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  1. #1

    Should be a limit on how far Guardians can stray?? (i.e., more bugs)

    While this is far from my favorite GE, I don't exactly mind it. Politely said, it's "OK."

    However, running around the open world just to fulfill some challenges and get those stars, more than once I came across a group that had the red "X" but no yellow shield icon in sight.

    I have to imagine the devs at least thought it through enough that a group couldn't spawn without a guardian (though I could be wrong on that one), which makes me think they wandered off somewhere? So either there's a bug that allows groups to spawn sans Guardian, or they can just meander off and get lost, which is not much different from a player's perspective.

    Conversely, I did a bounty and when the target and his minions charged out the door there were six Guardians and two non-Guardian hostiles. That's a ridiculous ratio!

    UPDATE: I went in later and did a quick bounty. It was Challenging, so there were two targets. I killed every one except the second target, who was alone, but had the red "X" over her head. You know how if you aim it'll briefly show a yellow line connecting to the Guardian? Well I did this a few times and the line went well outside the bounty area and connected to a group of NPCs so far away I could barely see them, and they were definitely NOT part of the bounty group.

    So my memory is a little foggy from last time this GE came around, but I don't recall it being so buggy. Am I mis-remembering, or did they introduce new bugs this run around?
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  2. #2
    My experience with this event is the guardians are always the stay at the rear, away from my aim at all times, i get close, they run away, perfectly covered or its a shielded enemy, you know the one with that shield where only headshots really do anything......well, try handling that while running from 4 hyena runner melee attackers..

    It put me off entirely.....never taking part in this crap event ever again...it was my first and only try at it....it is just bloody annoying.

    I have yet to encounter what you did, but its equally as annoying.
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  3. #3
    CategoryTheory's Avatar Senior Member
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    I've had a few cases too where the guardian was so far away in the open world as to be in another city. I don't mind this, though, since it's entertaining and, as with many of these sorts of things, it teaches me more creative gameplay.

    In this case, melee attacks are your friend and the Sweet Dreams shotgun (one-hit melee kills on non-elite enemies) is your BFF. Now that I've gotten the hang of that, aggressive enemies that are protected and have a guardian I can't currently reach are no big deal at all. I sometimes even go out to get them, especially if they're flanking, since going out and killing them directly with a melee attack can be much faster than killing their guardian.

    Elite enemies are slightly trickier, since they don't die from a single melee hit, so you need to be able to get in a fair amount of damge in the five-second window between your melee hit and the protection becoming re-enabled, as well as avoid taking too much damage yourself. In my case, using an AFK drone/turret skill build, I just set the skills on them before doing a melee attack: this both occupies the enemy to keep him from shooting me and ensures that he'll start taking damage immedaitely after my melee attack, even before I recover from the strike and can start shooting the enemy myself. A skill tier 6 drone and turret will generally make short work of most elites; a quick shot with the shotgun to proc Perfect Combined Arms (+30% skill damage) will help on the harder ones.

    Another option is to use a shield to protect yourself from the enemy, which has worked out ok for me. I'm sure that the creative folks out there can come up with plenty of other ideas, too.

    Originally Posted by Avalanche81 Go to original post
    My experience with this event is the guardians are always the stay at the rear, away from my aim at all times...
    This hasn't been the case for me; I find that the distribution is fairly random. I've had groups where a weak rusher was the guardian and he came straight towards me over open ground, which I thought was very kind of him.

    ...it was my first and only try at it....it is just bloody annoying.
    Well, it's annoying until you learn the new techniques you need to fight effectively in the global event. Some of these you can pick up from the challenges: this is why they have challenges like "Compromise hostile's protection by hitting the guardian's weak spot."
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  4. #4
    Melee attack to the shielded hostile does the trick. But I agree there should be a limit to how far a shielded hostile gets protected by a guardian.
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  5. #5
    From my perspective, this is another global event that -- once you adapt your play style capitalize on the events strengths AND if you have a build that compliments it -- it does drastically lower the time it takes to run missions, etc. and it is "fun". But, if you don't adapt your play style, or your build does not compliment it and you aren't in the mood to change either of those things, it isn't fun at all.

