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Played this on a multiplayer server with some friends and here's some general things we seemed to notice overall that might need adjustment still.

Sorry if its a bit long, tried to give a general point and explain the logic/reason behind it.

 

Loot Progression: Overall its been improved, but we did find some issues that ended up speeding us through progression faster than we did in A18, which is odd considering this was supposed to delay progression a bit more.

  • Certain recipes should have their drop rate/ability limited by gamestate.
    • Pretty quickly before we even had a workbench made a lot of us had stumbled upon the schematics for sniper rifles and other endgame weapons.
    • It quickly de-incentivized us from ever making tier 2 guns, because it was better for us to just get the ability to craft tier 5 equipment and hold onto the materials and make the endgame thing rather than make the in-between weapon, especially considering by the point we even had the materials we had found quality 5/6 versions of the T1 equipment; that with the extra mods in generally won out over T2 equipment that wasn't at least Q4.
  • Delay when crucibles can drop.
    • We found multiple crucibles in trash piles minutes into the game.
    • Mixed with the previous recipe issue we generally started into steel making the moment we had a forge. In previous versions the game tended to be pretty stingy with dropping that item or its related recipe.
  • Trash bins might need to have their loot weights checked.
    • There seems to be about a 80% chance for books to drop in those. Sometimes multiple. Its to the point trash bins are more likely to have books than bookshelves or the newly introduced book piles do.
    • We're barely into the game compared to our last A18 run and most of us have finished or are 1-2 books away from finishing several book collections, ending that general progression grind a lot sooner than before
  • Make the jump from T1 to T2 have a bit more impact.
    • Firstly most of us just used Q5/6 scrap or padded until we could just craft the Military or Steel.
      • This was because by the time we had a workbench the game was dropping T6 of those pretty frequently and the mod slots became far more important again.
    • Quality 5 or 6 items with mods even with most tools seem to overshadow Quality 1-3 versions of T2 equipment.
      • Stone sledge is probably the worst as the stone version of that weapon has much faster animations and less stamina usage per swing than their iron and steel counterparts. Mix that with the mild stat difference and you tend to hold onto those until at least Quality 4 drops.
    • The fact that most T2 recipes are unlocked now when you can craft Q5 versions of equipment also generally means crafting a Q5 or lower version of T1 equipment feels like a waste; and if you have the recipe already for the T3 equipment then you were likely just waiting for the ability to craft Q5 equipment and will still just skip right over.
      • Maybe add in some sort of system where quality is determined by some other method so the ability to craft quality 5 T1s doesn't mean you can also craft quality 5 T2s and T3s.
  • Adjust how modding works between tiers.
    • Right now mods feel more important than the tier item. Melee weapons are the worst for this as you tend to have things like burning shaft, weighted head and so on that can have a decent impact on the duration or safety in a fight. So the more mods you can stack generally the better.
      • This means going from even Q4 to a Q1 of a higher tier can have a pretty drastic impact on your gameplay where the next tier needs to have a fairly large points advantage to make losing those mod slots worthwhile.
    • It might make sense to make lower tier weapons have less mod slots overall, or make the bonus you get for installing mods greater for installing in the later weapons.
    • changing this might incentivize a bit more to make non Q5 T2 equipment instead of just hanging onto all our Q5/6 T1 equipment until we have the materials for the T3 variants.
  • Possibly add some sort of system to eventually craft Q6 items.
    • It seems like more focus had been shifted to crafting, but the quality 6 items still throw a wrench in this. Because if you happen to RNG your way into one either early or at all; you're never going to craft anything then (as even with random stats the extra mod slot usually makes up for it).
    • Possibly make a super rare drop that adds the capability or a rare item that allows upgrading something to that. It still has that RNG chance for things, but right now it seems silly that i can walk around in Q6 of a bunch of equipment i haven't invested into their governing attribute or perk yet for; because i have no reason to craft them.

 

General Balance: Generally ok, but i think the underlying system changes had untended consequences and turned strength into the one-stop-shop stat.

