The character file is a lot more open than Diablo 2’s. There’s not even a CRC involved, it’s quite crude. I don’t consider this a bad thing, myself, since all obfuscation would do is delay the inevitable. It’s as useless a gesture as copy protection.
As for the variation of weapons - there’s a lot more to it than merely the level requirement and color. The level requirement influences the maximum quality of the item which can then influence the maximum quality of each individual piece. A weapon is constructed of independent body, barrel, stock, grip, magazine and sight which each have their own qualities (and graphics! - appearance does mean something). Each piece influences at least one major attribute of the weapon, so you might wind up with a high-grade barrel (high accuracy) but basic sight (no zoom). On top of that each manufacturer has their own attributes that further influence things (Jakobs gets a damage boost, Vladof rate of fire, etc) and can limit which special mods can appear. Then the weapon gets its chance at special mods, which affect the name it winds up with and what additional quirks it gets. A “spiked” shotgun gets a +melee blade on the grip, and a “long” sniper gets bonus accuracy, for example.
So, even within the realm of, say, blue weapons of a specific user level and quality level, you can wind up with a surprising amount of variation in key characteristics like reload speed, burst fire, recoil, and so on. And the tiny little weapon description box tells you very little of any of this! The only real way to compare is to pick them up and play with them, which actually gives a reason for the stupid “swap my current weapon as I pick this new one up” feature to exist on the use button.
You guys should add me, Tr0psn4j, to your friends list so I can actually play some decent games. Finding good games has got to be the most frustrating part of the whole thing.
So, shameless plug aside, Brick as a brawler is just a blast to play (currently level 15). Mordecai is the other one I liked a lot. Bloodwing kills a lot of guys in one shot.
I got this about a week ago and I’m enjoying it a lot. I play with another guy, and we’ve started toons to play with another friend who got the game after than we did.
I’m a big fan of the hunter, and my buddy Chris plays the siren. Once you start adding artifacts to Lilith’s phasewalk she can just kill the bad guys at her start and stop locations. He’s got an incendiary artifact now that just leaves dudes burning to death in a ring around him.
My bird is covered in acid, so that’s pretty cool.
If you want to add me, my Xbox 360 gamertag is the same as my handle here without the spaces.
It’s a Friends of Friends account. It’s a workaround to expand your Friends List. Add AAA SDMB to your Friends List. Then, after I accept it, you can hit A on that Gamertag, push right, look at their Friends List, and you’ll see all the Dopers that are friends of that account. From there, you can send invites to Dopers.
What level are you?
You can play with us when we’re short a member - I’ve been playing with 3 other people on a regular basis though so we can’t fit anymore. But if we’re short one or maybe I’m playing another character then we can play.
What’s your steam name?
I generally use ventrilo for voice chat, by the way. The in-game voice chat is… alright… but you have to edit .ini files to set stuff like voice activation threshold and it’s kind of a pain in the ass. Any voice-activated setup is usually pretty crappy, especially one that doesn’t give you auditory or visual feedback of when you’re actually transmitting (you may be transmitting too much or too little, and there’s no way for you to know besides asking people). So for that, and for the ability to set volume levels individually for people, we use ventrilo.
Sure. Feel free to friends list me or just check for me on the SDMB group.
So I made it through the first playthrough. The ending is… unsatisfying and a bit confusing.
The itemization system definitely has me confused. It seems like there should be some base amount of item points, and they can be spent on different stuff like reload speed or power to differentiate the weapons. But a level X + 5 item of a certain quality should have more stuff to work with than a level X one.
But sometimes I find items that are nonsensical. For instance, I have a level 19 purple class mod that does
So the items are directly comparable. They are both purple quality, both the same type of class mods that modify the same thing… and yet the level 19 one is unambiguously better than the level 26 one.
Item cost is based heavily on level. A higher level version of the same thing will always cost more. The level affects the maximum stats it can have, not necessarily the ones that it will have. It’s one of the dungeon crawler conventions, where everything is up to the random number generator. A low level item that rolled really high on all of its individual components will be better than your average higher level items of the same type for a long time, even though the higher level ones get a baseline boost and could potentially go still higher.
