I'm a returning casual player (business owner and husband/father), but would like to somewhat optimize my gear and SHD watch. No clue where to start, it seems overwhelming. I only have 8d played, no gear that's "god rolled". I like groups, but I feel that I'm not contributing enough and I'm getting carried. I prefer LMG builds, but haven't a clue where to start to get those better optimized. Help!
My time is limited as well & acquiring good weapons, gear, etc to optimize is time consuming. I have three characters to speed up my SHD Watch. I donate weekly & do daily activities for gear & SHD level. You do not have to complete these tasks the same day, you have a week. When Time allows I go to the Summit & select specific weapons & gear to farm. I've had decent success but also acquired some very good items from the weekly's. Its a learning journey & like yourself I ask.
My view on optimizing is if its close or needs a little fine. If it needs more especially on two or more attributes I recalibrate only one & wait for a good example. It takes a lot of materials to Optimize & you guessed it takes up a lot time.
Welcome back agent!
So, let me tell you first that in my opinion with only eight days in the week you do not need to optimize anything. You don't need to have one single godrolled item. And you don't need to be afraid to get "carried".
But let's get into some more detail:
If you're a rather new, unexperienced, returning or only casually playing agent I'd first and foremost suggest to only play at the difficulty you are having fun with. I know that there are a lot of YouTubers and streamers out there who play legendary content all day long and make heroic difficulty appear like a walk in the park. And yes, with more than 2,000 hours in the game I also feel that heroic has become rather easy. But don't let influencers make you dizzy and don't try to compare yourself to veteran agents who had the chance to play way more often than you did. You should do you and learn and progress at your speed.
The good thing is – in reality you do not need godrolled items at all in this game to be able to clear any content and any difficulty. Optimizing gear is something that can be a goal if you literally don't have anything else left to do in the game. It's there to perfect a build that already sits at 95% of perfection and should not be a thing for rather "early" stages of the endgame.
If you're a good player and know what to do and how to create a build – then you will be flying through heroic content no matter how optimized your build is. And if you're not paying attention to the game's mechanics or talents/perks/bonuses and neglect your build – then you probably will already struggle on challenging difficulty even with fully optimized gear.
A good way to create a good build (and that's what I would like to help you with, not with optimizing) is in my opinion to look at the following three aspects. But please consider this only some basic stuff I'd like to share with you. I'm on purpose leaving out a lot of enhanced information in order not to cause too much confusion.
- As you can have a lot of builds saved as loadouts, you will probably want to have different builds utilizing different weapons or skills or performing different in all those combat situations out there.
So first things first: decide upon the basic role that your build will help you to fulfill. Do you want to be a Damage Dealer with this build? Or a Healer? Do you want to do some crowd control? Are you a Tank? A Supporter? And so on... This decision will have a direct impact on steps 2 and 3. Also it influences the Skills you will use with this build – of course a Healer will use skills to repair armor, a Tank might wanna use a shield and so on.
Finally, use the Specialization that helps you the most with your chosen role. Just compare the perk trees of the Specializations and decide for yourself which sound promising to you.
- Have an idea how you want to distribute your main attributes. As you already know, there are three of them: red/Weapon Damage/offensive - blue/Armor/defensive - yellow/Skill Tier/technical.
Distribute them according to the role you chose back at step 1. Obviously, a tank should have a lot of blue main attributes. The more, the tankier. A Damage Dealer should have some Weapon Damage, so rather go for red main attributes. And a Healer will need Skill Tiers. And so on.
Start with builds that rather are all red or all blue or all yellow, as this will make this systems and builds in general easier to learn. Once you feel comfortable with how for example an all red build melts through enemies, you can start to experiment with a build that still has three red main attributes but also has three blue attributes for better survivabilty.
Also, you can distribute the minor attributes of your gear accordingly. In general it is a good idea to have them in line with your preferred main attribute (e. g. Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage on a Damage Dealer), but later on you can also start to for example play a Tank with six blue main attributes but with CHC and CHD as minor attributes. Just don't mix up s**t to much, that rather seldom leads to meaningful benefits.
- Utilize Brands, Gear Sets and Talents. This step is one that easily gets neglected by way too many players. Just a a quick recap:
Brand Sets are the yellow'ish items that have different manufacturers, called Brands. Each Brand gives you a bonus for wearing one piece, two pieces, or three pieces of the same brand. There is no bonus for wearing four or more pieces of one Brand, so this is not recommended.
