Tag: tips

Bless Unleashed – Tips for dealing with the mid-level advancement wall

If there was an award for “Not the Worst MMO”, Bless Unleashed would certainly qualify. A nice mix of first generation MMO RPG shared world experience and current gen graphics, it has fun combat and a good challenge later in the game. As I mentioned in a previous post, it also has a mountain of bugs and tuning issues that cast shadows on the better parts of the game. Here are a few tips I would give to friends who were considering the game, or who had played previously and quit due to frustration.

Invest in a B Grade Weapon early

The gear that drops from activities falls way short of the advancement curve by the mid-teen levels, until leveling becomes prohibitively difficult due to gear score penalties. Eventually, a red penalty foe has a whopping 66% damage reduction buff that makes facing them almost certain folly. Even in a group you would be a liability to keep alive. B grade weapons and armor with “OK” stats are saturated on the player driven Market Place, and can be found pretty cheap at pretty much any hour of the day. The items may not be keeper gear for end game, but will make the teen and early level twenty content fly by.

When to use Common Enhancement vs Master Enhancement

This same B grade gear can carry you to the “end” of the first major story with some care and upgrades, but herein lies the most immovable part of the advancement wall. Budgeting Gold, Artifact Cores, Star Seeds and Repair tools will challenge even the most resourceful player. It helps to understand the built in risk and cost of each type of enhancement vendor. The Common Enhancement vendor takes Gold and Artifact Cores, the Master Enhancement vendor takes Star Seeds and Cores but does not have a risk of damaging or downgrading your equipment – which happens startlingly often. By that I mean, you will absolutely trash your gear and lose progress. The failure rate is much higher than 50%, so approach with caution.

For gear that is unenhanced for it’s rarity (blue, purple, etc), the first upgrade cannot damage the equipment so should always be done at the Common Enhancement vendor. If you have a repair tool, the second upgrade should also be done at the Common vendor as a failure can be recovered from without risk of further damage, at least to the first bar. The third bar is a gamble, as it will cost a lot less gold than seeds but cannot be recovered without risking a second failure. Remember what I said about failure rate being higher than 50%? Failing twice or more in a row at the common vendor is a regular occurrence. Anticipate disappointment.

Star Seeds are throttled to a daily maximum per character exchange rate from gold, and obtained from limited other activities or season pass rewards. When you first start you may find yourself a surplus of these before you needed them, but eventually you will be bound by the daily cap to get new ones aside from good luck selling loot and resources on the market place. This makes the Master Enhancement vendor very expensive, although safe from risk of damaging and downgrading gear. For any gear I care about, I use the Master vendor for the third through fifth bars and the upgrade to the next tier. Once you are through the surplus of seeds you started with and fixed to the daily allowance of seeds, you will be able to afford to try and upgrade maybe one or twice a day per character. You might have a few days without any success at all. Naturally, if you have a knack for making a profit on selling loot and resources on the market place, you will have a lot less problems budgeting seeds for upgrades.

Eventually your gear score will creep out of the penalty for content in the late twenty range, where you will start seeing better loot to swap out your leveling gear and fine tuning your build for harder content, which will in turn net the gear to keep progressing. You will need approximately 860-900 gear score to complete the last steps of the main story, with end game bosses starting around 1100 gear score and up. It’s a bear, but the dungeons and challenges later are worth the climb. PvP after level 28 introduces several new ways to upgrade gear and is fun, and is a great way to meet competent dungeon mates as well. PvP will also teach you a LOT about which character build you may care to focus on and your overall survivability.

Do Regional Quests

Long before side quest availability tapers off in the late twenty range, you will have always available regional quests that award both XP, trash gear for artifact cores, and a fixed percent of skill experience points. The latter, SXP, is vital to upgrading your blessings to make sure you are doing the most damage you can in dungeons and other challenging content. There is no time too soon to start banking skill points for blessings you have yet to unlock, the later ones need 25 or more points to complete and aren’t viable when acquired (Crescent Moon, etc) without 5-10 points for unlocks upfront. As the number of SXP is fixed per activity and the SXP advancement rate is flat, running all of the available Regional Quests is the fastest way to get skill points by far.

Do the Repeatable Quests

When you first find each region’s repeatable quest NPC, it isn’t clear right away that these activities will eventually be required for one of the stronger blessing unlocks and late game advancement. If you wait until level 25 to start working on the repeatable quests for reputation, you will be days or a week or more off the minimum rep for the prestige quests, which are a fixed block for quest advancement after a certain point in the story. It is a deliberately built in advancement wall to prolong the time it takes to reach the last dungeons and boss encounters. I don’t like this design decision but Elder Scrolls Online had a similar veteran rank advancement wall when it first shipped that was far worse in my opinion, and not even in the same category as the World of Warcraft barriers to end game raiding.

