Anthem

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.

Good morning folks.  Shocking to no one I spent pretty much the entire weekend playing Anthem.  We had some winter weather come in and I became the Oklahoma version of “snowed in”.  Aka we could easily get out if we really needed to but the yard was indistinguishable from the streets and figured it just was not worth the hassle.  As a result we drew upon our heavy stores of meals and just stayed snuggled inside with the cats.  This meant that I spent a significant amount of time on the couch in my blanket cocoon playing Anthem remoted into my gaming machine upstairs via Parsec.  I am still shocked at just how damned well that works… but I have found a hitch in the set up.  It appears to be blocking voice chat either on the microphone transmission side or the key press side.  I need to sort this out, but for the time being it means if I want to do proper group activities I have to go upstairs.  Which means 99.9% of the time I am just pugging everything…  including Grand Master 1 Legendary Contracts and Strongholds…  which in truth is what I spent most of the weekend doing.

As of right now I have a Masterwork or better in every slot other than the support item.  I have no clue at all how one upgrades that and gets a Masterwork Muster Point, but I am hoping they add in a new type of activity that has a guaranteed drop for those.  For those that did not already know this…  if you do a Legendary Contract on Grand Master 1 or higher you get a guaranteed Masterwork Component at the end of the mission.  Similarly if you do a Stonghold on Grand Master 1 you get a guaranteed Masterwork Ability at the end, and in my experience you often get at least one additional masterwork somewhere along the course of the run.  The best run ever saw me getting 1 off each of the chests and two off the final boss.  As such once I burn through my Legendary Contracts, my jam right now tends to be running Hive Tyrant over and over because that appears to be the fastest of the strongholds, or at the very least the one everyone knows the best.  Regardless I have collected enough components to feel like I have some semblance of a build working there as well.

I am still relying heavily on my Double Detonator build that I talked about on Friday, and have officially given up on using any weapons other than Ralner’s Blaze which is not necessarily a part that I think I covered.  When the perk states that it ignites the target after a hit-streak of 5… what that means in practice is after landing 5 hits on a target you apply the ignited status effect, which means that target is primed and ready to combo.  So even though I don’t technically have a primer in my build… I have two solid ways of priming targets either through this amazing weapon or through my melee primer.  As such I stopped using a second weapon and instead just run a second Ralner’s Blaze so I never run out of ammunition and can always swap to a backup version to continue priming targets.  So often people are running a frost AOE primer… which allows me to swoop in with a frag grenade and get to detonation city…  but even if I am alone I can prime single targets all day long. A B D…  Always Be Detonating.

The highlight of the weekend was getting my very first Legendary drop…  and it was off some random mob in freeplay.  I am super thankful in that I got a good lego on my first attempt, and didn’t get something like a sniper rifle like my friend Shadoes did.  Even better…  I got the same assault launcher I had already been using in my current build allowing me to just swap everything over without changing much.  Now if I could get a Legendary Ralner’s Blaze the luck gods would really be smiling upon me.  One of my only complaints with Legendaries is that there appears to be no re-roll system in that you cannot learn the pattern in order to craft more of them.  That is the thing that I like the most about Masterworks is that you can just keep crafting more until you get the set of inscriptions you really wanted.  Legendaries…  appear to be entirely on random chance for you to get one to drop in the first place…  and even more so you are up a creek if you didn’t get a good role.  Like…  Sniper is a worthless inscription for me personally…  but everything else is pretty reasonable so I still consider myself extremely lucky.

Since it was interesting last week, I figured I would throw this up again this week.  This is what my Alliance leader board looks like this week, and quite honestly I am not entirely certain why Wei and Maeka are giving me more gold than the others.  The closest I can figure out is that the bar continues to go up even after hitting rank 10… and once it fills one more time you start getting a message that you have reached your maximum alliance rank for the week.  I hit this and I am guessing that both of them have hit it as well…  meaning they are now worth 2345 instead of 2105…  which incidentally I should also be worth that 2345 if you get everyone else to rank 10 on your list as well.  That means the if that logic olds…  while I have 11,005 incoming for how the board is set up currently… a theoretical “maximum” contribution would be something like 11,725 gold if you could somehow get everyone to that full bar rank 10.

That said I am not expecting the gold train to last that much longer.  I am playing a truly silly amount of this game, and I thought I would post my hours played just to prove it.  At this point I have put in 132 hours in effectively 16 days that the game has been out… which works out to be 8.25 hours a day.  Now there was some heavy skewing there because we have had a few weekends where we didn’t have much planned and also I was fighting some respiratory nonsense so that had me home sick during part of it as well.  Regardless of how you slice it though… I have been playing a significant amount of Anthem and really show no signs of letting up yet.  I spent some time working up Interceptor and Colossus last night but most of that time has been spent on the Ranger working on getting to the point I am at right now.  I still think the game needs a lot of tweaks, but for now I am enjoying the game that is… as well as being hopeful of the game that is to come.

