PTS Review Megathread
Hi Massive,
After extensive testing I have lots of positive and constructive feedback about new and existing items, systems, and mechanics.
Exotics
The exotics feel unique, powerful and complimentary to a variety of builds.
Capacitor
Good mag, nice rate of fire, coherent buff. Will be a go to.
The bonus damage from skill tiers is great. I'd love to see a bonus when you're overcharged to create a 'final stand' type recovery.
Scorpio
Interesting weapon. A great variant that makes up for the general difficulty shotguns have in focusing down tanky enemies through distraction by status.
The immediate crowd control on a single shot is great to line up additional stacks, however since blank tusk grenadiers and other NPC's can't be crowd controlled out of their animation it feels inconsistent and frustrating at times.
Would be great if there was a slight ROF increase, but that's not necessary.
Waveform
A powerful passive. It would be great to have better visual cues as to what skill is being buffed rather than the direction of the arrow. My suggestions are:
* Both left/right icons are shown even when empty so it's visually coherently which side has stacks; or
* The left/right icons are merged into one like Coyote; and,
* The appropriate skill has the buff icon
New Gear Sets and Weapons
Scalpel / Tactical .308
Excellent sniper that i've had lots of fun using. The Tactical .308 archetype doesn't bring anything substantial enough to the table that I wouldn't just recalibrate Future Perfect on an more powerful m700 variant. This is a shame since it looks great and powerful, but isn't compared to the competition. The 90s overcharge cooldown is highlighted so I suspect you're aware of this and are going to reduce the cooldown to make up for the worse damage.
Test Subject / PDR
Very interesting. Great gun with unique handling and attachment compatibilities. Test Subject will be a great variant and remains competitive against the Capacitor due to its damage potential. The implications of an Achille's pulse and Test Subject in PvP has me excited.
Empress International
I don't know how I feel about this set. It's closest analogy is Hana and i'm not entirely confident that skill health brings enough in the two piece, but it's definitely worth keeping in its state for the one and three piece.
- Battery Pack -
Very nice backpack. The 5% increase is very nice, however it encourages static cover gameplay which is commented on later
- Caesar's Guard -
I think this is a lot less powerful than BP. The jump from 25 to 30% is a lot less exciting than the 10 to 15% in BP. I think this perfect talent is less powerful than it should be and that it will be used only because it appears on the Empress set. Notwithstanding I can't wait to have a build where i'm throwing seekers out like Oprah's season final in Christmas season.
New Skills
Achilles Pulse
This is hands down a great addition to the game that rewards both solo and group members. It would be great if the left pulse slot mod had anything that would better it. I think you should remove slot specific mods in the same way that you removed them for gear.
Weakpoints need to be better visually painted, and applied faster to targets. Weakpoint locations also need to be revised as some are under armor or inside models (dogs, mini-tanks) or non existent (add, or make target unpulseable). I'd also like the pulse/weakpoint effect to be effected by status talents allowing for large numbers of enemies to be tagged when the conditions are met (Eclipse Protocol spread etc).
I think the overcharge should also make the target take extra damage like the others, for balance and continuity.
Shrapnel Trap
All traps will benefit greatly from the new gear set's backpack talent and allow them to be more influential in combat. Nice.
The shrapnel trap is great at applying bleed to groups of enemies but the range, even when overcharged, is just way, way too small for them to be effective. In their current state they feel more like static bleeding seeker mines. I don't think locking down areas of the map is really what the trap should be built around. It feels too big to be damage focused and too small to be status effect focused.
Repair Trap
This is just... why. The healing is terrible, range is terrible, the configuration in a row is just confusing? Why would someone prefer a skill that consumes all trap charges to get to full health when the alternatives are massive burst healing from the chem launcher or long lasting, large radius tracking hive drones... This desperately needs a rework; i propose that traps apply a substantially long lasting heal, and traps only trigger on players who aren't being healed by it already. And an x-pattern. That'd be awesome.