Gear Sets are the mighty green'ish items that give you very strong bonuses for wearing two, three, and especially four pieces of one Gear Set. There are no bonuses for wearing only one piece and no bonuses for wearing five or six pieces. So don't do that.
Talents can be found on vests and backpacks. They are very useful and can contribute a lot to a good build. So always read carefully through their descriptions as they also are either offensive or defensive or skill-oriented talents. Additionally, there also are talents on weapons. You might have guessed it: they also can do a lot for you.
So my basic advise here would be to really make use of those talents and bonuses. They are very mighty. Don't be afraid to equip an item that gives you a bonus for your primary weapon, although it has a little less optimal rolls than your current item. It will be worth it. Try to make use of the Brands' bonuses rather than to simply equip items which are "all red" or have some "good rolls" – or you will pretty soon end up with a completely messed up build without any synergies at all.
And speaking of synergies: try not to waste the talents slots on vests, backpacks, and weapons. If you have gear with useless talents try to farm for new gear with useful talents.
As previously mentioned: this is just a rough guide I could write down without going into detail too much or having to make a proper research in order to bring in each and every important aspect. But I sure help it helps you out at least a bit.
And of course feel free to keep asking. There are a lot of friendly and helpful veterans out here that will gladly answer your questions.
Good luck, agent!
This is by far the most important piece of advice. And not just because you want to have fun, but also because scaling the difficulty to your ability and the power your build has at that level of ability is key to learning how to tweak builds. (I often scale back the difficulty when I'm trying builds very different from the ones I'm used to.)Originally Posted by Noxious81 Go to original post
As far as the rest, I don't myself worry too much about the role the build will fill, and I certainly don't start out with builds heavily oriented towards red, blue or yellow. What worked for me was the way the game taught me as I came up from level one: start with fairly generic builds and tweak them little by little over time to add what looks helpful and change out what you've discovered to be not so helpful. In fact, if you have an end-game character now and you're finding the options a bit overwhelming, it might be a good move to level up a new character from the start, this time focusing especially on what items become available to you along the way and fitting them into your build.
For an LMG build, for example, you'll see at some point that wearing one piece of Petrov gear gives a +10% bonus to LMG damage. So you'll probably want to try having one of those in your gear mix. (If you have specializations available, you can also allocate specialization points to boosting LMG damage by 5, 10 or 15%.) No doubt you'll have a preferred backup weapon as well, so you'll probably want a piece of gear with a brand that gives a +10% damage bonus to that.
Probably the other major thing you want to look at is what skills you're using and how much you rely on them to do damage, heal you, or whatever. Various brands of gear offer built-in bonuses to these as well. And of course if you're relying more on skills, you probably want more gear with the yellow +1 Skill Tier cores; looking at the skills themselves will tell you how much improvement and in what areas they get from skill cores. (This is likely the first are where you'll be experimenting, too; it's always nice to have more armour and weapon damage, so you might play for a while at skill tier 3, and then replace a piece of skill tier gear with something that brings you a different advantage, and see whether that works better or worse for you.)
And of course the talents provide various kinds of advantages to different loadouts and playstyles.
Eventually, as you'll see, putting your loadout together turns into a sort of puzzle where you try to fit together some pieces from a much larger set in a way that works for you. As your loadout gets better and you get better at playing it, you'll find battles starting to get a bit easy, and that's when you want to start turning up the difficulty a bit to stress you and your loadout more.
In the end, all this mucking about with loadouts can eat a lot of time, as much as a third or more of the time you spend in the game. If that doesn't appeal to you so much (such as if you're the sort that would rather be shooting than puzzling out loadouts), that's no real problem. You may find that you can tackle higher difficulties just on your skill at playing alone, or you may not, which is also fine: just play the difficulty levels that work for you without spending a million hours doing loadouts. Theyr'e a central part of the game, sure, but the game is well designed so that it can be fun without having to do all that.
