The Division 2

Raes said:

There's also a stat screen that you can see after a mission. Ignore the accuracy stat, it's PTS and solo hard is a cakewalk now so I wasn't exactly trying hard. One issue is that pulling up the stat screen (i think this is what did it) dropped my FPS to the teens and it stayed that way, I had to log out.

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I am logging to check this stat screen -- I hope it shows teammate performance if grouped!

More PTS stuff. The long loading/connecting issue is fixed, seems even faster than before they broke it. That needs to be hotfixed like now. Just did a CP level 4. Overnerfed. It was easier than current level 3s. I never got close to dying or felt any danger at all, total cakewalk.


Edit: Also, I have a max dmg Nemesis on PTS. Damage was 367k, now 315k.

Edit 2: Blue armor stat can now roll way higher, got some pieces with over 40k armor. Also, new blue stat, armor percentage, which usually only rolls on gear mods. Have a piece with 12.5% armor.

Even if the nerfs turn out to be reasonable alongside the changes to enemies, at this point I just don't feel like bothering to figure it all out again. And I sure as fuck don't feel like re-farming an entire new set of gear, which took me 120+ hours the first time and will now have at least one extra layer of RNG faggotry with the new recal station. All this shit should have been looked at over the course of the WT and no changes that completely break builds (ARs are still fucked even with Berserk being 6R, since Strained remains incompatible) or forces people to replace nearly all their gear made until it's time for WT6. This is the kind of newb shit devs who've never made a game before do, not something I expect from the people who turned Div 1 into what it was by 1.8.

If they make the game any easier I'm going to seriously lose enjoyment. Maybe I just lucked out on a good p416 but I'm melting elites now. I think damage to elites from armor is too high.

Torrid said:

If they make the game any easier I'm going to seriously lose enjoyment. Maybe I just lucked out on a good p416 but I'm melting elites now. I think damage to elites from armor is too high.

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I feel like it's easy, and then I suddenly, inexplicably get 1-2 shotted. Probably a dog or a turret. I'm also having a hard time keeping armor talents at the moment. I can't really play this game without Patience.

Torrid said:

If they make the game any easier I'm going to seriously lose enjoyment. Maybe I just lucked out on a good p416 but I'm melting elites now. I think damage to elites from armor is too high.

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Been this way since before WT5. You can't ignore elites because their abilities are strong/annoying when left unchecked, but as long as you're paying attention it's purples that are the real threats.

Also, it depends on what content you play. From what I understand, Heroic missions in full groups are filled with elites and DtE is hugely powerful. Heroic is a colossal waste of time though, and I only solo, mostly speedrunning hard and challenging because that's the vastly more efficient way to get loot. DtE isn't really something I care about much at all, since there's so few yellows. ~55-59% DtE from a good mask is plenty and I'd prefer to have Hardened on the rest of my LMG gear so that I can stay out of cover longer and more armor gives at least some bonus damage (from UE) to all those reds and purples.

I did Space HQ (challenging) last night and was looking forward to the boss fight because it's one of the harder bosses. I blew it up-- before killing the adds-- faster than I ever did in the 1-30 game and I was stacking elite damage then too. I one-shot the end boss in Jefferson Trade with my Tac-50 in a 2 man challenging game. I got a new M44 marksman rifle last night and I one-shot purple turret guys now with it. Head shots of course, but that's not terribly difficult; I'm using an ergonomic mouse even. I find minigunners attacking civilians in the street and they die in one 40 round AR clip without berserk; undoable pre WT. I solo Heroic bounties and they require me to play cautious due to their damage+special attacks, often retreating to farther cover, but they're not terribly difficult and I'm lacking some gear still.

Also did a WT5 DZ with my buddy and it was very noticeable how NPCs died quickly but did a lot of damage. Players will get more survivability with the new armor rolls/mods AND they're reducing NPC damage AND reducing HP even more? If anything they need to increase NPC HP if they're going to reduce NPC damage.

You said before that you didn't play a whole lot in WT1-4 before the WT5 patch though. In WT4 I had a fully optimized AR/SMG crit build with Berserk and Strained etc. and everything but Heroic bounties was always trivial. And most of my heroic fails were due to getting rushed by some enemy (like a sniper boss) that shouldn't be rushing at all, who then killed me with a one-shot melee attack.

Not saying it isn't even easier now, but there was never much of a challenge when you had a strong build. And yeah, I don't know why they'd even touch Normal-Challenge difficulty, it's just Heroic that is retarded. Even if I felt like cheesing my way through all that tedium, the rewards you get for doing it are a pathetic joke compared to what you get in a tenth of the time spent on a lower setting. I'd say challenge difficulty could even stand to be made a bit harder, except that it's already only really worth doing when you want to knock out the two dailies. Hard is where it's at for efficiency, so any increase in difficulty/time spent needs to come with a significant boost in rewards too.

