Tom Clancy's The Division

Zero-Cool

Thanks lads. I didn't mind the bullet sponge system. What made me give up BL was the constant fetch quests trekking back and forth. Much prefer a real world setting as well. I'm gonna get the vanilla game from argos. By the time i reach end game will be plenty to know if i want the dlc or not. Are the high value targets part of the underground dlc or just added into latest patch?

joe123

Zero-Cool wrote: »

Thanks lads. I didn't mind the bullet sponge system. What made me give up BL was the constant fetch quests trekking back and forth. Much prefer a real world setting as well. I'm gonna get the vanilla game from argos. By the time i reach end game will be plenty to know if i want the dlc or not. Are the high value targets part of the underground dlc or just added into latest patch?

No the High Value targets were just a regular patch update.

Zero-Cool

Cool, they sound interesting so was just wondering.

Zero-Cool

Got to operations base and have a **** ton of quests on the maps. Really enjoying the atmosphere and setting. Kinda wish i had started when everyone here was playing. If anyone is around level 4 and sees me online on ps4, gimme a shout - sheehy83

Sephiroth_dude

Oh man 35 is very tempting.

Zero-Cool

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

Oh man 35 is very tempting.

ECO_Mental

I just had revelation with this game, I was about to give up on it i even bought rainbow 6 and started playing it because i was getting very frustrated with getting any gear. For a game that is based around getting stuff they make it very hard. You all know the problems, I even saw a lad on Redit getting "4 LONE STAR HOLSTERS" yes that's right 4 of them! On the weekly HVT. I was also sick of doing heroic missions and getting 204 lmgs and shotguns. The only way to get any stuff was to do heroic incursions and you all know that is a serious challenge or go to DZ06 with it's lv35 shotgunners and the rogue gank squads .

Anyway i was stuck in limbo really i had mix match of gear the only set i had was 4 lone star but a gear score of 245 so in theory i was up there but i was very weak. I always tried to get balance but struggled didn't have enough firepower 190k, not enough toughness 360k, and not enough skills 20k . I was getting creamed in the DZ and i struggled to do the four horseman farm so i couldn't see anyway forward.

So then i decided out of boredom to pile everything into electronics and skills and totally ignore firearms and health my plan was to max out smart cover and pulse. What a revelation!! i now have 51k skills and my smart cover and pulse is maxed out. I now have 75% damage reduction and 50% exotic damage mitigation. When I'm in cover I'm nearly invincible,(even with only 270k toughness) i should have recorded it last night but i let a cleaner boss (lv30) flame me and my health didnt budge really.

I am now breezing through heroic missions, especially if with a half decent team, with me pumping out max SC 50% damage buff on all the time and max pulse.

I am slow learner i know.... But it's night and day for me now, how come i didn't do this earlier?

Wonda-Boy

Its funny that the main thing killing people in this game for months is/was the health/toughness. People are piling all the stats into toughness and its not worth a ****....so then DPS is too low to kill anything.

350-400K is the absolute max you should have in toughness everything else should be DPS with decent skill if you can. You will be a much stronger player alround with tanking which does nothing. You will still be one shotted or close too it with 600K health etc.

Much better off served in skill or DPS.

joe123

ECO_Mental wrote: »

I just had revelation with this game, I was about to give up on it i even bought rainbow 6 and started playing it because i was getting very frustrated with getting any gear. For a game that is based around getting stuff they make it very hard. You all know the problems, I even saw a lad on Redit getting "4 LONE STAR HOLSTERS" yes that's right 4 of them! On the weekly HVT. I was also sick of doing heroic missions and getting 204 lmgs and shotguns. The only way to get any stuff was to do heroic incursions and you all know that is a serious challenge or go to DZ06 with it's lv35 shotgunners and the rogue gank squads .

Anyway i was stuck in limbo really i had mix match of gear the only set i had was 4 lone star but a gear score of 245 so in theory i was up there but i was very weak. I always tried to get balance but struggled didn't have enough firepower 190k, not enough toughness 360k, and not enough skills 20k . I was getting creamed in the DZ and i struggled to do the four horseman farm so i couldn't see anyway forward.

So then i decided out of boredom to pile everything into electronics and skills and totally ignore firearms and health my plan was to max out smart cover and pulse. What a revelation!! i now have 51k skills and my smart cover and pulse is maxed out. I now have 75% damage reduction and 50% exotic damage mitigation. When I'm in cover I'm nearly invincible,(even with only 270k toughness) i should have recorded it last night but i let a cleaner boss (lv30) flame me and my health didnt budge really.

I am now breezing through heroic missions, especially if with a half decent team, with me pumping out max SC 50% damage buff on all the time and max pulse.

I am slow learner i know.... But it's night and day for me now, how come i didn't do this earlier?

Its definitely a steep learning curve in terms of min/maxing gear. The only reason I sort of knew what to do was by watching the likes of Streamerhouse and Skill up.

