I actually don’t really mind the whole “not all gear dropping at 500” thing, except for a couple of caveats - the SET PIECE gear should NEVER drop at a lower level than you. Getting the green gear should be an exciting moment - not a big disappointing “wah wahhhh” trumpet because it has like an 85% chance of being lower level than you are (not to mention the set gear being underwhelming in general right now).
Crafted exotics I have no issue with, except that they should craft at max level. It was ridiculous that the WT4 Chatterbox I made, had a max GS of 440. Same goes for all of the other crafted stuff, that inexplicably has a ceiling 10 GS levels below whatever the max is, at every world tier (except exotics in WT5). Why would anyone craft gear in that scenario?
The randomized gear score drops just felt like a post-hoc attempt by Massive to extend the game’s grind, after they realized that they made high-end loot way too easy to acquire in the end-game, and thus the end-game itself goes by extremely fast. So rather than complete the laborious task of taking out a bunch of loot drops and boxes in the world, they just made 90% of the drops you get useless to a min-max endgame build.
You don’t like the Anthem SOTG videos? You get to watch devs play badly, and listen to (Lead Producer) Ben Irving say, “I don’t know” over and over!
BW’s SOTG vids are mostly an embarrassment. They’re better when they have actual devs talk, but mostly they feed my theory that studio leadership is completely disconnected from the actual product.
Very cool of Massive to do this. I was afraid the extra keys would go to waste after the event is over but it looks like they anticipated some people would go hard at it and made sure any extra effort would not go to waste.
Everything about that apparel event was well done. It’s an enormous amount of cosmetics, most of which are very well done. They’re free. The ‘grind’ was easy – I finished it days ago. And if you miss the whole event, the items now go into the general crate pool, so they’ll be available forever.
That’s really cool and one of the things I wished Digital Extremes (Warframe) would do. Time limited events with exclusive gear/cosmetics are a huge downer for me personally.
This is brilliant actually. I have been trying to find motivation to play D2, I’m at WT2 now and the ‘sameness’ is starting to settle in big time. Perhaps your ping-pong strategy is the way to go. I —really— like the iterative design of Anthem w/ the ‘Iron Man’ shtick and the abilities being actually more useful than the guns. But the world state was so awful at launch.
Bouncing back and forth may keep my interest drip fed between updates / patches for both games. :-)
EDIT: re; skills. That is where Anthem just buries D2. As some people alluded to here, the skill tree in D2 is very ‘meh’. Every single person I’ve played with for the most part it is chem launcher + ‘X’ as a loadout. It is so vastly superior to all other tech it is comical. I’d love to see some patches make those other skills viable. The cooldowns alone are the primary killers for the other tech IMO.
I hit this game hard tonight and it turned into a Qt3 night, went from World Tier 1 to World Tier 4 and now have almost a 400 gear score, can’t wait to get to Tidal Basin.
One lesson when you get to the Tidal Basin – you’ll bump into bosses that appear to have a bazillion points of armor. They don’t, but they do have an immunity buff. Whenever you see “!!!” on their health bar, they are invulnerable. You just have to wait it out. They use it frequently.
The Wyvern is your introduction to this mechanic. After that, you’ll see it on many WT5 bosses.
Ahh, I never realized that is what that meant, considering the game already has the word “Immune” that shows up on guys when they are immune to fire damage or whatever. Good to know.
Lately as I am working my way toward GS425 or whatever I need for Tidal Basin stronghold, I’ve been joining up with 3 rando’s and just shooting shit up.
This game is so much fun with a team of 4 who know wtf they are doing.
Also I can equip 5 rounds now thx to a mod, for my chem launcher witch is just bliss… purple deadly bliss.
They must have some seriously muscly arms after swinging the nerf bat around that much on the PTS.
I’m not opposed to nerfs, sometimes that’s the clear solution (like with the MK17 being clearly better than anything else previously). However, I do wish they would focus a little more on making all the unviable talents/builds more appealing instead of hammering the few interesting things you can put together.
For instance, before nerfing all the skill mods into the ground, could they not have accompanied it by fixing skills which flat out don’t work or severely underperform? All anyone runs is chem launcher + revive hive, with the occasional flame turret. Same thing with talents like Patience, there’s a handful of useful gear talents out there with a whole lot not offering much. Rather than just nerfing that and other go-to talents, I’d like to see them accompanied by improvements to all the talents that no one uses.
Right now, it’s feeling like a repeat of early Division 1 for me in a lot of ways, which is not a good sign.
Am I right in seeing that the highest-tier gear, 515 GS, will drop only in PvP? That’ll drive me to straight-up uninstall. I don’t enjoy PvP in shooters, and being forced there for gear is a hard stop.