I always felt that the only thing that needed to be toned down was how aggressive the mobs were on higher difficulties. Their health was fine, maybe take down the damage a tiny bit, but if you're not in cover, you should die, period. At launch it felt more like the cover shooter it's supposed to be, but with the continued nerfing of the enemies it's going the same run-n-gun route of Div1. 4man Hard is already too easy now, and Challenging is only actually challenging in certain mission final areas, like TB, RI, and JTC. And how hard those are also depends on the competency of the other members of the group.

It's just a slog on heroic more than anything, mainly because Black Tusk are annoying at the best of times. There's too many elites that will sit in the back and spam drones/grenades while you play spot the medic (usually plural) so they don't run around and rez everyone you kill. Demo GL can't one-shot any of the really annoying ones, and you get shot to shit while trying aim it perfectly anyway.

So what I always end up doing is aggroing a room, then I run back to the previous hallway and I let them funnel into it to kill them. Doesn't always work though, sometimes just too many of them swarm in at once and they "flank" by just running right at you and if they get too close it's one-shot melee time again. I don't find it fun at all, so I've always been kind of glad that there's absolutely no incentive to do it.


Edit: Just noticed the new spec-based gear sets on PTS. Demo and Surv look to be Hard Wired-tier garbage. Sharpshooter seems like the kind of set you'd want some other poor hapless bastard to play in a group or raid to buff everyone else with real builds. No idea what they think they're going to accomplish with these sets unless they really do intend to nerf every talent into the ground so that people no longer mind using the sets.

I played two agents to 30+ and three agents to 19+. One thing that struck me was how difficult the first control point (at level 3 or 4?) was when doing it over again. It honestly felt harder than doing one in WT.

And yeah, the itemization guys in this game don't seem to know what they're doing

I have logged in once in the last two weeks after playing every single day from launch. They better knock the PTS changes out the park or I'm going to be sad shelving this for a year or two like D1 ;[

We really need a yawn emoticon.

Raes said:

We really need a yawn emoticon.

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Added the yawn emoticon to your post.

So the raid will drop GS 500 items? Well what the hell. I suppose the raid will have the new set which may be nice enough as a GS 500 to warrant using over the existing stuff and/or some more ideally min/maxed items but overall that seems like a weaksauce cop out if the raid is at all challenging.

i've only just started playing last week or so, i'm at like, GS 465 or something, but there seems to be a little bit of a weird range where like, 15 GS can make a huge difference. like when you just start a new world tier, everything has a nice challenge to it, but then after you get a couple of new pieces it goes back to being "normal" difficulty pretty quick, it seems. i mean, honestly the only time i found the game actually interestingly difficult, is when the black tusk show up, because the world is a higher GS now and it's a completely new couple of enemies types. but again, once i got some new gear pieces, they really aren't any more difficult than anyone else.

i'm wondering if the reason why they aren't adding a higher GS level is because then people can't "outlevel" the raid. no matter what perfect gear combination you get, they'll still be higher level than you.

I don't think the game was meant to constantly increase gs like wow, D1 got to a cap and then it was about collecting the perfect set items. It was weird they were attempting to raise it another 15 levels so soon after getting 500 after getting so much complaints about going from 450 to 500 so soon, really the only reason I can see them doing that was to try and encourage people into the dark zone, and when that back fired they had to say raids would have it too for quick damage control. Now it's more guaranteed 500 drops from the high end stuff, with a separate 100pt upgrade.

Problem with the game is they started with 3pc branded sets, but for the most part they suck because:
1. Most of the 2nd or 3rd bonuses are not required.
2. It's a bit complicated trying to piece together some sets because of the slot and attribute and talent restrictions.
3. You're better off just going with a hex build because talents is where the real power is and all that really matters.
4. If you want people to play with full sets then the bonuses need to get progressively better, like 6pc sets usually have the unique 4th and 6th bonuses that make a set. A 3rd bonus of 15% pulse skill power doesn't make me want to take it over getting a 1st bonus 10% more skill power to everything.

They've fucked over skill builds with the way skill power and requirements work in D2 over D1.
They fucked over mods with restrictions and level 19 blue mods being better to use than gs500 yellow mods.
Now they need 6pc sets to reward the major content parts, but so far they've been pretty bad too, and not enough sets available so people are bored with content.

They forget the 15 D1 sets which included a lot of skill type builds which gave players a lot of choices and motivation to farm. In D2 it's like 2 gun builds and maybe one general skill build and that's all you need, the looter part of the game is boring, it's not worth the time to grind shit. 15gs was not going to motivate me to grind again, offering me more sets to play the game in more unique ways will. New sets and some changes to the old ones are coming, about the only thing I'm looking forward to.

These patches are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. How can they not see that the rewards don't inspire any motivation to play?

If they are going to normalize PVP at GS 500, they don't even need to worry about PVE loot.