Anthem Archives - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Loot Problems

March 11, 2019 by Belghast

Shocking to no one I spent the majority of my weekend playing Anthem again. It was a bizarre weekend for those of us who spent both Friday night and Saturday playing because some things happened. Firstly the the 1.0.3 patch that we were expecting to land on the 12th launched a bit early on the 9th around 7 am, meaning when I woke up for the day I had a significant patch to download. However Friday night… they did the thing where they accidentally set the loot drops too high and we were getting Masterworks left and right. Once again the community thought this was intentional… because ultimately it is what we have been clamoring for all this time. However with the launch of the patch it was rolled back… and it has been a bit hard to separate the good of the patch with the bad of having loot nerfed again.

Anthem has a loot problem, namely that it is way too stingy with Masterworks but more importantly too stingy with Legendaries. All told I have gotten 4 Legendary drops in what is now 164 hours worth of play time. Dividing that out it is me seeing a Legendary drop every 41 hours of play time. There are folks out there who have racked up similar hours and have yet to see a single one. It was the futile hope of the player base that when we removed Whites and Greens from dropping in post 30 content… that it would have a positive effect of skewing the number of Masterworks and Legendaries we would get. However as some testing has shown… essentially every green and white drop was replaced by a purple… which is awesome if you are just getting started but more disenchant fodder once you enter the hunt for Orange and Lime (that’s what I am deciding to call legendary green). There is an interesting post that was up on the reddit over the weekend… where a player farmed 200 drops with +95 luck before and after the patch, linking to the original thread but going to post the data here for reference.

Pre-Patch Numbers

Common: 17 items at 8.5%
Uncommon: 24 items at 12%
Rare: 34 items at 17%
Epic: 102 items at 51%
Masterwork: 21 items at 10.5%
Legendary: 2 items at 1%

Post-Patch Numbers

Rare: 28 items at 14%
Epic: 163 items at 81.5%
Masterwork: 7 items at 3.5%
Legendary: 2 items at 1%

The original poster went to the trouble of documenting all of their loot with screenshots, but accounting for randomness it does appear that the Common and Uncommon slots are now just Epic items, which again is great for people getting a start in the game but bad for anyone who has collected a set of epic gear which now happens frighteningly fast under the current loot environment.

All of that said… I am still enjoying myself and have managed to cobble together gear for three different javelins at this point. I will probably be starting on the Storm at some point soon once I have spent a bit more time fine tuning the Interceptor. Right now I have something that I would call a proper build on both the Ranger and the Colossus, and I will be farming content until I reach that point on the Interceptor as well. How I am getting there… is because I am exploiting the fact that Strongholds drop a guaranteed ability and Legendary contracts drop a guaranteed component. While I only have three legendary contracts available to me each day, it seems that Quickplay on Grandmaster 1 difficulty tends to place you into a Legendary Contract more often than not… and doing this nets you a guaranteed component as well. Stronghold Quickplay similarly nets you a guaranteed ability drop… however in my experience this is bugged out the vast majority of the time and not really worth your effort.

Now I realize there are a lot of players out there that have been having issues with the game nonstop since release. However for the most part I had not… until this weekend when I started heavily relying on Quickplay. That functionality seems to be far more buggy than the rest of the game, and I am wondering if the majority of the issues that players have been encountering have revolved around trying to do this abbreviated path to loot. Normal Quickplay seemed to stick me in far fewer bugged out instances than it did before the patch, however when something went wrong… it went REALLY wrong often times causing me to have to either go through a loop of being bounced back to the loading screen like the above screenshot… or having to hard kill the client. Starting Missions, Contracts, Strongholds and Freeplay myself all resulted in predictably smooth gameplay… however any time I dared to mess with Quickplay I was effectively playing with fire.

Another byproduct of the patch is that overall Javelin power feels like it has increased, and a side effect of that is that none of the lower difficulty ranks seem to be anywhere near as populated as they were. Thalen reported issues getting full groups on normal difficulty as he was playing through the story and leveling, and I personally experienced a challenge getting groups at hard difficulty when I was attempting to finish getting the epics on my Interceptor. So one of two things has happened… either the average player has released that they can now crush Grandmaster 1 thanks to the power scaling, or more likely a lot of players have just stopped messing with the game out of frustration over various issues. Neither case is great for the game as a whole because it makes it harder and harder to onboard a supply of new players. Grace will be starting up this week and I will be curious to see how that experience is as a new player and whether or not the matchmaking is as quick as it was for the rest of us that started out. Side note since I have done this pretty much every week, throwing out a screenshot of the Alliance contribution screen… I have yet to hit the hard cap for the week.

