aren’t all DA channels and casts uninterruptable? it’s never worked for me
Some abilities can be interrupted - the Echo of Knowledge will normally tell you if they can be (so like GK’s Anima Drain and Anima Transfusion can both be stopped).
While it is true that Item Power tells you nothing about an individual’s ability to perform, there are minimal expectations from the developer on what an individual must do with their Item Power to succeed in a specific Elite difficulty. During the closed beta testing for Dark Agartha, we were all provided with just enough DPS gear to meet the minimum Item Power required for Elite 1, 5, and 10 and asked to submit feedback on the difficulty to ensure it’s fair and balanced under these limitations. You have more than enough power through your gear to complete an Elite tier the moment you meet the requisite Item Power, no matter your weapon of choice (all weapons were tested). But, as you know, your gear is only half the equation. The other half consists of your build and your ability to use it well under every circumstance. Player skill can make up for a deficiency in gear, but minimal gear cannot compensate for a lack of ability.
@Onevia, all healing weapons have more than adequate self-healing capabilities. Assault Rifle has Leeching Ray and Anima-Tipped Bullets, Fists have Vigour (which procs frequently with Bladed Gauntlets and worked surprisingly well in closed-beta testing), and Blood Magic has Absolution and Reap. Be sure to have a decently-leveled Cruel Delight by the time you reach Elite 5, and you’ll have more healing than you need for Dark Agartha and even Occult Defence.
A) only if you’ve geared correctly and B) I didn’t say it was impossible to complete content the moment you reach the IP requirement so cool your boots. It’s not a useful indicator if you’re inexperienced enough to need an indicator - if you know enough to do well at a tier the second you unlock it, you know enough to figure out your limitations on your own.
That’s the whole point. If you aren’t geared right, then it isn’t FC’s fault nor responsibility to nerf content to make the lowest common denominator happy.
There is some wiggle room since we didn’T use min maxed gear (like you could push head harder) either or agents. Making it easier than it ended up would pretty much trivialize it, which would piss off people on the other side of things (Stuff is to easy instead of stuff is to hard).
If you ask me DA is far more forgiving than OD when it comes to all the builds that can complete it. And even if it than is to hard there is always the option to go 1-2 elite levels lower for the more casual players.
Depends what you mean by “geared correctly”…
If the standardly accepted “correctly geared” is the BiS weapon (KSR, Pneumatic etc) no … that’s pretty lame to tell someone he’s bad if he can’t handle elite level as soon as is iLevel allows it.
I didn’t say it was.
I find it alarming that neither Funcom nor some of their fans seem to comprehend that both those lines being technically true is a an immense problem.
The worst is there are actually people who’ll spout elitist drivel like this:
Fact is, in SWL, it often is. For example, Funcom pretend to the new player that “not hammer” is as good a weapon choice as “hammer”, so a new player falling for that actually is 100% Funcom’s fault. It really is. More broadly, stacking the game with too many cases of “A >>> B” is Funcom’s fault. It’s their job to create some semblance of balance, not the players’, yet SWL is worse in this regard than any other MMO I’ve ever played. (Well, with the exception of garbage that at least is upfront about “pay XXX $$, you get this currently best pay-to-win stuff”.)
What’s worse, Funcom does not offer those who misgeared under a broken system a reasonable way of fixing such mistakes; instead, fixing mistakes that often are Funcom’s fault is hideously expensive in time and MoF or in Aurum, which honestly seems to be part of the SWL business model.
I mean, most of this discussion would be moot if Dark Agartha were part of a game with a more traditional gear system, like, say, TSW, maybe?
KSR’s the only weapon that changes a gimmick enough to be mandatory for a certain playstyle, since it lets AR burst instead of it being a damage over time weapon. I play with a non-pneumatic maul and my dps is at-par on any fight length over ~5 seconds.
Geared correctly means:
5 crit, 2 crit power, 1 hit glyph
head/major signets that affect your primary weapon (generic or primary-specific both fine)
weapons + upper 4 talismans at least within shooting distance of being your highest level items, if not actually highest
using a power move from your primary weapon that hits the correct number of targets (1 or aoe)
willing to change every other slot (except basic) to something that works for the current fight
Specific talisman effects and weapon effects (energy, havoc) are not particularly relevant to being correct, just fine levels of optimization.
Ultimately each E-level is ~20% harder than the last, and the difference between full “bis” and effect-less items is under 20%, with “500 mof bargains” making you at least 95% as strong as a “bis” player. Dropping down 1 difficulty should always be enough to get you some experience, and then you can go back to the top one you’ve got unlocked.
To be honest, I used to get around the ip system with my scenario build. It was a lower IP than my dungeon build, so I’d just switch gear once I’d loaded in (and yay, the group finder now remembers, so no more need for gear swapping ). I didn’t have optimal weapons, I didn’t have cruel delight, and yet I was able to complete scenarios which officially I was undergeared for. Yes, cruel delight is a great way to keep yourself healed, but you can do that with pretty much any weapon, (think ele is the only one who would need to be paired with a survival secondary).