  • Passive hunger depletion needs to be reduced. - Apparently i've been informed this doens't occur in single player, so it could be a bug.
    • Losing 1/3 of my bar while just standing still waiting for a short couple minute craft to finish is insane.
    • The passive rate also can't be adjusted with any perks making the stamina or food preservation perks not help the overall hunger situation.
    • Its bad enough that i barely notice the difference between a day of active mining and just how starving i am driving around or just walking around my base queuing up crafts.
  • Water should probably match the food depletion somewhat.
    • If they want us to be constantly chugging for that efficient digestion buff at least make it so I'm not constantly over my max water then. Because even in a desert environment in poor clothing I'm scarfing food constantly, and only drinking because i want to refresh that buff.
  • Strength feels like the wonder-stat.
    • Sexual Tyrannosaurus does more for food preservation by reducing stamina costs than iron gut does; a perk that its entire purpose is to do that; instead the secondary benefit of the strength perk does it better.
    • Shotguns seem to have the best ranged weapon support.
      • You early on have blunderbuss which is governed by the shotgun perk. Which drops very early and plentiful.
        • This means your shotgun build can start working almost immediately. While other weapons will need to wait until their weapons begin to drop before they either switch off of melee, bows, or a blunderbuss.
          • Made worse by the fact really early on i had accidentally found tons of blunderbuss ammo by accident. While people had to go out of their way to find materials to make arrows to do anything with a bow.
      • Shotguns  have the most unique gun-mods that only they can use.
        • With the choke, and the duckbill you generally can customize your game-play a decent amount.
      • This is less of a design fault and more of a coincidence but blood moons generally make shotguns more preferable (minus maybe for the demolition zombies); while you need to generally go out of your way to design your base to have any chance of taking advantage of long range things like rifles.
    • Club seems to be the best supported melee weapon.
      • The weapon has the most unique mods for it and it alone.
        • Spears and daggers share a lot of mods. Sledges and stun batons have nothing unique to them (and stun batons lost some mods this time around).
      • It has about the same knock-back potential as a sledge, but less stamina consumption; and even works with flurry of blows. And the damage seems to be slightly behind the sledge but once again not enough to matter compared to the generally equal knock-back and less stamina.
    • Heavy armor got moved here also reducing a decent amount of reason going into fortitude now.
    • Strength also governs the cooking skill and material gathering.
      • this means with the increased focus on hunger and cooking you're going to want strength in some capacity.
      • and its difficult to avoid getting the construction perks because material gathering is a pretty important aspect that you tend to not be able to ignore.
      • Possibly these skills could be moved to some sort of universal tree because if a skill is crucial to have and the game wants to force you to have it, then it probably shouldn't be tied to a stat like this, because it punishes you for trying to build into a different stat/tree.
  • Fort is a lot weaker now.
    • Heavy armor is moved to strength.
    • Huntsman doesn't matter that much.
      • Bone is already pretty plentiful.
      • You can't possibly use up all the leather you end up with in this game by accident already.
      • And meat doesn't even go into the major foods.
        • The best recipes all require canned goods and maybe corn/mushrooms.
    • Well insulated barely matters.
      • You are either going to live in the non-extreme environments, or when you are in those environments you already have the clothing to generally shrug off the environment. Or bare minimum putting a single point into this mixed with clothing is going to generally get you by in most situations, making further investment a waste.
      • Humorously pack mule from strength also reduces this perk's usefulness as insulation or cooling weaves can be put in, and pack mule can remove the need for all the pocket mods you'd normally stack.
    • Healing factor isn't worth it anymore.
      • The health regen was nice before, but generally getting up to "animal" tier was important because passive max health regen was pretty important.
        • Now abrasions healing faster barely matters; and you eat enough food now to make the normal health regen not a problem.
          • This is partially because before you'd almost always lose max health, while generally unless I'm absolutely overrun I almost never get the new status ailments so i never see my max health down (or if its not long enough to matter).
    • Iron gut is horrible now.
      • It does less than sexual tyrannosaurus for preserving food.
      • The reduction in dysentery chance never comes up unless you're eating the 2 specifically bad foods of moldy bread or sham sandwich, that now don't give nearly as much food, but the health loss from them matters more than the dysentery chance. Eating any other food has no chance for this so this part of the perk is just wasted.
    • Rule 1 cardio needs to be reworked.
      • It should work like other perks and reduce stamina loss, instead of boosting stamina regen. Because you're still losing stamina and shredding your hunger meter. This just lets you sprint ever so slightly longer.
  • Int tree needs some more attention.
    • While the update added some more, it feels like a bit of a jumbled mess right now.
    • Stun batons could use a bit more adjustment.
      • The tech junkie book is primarily around turrets while a couple of stun baton specific perks. It would make more sense to have a separate book for turrets and stun batons allowing more stun baton focus.
    • The tree has no dedicated ranged weapon beyond turrets.
      • Robotic sledges replaced junk turrets as the early game weapon.
        • This weapon is unique enough you could probably just make a separate skill tree around these rather than lumping them in with normal turrets. There could be some fun building specifically around these.
      • Robotic Turrets and later Robotic SMGs aren't bad, but they aren't really meant to be used as ranged weapons; they're primarily built for use as turrets.
        • I do feel the turret perk is a bit underwhelming. The extra activation range barely matters, and the big capstone of having 2 at once doesn't matter much as most turrets won't last an entire blood moon so you generally put down multiple just so when one runs out of ammo the next will activate and begin firing. And in multiplayer you just have each person put down one if you want more active because everyone can have one.
      • I feel some sort of int-only mod system could be made where they either get extra bonuses for mods, or special mods that they can put onto weapons that give some int-based bonuses to them; it would allow them more synergy with other trees. Or add a unique weapon for the tree; right now things just feel very lumped together in there.
    • Advanced Engineering is more of an anti-bad-luck perk as the general benefit from it is minor and you'll find a lot of the schematics doing non-intelligence.
    • Grease monkey should give some sort of perk to actually driving the vehicles, because we end up passively learning the schematics anyways, and crafting them slightly cheaper for massive investment isn't worth it.
    • The influence perks aren't bad, but aren't great; best of course being Charismatic Nature, but obviously is only useful if you're in multiplayer.
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  • 2 weeks later...