Yes, it’s a grind.

Like pretty much every live-content ongoing game online today, after a point in the story you repeat content to continue advancing. Honestly I don’t think Bless Unleashed is worse than Destiny 2 for “the grind”, nor any other hybrid RPG shooter with character advancement beyond the story. There is a reason this type of post launch content is ubiquitous on consoles today and that is a lot of people enjoy it. Bless Unleashed isn’t a terrible grind and with additional content presumably in the pipes may be worth the time investment.

If you found this article I hope these tips help, or are at least somewhat cathartic to see someone else dealing with the same issues in an otherwise salvageable game. Now to get back to the game and Queue Red Basin 🙂

Five Fortnite Tips I Wish I Had Known

We thought we were prepared for the storm until it got ugly. In the distance, we heard the bellowing roar announcing the arrival of a colossal mutant zombie known best as a Smasher. Down to the last magazines of ammunition and with weapons looking the worse for wear, there was little more than harsh language between the behemoth and the hastily boarded up wall around our objective. Epic Games’ Fortnite is a clever mix of quick thinking, base defense building, exploration and all out combat. Although it can be played alone it is geared towards play with a full team of four players, and the harder the missions the more extreme the challenge. Thankfully the game shines best when the zombies are at their worst.

Fortnite is an “early release” title but plays as well as most released games, although it is not without a few bugs, performance issues and potential imbalances that may be changed later. Below are a few things I learned “the hard way” that I wish I had known when I started.

Green is Good

We’ve been taught in other games with similar loot rarity coloring that grey and green items are generally trash if you have access to better. Although this is technically true in Fortnite, green weapons and traps are particularly useful in that they require only common materials found in abundance on any map. Given that all items break fairly quickly and traps are one time use in every mission outside the storm shield base, knowing when a green weapon is good enough becomes critical to managing rare crafting resources you might not find every mission.

To be more specific, it is unlikely you will find enough “rotating gizmos” to replace 2-3 Epic weapons as fast as those weapons wear out. In some cases I would say this is true of even one Epic weapon – which could require three of these gizmos each, enough for three Rare weapons that are just as durable and almost as powerful. It is business as usual to be completely out of these key materials, and probably when you need them most.

The bottom line is don’t discard, recycle or otherwise lose the only green schematics you have for key traps and weapons. I’d keep at least one for each class of weapon and level up that schematic to make it closer to par with a rare blue of the same sort.

Examine Apparent Duplicate Rare Items and Heroes Twice

Any two items of the same rarity might look identical if you examine only the base stats, but in almost every case the optional stat bonuses for leveling up that schema will be randomly different. This is true to some degree for survivors, defenders and even Heroes. Before cashing in that hero for quick XP or collection book advancement, check the perks, support squad bonuses, and other abilities they would get if you leveled them up. Traps especially have different abilities when leveled that could make a huge difference, like in the case of passive floor and wall spikes.

For heroes, there are both support squad roles they can take and expedition seats to fill even if they aren’t among your favorite to play. In the case of the latter, expeditions become an important source of crafting materials and survivors later but require leveled up heroes – ones you spend XP on but can’t actually play while they are out on expedition. It makes sense to keep a deep bench of talent rather than retiring heroes for this reason alone.

Blue Rare Schematics may be better than Epic ones

Another way that rare crafting materials shapes the economy of the game is when you compare a Blue weapon and a Purple of the same type, and consider the cost of keeping your favorite weapon replaced once it is worn out. In almost every case I have examined, a Rare Blue schematic leveled to 10 is much better than a level 1 Epic Purple, but may cost half or a third the key materials. Sure, the level 10 Epic Purple weapon would do more damage but unless the perks included dramatic reduction in wear and tear, you aren’t getting “three times the weapon” out of it. The comparison gets even more comical if the Rare weapon has the wear rate reduction perk instead, also at the cheaper cost of materials. That blue sword will be more than just “good enough” long after the less durable purple one breaks.

Use the Outlander Pathfinder to gather.

