The times I’ve tried it’s been too buggy to be worthwhile.

Yeah, between the crappy matchmaking and the risk of inventory wipe, I never bothered during the campaign, though I did play a bit of coop during the demo. I’m not totally averse to it conceptually - I did most of The Division 1 and 2 in pick-up groups, and I’ve done a fair bit of Borderlands co-op with a friend. But apart from maybe boss fights (and, now, Expeditions) it never felt necessary and given the issues I preferred to play solo, albeit at a lower WT level.

I lucked out and have two friends who like playing this every night with me, so we have a trio to do the expeditions with. Playing with friends is definitely fun but as has been said, I’ve had trouble with the hit or miss drop in co-op queue.

The builds at CT15 are wildly skewed towards gun enhanced bullet builds, which is a bummer because I really was enjoying being a cryomancer. I am looking forward to the balance patch, whenever that will happen, because my current damage is about 95% Blighted Bullets. Before anyone uses the “play what you want and have fun” retort, the success of your endgame is 100% based on time to complete, and I’ve tried all 3 trees and 3 different legendary armor sets, and it is MUCH more difficult to get a gold CT15 with any other build. But the build imbalance isn’t really my main gripe. My current gripe is that the legendary armor bonuses are very lack luster. You are often times better off just dismantling them for the tier 3 mods and using them on more appropriate gear. The Attributes, mods, and “meh” set bonuses do not often align well at all. Still having a lot of fun with it, and am trying a pyro next.

Definitely been my experience as well. Expeditions as currently implemented certainly railroad you into particular playstyles. I never really touched blighted rounds in the main campaign, preferring a crit sniper-focussed build, but expeditions make that build pretty worthless. Too many fast-moving targets from all angles, and some arenas totally lack cover.

The thing is, I still take that sniper rifle as a backup gun and the 300-500k crits I was getting with it would still be great in the right circumstance - but the loss of blighted rounds on switching weapons makes it a total no-go.

Ridiculously overpowered set bonuses is something I’m glad to get away from after Diablo 3 and I don’t think it’s a problem per se. However, the bigger issue is that since rolls on legendaries do not appear to be random, you’re forced into trading off against well-rolled epics. The three piece bonus is just not worth working towards when you’re losing essential mods and e.g. the gloves will never have ‘bonus firepower’ as a stat.

Alright. I’m just going to put this on difficulty 3 and turn off the auto-difficulty raising ( I missed that setting). If that’s like playing other games on “normal”, maybe I can just ignore the whole silly system.

It’s on the save screen where you select world tier. A checkbox at the bottom, I think

I play solo largely because my time schedule and inclinations don’t match up with many folks, and I, um, don’t have any friends. So there is that!

I decided to pull out my Razer Turret so that I could use keyboard + mouse instead of the controller. As I predicted, the difference is night and day, since the autoaim for Outriders is pretty minimal (or non-existent, I can’t decide which). I immediately went back to my highest World Tier, instead of WT6, where I have been hanging out. Being able to immediately and accurately put rounds on heads and swivel quickly to shift fire (especially those maps where you’re in the middle with no cover against a zillion perforos) made a tremendous difference.

edit: I also discovered Edge for Xbox has no mouse support. Really, Microsoft?

Yeah, I really strongly recommend those that can play K+M on Xbox do so. There is auto aim by default, but you can turn it off.

On the one hand, blight is such a powerful way to go that I find trying other builds less appealing; you have to dial down WT a lot to make them nearly as good. On the other hand, that makes more nerfs perhaps a good thing, because all of the builds should be cool. I just don’t want that process to create a situation where everything is brought down to a low level, rather than elevated so that other builds are competitive too. Working WT 12; while the tiers themselves are not very crucial, though they do supposedly increase legendary drop rates, you get some nice rewards for making each tier.

It is fun essentially going a whole fight with Blighted Rounds never running out.

Apart from the guaranteed drops for the last few tiers, the drops you’re going to get from WT during the campaign will be swamped by what you get from Expeditions.

Oh, no doubt. I ran one character up to Expeditions, then turned around to do another class. Not sure when I’ll dive into Expeditions, because I kind of want to try the other class abilities too.

ugh expeditions are cool but i got my class nerfed pyro, and then a few of my legendary weps… its so annoying, cuz with my shotgun build i spent alot of titanium upgrading skills built around that shotty… doing a shitton of dmg! but over weekend i knew they nerfed it… the crit rate seemd off and radius of damage was so small … thanks!

The game has a great foundation, the devs seem to know how loot should work … compared to Borderlands 3 this game is a like grad school and Borderlands junior high level when it comes to progression and satisfaction.