One final screenshot of note… since I played a bit of Warframe this weekend… I am pretty sure these two chests in the hanger area are a nod to that game. Anyone has played much Warframe will notice that they have a lot of lockers scattered throughout the ships that look suspiciously similar to these. Also oddly enough playing a lot of Anthem has somehow made Warframe feel more manageable? I was not nearly as motion sick playing it yesterday as I have been in the past, and the way too zoomed in perspective did not feel anywhere near as bad as it had after playing the whirling ball of death that is the Interceptor. I still greatly prefer Anthem, but I have a feeling I could probably start to finally delve into Warframe if I so choose.

So where we are left is that Anthem needs to make a lot of changes quickly. Chad Robertson the Head of Live Services chimed in over on twitter with some comments to this whole situation. It spans several tweets so quoting rather than just pasting the thread for ease of consumption.

We appreciate all the feedback from the community on the game. We love the passion and share it. We’re not yet fully happy with the game’s loot behavior either. One of the downsides of moving so fast to improve is that we’re making changes to complex loot systems in several areas and it’s then harder to know how it’s performing. In the next few months, we’re expecting to make significant changes, but we’re starting with some incremental ones so we can better navigate that evolution. Our goal is to ensure the best possible player experience.

So while I appreciate this comment, because they are actually saying words in reference to problems… which is a step above a lot of studios out there. The biggest problem that I have with this comment is the fact that he mentions the time frame of “the next few months”. I am not entirely certain that they have months… and more likely have weeks to sort this out before players simply give up and file this game in the bin of “check back for year two” like so many of us did with Destiny. We already see the signs in matchmaking of players dropping out of the system, which is a bad sign. Additionally the temperature of the Reddit has shifted drastically over the last few days, which was a different situation than the inflammatory YouTube community… they were positive and hopeful and I think were pinning their hopes on the patch from March 12th fixing a lot of the major issues… namely with loot drops. That however has drastically shifted to a community demanding fixes now, because Patch 1.0.3 did not deliver the solace they were hoping for. While I am still playing the hell out of this game… I cannot say they are necessarily wrong in their frustrations.

There have been two situations where supposedly accidental loot changes have “fixed” the game. In both times the game felt so much better because it didn’t feel bad when you got another Masterwork with crappy rolls, because you knew another one was right around the corner. The unbridled excitement of actually seeing a legendary drop, and knowing that this wasn’t a once in a career thing… made you care less about also getting crappy rolls on it too. Loot needs to flow like water Diablo 3 style so you can pick through the dross and cobble together something resembling a proper build. Nothing is more frustrating than getting a bunch of abilities you don’t care about… when you have a specific style of play that you enjoy on your character… but feel forced to use the Masterworks because the item level increase makes them just flat out superior to using a proper build. All of this felt less of the case when the loot was accidentally generous… and the players will not be satisfied until we get something resembling that state again.

Masterwork Colossus

March 8, 2019 by Belghast

Last night I managed to push through to Masterwork Colossus. It might not be the most optimal build but I was just mostly going for being able to experience what having a heavily armored Chonky Boi feels like. It is pretty good but all in all I still feel like it is really sluggish to play as. I need to spend a night running a bunch of strongholds in an attempt to get better abilities, because the currently batch I am using doesn’t really make sense even in the simplest of terms. However they are both orange and as a result I am using them… because based on my experience with the Ranger… it generally makes enough of a difference to make it worthwhile. I am deeply looking forward to the March 12th patch and seeing how the game feels after that because it sounds as though they are giving the weapons a little loving. My next goal in the queue is to start branching out and trying other weapon combinations, seeing as I have mostly just used a handful of weapons the entire time I have been playing and I have a vault full of interesting sounding Masterworks.

