First Impressions of DLC 5

[ironcladtrash]

Wait...wait.......seriously just hold up.

Did I just see CRIXDA say something positive about Defiance? Then this patch must be pretty awesome! If I see Arsenic_Touch, Lillith Valerian, bonehead and ironcladtrash all say something similar then I fear my heart might not be able to take the shock.

Lol. I actually like a lot of the stuff in this patch. It's great they finally give high EGO players things to do and not be punished. I like the legendary vendor weapons and mods. I like the expert co op maps too.

There is always a BUT though. It was nice of them to listen to us and upgraded our low EGO weapons to 75% instead of nothing but it should have been 100%. The ark forge is a disgusting money grab and is insanely expensive. It's about $40 for 1000. We earn it in game too slow to use weapons we already earned in game. If You want to upgrade your weapons it's going to be months to earn enough ark forge. This is a bad departure from the whole year when we could use any weapon.

There are a lot off issues with scaling and I don't always want to play in hard mode. We couldn't even make into the WM earlier because time ran out, outside. There were only a couple us all fighting about 10+ Ark Viscera and couldn't do much of anything to them. Next time there was more of us there and no Ark Visceras spawned.

They also broke how shields have worked for stats and rarities.

I think I balanced that out enough to save your heart.

[CRIXDA]

Awwww. See, now he dundunit.
Angeleus,
Is You crazy?
I loves me some Defiance!
I play this piece EVERYDAY and I hate to miss it.
Silly pants. My only issues are with cement-heads around here who do that "fishing" thing...uh...yeah.....Trolling, that's it - and a lot of the Standards and Practices of "The Company".
That is when I get put into the metaphorical penalty box around here.
Other than that, I LOVE Defiance and I only want what is best for this game.
In all honesty, You can dig into the "vault" and find post that I used to put up in which I crusaded to "stamp out the negativity".
Funny stuff, too.
The more that You hang around and see what goes on, the more jaded and cynical You become and that is what happens to us all ( pretty much ).
BUT!!!:
This new DLC is a jai-normous step in the right direction!

No champagne yet, but I wouldn't mind some if there happened to be some around....

[Bonehead]

so how is it for low ego?

IMHO it sucks the root.

[Bonehead]

Man that game bored me to death. Lacked the charm of the first game in my opinion. Wasn't really fun either.
Quick question, are you on console?

Nope. PC. .

[Angeleus09]

Lol. I actually like a lot of the stuff in this patch. It's great they finally give high EGO players things to do and not be punished. I like the legendary vendor weapons and mods. I like the expert co op maps too.

There is always a BUT though. It was nice of them to listen to us and upgraded our low EGO weapons to 75% instead of nothing but it should have been 100%. The ark forge is a disgusting money grab and is insanely expensive. It's about $40 for 1000. We earn it in game too slow to use weapons we already earned in game. If You want to upgrade your weapons it's going to be months to earn enough ark forge. This is a bad departure from the whole year when we could use any weapon.

There are a lot off issues with scaling and I don't always want to play in hard mode. We couldn't even make into the WM earlier because time ran out, outside. There were only a couple us all fighting about 10+ Ark Viscera and couldn't do much of anything to them. Next time there was more of us there and no Ark Visceras spawned.

They also broke how shields have worked for stats and rarities.

I think I balanced that out enough to save your heart.

Phew, I think you did lol. It still sounds like there are (as always) a few things to iron out still but overall the impressions and comments from those of you who have tended to be more consistent with your feedback here have been positive. It actually makes me eager to get back in and see how it feels.

Awwww. See, now he dundunit.
Angeleus,
Is You crazy?
I loves me some Defiance!
I play this piece EVERYDAY and I hate to miss it.
Silly pants. My only issues are with cement-heads around here who do that "fishing" thing...uh...yeah.....Trolling, that's it - and a lot of the Standards and Practices of "The Company".
That is when I get put into the metaphorical penalty box around here.
Other than that, I LOVE Defiance and I only want what is best for this game.
In all honesty, You can dig into the "vault" and find post that I used to put up in which I crusaded to "stamp out the negativity".
Funny stuff, too.
The more that You hang around and see what goes on, the more jaded and cynical You become and that is what happens to us all ( pretty much ).
BUT!!!:
This new DLC is a jai-normous step in the right direction!

No champagne yet, but I wouldn't mind some if there happened to be some around....

Ha, the Vault. Oh I well remember, I used to be quite the staunch defender of Defiance's alternative MMO concept both here and over on the Defiance subReddit. But like you, persistent technical issues and unpolished mechanics that stuck around like hellbug grease in the wheels of my Med Tech Buggy started to really wear on me. There's obviously still some work to do but seeing these enthusiastic and positive comments from you all is really encouraging! Especially compared to how lackluster the feedback threads usually are after a DLC launch.

It seems to me like the work leading up to and including AR has basically been a rebooting of the core game mechanics. So far it seems to have worked. Hopefully this fresh start (new scoring, new scaling, new weapon stats, new office, new community managers, etc.) has put the game in a place where the dev team can stop running around Paradise with a box of band-aids and start really focusing on developing new content.

