The Division 2 – Page 3

Reevaluating Siege Breaker

March 19, 2019 by Belghast

Some time back in the land before the 1.0.3 patch seemingly screwed up my legendary drop rates… I picked up this weapon the Siege Breaker. I had mostly ignored it given that sniper rifles are not exactly my jam, but them noticed the perk. Three shots in a hit streak causes it to freeze the target. Now this only works if the shields are down, but unlike a lot of the other abilities does not require you to hit a weak point. This means you can do some freaking awesome crowd control tricks with this weapon, especially on shutting down cannons and turrets that are way the hell across the map from your current position. It does little unfortunately to most of the sniper types given that they are highly shielded. Even with knowing this I still didn’t really use it much because once again… I am not a big fan of sniper rifles.

Then in my travels I stumbled across a suggested Ranger build for easing into Grand Master 2 and given that I was feeling less than effective there I opted to give it a shot. First off the build in truth is a tweak of the sort of build I was already going through which relied on the double detonators of Recurring Vengeance and Last Argument that I have already written about before. Essentially this means you have to prime the target through other means, or in this case with either melee or siege breaker. Other than Siege Breaker it relies on Divine Vengeance that also seems to have a small chance of catching the mob on fire and priming them as well. Divine Vengeance has the interesting perk of causing a large fire explosion every time you land three weak shots in a row… and since this fires four round bursts it is pretty easy to get a proc pending you can dial in on a weak point. What I did not realize is that these explosions seem to have a staggering effect and do a somewhat effective job of secondary crowd control and even have a chance of knocking flyers out of the air.

As far as components go the build relies on a bunch of them that either increase survival, boost damage or cause you to get your combo faster… and quite frankly that last one is greatly increased by Last Argument that can fill half a combo bar if you get a really good multi target combo off. The goal is to always be able to combo something, and when in doubt use Divine Vengeance to mop up the little trash mobs along the way. So far it seems to be working extremely well and I feel way more comfortable roaming around in freeplay and doing GM2 strongholds. That said I didn’t have any luck last night with the drops since I firmly believe my account is now cursed post 1.0.3 seeing as I had been getting pretty much one Legendary a night up until the drop of that patch, and have gotten exactly one since. I hope they come up with a more permanent and generous solution in the near future, but I am booned to finally have a build that I am comfortable doing solo content with. I also need to hook up with Weiward at some point and do group content since we are both largely in the same position of just needing to farm a ton of legendaries.

At some point the very needy Kenzie the cat wanted to snuggle so I went back downstairs and chilled out on the sofa playing some Division 2. I wound up grouping up with other players for the first time and running a story mission with some randoms. I am not sure if that upscales based on the number of players that you have in a party, because if not… wow that was going to be a rough story mission. Unfortunately I seemingly clicked on the wrong mission and wound up running one two zones over instead of the one to open the zone I was organically planning on moving into. I am effectively finished with the first area and now will be moving into the second. For the seasoned players… is there a sort of check list somewhere in the game so I can see visually how far from finishing a zone I am?

At this point I am in need of both weapons… and the trusty shotgun seems to be peforming worse than it was previously. I forget who suggested that I would need to swap around level 8, but they nailed it. The only problem I am seeing is that replacement shotguns don’t have anywhere near the capacity of this one. The game seems to indicate that I might be able to upgrade the weapon… but I have a feeling that is more endgame stuff and not something I can realistically do right now given that I have no clue at all what the crafting component that I am missing is. All in all still enjoying myself but while Anthem is something I am still gearing up to play very seriously once I get a group of AggroChatters up to the appropriate level (or quite honestly Grace)… Division 2 is my solo jam.

Division 2 Impressions

March 18, 2019 by Belghast

This morning I am going to take a break from Anthem and talk about The Division 2 which released for me on Friday… but for other folks earlier in the week. I still played a significant amount of Anthem including some running around with a large group of people on Saturday, but until the drop rates are fixed to reasonable levels I am probably going to be tapering off my time played to stave frustration. At this point I am up to 192 hours played of Anthem… and by contrast I am sitting at roughly 6 hours of time played in Division 2 so far. Largely I am approaching the game as a much more single player experience, and in the same manner I would one of the big Ubisoft open world titles like Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed.

Probably the biggest praise that I can give to Division 2 is that it is a game that has learned from its past without forgetting it. Division 2 feels like I am picking up where Division 1 left off, with all of the quality of life improvements that came towards the end of the patch cycle… and then this game takes that position and builds upon it. This was the problem with Destiny 2 in that it felt like we were losing more from Destiny 1 Year 3 than we were gaining in the process. Sure Destiny 2 turned out eventually to be a really great product but it took some time to get there because it had felt like they forgot all of the lessons learned along the way. Division 2 is cognizant of what came before and gives us effectively all of that product… with more features heaped on top of that.