Having a maxed out skill power build is essential I think (even though I still don't have one personally) especially for heroic content. Firearms are only useful to unlock talents, after that I pump everything into Stamina and making sure my mods all run skillpower. My current sentry build has like 2500 firearms, 470k toughness and 32k skillpower.

Running the four Horseman farm, a maxed out skill power build is number 1 priority. Smart cover and pulse.

After that, 1 Sentry and reclaimer are important. Its doable without reclaimer though.

To be honest, HVT's are probably the worst gear drops in the game in terms of constant lone star rubbish. Four Horseman and Undergound are the way to go for quick or fun content.

Falcon Lost heroic is painful. Takes an age and you could have wasted a good 30 - 40 minutes by wiping on one of the last few waves. Saying that wiping at the last stage of underground can be equally as annoying but thats usually down to crazy team mates going rambo. The upside to Underground is that its easier, more interesting and usually you pick up loot along the way.

joe123

Wonda-Boy wrote: »

Its funny that the main thing killing people in this game for months is/was the health/toughness. People are piling all the stats into toughness and its not worth a ****....so then DPS is too low to kill anything.

350-400K is the absolute max you should have in toughness everything else should be DPS with decent skill if you can. You will be a much stronger player alround with tanking which does nothing. You will still be one shotted or close too it with 600K health etc.

Much better off served in skill or DPS.

Got to disagree with this in terms of Firearms/DPS. Get your firearms to where you want to unlock talents then forget about it. High skill power is massively important. A high skill power running pulse or smart cover will increase your DPS AND increase your toughness provided you are running a pulse or smart cover.

gimli2112

I took a break from this and am seriously under levelled after coming back. Have the season pass (drunken purchase) so I have underground and have it at rank 11 now. My DPS, Toughness and Skill are all really low though.
Do I just keep levelling up so I can access the higher level gear/underground missions or is there something else I need to be doing? Hard missions only drop 214 gear and there's no point in attempting challenging at current levels.

Slutmonkey57b

Main story game is excellent, the game is beautiful, well thought out, atmospheric and a good blast. Well worth 35 quid I think.

After that, it goes from being a solo game to very much a multiplayer one. And it's much harder because the way you need to run your character totally changes because you go from being usually a couple of levels above the enemies to being permanently a few levels below; gear, weapon and character setup choices become really critical and without looking up some guides you'll get stuck.

Most of the PvP complaints are about balance, griefers and cheaters (on PC); those are always a problem in loot based games, I've always hated PvP games so I just avoid it by not going into the dark zone (or only do it late night during the week when obnoxious teenagers are in bed).

joe123

gimli2112 wrote: »

I took a break from this and am seriously under levelled after coming back. Have the season pass (drunken purchase) so I have underground and have it at rank 11 now. My DPS, Toughness and Skill are all really low though.
Do I just keep levelling up so I can access the higher level gear/underground missions or is there something else I need to be doing? Hard missions only drop 214 gear and there's no point in attempting challenging at current levels.

Well rolled 214 gear is enough to start challenging. A lot does depend on how good your group is though.

Check this video out by Marco. He explains how he levels up his character by running solo and matchmaking with groups. Might help!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poDUEst_Q_s

Spear

gimli2112 wrote: »

I took a break from this and am seriously under levelled after coming back. Have the season pass (drunken purchase) so I have underground and have it at rank 11 now. My DPS, Toughness and Skill are all really low though.
Do I just keep levelling up so I can access the higher level gear/underground missions or is there something else I need to be doing? Hard missions only drop 214 gear and there's no point in attempting challenging at current levels.

I'd say to not do the UG stuff, you'll just get the low level stuff from the caches. It's with a GS of 225+ you start getting the 229 weapons/268 gear from them instead. The daily/weekly HVTs are also a source of 240/268 gear. Or you could just flat out buy the higher GS pieces, phoenix credits are much easier to obtain these days.

Zero-Cool

Really enjoying it so far, rank 9 and solo'd all missions so far, getting a nice mix of loot so constantly mixing up my loadouts. Would definitely be miles better in a group but still enjoying it a lot. Haven't gone near the darkzone yet.

Slutmonkey57b

You can pretty much solo all the in game missions, provided you keep yourself above the average NPC level in a given area. A good tip is to stick in one district and mop up every side mission and encounter before moving on to the next. You can easily get yourself above the max NPC level for the next district before leaving the one you're on. Particularly if you get the canine unit built and have some +xp gear on

ECO_Mental

Having good fun with my new fancy 52k skill build and running maxed out Smart Cover and Pulse and been flying thru heroic missions helping my team mates out. But I just picked up a 229 vigorous chest piece and I hear that it grants overheal to all you team as well. Now I can swap out my current lone star with this vigorous piece and it won't affect me much but is worth it.

If I put in booster shot will that grant the damage and resistance buff also to the team? Also I hear its only 15% so am I better off sticking to my current set up. No harm in trying it out anyway.

ECO_Mental

Ah I think I made a bit of a bollocks of it the vigorous chest rolled skilled and I didn't want that so I rolled it to health. But I should have re-rolled it for extra armour and swapped another piece for skilled. Now I'm down to 65% armour disaster....