All heroes do almost every task equally as well as one another – specially at the start of the game, with a few exceptions. Soldiers do get bonuses to ranged weapons, and in some cases stacking bonuses to a specific type of ranged weapon, but no one can hold a candle to the gathering mastery of a Outlander Pathfinder. Once you have “focused acquisition”  and “in the zone” perks, along with the ability to create Loot Llama supply drops the Outlander is significantly faster and better at locating and gathering treasure. The difference isn’t slight, even the 6% chance to find double loot is noticeable over the course of a single mission. Level up your Outlander further and you can see loot through walls and floors and even how rare it is. Given how often you will need to restock on materials needed to make ammunition and traps, the speed boost and faster pick-ax of “in the zone” is a welcome ability indeed.

Never overbuild.

Traps and any section of building count towards the build limit objective in almost every mission in the game. The limit and associated penalty for overbuilding is shared by the whole team, and is the highest weight penalty for end of mission scoring next to complete mission failure. Very few other objectives are classified as “gold” objectives, and most are ones you obtain through exceptional effort (rescued all bonus survivors, etc), rather than one you “lose” by being careless. Watch the build limit when you are setting up defenses or using stairs to reach loot and survivors. I try to stay under half the limit just in case zombies create an unexpected route to the objective or additional traps / healing pads have to be made in the heat of a fight. If your teammate looks like they are working on a masterpiece of excess mats, hold off on putting down floors or traps in hopes that they stop before they hit the limit.

Another way to help reduce build time and stay under the limit is to use perimeter walls sparingly – imagine funneling the zombies into a few open sections of the outer fence rather than trying to build a solid barrier. Save your fortress construction passion and skill for the more critical objective walls. Perimeter knee-high walls are easy to shoot over and will usually direct zombie traffic to a different (or less defended) entrance point, which is a great place to put a few key traps without needlessly carpeting the entire area in spikes.

 

Fortnite is a lot of fun, and is quite addictive. The early missions do a good job of introducing key mission concepts like building under a time limit to precise specifications under pressure, customizing structures and dealing with attacks from multiple directions, as well as effective exploration of an area for loot and survivors. The harder missions will test your teamwork, but these are also the best parts of the game. I hope the above tips make a difference in helping to keep you in gear when the hordes descend on your base, and enough ammunition left to drop that Husk Smasher. I hope to see you online!

Seven Tips for Mass Effect Andromeda Insanity Mode

captured on xbox

One hundred seventy five hours and eighty two levels later, I completed a second play through of Mass Effect Andromeda on Insanity Mode. The combat in ME:A is a fresh new look for the franchise, and gets even more fun when you turn up the heat. Hardcore mode was very satisfying, but I could not resist the ultimate challenge of Insanity mode. It was well worth the effort. Below are a few tips that helped me.

New Game Plus

Even if you’ve completed the prior Mass Effect trilogy on Insanity mode, I do not recommend attempting Andromeda on Insanity mode the first play through for reasons that have nothing to do with skill. Once you have finished it on normal or hardcore, you can choose “New Game Plus” mode, and keep all of your skills, gear, upgrades and squadmate skills except for specific abilities unlocked via story. You also keep your research, rare consumables, and other critical resources. If you take your time and get the most out of your first play through you could be upwards of level 60 with multiple profiles at maximum rank, with squadmates at the level cap. This makes that first return to Eos on Insanity mode a lot more do-able, and will better prepare you to tackle the boss fights later on.

Use Multiple Profiles in the Favorites Wheel

The critical stat bonuses provided by the top ranks of each profile are useful in different situations, and quite frequently in the course of the same fight. Shielded heavy ranged opponents require a different approach when you find your cover compromised and with only three moves you need to be able to switch between maximum damage output and maximum survival on the fly. Experiment with the favorites wheel and different profiles to find out which work best for you depending on combat situations. I kept profiles for optimal sniping via Infiltrator, well rounded close quarters combat with Adept or Sentinel, and variations of each optimized for high damage output or immediate shield recovery with key tech and combat tree skills.

Stack Anti-Shield Attacks

By a large margin, the hardest part of Insanity mode are the blue-shielded heavy opponents. Not the bosses, not the big hairy armored beasts, but the quite common “normal” shielded foes like the Observers and Kett Heavies. Because shielded opponents fully regenerate their blue bar if you cannot sustain enough damage to deplete it in a timely manner, they recover while you waste ammunition. On Insanity mode that definitely will take a turn for worse fast. My main profile stacked three skills out of a handful that can be upgraded to do quite a bit of shield damage. Overload is a signature anti-shield move that can be charged to also hit other enemies nearby even if they are in cover. Pull from the biotic tree can be upgraded to do reasonable shield damage, has a quick recharge and doubles as a super effective knock-down on unshielded opponents. Energy Drain does great damage to any target including shielded ones and is the best self heal in the game. There are other anti-shield moves, like Lance, but I find they are not as well rounded as the above three for most situations. For any of these moves, be sure to pick up passive bonuses from the skills at the bottom of the biotic or tech trees, which could boost your damage or defenses significantly.

