My take on the bullet sponge pandemic
See my feels on it are a game should have a "rule set" for lack of a better term.
Take our agents as an example.. we have our 3 areas.. firepower, armour and skill tier. You can mix those, sure, be a jack of all trades, master of none or lean fully into one stat to become a master of that area. Earlier, I decided to lean fully into armour, just out of curiosity, ended up at 1.7m armour with 300k health, so 2mil hp effectively. At one point I hit cover in a gunfight.. Saw a guy prepping to fire a grenade at me.. lit him up in attempts to stop it.. he stood there, not a care in the world.. tanked the lot.. then fired his nade launcher anyway. I rolled to avoid, still got hit a fair chunk by it.. as I came out of my roll, sniper hits me.. downs me.. 1.7m armour, 300k health.. all gone in two hits. Yet even when I then lean fully into firepower, and put as much damage behind my shots as possible, the enemy will sit there and stare at me like I'm firing nerf darts at them, then shoot through me like a paper target. Same going up to Skill Tier 6, I've done that, hit overcharge, then sticky bombed an elite in the face.. took off one block of armour and slightly faded the one after it.
It kinda pisses me off that we're bound to this.. limited structure of how we can build ourselves out.. meanwhile the enemies roll up.. tanky AF, all wielding the Death Star, with gadgets that act like they're at skill tier 9? People keep saying about min max and the watch levels and yadda yadda.. but when you look at the differences that'll make.. they aren't going to mount up to enough to change the tide of how spongey these enemies are with how much damage they can put out. Example, just say you could level the watch however you wanted and went straight into armour and gun damage.. you get 10% max on both. Considering 2mil HP got taken out by 2 hits in heroic, what's 10% more gonna do? Enable me to take 2.1 hits before I'm downed? It's really not going to make THAT much more of a difference.
What confuses me about it more so, is I've always said extreme bullet sponging is just a cover up for a game with bad AI, but Division 2 has genuinely great AI.. Ran into a squad of rogue agents earlier just messing around in a challenging stronghold, and it was one of the best fights I've ever lost.. this quick, savage game of cat and mouse around a small area.. diving from cover to cover while they did the same, gadgets flying all over the place.. It was fantastic.. but then ruined by the fact that I felt like I was firing nerf darts at a Terminator.
I get that we can't have the game without it being a bit spongy, without it being a bit unrealistic in regards to how many bullets fly around.. but with the AI you guys have put in this.. you really don't need to rely on extreme bullet sponges to make the game interesting and difficult. Just my two cents on it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