One of the core problems I had with the original Division is that it was a game without hope. The setting was bleak and it felt like as a Division Agent I was doing very little to actually help those around me. Sure there were those occasional events where someone would run up on me and ask for food or water… but if I moved even in the slightest they would go running off. The citizens were scared of me… and for good reason… because I while I was attempting to help make things better… I was doing so by laying down a trail of dead bodies in my wake. I think the core problem with the narrative is that I was helping to try and prop up what was ultimately a dying vestige of the government… of control of the masses. Division was a game more or less about trying to salvage the status quo at all costs.

Division 2 on the other hand is something entirely different. The status quo died long ago and from the ashes new communities sprung up of survivors trying to hold things together and carve out some piece of this new world. The setting shifts from New York to the Washington D.C. where our nations former capitol lies in ruins… and what is left of the former government operates out of the husk of the White House. As such the story shifts from rebuilding the nation… to acting as a sheriff of the wild lands and helping these struggling communities gather resources that they need to survive and thrive. Similar to the first game as you finish missions your bases evolve… but this time around the results feel more tangible as new areas are added like this game room for the kids for example.

The game map is similar to the first game, but once again has evolved to include a bunch of new options. There is now the concept of a control point, and these take various forms… but are more or less outposts that have been overrun by whatever enemy faction is in a region. In the White House area and Downtown East this is controlled by the Hyenas… which are part street gang and part borderlands bandit psychos. In the above map everything that is a green flag is a control point that I have reclaimed and was previously held by the Hyenas, ans as a result there is a tangible feel to winning back an area because you start to see it improving. As you hold more control points it seems as though there are more frequent NPC foragers going out into the wilds to scavenge for resources. Additionally there is a whole mini game surrounding delivering food and water to these outposts for experience. The markers in Red on my map are of course control points that I have yet to liberate… and I am focusing on clearing 100% of this single map before I move on to other areas.

As I mentioned earlier… Division 1 was a game without hope… and I think Division 2 more than anything is a game with a lot of hope in it. You seem to no longer be as focused on fighting for the sake of a government, but instead roam around as a free entity helping everyone in your path. I am not very far along in the game but I am assuming each region is going to have one major settlement that you will be helping to reclaim the wastes. Ultimately I can see that they are trying to modify the tone of the game. The first game had some really awkward feelings associating with it… as you spent much of your time gunning down people trying to survive. Sure there were factions that felt good to take down… like the Cleaners or the Last Man Battalion that were just fucked up ideologically. You know I will even lump the Rikers into that group with their public executions of JTF agents… but the Rioters… they felt real bad to be taking out given that they were just doing exactly what you were doing and trying to survive. So far the Hyenas do not feel like taking out Rioters, because they do feel like more of a twisted and cohesive threat given that they are taking on the role of bandits in Fallout and attacking settlements.

While I am again only about six hours into the game, I am enjoying it far more than I did the first one. I also feel like they have done a lot to fix some of the issues the original had with item drop stinginess. I sat at level 26 for the better part of a year and a half because I felt like my weapons were ineffective… and I didn’t have the cash or crafting resources to make anything better. I came back towards the end of the game and found that drop rates were greatly improved and actually provided pieces of gear that were useful. Once again this game seems to have learned that lesson because I am swimming in loot right now. It really seems to be rewarding me for exploring every nook and cranny of a zone as I am constantly coming across abandoned gun cases and such.

Essentially where I am now… is I will be poking my head into Anthem and keeping tabs on that community in hopes that we see a future patch where the loot is truly improved for everyone… not just the folks doing GM2 and GM3. I will also be hanging out with my friends whenever they are free to be playing Anthem as well. In those solo periods though, I am going to ease back on the throttle and spend some more time exploring the DC area in Division 2. I realize it is too soon to really give a proper review… but in every way I am seeing it is a worthy successor.

Challenges and Division

March 15, 2019 by Belghast

Last night unsurprisingly I spent most of the night playing Anthem, and noticed that the lighting in the launch bay is really rather good. They should add a photo mode functionality in here so you could get good shots of your javelin for all the fashionlancers out there. I also spent a good deal of the night hanging out with friends on voice, even though we weren’t actually doing the same things. One more friend made it through the final quest in the main story, so looking forward to maybe just maybe having a group that will be ready for shenanigans soon. In the meantime I have been working on various weapon achievements or challenges as the game calls them. I finished up the two weapons that I had related to Light Machine Gun and made an attempt to start on Machine Pistol… but I just do not think that weapon is as good as it should be. Since it has such a high rate of fire and such a relatively low operating time… it should be dealing a lot more damage than it actually is. I am taking this queue off of how SMGs felt in The Division where they were an up close melt machine.

I am slowly working on the Challenge of Strength after wrapping up the Challenge of Valor, and quite honestly… it seems like it is going to be relatively easy to complete. Valor required you do complete certain objectives… and Strength is just “Kill a Bunch of Stuff that you are already killing a bunch of anyway”. Sure it might force me to vary up which activities I do, but just by running contracts and Quickplay you encounter a lot of the above. The 200 legendary kills is going to be the slowest bit, and as I checked at the end of the night… I feel like the Elite kills step is going to come the quickest by far. The only problem I have with these and the whole gain a ton of faction quest… is that they are not terribly interesting or interactive. In both cases they end up just being “play many hours of this game”. I am hoping with future content drops that we get some more interested long tailed quests. It sounds as thought my friends will be around quite a bit this weekend so as such I am going to try and make myself available to run Strongholds and such. However I will bow out if we have four given that I outgear the lower tier content and I don’t want the experience to feel like getting carried.