I can see some of your points but it seems you're being mostly negative and nit picking for the most part.

 

Most of your feedback is what should be considered improvements. If you want some attention then look/report things that are obvious bugs.

 

I too have looked for the infamous "improvements" category with no success. Tried doing a bug report but I guess the pictures have to be uploaded to Pastebin, I created an account but it's more confusing than Autocad to me (I can do autocad btw). Paste what here? Text? I just want to upload a damn picture which trying multiple copy/paste/insert options did @%$*#!.

 

Anyhow, I digress, lots of thought definitely went into your post, some great improvements, some short sighted observations, some inexperienced ideas (in life, not the game, they would just be unrealistic to most people over 40).

 

Honestly, could create tons of perk trees and make them easy to get (kill a dog, kill a wolf, kill a boar, kill a chicken). I honestly hate that TFP reduced the number of levels and skill points for various perks.

 

Well, at least your post finally got a response.

 

Try enjoying the game instead of looking at what you would like changed.

 

Blaster

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Nothing is really hurt by me making these. This was the collective ideas/thoughts i had discussed with about 3 others on just things we noticed that got changed and what we thought about them.

 

Heck some of these points aren't even valid anymore. Hunger was fixed as apparently that was a bug, so some of those points aren't as valid; and they moved a number of things to the loot tier list meaning my point about finding a sniper rifle 3 seconds into a game was also out the window; restoring a general sense of progression.

Shotguns got somewhat of a nerf so they might not be the super weapon anymore either.

 

Really we just kinda included whatever, because the nitpicks are probably the most easily changed things, major rebalance requests are alot less reasonable to throw into a single patch.

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Nice job.
In general, I dislike the perk trees. I don't think they're totally horrible. I mean, obviously I'm gonna like any way I can improve my character. A lot of perks affect things like books should... and there are some book rewards that feel like they should be perks. Even back in LBD days, the perks got really messy and I feel like it's almost to that point again.
 
I wouldn't mind if they scrapped the perks and made everything books... then perk points are just used to simply build up your character's base attributes. This lets players figure out on their own which base attributes are going to maximize the weapon class(es) they choose.
 
Things like pack mule are weird. Slots should just unlock as I build strength. It's kinda weird to max out strength and still get encumbered because of some other factor that I don't quite understand, and of which needs even more points put into.

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I get that Atomic, some perks do seem to be in the wrong tree. Of course shoving a 4x4 in my backpack and running across a map isn't so realistic either but I see the developers intentions (road to hell).

 

Any idea where the so called "improvements" category is on the forum? Have plenty of ideas but from looking at "Bug" threads anything that would be considered an improvement is simply ignored and closed with the repose of "this is not the place for improvements".

 

Blaster

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