While most of this advice is VERY good.....I must point out that armor is a trap. It's a BAD attribute to invest in. There are no tanks in this game. You do not have ANY ability to pull and hold aggro, or otherwise guarantee that enemies will shoot at you. And a shield does a better job of making you tough than armor ever could hope to do. Shields get tougher with Skill Tier and Armor....so use skill tier since that way your other skill will also be good.Originally Posted by Noxious81 Go to original post
So how do you survive without stacked armor? Get good. Learn to use cover. Learn to use line of sight. Learn to take down priority targets fast. Improve your aim to land headshots and weakpoint hits. Shoot propane tanks and gas barrels to disable enemies. Use your skills to disable and distract.
Armor does nothing but slow down how long it takes you to die, and comes at the cost of making your offense weak. The enemy NPCs know this. They WILL take advantage of the fact that your 6 blue armor tank is not a threat. They WILL rush you, flank you, and kill you.
Now....having said that. Having 1 or 2 armor cores isn't necessarily a bad thing while you're still learning. There are a couple ways to get this without losing anything. The technicial specialization gives you a free Skill Tier. That means one piece of your gear can have armor. The exotic backpack "Memento" has one of each primary attribute(red/yellow/blue). That means you get armor.
But mostly you should only use as much armor as you need to not die instantly while you're taking out an enemy. It lets you survive out of cover. That's its only job, and shields do it better. So get better at cover or use a shield.
Much of what you said was informative and helpful. This line though comes off being insulting. Why exactly does he not "need" godrolled item or let alone many? Is not getting the best gear in the game, that is exactly we farm in a looter shooter. Is it not? Surely you don't want to have players believing they are suppose to be seeking crap gear? This game isn't about the amount of time played. It comes down to RNG and whether or not you are favored by it.Originally Posted by Noxious81 Go to original post
I didn't get that vibe at all.Originally Posted by YodaMan 3D Go to original post
You don't NEED godrolled gear to progress. You don't NEED to solo everything.
You can do those things, but the game itself doesn't require it. For someone who has limited time, it's good to know that you can be carried to good loot. And that even legendary can be taken down by someone without perfect gear in every slot if they have a good team.
It's not just that, at least not for me. I very much enjoy the process of getting better gear, but getting that better gear is more a matter of curiousity and being able to have more options when futzing around with my loadouts than anything inherent in the gear itself. I'll regularly play with what for me is worse gear just to change up how I play.Originally Posted by YodaMan 3D Go to original post
I took the original comment to be saying, "It's perfectly possible and reasonable to enjoy this game without the very best gear, and if getting the best gear doesn't appeal to you for any one of a multitude of reasons (you don't have time, you find it frustrating chasing loot, whatever) you can still have a great time."
There are many motivations for playing a video game, a feeling of power is just one of them, and most (perhaps all) players have a mix of these, and probably even different mixes for different parts of the game (doing battle versus collecting loot, for example).
Well, it doesn't come down entirely to that. RNG is a component, but the game is well designed enough that it will be heavily influenced by your skill at and what you're willing to learn about playing it. I find that the RNG level provides a good amount of "spice" and keeps me on my toes without ever making me feel that something is hopeless. (Some things, like the Aaron Keener battle, might be considered exceptions to this; in that one my frustration sent me to the Internet to look up techniques on how to get through it.)It comes down to RNG and whether or not you are favored by it.
For others reading this thread but not aware of the New to The Division... some questions... thread, that may also be useful for those wanting some help getting up to speed on the complexities of the game. It's long and delves far more deeply into the details of game mechanics, if that's your thing. (Again, though, the game can be enjoyed without all of that: just don't dial up the difficulty so much that you need to take advantage of every aspect of the game to get through battles.)Originally Posted by Virtual-Chris Go to original post
If you're on xbox live drop me a message and i'll drop you a clip of my lmg build and the premise behind it. I wpuldnt say it needs to be god rolled but yes i have a full shd watch (couple of hundred off 3000 now) and fully optimised gear which obviously helps, but it can be effective without this. Some items you'll find pop up in vendors etc as well. Sure we can get you something that works for you and your style of play. Id say though that as an lmg user you need contractor gloves for any lmg build, the rest is personal choice to an extent.Originally Posted by gearsoup Go to original post
Also when you message me specify forums and refer to this thread. Apparently i have some people posing as me on facebook. I dont even have a facebook but every now and again i get a message from someone saying i just spoke to them on facebook and offered this that an the other...the xbox community as a whole is pretty toxic in the dz, for some reason they all think copying youtube builds makes them youtubers...