[Theatremse]

Here are my first impressions of the v1.5 patch.

I wish I could give more of a critique of the gameplay changes, but I cannot. Two choices in the implementation/deploy of the v1.5 patch soured me so much on the game that I could not bring myself to play more than two Emergencies before logging out of the game. I have tried to detail those choices below.


Choice #1: Choosing to upscale existing character weapons/shields to 75% instead of 100%. Why is this an issue? Let me give you a practical example. My primary is currently EGO rating 3435. Using the 75% rule, that means that *any* Epic or Legendary weapons/shields he picked up when his EGO was less than 75% of what it is now will *only* be scaled up to 2658. Now, if he held on to a gun for that long, it *is* going to be one of his primary weapons and *will* be equipped in one of his loadouts. It is a valuable weapon to him.

Now, Suppose he only has 5 weapons/shields that he held on to for that long, 3 Legendary and 2 Epic. (Make one of the Legendary the Shanjifyo Blade, and this scenario does not seem all that unreasonable.) To scale just these 5 weapons up 700 Rating to 3358, it would cost 1330 ArkForge. If you need it, here is the breakdown off the math:

(3 Legendary Weapons) X (50 ArkForge per 100 Rating) x (7 increases) + (2 Epic Wepons) X (20 ArkForge per 100 Rating) x (7 increases) = 1050 + 280 = 1330

As you can see, this more than chews up the 1000 ArkForge given to the account through the "Chimera ArkTech Kit". The closer you get to the maximum of 5000, the worse the cost gets to increase the rating of the weapons/shields. Choosing to scale the guns to 75% effectively punishes characters with higher EGO. Put simply, this scaling devalues higher EGO characters, and *punishes* them for the fact that they spent more time playing Defiance. The only high level EGO characters who would be unaffected by this are those of EGO 5000 who only have weapons/items of rating 5000. (Now, if you consider that most guns purchased from shops did not scale before the v1.5 patch, this would be a *small* minority indeed.)

In addition, since it appears that Threat Level scaling is based on the character's EGO level, and *not* the gear they are using, choosing to scale guns to 75% and not 100% does nothing other than punish a large swath of the faithful player base.

Choice 2: Making the 1000 Arkforge "Chimera ArkTech Kit" account wide (i.e., one "Chimera ArkTech Kit" per account) instead of giving each character on the account a "Chimera ArkTech Kit". This is a significant departure from how DLC lockboxes were handled in each of the other 4 Defiance DLCs.


If I may use an analogy, here is what the above two choices feel like to me. These choices can be likened to a bank deciding that they have been calculating the interest wrong on all of your bank accounts. To correct the problem, they will reduce the balance of the account to 80% of what it was because "The new way of calculating the interest will be better." (Choice #1) The bank then increases the account balance up to 84% on *one* of the accounts "because you have done so much business with us." (Choice #2) In the end, you feel cheated and find yourself left with something that has less value than it had before the change was made.

Now, all that being said, I can't rant and rave and say something like: "This was the last straw...I'll never play Defiance again!" I've paid for the game and the DLC. I have no doubt that I'll log back in to the game at some future point. This was just my initial impression of Defiance v1.5...and it really feels like I have been kicked in the gut by a game I loved.

[Deunan]

I had to extract twice in 3 hours, revived 3 times. Only ran incursions, scaled up to 4,750. I think I did alright.

I died twice with an EGO rating 350ish character on the test server doing incursions while scaled up to Threat Level 10 for about half that time on the test server. If all you did were incursions you are in for some eye opening experiences when you enter the interior of a Major Arkbreak or an Expert co-op map because the Threat Level scaled incursions are a total cake walk in comparison.

One of the biggest issues is that no one is healing, and no one has teamwork centric perks equipped because they were generally useless before. When I saw 5 people downed at once, I equipped the revive 1, revive all perk.

You do realize that perk only works on people that you're grouped with? It won't affect anyone else including anyone you are teamed with which is why neither it nor Phoenix Boost have much value inside of Major Arkbreaks. Healing remains highly overrated inside them and generally does more harm than good notwithstanding all the trolls in zone chat on PC NA pretending to the contrary.

When you do get around to doing a Major Arkbreak you're going be reminded in no uncertain terms how poorly implemented that content is because of the lack of features to coordinate large group efforts including the lack of any ability to control which internal instance you're sent to.

[Deunan]

Even the fights at the Monolith were nice

Were you getting any points for damaging its health? I'm not sure if it's intentional but I literally got zero points for it. I generates zero points which is pretty awful considering it's the Arkfall boss.

[Thomdark]

...funny holiday days are over, fight for your life!

I play since release and there were so many mistakes and bad updates but this time it is for me a huge step in the right direction.

I usually do not write in forums. But this time i really want to say, some people like this update!!


Wish us all a lot of fun with DEFI.

[Shakk]

I cant wait to get back into Defiance to try out this patch, it sounds like what i always wanted Defiance to be. Not so ****ing simple!

Shakk