So today I was considering of uninstalling because since the last update I can't find any decent ARs and that is my favorite weapon to play with. When Massive decides that I am not allowed to use it anymore, accept for those crappy ones that is fine. I might as well stop playing all together. Played about 80 hours and so far only found 2, the Military AK or CTAR-21, all the other ones seem to be missing or have incredibly crappy attributes.
Then I had a brilliant idea, my go to builds are always reds so I thought, why not play different. Go all red, find worse gear with red indicator for lower quality, nice use it. So going along I slowly decreased my GS515 build to around 467, all purple gear on WT5. To my surprise it could withstand any thing that was thrown at me in the city. Named Elite and Patrol combo, no problem using right tactics. I actually found one item with 449 score and made me feel bad that I scrapped it earlier today.
So now I am running an all purple build at 467, heavily focused on armor regeneration and turns out I am impossible to kill. Still hunting for gear to get even lower, my goal 451. This got me thinking, if these builds are possible then of course NPCs need to be bullet sponges too and more firepower. My agent is more or less also one, fire few shots from cover, wait few seconds to regain max armor, rinse repeat until all NPCs are killed. Is this my style of playing? No way, because it's just silly, boring and unrealistic. But the game need to take these builds into account and players that don't use it seem to be putting themselves in a huge disadvantage. I won't say I could do heroic of legendary missions using this build, but then again who knows, you actually don't need any healing skills or armor packs at all if you can stay in cover long enough.
Not sure if this was possible before the update because I usually play with firepower builds and very low armor to make it all a bit more realistic. But it makes me kind of sad when it turns out that this defensive playing style is actually preferred to make it much easier. Funny how you can get some new insights on this game when all I wanted to do is check if having lower gear meant I would find some better loot, and my favorite ARs, which in the end I still haven't found.
I have also come to the conclusion that targeted loot isn't worthy of its name anymore. You are more likely to find those items outside the targeted areas when opening loot boxes or drops from NPCs. It also doesn't happen a lot that you actually find the targeted loot. So eventually the hunt for loot still continues...
I found FAMAS with god roll 15% AR damage. Then I get G36 with good rolls and low AR damage stat. I used recalibration station to get my 15% AR dmg from FAMAS and put it on G36. Profit. Good AR with nice roll.
Where I find all this? On the mission, that was marked as AR target loot. On hard level I did it with a friend and have 5 ARs including this FAMAS.
Use target loot. It's perfect. I got exotic shotgun from random open world event in zone, marked with SG target loot.