Good Morning Friends. I normally put an exclamation point at the end of a sentence like that, but forgive me but I am not feeling terribly exuberant. I am not sure if I just slept poorly, or uncomfortably… or simply am generally sleep deprived but all I really want at this very moment is to crawl back into a warm bed and forget the world exists. Mondays being devoted to the Mixtape project… because alliteration… means that now Tuesdays are effectively my first real post of a given week. It is normally in that first post that I catch you up on whatever mischief was managed over the weekend. Probably the highlight is that I managed to ding World Tier 15 now allowing me to run all of the Hunts and Wanted quests at maximum level for theoretically maximum reward.
Or if you just want a more blown up transparent version I have that as well…
I’ve seen multiple versions of this scale, but they have all been exceptionally blurry representations so I decided to just go ahead and make my own version. There is an intentionality of overlap between World Tier and Challenge Tier which are effectively two competing end game systems. World tier will take you up through item level 42 and Challenge tier moves that onwards to 50 which is the current level cap for gear. When I first started attempting the expedition I steam rolled the first one and then got my butt handed to me in the second one I attempted, because it bumped me up to having to deal with level 34 encounters after completing that first one. I was not prepared and as a result I started walking up the World Tier system in an effort to gain gear and prepare for the stark difference in difficulty.
Since capping the World Tier, I have managed to get up to Challenge Tier 9 in the Expedition system. The problem that I have encountered as I go up in tier, the fights become significantly more frenetic. Additionally I have found out that not all expeditions are created equally. Chem Plant for example seems to be pretty easy, and Timeworn Spire on the other hand was 22 minutes of non-stop fighting to stay alive madness. There is a working theory that certain legendary gear is tied to completion of certain expeditions so I am trying to run them all just to make sure I have access to everything. There are reports of folks completing an expedition and then suddenly starting to see legendary weapons they have never encountered before in their loot pool. No clue if this is a real thing or not, because randomizers absolutely seem to get “stuck” on specific items sometimes.
Another thing that I have done is start the campaign over on my Technomancer. I’ve heard really good things about the infection tree for that class. I also wanted to experience what the game is like with a female voice actor, and I have to say if you have the option you might want to go down that route. The game seems significantly less bleak playing as the female character. Her delivery of lines is just more reasonable to what I would be expected in that situation. The male character seems pretty much aloof to the entire situation, and so far the female character seems to be more progressively perturbed by what they are experiencing around them. One massive negative about a replay however is that you don’t get to keep the mods that you have unlocked. Thankfully I had a few trash blues with decent mods on them in the stash allowing me to get a bit of a jump. I might start dumping trash in the bank so that I can deconstruct on my alt and get a boost in resources.
I am still enjoying myself, but I am finding it likely that I really need to try and pull together a group night since we all seem to be coming up against the same expeditions wall. They just end up so freaking stressful as a solo player, especially given that my build is about survival and not killing things quickly. I’ve seen several of us making similar comments and I think it might be fun to do a group play night, but timing is always the challenge. I realistically need to operation on either Central or East Coast times and a lot of the people that I interact with regularly are on West Coast time. Hopefully we can make something happen because I am really enjoying the game, but think it would be even more enjoyable with friends.
An interesting note for Outriders MP is that you get revives, even a self-revive, which is a huge benefit. The downside is the massive HP scaling at higher CT – for practical purposes it’s not possible to clear high CT without the character debuffs that massively boost damage output so more players is dependent on them having the right skills slotted.
I wrote a post about gearing for higher CT, but the gist of it is that you’re better off running a CT 2 lower than your max, finding the ideal items, then boosting them to the appropriate level. Legendaries are not inherently better than purples… which is sort of offset by the ability to swap mods.
Chem Plant is by far the easiest, and Boom Town feels the fastest (though that last boss has some nasty friends).