    That said, there is an RNG element which can make or break each encounter..... and that is: which archetype is picked to be the guardians.

    If the archetype is a type that rushes or assaults, that is fine. But if the archetype is a hider, like the black tusk minitank operator or hyena car bomb lady, that can make it monumentally harder and a lot less "fun". Of course, it is even worse if a high damage tank type is "protected" by a guardian that is a hider.

    This is where build and play style are going to come into play. If your build is high armor it isn't hard to go on a search and destroy mission to find the hider. I play a shotgun/crusader shield build so I can pretty much muscle through whatever immune NPCs are on the frontline, to [penetrate and take out the hider.

    My build also is a hunters fury build, and the shotgun is the scorpion .These really play into this event well. The scorpion will status effect the immune ones, and that is a big deal working in your favor. Because as you need to run across the battlefield to get to the hider, you can shoot each NPC just once or twice and it will at least make them stop shooting.

    And the HF and Scorpion really shine once you get one of the guardians down, because once you get that buff you are going to blast through the rest of them. Because more than likely, you will be in good position to really "ride" the special talents of HF and scorpion. Between the hunter's fury "daze" combined with the scorpion's status effects, you can usually clear the entire battlefield really quick because they are frozen by the status effects..... and since they explode on kill you also have that.

    It appears that once you get the special buff that this event gives you for taking out a guardian, as long as that is active you can take down protected ones.

    It also feels like they did reduce the damage and modify the behaviors of NPCs somewhat. I say that because even with my build, I shouldn't be able to just run and gun and stand out in the open and not die.

    It also appears they increased the number of patrols in the open world, etc, increased the random spawn rate, etc. Of course, that also means there is going to be an increase in overlap. If you aren't fan of the event, it is going to be a nightmare. But if you like it, it can be great fun.

    Oh, and there is a solo penalty. LOL. Those that play in a group probably already noticed that you get the buff when one of your group members takes out a guardian. This makes group play for this event very fun, but if you play solo -- well -- you get screed again. LOL.

    Yes, I do both, and yes on heroic, not normal, not hard, etc.
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  6. #6
    Originally Posted by tcarlisle2012 Go to original post
    From my perspective, this is another global event that -- once you adapt your play style capitalize on the events strengths AND if you have a build that compliments it -- it does drastically lower the time it takes to run missions, etc. and it is "fun". But, if you don't adapt your play style, or your build does not compliment it and you aren't in the mood to change either of those things, it isn't fun at all.

    ...

    Yes, I do both, and yes on heroic, not normal, not hard, etc.
    All true, and I agree to some point, but while I admittedly did start with a commentary on the GE in general, my primary concern was the inconsistency with which Guardians appear, or link to far-away hostiles, etc. I don't recall it being this buggy last time around, but not sure I am remembering it clearly.

    Having said that, when it is working my preferred build (for most Challenges - not all) is my Bulwark. Mine is a little unique in that I have a lot of headshot damage built in, and my primary weapon is a sniper rifle (White Death). This works extremely well when encountering a group: I sneak up and snipe the Guardian in the head, then run in, throw up my shield and start pounding away on the rest with my Liberty pistol.

    This setup also works for the melee challenges, though I'll obviously have to switch for the "burn" ones, etc.
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  7. #7
    L3AND80's Avatar Member
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    I liked the Guardian, despite not being my first favorite GE (Reanimated) or second (Golden Bullet), it is the third, because apart from my two favorites, this one really is a challenge, but I share the same idea that some guardians are getting too covered or there are absurd distances from their group, it is true that there is the melee attack that takes away their protection, but the problem is that while we are taking away the protection of a runner, there are several other NPCs shooting while their guardian it is very far away, hidden, I think there should be a distance limitation between the guardian and the protected ones, who in case they got too far away (or the guardian stayed asleep in the cover), they would lose their protection.