Tactical Cloak

It wouldn’t be Insanity mode if you didn’t find yourself neck deep in melee critters, flanked by half the Kett marksmen club and low on ammo with squadmates dropping. This is business as usual in several parts of the story no matter how good your aim or approach is. One of your favorite profiles should have tactical cloak. If you are careful not to uncloak on accident you can interact with terminals and revive teammates without being seen. There are numerous opportunities to hack turrets that you can get to at the start of a very tough fight only if you use tactical cloak, turning a nightmare encounter into a fun one as the turret wrecks their heavies instead of your squad. Tactical Cloak is also a life saver when you need to make a big position change for new cover or fresh ammo/health boxes during a long fight.

DIY Armor and Weapons

Another big benefit from starting from New Game Plus is keeping all of your research data and progress, and higher end crafted gear and enhancements are substantially better than the random loot you’ll find or vendor bought weapons. A tier VIII or higher crafted sniper rifle like the Widow or Black Widow with max mod slots and proper level mods may be the most valuable piece of equipment you’ll ever carry. Use AVP to unlock as many Science and Market options related to special merchant inventory (for rare mods) and crafting as possible to make the best gear you can and it will keep you in the fight.

Know Your Consumables

When push comes to shove, the boss fights and encounters with monsters like fiends can demand more than you have to spare in a pinch. Ammo consumables like Incendiary or Cryo rounds are too rare or expensive to use constantly, but are amazing in specific encounters. A Cobra RPG can turn a surprise ultra encounter around, and Incendiary rounds can cut the time to kill a fiend in half. Cryo rounds are best when combined with an AR against a swarm of unarmored foes like Kett Chosen or Raiders, as they will snap freeze your targets long enough for you to reassess cover or close for a melee kill. Finally, Overcharge boosts a few key stats and instantly recharges your current abilities so they can be used, which can make the difference between death and narrow escape if you needed a Tactical Cloak or Energy Drain right now. This trick saved my bacon in at least one of the tough fights towards the end of the game, and prevented a frustrating reset to the last auto save spot.

Bring More Ammo, Not Less

Some mods, including tasty fusion mods have a negative trait of reduced ammo or clip capacity. Insanity mode will push your ammo conservation and recovery skills to the limit. Avoid tempting critical hit bonuses that trade for reduced ammo, as most encounters are quite capable of expending all of your ammo and anything to be found in crates no matter how good you are with headshots. With proper investment into crafting you can choose mods with reasonable damage bonuses without penalties or trade-offs.

In conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised at how fantastic the combat would be in Mass Effect Andromeda, and thrilled at how well the fun scaled with the challenge. I found I enjoyed the game even more the second time through.

Evolve: Seven Monster Tips for Defend

image credit: Turtle Rock / 2K / incgamers.com
image credit: Turtle Rock / 2K / incgamers.com

Morning, minions. It’s moving day for the hunters, and we are going to throw them a going away party. Whether you face it on day five of Evacuation or randomly in quick match, Defend mode as the monster is one of the hardest matches to win against a good team of hunters. Not only is it the only mode in which slaying all of the hunters counts for no gains – they return from the drop ship at full life almost immediately – the match timer counts down to a hunter win if the monster does not completely destroy both stage generators and the power source before the timer expires. It gets worse. Despite starting the match at stage three, and having a near continuous stream of Goliath minion pairs to help, the generators are defended by both the hunters, bottleneck terrain and armored turrets.  Destroy a generator, and some time is added back to the clock. Here are seven tips for monster players hoping to crush the hunters and destroy the evacuation ship in one of the funnest, most difficult map modes in Evolve.

Turret syndrome

This might sound obvious, but I’ll dare oversimplify the match with the first do-or-die tip. Prioritize the turrets. Your minions are quite capable of carrying the match all the way to the final power source with little assistance but stand no chance against the turrets and will not attack them. You and your minions will face high, sustained damage as long as they are standing – so when the match starts, eat as quickly as possible to shield up and try to take out at least one turret along side the first set of minions. Flee ideally before your shield is depleted and feed again, you are unlikely to regenerate any real health via food buffs in Defend. Return as soon as possible to finish wrecking turrets, and your second and third wave minions will do a lot more damage to the generator before getting killed.

Expect maximum hunter force – a good team will take huge risks to make stage one generator as hard for the monster as possible. As this point they can afford multiple full wipes and still pull out a win later if they damage the monster enough, prevent it from feeding, trap it away from the turrets, or any other super nasty harassment the hunters can dream up.