On the other things to do front… I was in The Division 2 just long enough this morning to create my character and run through the intro tutorial. Division traditionally has not been my jam but I am still interested in playing through this as a largely single player experience. I didn’t do a lot of grouping last time around… and maybe that was what harmed my overall adoption rate of the game? We will see… I have a handful of friends on my UPlay list but if you want to add me I am BelghastStern there. Essentially if a service already has a Belghast… which is weird because I thought I invented the name… I go with BelghastStern. For years I was the only Belghast on WoWhead… and then a handful more showed up. I am happy enough with my character, thought I wish there was a clean face option… I am not big on military fantasy as a whole and as such smudge sticking your face is not really my jam. I am also sorta disappointed that we could not pick two sleeves in the tattoo options but whatever. All in all I am cool with this being my avatar going forward… I strayed away from my traditional black hair and went with dark maroon because I thought it looked cool.

The Will of the Moon

February 11, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend was largely about me trying to recuperate from whatever crud I had on Friday. I’m feeling better as a whole but still not feeling 100%. I’ve referred to this weekend as a name brand beta, because when a company throws a special test that most of the world seems to be invited to it definitely comes off as more marketing ploy than actual test of the game infrastructure. Overall the game performed flawlessly other than an apparent known memory leak bug, that I never quite encountered because I didn’t play longer than the requisite two or three hours that it takes to encounter it. The missions that I ran were rather enjoyable, and I fully expect to at a minimum play through the story content and unlock all of that. I make no guarantees about how long it will take me given that it took me a good two years before I reached maximum level in the original game.

I still question how well the game fits my play style, but at the moment I am looking at it for a purely single player experience given that I know going into it that none of the other AggroChat crew will be playing it. They all for the most part bounced off of the original Division, and primarily for the bleak story beats. I think the fact that we were effectively working for the various communities that we discover makes the flow of the story feel better. However as Kodra pointed out on the podcast, it does leave us a question of why exactly we are still an agent if there is no organizational structure left? I mostly view that trope as the lone lawman in the wild frontier sort of approach. I will say the game improved massively after I turned off the HDR, given that I was only able to SEE the HDR effect upstairs in my office and not while playing remotely through parsec… and as such it made everything extremely washed out and hard to pick out details.

The game I spent the majority of Saturday playing was Assassin’s Creed Origins and I have reached a point where I am staring down the barrel of the ending. However I am extremely frustrated by what appears to be the ending that is unfolding in front of me. Now I have said for some time that my opinion is that when this game was originally planned the ultimately design was that you could play it as Bayek or as Aya since the two characters at least on some level are interchangeable and have the same reasons for engaging in the main story plot. For sake of budget I assume they cut one character so that they would not have to animate two copies of everything, but the problem with this is… that every time you are forced to play Aya it is like stepping foot into a level one character.

What I mean by that is through the course of the game you make a lot of stylistic decisions about what weapons you want to use and what talent points to sink into. Then each time you are throw into playing Aya you are forced to return back to the character that lacks the ability to customize anything. So spoilers time… but I just went through a sequence where it appears that I am saying goodbye to my character Bayek… aka the one that I have spent the last 40 levels customizing to be exactly the way I want him to be… and being forced to do the ending of the game with Aya the level 1 blank slate. This makes me really not want to do any of the ending and just call it good enough… returning to playing through the fun part of the game which is doing random quests out in the world. Maybe this isn’t exactly what is about to happen… but it certainly seems like I am just about to be forced into beating the game as a proxy. Please note… I like Aya as a character and would have been fine playing her… if I could actually control what sort of gear and talents she had.

Lastly I spent some time playing Final Fantasy XIV this weekend and accomplished two things. Firstly I managed to get my Blue Mage to 50… which means I now need to find a party of blue mages to go collect the rest of the spells I have available to me given that everything else seems to come from a dungeon or trial. I spent the podcast grinding out mobs in Northern Thanalan and managed to push across the line solo. I also managed to get through The Burn which served as a bit of a roadblock since the final boss of that dungeon appears to be a PUG destroyer. I’ve now moved the quest line along to where I am failing miserably at a fight that is about four times longer than it really needs to be. Actually I have only failed it the one time and it was mostly because I didn’t catch on what was going on fast enough. I opted to play through the mission as a warrior instead of a samurai, but that also meant that I was not prepared for a burn phase, because I assumed I was simply trying to out survive the encounter.

I will likely poke my head back in again tonight and give it another shot. I think I am probably nearing the bridge between 4.4 and 4.5 and as such getting closer and closer to being able to understand what the hell is going on.