The truth is I did not have a terribly productive night seeing as I spent most of it trying to fight falling asleep. I am still coming down off being used to consuming three or more Energy Drinks a day… and as a result everything feels way harder than it should. I could have probably gone to sleep around 7 pm last night but my wife was not ready until around 9:30 so I managed to hold out until that point. I spent a lot of the night doing more passive things like watching YouTube than I actually did running content in Anthem. My hope is as we clear the weekend I will have distanced myself from the influence far enough that I will once again begin to feel like myself. The further into this I get… the more I realize how much it was actually needed. I am going through some of the basic signs of withdrawal… constant headaches, dizziness, muscle aches, alternating between feeling like I am freezing and feeling like I am burning up. I realize it is nothing like ACTUAL withdrawal but man it still sucks.

My hope is as we make it to the other end of the weekend that a lot of these symptoms will lessen. Yesterday however was pure hell to make it through, and there were several times that I contemplating going to the vending machine and just saying fuck it. So yeah that is my world right now and until I get on the other side of this I am probably not going to be doing a lot of thought provoking content. I hope you have an excellent Friday and an even better weekend. Tomorrow I get donuts… so there is at least that to look forward to.

Energy Saving Mode

March 7, 2019 by Belghast

I have no idea at all what I want to write about this morning. So for some back story I am struggling a bit to get my shit together right now. Unfortunately this condition is self imposed. While I no longer necessarily identify as Catholic, I still find myself doing some of the trappings of my upbringing… like my wife and I often go through the motions of giving up something for Lent which officially began yesterday with forehead smudge day… aka Ash Wednesday. Side note… there was a guy in legal who was completely on point with his smudge because he somehow got the priest to give him a Harry Potter lightning bolt. That is a tradition that I do not necessarily miss, because growing up as the only smudgehead in a baptist town… was not a joyful experience. However the concept of giving something up for the roughly month between the start of Lent and Easter is still a useful practice because it sort of helps me do things that I had been contemplating already.

For me personally… I gave up pop and energy drinks… the later being my real crutch that has lead me to my current state of stupor. I was drinking an excessive amount of them… often times I had one on the drive into work after having already consumed my morning cup of coffee. Then if I went out at lunch I would pick one up on the way back to the office. Then at night I would often times start the evening off with one as well. Three a day on average is a lot of that to take into your system… not to mention the actual monetary cost of it given that they are all pretty much $2.50 each (even though we bought flats of them at Sams to blunt the cost a bit). Yesterday I was doing okay for most of the day but hit a wall around 3 pm… then was completely out of it last night. This morning I am feeling groggy as hell, which is in part why I could not come up with anything meaningful to talk about this morning and dove deep into the source of my misery instead.

Right now the wife and I are both trying to do this thing, since she too consumed energy drinks… but in nowhere near the frequency. Most days it was still one of them and occasionally two of them. What we have ruled as “in bounds” are Coffee and Tea, so we can still have that first cup of coffee in the morning. Also any sort of additive to water is also in bounds like those little drink mix packets. Essentially the entire purpose was the exorcise the position Energy Drinks have held in my life and also to keep me from just falling back on Mountain Dew as a replacement by also banning pop. We will see how this goes but the end goal is to get off of them while doing Lent and then hopefully not return to them shortly after? I gave up Monster a few years back… but I rationalized that I was specifically giving up Monster… and not all Energy drinks… and just wound up leaning on the occasional Red Bull instead. This time around however I am trying not to give myself much wiggle room to simply follow the letter of the law rather the intent.

On the gaming front, I spent some time last night working on Chonky Boi and doing the Legendary Contracts. From them I managed to pull two different Masterwork Grenade Launchers that represented the last weapon type that I did not at least have one MW for. Sentinel’s Vengeance is the only one that I can really see myself using in the long run, as the other… Insult and Injury is a bounce type Grenade Launcher. Functionally how the one I like works is that the grenades stick to the target and upon detonation applies an Acid area effect priming the target seeing as the grenade appears to explode three times qualifying itself for a small hit streak in the process and proccing the perk. The one I don’t like bounces the grenade once and then explodes meaning that too often you hit the target with a grenade… it bounces off.. and then explodes in a way that doesn’t actually trigger damage. The core problem I have with heavy weapons right now is how cumbersome they are to reload, and as such I have swapped back to a more normal load-out.