Follow your nose

If you haven’t developed a habit of continually smelling as the monster, now is a good time to start. Smell as you eat, smell as you change facing, smell before you attack, smell before you retreat. Smell everything. Otherwise you’ll never spot harpoons, most mines, and potential snacks hunters left for you. If you haven’t seen what an overlooked harpoon and a few cleverly hidden mines in your escape route can do to a monster that needs to get away fast, I’ll give you a hint – it’s not pretty and can completely blow the match.

If you are just out of line of sight but within smell range of the generator as you feed to get shields back, you can safely spot the hunters and keep an eye (or nose) on your minions and have a pretty good idea of how the fight is going. Hurt minions will usually turn on the hunters before they die, which can be an excellent opportunity to quickly incapacitate a vulnerable hunter.

Know when not to kill a downed hunter

During the fight keep in mind an incapacitated hunter is more or less out of the fight minus his or her sidearm. Most of time time this will also take a second hunter partially out of the fight to revive the down hunter unless they have Daisy, but killing a downed hunter can take more time than you want to spend if they have someone shielding or healing them or you are taking fire in the back. A dead hunter might make a good quick snack in a pinch, but is also back in the fight startlingly soon. Consider just incapacitating them unless you know they will go down quick and you’ll be able to eat them without being shot at.

Know your opponents hand

No matter if you are facing the classic four hunters or a mix of higher tier hunters, be familiar before the match with how their abilities can be used to ruin your day in Defend. Assault may have mines (super effective), long range toxic grenades, or potent burst damage. Ditto your other three hunter types, as each has similar abilities that can stack slow effects at range, trap or defend a location, or cause immense burst damage – usually in that order. The play area is very small compared to normal hunt maps, and with basically no fear of death any number of hunters can break off generator defense to chase you when you try to feed – even just slowing you down or pelting you when you feed is enough to keep the fight in their favor. Beware clever cat and mouse tactics. If you get distracted from feeding, turrets or generators for very long and it won’t matter how many times you kill the hunters – when the time is up they win.

Listen for audible callouts (or turn on subtitles) for when the hunters use key abilities. You’ll hear “switching to mines!” before Markov places a mine, which at close quarters gives you only seconds to avoid or destroy the mine. The same is true for most hunter special abilities.

Watch the clock

Keep a close eye on both your minion wave spawn timer (it also has an audible sound) as well as the match timer. If or when the match timer reaches two minutes, you need to know how much health the generator or power source has left and move to assist your minions. Use the minion timer to gauge if you should attack the generator yourself or wait for a wave. If you time it right, you can destroy the generator with the minions and have them survive to charge the next target – even though they are likely to die almost immediately to turret fire they might do a little damage if they weren’t too badly injured.

At the power source, feed and do your best to dismantle the front turrets first without getting overwhelmed, and feed as often as possible until the final two minute warning. At that point you’ll need to have also destroyed the rear turrets and be ready to engage the power source with everything you have left and push for the hard earned win.

In this last phase food is dangerously close to the fighting area, making it easier for hunters to deny your snacks when you flee. While the turrets are still up they can easily kill your minions and have a lot time to focus on you before the next minions spawn. This is where a lot of matches end in a hunter win and if you took a lot of health damage in earlier risky fights, it will be that much harder to survive.

Don’t die to wildlife

I see you laughing, but the “food” in Defend usually bites back. Those annoying (and yummy) electrified tentacle faced raptor critters can take a huge chunk out of your shields if you aren’t on your A game and are usually in pairs. This can cost you almost all of the shield you hoped to get by eating them – a costly delay when seconds matter and hunters might be bearing down on you. For the same reason, if you have no shields choose a less violent food first when possible or at least be very sure to get a clean kill when you engage them.

The giant sloth beasts or other aggressive wildlife may actually help you if you pass them up as a snack without enraging them. Better they attack a pursuing hunter than you, and if you’re super lucky the hunter’s team is distracted and you get a free incapacitated hunter.

Win day four in Evacuation

Days one through three of evacuation are a wash once day four arrives. As a monster this is your semifinal, lose this and on day five the turrets get extra armor. What started as an uphill fight now borders on impossible, as the turrets no longer crumble after a few hits and will make trapjaw food out of your minions. Know your map modes, and if you luck out you might get Nest on day four for a relatively good shot at a win. Succeed, and instead of turrets with extra armor, your minions have extra armor. Now, it’s a party. Time to evict some hunter scum!

See you on Shear.

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