Slutmonkey57b

And as the above post indicates, the end game is more about running a comprehensive spreadsheet than it is about playing the game! Unless you just decide not to take the whole post-story loot grind seriously and just mess around having fun.

mossym

ah not really, you want armor as a main start on everything except mask and backpack where you want skill power. not exactly spreadsheet material in fairness.

it's a loot based game focused on acquiring loot to gear up, so tinkering with stats is part and parcel (not forgetting the issues with getting the loot in the first place/issues with gearscore). if you don't like tinkering with stats it's not the right game for you, but that's hardly a criticism of the game

Slutmonkey57b

True, but there the rabbit hole starts: why armour on everything except mask and backpack? Surely if you get +400 armour on a piece of gear, it doesn't matter which piece of gear? Why is skill power better on those but not on, say, gloves? A quick browse of the various wiki's and boards shows that this stuff has gotten really obsessive. I think you're right, it's not a criticism of the game, it's just something to be aware of that once the story missions end it becomes a really different game.

mossym

it's way more simple than you are making out. backpack and mask are the only ones that can roll skillpower as a major stat, none of the other can . you can't get it on gloves. (don't mix up electronics and skillpower). so you stick it on those and roll armor on the rest.

i actually think the stat system they have is pretty straight forward and pretty well worked, you can make it as simple or complicated as you want. the issue is getting the gear to actually play with the stats.

Slutmonkey57b

See, that would never have occurred to me (and I certainly wasn't prepared to dig into the details that far for my own game). But like I said, fiddling with the stat bonuses can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be; and most of the people who complain about the end game gear scores, stat bonuses, balancing problems etc are people who go all the way down the rabbit hole.

joe123

Skill power on mask and backpack and then you need to reach armor mitigation which is capped at 75%. Once you get good enough gear you don't even need armor on knee pads and still hit armor cap. Allows you to keep crit hit damage or whatever you want.

Tazzimus

Tried the above and went from 150k ish toughness to 226k toughness just by rolling armour on a few things. Easy when you know ha.

Now to get the dps up.

ECO_Mental

Tazzimus wrote: »

Tried the above and went from 150k ish toughness to 226k toughness just by rolling armour on a few things. Easy when you know ha.

Now to get the dps up.

Forget about dps go for skills instead. Skills will sort out your DPS and increase you toughness. If you read my post back a few days ago there you will see I was trying to get all my stats high but you can't do that and it'll drive you crazy.

Currently I'm about 120/270/52 and as you can see my dps and health are nothing to shout home about and I have a gear score of 249 as well. BUT and that's a big "but" when I lash down my smart cover my dps is increased by 50% straight away and all damage fired towards me is reduced by 75% then I fire out a pulse and my crit hit chance is increase by 40% and crit damage by 100%. The beauty of this this applies to all the team if they get into my smart cover. So a dude with decent dps of 200 goes up 300. I am breezing through heroic missions now, when I'm in smart cover I'm nearly invincible, I sometimes go through Lex on heroic without even popping a first aid

You should aim for 50k skills that's when it maxes out.

If you look up skill-up on the old YouTube he has a video explaining all this.

gimli2112

Got a second PvE supply drop for my two characters. It was a reward for having the season pass. Two more 240 gear sets, this levelling up GS is taking a while.
Presumably that's it for the supply drops for now?

Tazzimus

ECO_Mental wrote: »

Forget about dps go for skills instead. Skills will sort out your DPS and increase you toughness. If you read my post back a few days ago there you will see I was trying to get all my stats high but you can't do that and it'll drive you crazy.

Currently I'm about 120/270/52 and as you can see my dps and health are nothing to shout home about and I have a gear score of 249 as well. BUT and that's a big "but" when I lash down my smart cover my dps is increased by 50% straight away and all damage fired towards me is reduced by 75% then I fire out a pulse and my crit hit chance is increase by 40% and crit damage by 100%. The beauty of this this applies to all the team if they get into my smart cover. So a dude with decent dps of 200 goes up 300. I am breezing through heroic missions now, when I'm in smart cover I'm nearly invincible, I sometimes go through Lex on heroic without even popping a first aid

You should aim for 50k skills that's when it maxes out.

If you look up skill-up on the old YouTube he has a video explaining all this.

Skill power is around 25k ish now so might start looking at getting that up more and running those abilities. I have one or two bits of lower level gear that I need to swap out first that should help with that.

ECO_Mental

gimli2112 wrote: »

Got a second PvE supply drop for my two characters. It was a reward for having the season pass. Two more 240 gear sets, this levelling up GS is taking a while.
Presumably that's it for the supply drops for now?

Yeah until the 1st of next month, they are doing it twice a month one on the 15th yesterday and then on the 1st of each month (for season pass holders)

Zero-Cool

I got to level 14 and getting a bit tired of it. Did a bit of co-op with randomers but just not the same as doing with lads on here and everyone on my friends list is 30-60. Think I'll trade in but still got life 15 enjoyable hours out of it.