The whole reload thing wouldn’t be so bad if you could reload while sprinting… because the second you hit that booster to get out of harms way it interrupts the reload animation which is maddening. Last night I also pulled a Masterwork Heavy Assault Launcher in the form of Black Powder which is far from ideal but I am using anyways because I like seeing orange rather than purple. It actually does a really good job of mopping up targets that didn’t die from a melee smash. I still feel like I cannot quite get the swing of Colossus, but I also am on this path that makes me not want to stop until I have filled every slot with a Masterwork. At some point I am sure I will be doing the same process on both the Storm and Interceptor… but in part I have been holding off on those for grouping with my friend Grace when she starts the game. I like the Storm and Interceptor far more than I do the Colossus so in theory this experience of gearing up my least favorite of the suits… has been interesting. I like the look of the Colossus and I want to like it as a whole… it just feels awkward and I cannot move in it the way I can with other frames and it feels bad. I mean I think that is the point, given that you are supposed to be this giant immoveable wall… but the way that shields have a cooldown makes it feel like I am left sometimes with no real way of dealing with incoming damage. In a traditional MMORPG… this character would have a healer backing them up and it would make it feel much better than it currently does.

Now however I need to get to work and try and survive another day caffeinated way less than I usually am.

Chonky Boi

March 6, 2019 by Belghast

Monday night after finishing a significant number of contracts and stronghold runs I opted to spend a little time on my Chonky Boi in Hard Mode normal contracts to start building out enough gear to make something functional. I’ve been spending a little time now that I have the Ranger in a good spot, working on the other javelins and Colossus seems to be the one I struggle the most with. What I expect is for it to be this unstoppable juggernaut… and what happens in practice is that I am constantly having to run away from the fight and find red chicklets on the ground to heal myself back up. In my hard mode travels however I came across one of the last “drops in any mode” Masterworks that I did not currently have… the Fist of Stral which is based on Cloudburst one of the two Autocannons that don’t require much in the way of spin up.

Also in my travels I picked up my second Legendary in the form of Glorious Result a Heavy Pistol. This is not exactly my jam but I spent a little time checking it out and playing with it. It is somewhat unique in that it fires two shot bursts and it feels a bit like using the Crimson Hand Cannon from Destiny 2. That was not really my moment of joy and neither is this weapon, however I do dig the fact that it reminds me of Ghostbusters with its “Scarbusters” paint job. This is largely going in the vault as more of a collectible than something I am actually going to use, which is a little disappointing for how few and far between Legendary drops are.

After running a bunch of regular contracts on Monday night I managed to cobble together something resembling a decent build and last night I opted to do my Legendary contracts as Colossus to start piecing together a reasonable assortment of components. I also had time to run one Stronghold as Colossus which was manageable but still as a whole the suit feels unwieldy, especially considered to the much more nimble Ranger that I am used to. Right now I am running the Fire Wall ability as primer and Siege Cannon as my detonator, and it seems to work for most things… and thankfully I managed to pick up a Masterwork Rubidium Furnace so I can continue with that build. That is the worst part about easing your way into Grandmaster 1 is having to abandon what was a build that felt good… and deal with whatever luck of the draw got you.

Overall for the night I got several components including my third Legendary drop… which I was sorta kicking myself a little bit that it happened while playing my alternate frame. The biggest thing I am noticing is that as I get better gear I seem to be getting more pips of armor… which means I can survive significantly more damage before I have to run away and find skittles on the ground to recuperate that health. Not having and over-shield is still fundamentally weird and feels not amazing… but I think I am starting to hit that break even point in Grandmaster where it largely feels the same as Hard mode used to.

I’ve not really talked about it much on the blog but I have been using a really cool website called Anthem Archive to look up various gear options. What I would really love for them to do is implement some sort of a profile system that allows us to either run a tray resident app that uploads our loadouts, or for Anthem itself to have some sort of an API that they can access to pull the same information. I also wish it would allow you to link to a specific item… so that I could have included links to each one of those components so you could find out what exactly they do. The site as a whole isn’t quite there yet… but it is the best that we have and I am thankful to have ANYTHING at this point. I however have been spoiled greatly by the utility that Destiny Item Manager provides for Destiny/Destiny 2.