That said, there’s also another factor at work. Unless you’re on a PC and have manually applied one of the game file tweaks to expand it (as in this forum post), the item descriptions only display 4 lines of stats. However, items can have (at least) 5. Class mods are especially notorious for this, because that invisible fifth stat is usually something highly desired. Your Hunter mods there, the ones that always start with bloodwing damage, can have a bonus to “Scavenge Extra Items” that, if it rolled with all 3 of its stat boosters, you will never be able to see, but it will still impact the item cost.
I did apply the 5 line tweak actually, and both items are indentical in the number of stats they have.
If each individual stat is idependently determined by a dice roll, what determines what “level” an item is? I thought it was like WoW, where you have an item level where the developers “spend” item level points on the different stats on the item - you could have one item with more of one stat or less of another, but items of the same ilevel would have roughly the same amount of total stats on them. This game doesn’t seem to follow a similar system, and sometimes low level items are unambiguously better than high level items across the board.
It makes it difficult to evaluate some items, like weighing a different elemental chance and effect vs more damage. You can’t even use “well, this item is a blue level 31, and this item is a green level 24, and they have the same stats, so the blue level 31 one has to be better” as a guideline, since it’s often not true.
Item level is determined by the source of the item, probably in a bell curve style manner. Enemies typically drop stuff around their level, and vendors…not sure, maybe the zone level. After you finish Playthrough 2 the bell curve disappears and everything is brought up to the level 48 cap.
But yeah, it’s definitely not a WoW-style system where everything is based on an inflexible budget of points. It gets even more complex because the component effects aren’t reflected anywhere on the item description but the actual graphics of the gun in the corner (or the debug console command). If this SMG has a big fat shoulder stock, and this other SMG has no stock at all, you can bet that the first one will have vastly better recoil control than the second, even though it’s not mentioned in text anywhere. That’s fine and dandy when it’s a difference that obvious, but usually it’s not, until, say, you go through so many combat rifles you can recognize which of the slightly-different side slotting magazines offer fast reload times and which are slow. Oy!
In the end, the item descriptions are really just vague guides. The only real way to appraise different weaponry is to pull it out and shoot it. Which I don’t actually mind, that’s kind of the whole gimmick to the game’s loot method in the first place, but it does raise the questions of why they give you any hard numbers at all when they’re leaving out so many of them.
The problem is two-fold and it dovetails into another thing that some folks have been clamoring over (increasing/getting rid of the level cap). If they got rid of the level cap, then everyone’s character would/could get maxed out. Everyone is now the same, and duels aren’t about different strengths and weaknesses, then.
Also, if you could build your own guns, there’d have to be very strict rules about it, or else, everyone’s going to be running around with a clutch of superweapons. The fact that you have to carry around 4 weapons and treat them almost like tools for a job (killing certain things) and have different kind of weapons to combat ammo scarcity is a good thing.
Well, a crafting system doesn’t mean that some people will become just too awesome to withstand. Diablo 2 had one, WoW has one, and they haven’t had this problem. Of course, you probably shouldn’t be able to just lash together whatever you find and create weapons that are IMBA, but it would be nice to be able to do some things.
Perhaps we could have an epic gun of some kind that lies at the end of an epic quest. Make it fiendishly hard to get to. I haven’t gotten to the end of the game yet, but it seems to me that having a large population at the end game is one of the most common video game problems.
The guns, as they are at the end of the game, are pretty badass in their own right. I’m not done with playthrough 2, and I’d like some more elemental firepower, but I’m happy with the amount of damage I’m dealing.
I’d assumed that was the case. The guns seem to roughly scale with the places you need to go. There are times that they just don’t, but I chalk that up to the vast amount of vendor trash that is there to be turned into cash. There’s usually diamond or two in the rough.
If they were going to add some super-guns they’d need to be at max level/difficulty I suppose. What does one do when they’re level 50 and they’ve beaten the game three times? Is there anything else? I assume that someone must have done it by now.