So I had nearly written the game off after my last login because of how horrendous the enemy scaling has gotten in DC, but others have posted that it seems to actually be an intermittent bug and I can now confirm this for myself as when I decided to bite the bullet and play again tonight, enemies were far, far more reasonable. Still too hard frankly on Challenging (It feels more like Heroic/Legendary in D1 honestly) but not by *that* much - and there are numerous factors that need adjusting it isn't any one thing, other than enemies having too much armor and damage across the board and CC being very spotty at best (was finally able to use Fire again properly though I did still notice burning enemies not being forced out of cover as they would have been before)
And before I get too far in, let me make one thing perfectly clear:The people complaining that Gear 2.0 is too simple/casual and that their builds are broken, need to seriously shut the **** up.
We actually have a working progression system now. It's not without problems (which I will get into shortly) but it is miles better than what we had, with clearly visible differences in quality; No more spreadsheets required to determine if a drop is good or not, and banking stats and talents in the library is a freaking Godsend. Also glad that we aren't just bathing in drops anymore either, it was kind of ridiculous before. Oh yes and the change from Skill Power to Tier is also fantastic, thank goodness they honestly did a good job of streamlining the systems.
Now on to the bad parts;
- Average quality of drops is frankly unacceptably bad, and a far cry (lol) from what was promised. My proficiency caches for example, are coming in at 450 now instead of 500+... what the actual F? I basically am forced to play missions on Challenging now to have any hope of getting an even remotely usable drop, which is absurd.
- The nerf to the crafting table was also BS, seriously what the hell Massive? I get you don't want us crafting 515 right away but COME ON that was a **** move.
- Way too many items got drastically changed (particularly mods) and I'm honestly wondering why there are multiple mods with different names but that do the exact same thing for a given skill and within the same slot to boot . I thought the aim here was to reduce redundancy not add to it. And as a side , this is the part that people are rightly losing their minds over when it comes to their builds being "blown up" because they completely changed how all the brands work (D&H is completely worthless btw who the hell thought anyone would want 20% pistol damage?) and Wyvern Wear went from being crit-based to skill based.... um, what?
- As I mentioned previously enemy scaling in DC is entirely out of whack, the first night I was getting my arse handed to me by red bar trash enemies in the LZ and then tonight it was the total opposite (at least for the trash enemies) - I was actually killing them *faster* than before so what gives? Also the new minigun warhound is horrificly overtuned I'm fine with it being a threat but tone it down a bit so it doesn't automatically kill non-tanks in the blink of an eye. Also I want to personally strangle whomever decided to bring back the support station for enemy AI, dear lord WHY. Yes, bring back what was aruably the singularly worst thing about Legendary Missions in Division 1 with the LMB just never dying/infinitely resurrecting because of the damn box and the medic running around reviving with impunity. Seriously not cool, tone down the medics on Challenging and up PLEASE. It's bad enough that they are bulletsponges without also being constantly healed to full and revived every 3s.
And the last thing is just some more balancing issues that stand out to me. Obviously not everyone will agree with me here but these are my own observations & opinions;
- In general a lot of the skills feel extremely weak at Tier 1, some just aren't even usable at all below Tier 3-4 (like the defense drone or chemical fire) and so might want to level them out a little more.
- Fire is very inconsistent, and takes longer to actually affect an enemy - particularly the Flamethrower, I used to be able to ignite with a glancing puff (very useful for conservign ammo and controlling groups) and now you really have to aim it dead on and hold it for a few seconds using much more ammo and for less effect. As I said, often enemies won't even leave cover or flail around the way they would previously. Most of the time it feels like a crappier bleed.
- Speaking of Fire, can we please give the incendiary grenade to the Firewall already and get a rework of the survivalist? I'm still kinda baffled why it (Survivalist) isn't the tank role for that matter. Also the Firewall desperately needs to have its health on kill perk changed to armor on kill, since we lost max health as a major stat and can no longer increase it nearly as much as before. Either that or include a max health multiplier within it so that Firewall can properly function as a Bruiser role again.
- Which brings me to the Gunner, being the designated tank having armor on kill doesn't make a lot of sense I think either a passive max armor percentile increase would benefit it far more, or even better armor regeneration (and change Regen so that it actually works all the time not just while in cover). This would give gunner a lot of self-sustain and ease the life of support players a bit (also make it more reasonable to get in the enemy's face).
- Technician kinda got nerfed a bit too much IMO. Now obviously we can't allow the passive to enable full-time overcharge that would be dumb and invalidate all other classes for skill based builds, but I do think it would be fine receiving 2 free Skill Tiers rather than just 1. The extra 1000 SP they got (assuming 2k build for the max of 3k SP) before was a bit too much, but just 1 extra tier is taking it too low especially with the new core attributes - and I'm only speaking as someone at 30, I imagine the disparity at 40 is even worse as Skill Tier remains a static thing regardless of player level whereas Weapon Damage and Armor scale up.Plus quite a few skills (last I checked anyway) don't see all that huge of a jump from tier 5 to 6, the largest increases seem to happen around 3 or 4 and with overcharge. I could be wrong here and maybe at 40 only 1 free tier is jutified but I doubt it. Feel free to correct me though.
There's probably more stuff I missed, but those are the biggies that stand out to me currently. I want to express again that I'm actually very grateful for gear 2.0 and the majority of the system changes, putting together a build is much more intuitive now and once people get over the initial growing pains I'm sure it will even out. But there are glaring balance issues that need to be addressed ASAP.