I can’t really say that I blamed Funcom for my gearing choices - for example, I really like using Blood magic DPS, so that’s what I do in dungeons. At no point did I find myself thinking it wasn’t anything but my own choice. Yes, I had friends doing more damage than me, but I had other friends doing less. That’s pretty standard for every MMO I’ve played, it’s not a clever innovation by Funcom.
When I decided I wanted to be able to tank too, I switched out my specific signets for agnostic ones, and honestly, I was surprised by how quickly I was able to do it. I wouldn’t say it was an overnight thing, but I didn’t blame Funcom for it not just being an instantaneous change.
Glyphs have less impact at lower ips too, so even if you make a mistake there, it’s not the end of the world. Then consider the fact that unless you’ve managed to make it to red before realising you wanted to gear differently, you still aren’t actually wasting anything. You’ll need the item you’re replacing anyway for future upgrades, so it’s not really punishing you for your choices.
TSW’s gear system was pretty unusual - it wasn’t just a standard traditional RNG system. And when you wanted to swap out a signet in TSW it sucked. 10 greens, to a blue, 10 blues to an epic. Hell, I spent a few years in TSW trying to build up my epic laceration, because RNG hates me. I’m not sure why I’d be nostalgic for the 2 years of raiding it took for me to win a Subway Tokens roll either.
With the way that more weapons are added to the game via caches, there’s always the potential for a new weapon to suddenly change the meta around it. It could be that the next shotgun makes it awesome. It’s pretty common again in MMOs - something changes or gets added and the meta shifts. And there’s always going to be a top spot. It may be hammer atm, but at least you’ll be able to level a new weapon from your best elite level already, which will help speed up the process without costing you MoF or Aurum.
The thing with another MMOs, their players don’t fear that a new potentially awesome piece of gear would drop.
As far as I’m concerned it was quite the opposite. Getting end-game signets in TSW was child’s play compared to grinding levels in SWL.
New drops in other MMOs often come with new raid content, and whilst people are often looking forward to the new content, many players don’t look forward to new RNG competitions over drops. It’s not the case that everyone is really excited that their gear is suddenly obsolete. When you’ve finally managed to get your gear to BiS, then actually, a lot of people are afraid that they’ll have to start the grind all over when more items come out.
I think that’s just apathy, especially when it comes with a “ching” and the text “You received 250 Anima Shards.”.
Belated thanks to all who replied - a lot of good advice/feedback. I’ve had limited comp time due to holidays and procrastination. Did I mention procrastination?
(Drenneth if you read this before I contact you in-game, I’ll take you up on your offer. I’m Pacific Standard Time, though, so I get on comparatively late).
I still maintain the difficulty levels are out of whack. If I were the lone voice in the woods, I’d certainly think otherwise, but I’m not.
I do know that the IP requirements are the bare minimum. Still, if the bare minimum to enter is 175, then that does say that it should be able to be done with an IP 175. It’s explicitly implied. Otherwise, what sense does it make to say you can enter but not be able to do it?
As I’ve mentioned, I can do S&P and OD. Maybe I should be able to do them at higher levels, but I can do them at higher IP levels than DA. In theory, imo anyway, since the IP requirements are the same the difficulty levels would be the same. Clearly, they’re not.
I’ve done every difficult quest including Rogue Agent (think I only hated Cost of Magic more) at lower levels, so while it might be hubris on my part, that tells me that I do know how to strategize/adapt.
All weapons/talismans are mythic as are many of the glyphs and signets. I have red gadgets (including those for interrupt and cleansing) that I trade in and out depending on the Boss. I use items, agent pluses (defense for my dps, crit for my healer), and adjust my anima.
The builds for my dps/healer are based on internet research and advice of veteran players. I’ve learned even more since and some changes could be made, but they’re pretty decent builds.
The difference is I can keep my healer alive but not my dps. (Well, am going to try sacrificing dps to give my dps toon more healing ability via hammer so we shall see). In any game, some classes are going to do better at some things than other classes - if levels are comparable. But the levels between my two toons are not comparable. That my much lower IP level healer can do DA but not my dps tells me most of all that the difficulty level is skewed.
So, I still ask: devs give a thought to adjusting DA difficulty levels.
The difficulty level is okay. I have two toons with about the same IP, but they do different levels of DA. It’s not like I play worse on the one character, or have less understanding of mechanics. Some weapon sets are just better for this than others.
Good observation, wrong conclusion. It tells you that your “healer” has a build more suited to Dark Agartha. You’re not meant to go in guns blazing with a glass cannon dps build.
I think we had no weaponbuild that couldn’t do DA in the testphase. We didn’t test all but even highly unefficent combinations worked. So it’S probably that you need a little respec and other skills that would make it work. I mean AA lets you change on a whim.
It’s also worth mentioning that testing isn’t only done on high IP characters. The testers use a range of characters with different IPs and limited passives so that the data is as representative of live as possible.