This morning I am struggling more than I do on the average morning.  I did not sleep well last night and wound up not falling asleep until almost midnight.  Then that got compounded by the fact that I kept waking up every so often for unknown reasons.  It was one of those “the bed is not comfortable” sort of nights.  As such I feel like I can’t really get into any higher logic yet.  I didn’t even make coffee this morning until my wife noticed that she didn’t have a cup…  I knew something was off but could not quite put my finger on it.  That has since been remedied, but suffice to say I am not firing on all cylinders…  which is evidenced by the fact that I just backspaced the word cylinders several times until I got it right.

Last night I spent some time testing out the new loot system and it does in fact seem to be giving better options.  Gone are the days of getting a Light Machine Gun with weapon only (gear icon) Heavy Pistol effects on it…  but what has arrived instead are a lot of instances where you just get a suit wide weapon bonus in general rather than it being something specific.  I have not gotten anywhere near enough items to test this out more thoroughly but it seems like they might have dropped some of the nuance and landed on the side of “make this more universally useful”.  In fact those gear only inscriptions seem to be the exception rather than the rule now, with most things just simply giving Javelin wide effects.

During the course of the night I ran three strongholds, still focused almost entirely on Hive Tyrant since it is fast and predictable.  The first first one lead me to believe that they maybe tweaked the drop rates at the same time as applying this patch.  That first stronghold rewarded me 1 weapon, 2 abilities and the every so sought after component.  However after tweeting that out and making a fool of myself…  the second stronghold rewarded only the guaranteed masterwork ability that you get for completing the mission.  On the third stronghold however, I did manage to get one additional masterwork to drop…  meaning I got a weapon and an ability.  This is still better than Wednesday night when I chain ran strongholds and got nothing but the same ability over and over.

As such I thought I would go over my build this morning and talk about my choices a bit.

Primary Weapon – Cycle of Pain – LMG

This is one of the new acquisitions of the evening, and I am largely using it because the Sledgehammer with its slow rate of fire but decent punch with little recoil is my favorite archetype of the Light Machine Guns.  The perk called Marksman’s Swiftness makes it so that weak point hits increase weapon rate of fire by 10% for 10 seconds… and this stacks to 10.  In practice what this seems to mean is that if you can nail the weak point you get an improved rate of fire without added recoil making this thing just melt targets.  It reminds me a lot of how it felt to tear through things in Destiny 1 with Fabian Strategy, which is a weapon that only I seemed to like…  but I loved it.

Secondary Weapon – Ralner’s Blaze – Assault Rifle

I’ve dropped Thunderbolt of Yvenia from my secondary slot for the time being only because this is also a brand new weapon and I am getting used to playing with it.  The perk is really vague, but what it means in practice is that you seem to constantly seem to be igniting targets given that it is fairly easy to hold this on target.  I like the feel of it quite a bit and it seems to do a reasonable job of just deleting lower tier trash mobs, which admittedly is nice that Grandmaster finally feels like that for me.

Assault Launcher – Recurring Vengeance – Seeking Missile

This is a new acquisition from the night…  Recurring Vengeance which is an impact detonator and seems to pack a much harder base punch that the Argo’s Spite.  In my experience lots of people rock crowd control abilities, like frost or fire fields…  which means with double detonators I can just constantly sit back and be always blowing things up.  If I do need to prime my own targets, this allows me to use my melee way more liberally given that I get one of the primer melee options as a ranger.   So far the one two punch of melee to Seeking Missile can just delete a lot of targets, or at the very least make them hurt significantly.  If need be I can follow up with another melee and my next attack to finish it off.  While I don’t have any of my favorite combos in Masterwork form…  this works well enough for the time being.  I love the perk on this one that allows me to get back my charge if I can finish off an enemy with this attack.

Grenade Launcher – Last Argument – Frag Grenade

I am super thankful that I managed to pull this ability, because Frag Grenade is sort of the most basic utilitarian detonation option for Rangers.  It doesn’t have the best package of inscriptions….  namely I wish it had something other than sniper seeing as I will probably NEVER use sniper in a serious way.  However the fact that it buffs my E ability by 31% speed is pretty phenomenal…  so even if I don’t manage to kill the target I am going to get it recycling pretty fast.  The perk of Last Argument which is hitting enemies causes you to gain 700% Ultimate Charge… which I assume is 700% of the amount you would normally gain for hitting someone with a grenade?  Whatever the case what this means in practice is that my ultimate charges really fast…  and I love this.  For those who have fought Hive Tyrant, you will know that it disappears every so often and you have a trash round to fight through.  I got enough ultimately during the trash out to predictably have my Ultimate or as I keep trying to call it… Super…  up for the next Hive Tyrant burn phase.  This is so damned amazing and makes me way more free with using my Ultimate knowing I can get it back pretty fast by lobbing grenades.