    Another trouble for me is the fact that if you kill the guardian and almost everyone in your group, those who are left take the invulnerability of the new guardian who appears, I also didn't like it, I think the guardian should only protect his team.

    Playing with sniper build (long distance), is a great challenge, even with these "problems" mentioned, now playing with another build, where you have to stay at short or medium distance from the NPCs is no longer so fun... depending on the case can be quite frustrating.
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  8. #8
    I'm having a decent time with this GE. Using a PFE Crit build and it's holding up well on Heroic difficulty. You definitely need to take a sec to plot the best route to get to the guardian. Then it's fun to mow down the crowd. And as someone else mentioned...you can use the melee attack to take down the protection on an NPC. I didn't enjoy the last one as much as the re-animation was more of a nuisance than something that changed the way you played the game. And like someone said...it's just about adapting to the changing conditions of the event.
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  9. #9
    CategoryTheory's Avatar Senior Member
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    Yeah, I'm rather liking the extra bit of difficulty it adds to Heroic missions. A friend and I just completed Pentagon and DARPA on Heroic with Guardians and all five directives enabled, and the last battle of DARPA was a pleasant bit of work, especially with some of the guardians being snipers who hang at the back. We did have a few wipes before we got it, mostly due to my partner not knowing the battlefield very well; one particularly fun one was when we looked up to find the named boss had wandered over to our end of the field while he was under Guardian protection. That obviously did not go very well for us.

    We did it with fairly builds heavy on the skill damage boosts (gear, In Sync, Combined Arms, Spotter) and turret/drone, except for the Pentagon server room where we used turret/hive.
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  10. #10
    CategoryTheory's Avatar Senior Member
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    Originally Posted by tcarlisle2012 Go to original post
    That said, there is an RNG element which can make or break each encounter..... and that is: which archetype is picked to be the guardians.
    Well, RNG elements affect even regular encounters without a global event enabled. Less dramatic might be certain selections of enemies (e.g., three elites versus a dozen lower-level enemies in a particular battle of a mission), which still can favour different loadouts and play styles, but the biggest one that comes to my mind is the arrival of extra groups of enemies in open-world encounters. I was recently trying to run through a bunch of Heroic checkpoints, and I ended up dialing my world back to Challenging because, though the Heroic CPs alone were no problem, the regular arrival of a resource convoy or whatever was causing me a fair amount of difficulty that, while sometimes fun, I really didn't want to deal with at that particular time.

    If the archetype is a type that rushes or assaults, that is fine. But if the archetype is a hider, like the black tusk minitank operator or hyena car bomb lady, that can make it monumentally harder and a lot less "fun". Of course, it is even worse if a high damage tank type is "protected" by a guardian that is a hider.
    Yup. But for me that is part of the joy of the event. (Fun is in the eye of the beholder.) It's not like they haven't provided ways to help deal with this: you don't even need to touch a guardian to kill a guarded enemy.

    This is where build and play style are going to come into play.
    Yes, this is one of the things I find annoying about events: they often seem to to heavily favour certain loadouts and play styles over others. I don't see any good solution to this problem, at least not any that don't involve large levels of game design work that I would rather see go into having more different events. So I just change up my play style as needed. (Once this event is done, it will be nice to switch from turret/drone back to an all-red loadout for a while.)

    Thanks for the tips on the Hunter's Fury approach to this; I'll have to try that out next time the event comes around.

    It appears that once you get the special buff that this event gives you for taking out a guardian, as long as that is active you can take down protected ones.
    I had not noticed that! Are you sure you're not seeing just the effect of having removed protection? I have noticed that unprotected enemies seem to be able to pick up protection again when a new Guardian appears; could you be confusing it with that?

    Oh, and there is a solo penalty. LOL.
    Heh, yeah. I am at this point used to the solo penalty in a lot of places. It's hard to see how that could really be fixed well, given things like the inherent advantage of more people presenting separate targets, especially against bosses such as the quad-copter at the end of Pentagon.
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