I cut back on my SWL gaming time because I found the gear grind too tedious. The updates (such as increased rewards, new distillates, and eliminating daily locks) that have come with the new patch finally changed that. I find myself playing more, and feeling much less restricted in terms of weapon and gear choices. Leveling other weapons to red doesn’t feel as unattainable. Back of the envelop math, I believe I’m getting XP at 3x the old rate given the same activities.
Really appreciate this patch, along with the healer-tank update. I plunked down some $$ for the first time in a while to show my appreciation. Thanks again, Funcom.
PS Not going to touch the need for new healer & tank gear – I don’t have enough experience. Looks like it’s really only needed for E17-ish content, and even then feels fairly attainable with the new XP drops.
I was hoping for group finder to perk up a bit more, after the first week it seems to be dead as always, with LFG being the only way to get groups. I think it just isn’t informative enough about how the queues are going.
I’ve also noticed that under E10 tanks still request healerless groups, so… maybe the rebalance needs a rebalance.
I was kind of surprised to see that if you’re not running e11+ content that healers still aren’t really needed. I feel like it’s more of a side effect of a lot of tanks and DPS already being at e17 for years now, so they can already blow e10 out of the water healer or no healer.
I’ve started tanking lairs recently and also surprised that you don’t really need to heal for lairs either, so long as you can do at least some self-heal and have good DPS behind you. The mobs and bosses won’t survive long enough to damage you…
I’ve taken the game much more casually so I just got to e10 myself. Really looking forward to getting to e11 and taking on the tougher dungeons and Penthouse.
Yeah, lairs are designed for 5 E4 players, so 9-10 E10+ dps really runs over them easily.
My understanding is anima-infused shells are the odd one out for not having a healing cap on them like the basic heals got; Forged in Fire gives me 7500 hp in 20 seconds and a primary shotgun tank can do several times that.
I’d say the issue is E17 solo mobs do so much damage that E17 players need such strong self-heals that they can then take it to E8 and self-heal as tanks, can’t really balance without changing something in that loop. Didn’t come up so much in TSW cause there was less power scaling and no solo endgame content expecting players to be able to heal (scen bosses were 100% avoid, interrupt, etc. until you went to groups)
They should institute a “call to arms” type reward similar to WoW where a player gets some additional bonus for queueing (atleast for SM) when someone is looking for group and it takes longer than x amount of time. These systems tend to get groups going.
Anima-tipped bullets passive didn’t get a cap either. I went in some E11-13 dungeons tanking with AR to see how it would work lol. It’s the only first heal passive that I see that doesn’t have a cap, and I specifically pointed it out to a Dev in beta. Heals like an old CD, and it’s still amazing in OD.