Existing Skills
There has clearly been a lot of work that has gone into each skill, including its visual ranges, some changes etc. but there are still problems with existing skills.
Cluster Seeker Mines
Firstly, the recent improvement to throwing is excellent. Thank you.
Cluster seeker mines are still too easily avoidable by elite enemies. Not only do they have the greatest amount of health but roll so effectively that they rarely get hit. Seekers being used to CC enemies is a waste. I would suggest better tracking, but not on player enemies.
Turrets
Love being able to pick them up. Great addition.
I see that you've fixed the bug where deploying a sniper turret when overcharged would make it always be overcharged. It would have been nice that the regular fire rate was increased to make up for it, since the slow fire rate and regularity of the turret missing the target made it must less effective than on paper. I'd still like to see some visual improvements so that i'd know when the turret is going to definitely hit. Because of this I think i'll use the sniper turret much less than before.
Oxidizer Chem Launcher
I'd love for this to be more effective in some way. It still feels very underpowered. Given the threat mini-tanks and dogs present I'd like to see the oxidizer find a niche by doing extra damage to metallic targets.
Drone
Less noticeable than the seekers but their target tracking (more specifically their target bonus tracking) should be improved. The healing drone's inability to keep up when you're running in ways to avoid fire just makes it useless.
Booster Hive
The hive got changed so that it no longer gives a damage bonus, but gives more effective bonuses to other attributes. I understand why this occurred and I support it. I think this will be a hidden gem.
Rigger Quick Access
Wow. Just wow. Love it, all of it. Talents create diverse builds, powerful... a true presence.
Other Important Issues
Reverse Weapon Handling
This has been a bug for a while. Whenever weapon handling, from any source (talent, attribute) reaches a certain amount some weapons take negative recoil. This is really disruptive behaviour for gun control that affects marksman rifles most notably. A good reproduction is to use a marksman rifle with a tier 6 booster hive, in cover.
Boom Booms
Despite the growing number of talents that reward cover based behaviour there are still too many reasons to keep out and keep moving. Legendary black tusk have access to grenades, drones, launched grenades, mini tank grenades, rusher shock grenades etc. Cover is both a death sentence and a necessity to avoid cover. This balance is just so confusing and i'd love to see better ways of dealing with the projectile spam (especially team based), or just simply less enemies with those tools spawning at a time.
Skills being distractions to these targets is excellent, when it works.
Loadout Changes
I think the specialisation trees could be more uniform, but that's another topic. Please allow specialisation changes directly from the inventory in safe areas. You can't even change it in the Summit Lobby.
The targets in the range are now considered enemies that you enter combat with when you enter the room. This obviously means you can't change your loadouts. This was never the case and feels counter intuitive given the point of the room.
I think there needs to be a better approach in being able to swap loadouts than what there currently is catered for.
Obtaining of Exotics
I really, really wished there were better ways of obtaining exotics than just through the season pass. This is clearly a marketing necessity to get people to buy it but they just make the exotics feel so unrewarding to get and have. How did I get a powerful Memento backpack that has the watches of fallen agents attached, a backpack that clearly has so much story and personality baked into the design? Oh I just levelled up and it got given to me; practically found it in the gutter. There is an entire community who have stories in their epic quest to get an Eagle Bearer (which might be a bit too much) and now the story is just ("I paid $25"). I'd love to see more creative ways of disbursing exotics throughout the game than what we've experienced since the season pass was introduced.
Optimisation Station
The quest for god loot has changed. In conjunction with the first attribute changes it will now be much, much easier to get completely maximised gear. Whether this is sustainable in the long term is yet to be seen. I am totally unmotivated to grind the 21 new required components. I think the number of different components is terrible idea designed to force players to do certain activities for the parts, and totally unnecessary given that you could achieve the same experience without the 8 faction, recon, and SHD wallets. I really don't think the grind is worth the payoff, but we'll see.
Final Comments
Good job, honestly. There's some criticism above but overall i'm really excited for the next season to go live.
I'd love to hear feedback on my thoughts.
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