As far as the components go… right now I am just using the ones that fit this build the best for the moment.  However only having two Masterwork components so far greatly limits me.  As I said at the start of this… doing group content… having double detonators makes this work insanely well as someone is constantly applying a status effect that you can exploit.  In solo play however I find myself priming with melee a lot more often to get my own combos…  which still makes double detonators a very viable option.  I like to always be making things explode, even though the ranger explodey options are nowhere near as over the top as the other classes.  What I need to improve on is more efficient use of my DPS boost aura during burn phases.

What are your thoughts about a double detonator build?  What are you finding that is working really well for you… and more important if you are a Grandmaster Ranger…  what the hell build are you leaning on?  I am just happy that I feel like I have pushed out of that “high center” feeling phase to where I finally feel like I am a contributing member of the stronghold and not just being hopelessly carried.

 

Yesterday’s post and the follow up reactions that continue to flow through the twitter thread that I started a few days ago have been interesting.  Firstly I have no problem if someone simply checks out of the game because it isn’t for them.  This emerging genre of “MMO Lite” games just isn’t for everyone.  If you didn’t like Destiny, Division, Warframe or even Monster Hunter World in the way its interaction worked…  then you are not likely going to like Anthem either.  Of those I am not a fan of Warframe at all really, and was luke warm towards Division…  but Destiny and Monster Hunter World were strongly in my wheelhouse.  My commentary in general has been about folks going out of their way to express their anger over the game.  The thing is… the game has flaws.  They are not big enough flaws to keep me from enjoying it, but there are definitely flaws there.

This morning I thought I would take a bit and go through some of the things that I wish the game did differently.  As such this post is more or less going to be my wish list for Anthem.  Be warned this is likely going to be a train of thought post with little organization.  As is often the case with unorganized content…  this is going to be in a bullet list form.  May god have mercy on your souls.

• Mini Map – The world of Anthem is very intricate with full usage of lots of different levels of verticality…  as such flying from point A to point B is never that clear and as such I find myself opening my map often trying to figure out where the hell I am going.  One of two things happens… either I overheat and go crashing down wherever I happen to be hovering because I could not be bothered to get to safety before doing so…  or I get sniped by a Scar.  I would love some form of a mini map that we can toggle on and use for navigation purposes.
• Waypoints – In a similar vein…  the game does a good job of giving you waypoints on missions to reach the objective with icons that show where you should turn next to get there.  I want the ability to set my own waypoint in the world and have this same advisement system turned on to direct me there.
• World Events Markers – I want to see all active world events at all times.  The world is too big for me to efficiently stumble across an event, and god forbid if you are doing it on harder difficulty modes with randomly matched people…  that you will get any help in doing said event you magically stumbled across.  Guidance towards events would be beneficial.
• Strider Redeploy – There are many different Striders out in the wilds…  there should be the ability to redeploy at a Strider closer to the action.  I mean it happens if you die, but there should be a more formal system that allows you to pick a new strider and respawn closer to wherever a World Event is happening.
• Corpse Waypoint – One of the most frustrating experiences I have had is you are working on a World Event…  and then you die…  and you have no clue where the World Event was happening in relation to the Strider that you just spawned in on.  Would be cool if you got a bonus of some sort for going back to the point of your death and taking down whatever mob killed you.
• Larger Freeplay – I ultimately expected Freeplay to be more like Patrols in Destiny, where you are randomly matched with whoever else happens to be in that area and as you move between sub zones…  you get a different population of players.  The problem is right now when you go into Freeplay, you are matched with 3 other players…  who are often times on completely different ends of the map making the challenge of actually completing anything very difficult unless you bring your own four player team.  Essentially Freeplay needs two modes…  matched with 4 players and a subzone matching system like Destiny Patrols.
• Better Hit Advisement – right now there are often times when I am being hit by something but I have no clue by what.  Last night there was a moment when I thought I was being hit by something in front of me… but in reality a shotgunner had snuck up behind me and was hitting me in the back.  I would like to see them implement a sort of “your damage came from this direction” system.
• Better Quickplay Incentivization – Quickplay should be something that is incentivized better than it actually is.  Right now there are problems with about half of the Quickplay sessions being in some form of a bugged state, and that is something I am sure they are working on.  I’ve seen reddit commentary from Devs stating as much.  What concerns me more however is that after you have finished leveling… there really doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for playing Quickplay especially once you are completely decked out in level 36 purples.  At the end of a match for Quickplaying in… you are pretty much guaranteed two pieces of loot and I have NEVER seen these be a Masterwork.  Joining Quickplay should be considered a positive thing for the community given that you are filling a slot in a group that was otherwise empty…  more often than not because someone abandoned a mission.  There should be some reasonable reward for doing this thing that helps out the community as a whole.
• Better Grandmaster+ Incentivization – Right now Grandmaster rank doesn’t necessarily feel like it is respectful of my time.  There is a big jump from Hard to Grandmaster and while I am struggling along…  I am also feeling like I don’t have an awful lot to show for my effort.  Other than weapons… which you can get in Hard mode and below I have 1 Component and 4 abilities that are all from the same slot…  none of which really help me to be more efficient in Grandmaster so that I have a hope in hell of moving at some point to Grandmaster 2.  I also feel like I have a better shot at loot in running World Events than doing QuickPlay or Strongholds, given that anything that drops other than orange gear is largely useless to a player once they have reached Grandmaster.  I hope that the Anthem team takes the post to heart that Travis Day from Diablo 3 loot 2.0 fame made on the Reddit.
• Mass Dismantle System – This goes hand in hand with a comment I made above… that once you reach a certain point in the game any drops that are below purple are completely useless to the player… and honestly MOST purple drops are completely useless.  The current dismantling system is cumbersome and what we really need is a version of the Diablo 3 Smith system where you can say “dismantle all of a specific color” so I could grind all whites, greens, blues…  sift through the purples manually…  or once I am fully orange grind them as well.  This needs to exist in all three places where you can do this functionality…  on the post mission screen, the vault screen and the forge screen.  Similarly there needs to be a way to flag items as “Do Not Dismantle” and then let you grind everything else without that status.
• General UI Tweaks – Anthem is a game without a great UI.  Many things are cumbersome or obtuse.  I think there just needs to be a general pass rethinking how the players interact with the UI and improving its responsiveness.  Additionally especially when Dismantling there are times when the UI just bugs out and you have to exit and get all the way back into the menu structure to get it responding again.  UI/UX needs a lot of love here,  because as a long time developer myself… I can look past it, but it will stop a lot of users straight in their tracks.
• Ease Transition Between Hard and Grandmaster – This is mostly important because of the stinginess of the loot system right now…  means I feel like I am struggling transitioning between Hard and Grandmaster and that there is nothing much that I can do to ease that transition.  The feeling I get is like when you can first step into Torment 1 in a Diablo Season… and you can kill stuff…  but you aren’t doing it efficiently and nowhere near fast enough to push through a Greater Rift in time.  This gets eased a bit as you get better loot to drop, but in Diablo… you can always drop down a tier to make it more efficient while still getting the same loot.  There is a barrier between Hard and Grandmaster in that you simply cannot get the items you actually need to progress…  namely components and abilities to drop at a Masterwork level in anything below Grandmaster 1.  So I feel stuck, in that I have limited ways for me to actually better my situation.  I will grind through this barrier, but a lot of people will not and will get hung up here.  Essentially the only difference between the itemization of these tiers should be the frequency of drops.  So Hard…  Masterworks should be super infrequent but you do have the ability to get anything from the pool… just super rarely.  Grandmaster 1… Masterworks should be more plentiful, on a similar loot timer to Diablo 3… if one has not dropped in X minutes then drop one while Legendaries should be super rare.  Grandmaster 2…  timer to Masterwork lowers and the frequency of Legendaries increases as well.  Grandmaster 3…  hot and cold Masterworks running out of the Tap and again ratcheting up that chance of seeing a Legendary.  I don’t think you ever want Legendaries to feel common…  because I can see them like Diablo to continue adding tiers of difficulty on top of GM3.

I am certain the second I stop this list I will think of another dozen items that should have gone on it.  I may add those throughout the course of the day as I am off doing other things.  However like I said…  I am more than happy to admit that Anthem is not a game without flaws.  However I view it as a work in progress as ALL MMOs are…  since they have a live patching cycle that comes along and tweaks things.  I am sure all of the systems that are in the game now were put in with the best of intentions, but seeing how users interact with your creation often times makes you view it in a completely different light.  I learned this as a developer years ago, and you have to be willing to react to the situation post release and be willing to admit you were wrong about some of those cool features that you really liked in the development cycle.

Was there anything I should have put on this list?  Chime in with comments to let me know what I missed.