@yodaman3d Indeed, ultimately it is a form of discrimination which is the main reason I'm always in here defending skill builds. It's a dangerous thing to allow a community to do; after all, if you discriminate simply because someone uses a skill what else are you willing to discriminate against.

It's bad enough listening to them in the DZ but I'll have no truck with anyone demanding that the DZs operate in a specific manner. They have absolutely no claim to that zone and neither does anyone else. Were they in here banging on about Conflict I'd by and large ignore it. But not this. Never.

@richardoshea ....you're making this about discrimination....but I'M the one who needs meds?

LOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!

@darth_potat0 Maybe you mean someone else. I never mentioned anything about that. It's not me that's making it about discrimination; I don't run around kicking gun builds or skill builds; I don't have a go at them either until they gob off to me; I don't exclude them from activities nor would I wish to; I don't demand that any other player does anything at all, they can wear what they want and do what they want as far as I'm concerned. I don't come into these forums demanding that this gun gets nerfed or that tree ability gets removed etc etc. In fact, I have called for exactly one nerf in 2 and a bit years and that was to the M1A and they pulled a slight of hand trick with that and never nerfed it anyway. They just rescaled all guns and left that one way out in front.

There is a limited amount of role playing you can do in this game for sure, but you can set a character morality and determine how that player views the world and interacts with it. That's what I have done with this one character. The other one, well, she's not as nice as me.

@darth_potat0 That characer doesn't do much of it, again for the sixth time. Stats, and I should worry about them why exactly? Because I derive my self-esteem from video games? Nope. Because being good at a game makes me a better person? Nope. Because bragging is cool? Nope. Because if I suck at a video game my life has no meaning or value? Nope. I really hope you don't see things like that as that would be truly sad and I'd be concerned for you. You don't though do you, just in here with some substandard smack talk.

As to my relevance to this topic. The DZs have PvP in them but they are not a pure PvP zone are they. How many times must we say: PvPvE. As such anyone that goes into the DZ has the ability to comment on it. That idea, that the DZ is only for people that PvP or (for some strange reason see that as something special about them) is nonesense and false. It's an open zone for all and that includes you and me and anyone else that feels like venturing in there.

27 months guys. How successful have you been at your attempts to alter how skills operate in the DZ? Think on it a while because the answer is that you have not been successful, nor will you be.

@darth_potat0 Oh this is brilliant. I just checked my stats for the guy that doesn't PvP much and he's in the top 3% for PvP kills. ROFLCOPTER. So a character that barely plays PvP is by all accounts among the top 5% of PC Pvpers. ROFLCOPTER.

Stats ha ha ha. They don't amount to much do they.

Lots of players are salty whatever you do. You kill players with a skill build and apparently you can't aim. Proceed to then kill them with an AR over and over again and you have an aimbot. What is it? Can't aim or aimbot? Then it's "you're a bot cheater noob". So f***ing original. Simply because they suck at the game and lack the ability to identify a weakness in a build and come up with a counter to it. Your 16 loadouts are a toolbox of counters. Use them.

My 2 cents are that I think there's a lot of skills that are too strong at zero or low skill tiers for example explosive traps as already mentioned, foam, sticky variations & stinger hives. Balance should be better. Skills should be powerful when spec'd into and not so powerful when not. It's that simple.

Exactly. Watch any Youtube PvP content and it's just one long complaint that moves from gun to skill to heals to sniping to the NPCs to the bloody weather. I agree with your assessment of tiers 0-3 and it's exactly what I told Massive during the PTS where those changes occurred. I insisted that they were too strong for no effort and that they would bring all skills into disrepute. And here we are today.

OK, so I'd like people to look at a video where you'll see what is likely to be a low skill tier shrapnel trap covering an exit. Watch what the streamer does, note any mitigation they're attempting, what heals are deployed, if they are shielded etc etc. Skip to 1:50:00 and watch the next two minutes of gameplay.

Tiers 6 should kill. Tier 0 clearly does not.

@richardoshea

Time stamped the context.

So, we see he barely gets that jammer off in time before all those traps kill him indicated by the blue damage numbers from the jammer pulse. The guy that deploys them has zero yellow cores on his build. He has however spec'd into skill damage on his build you see later when inspected. That means he has 10 traps. You start with 10 traps and you gain 1 trap for each skill tier and 10% damage increases per tier. As you can see at the time stamp above he just manages to jam 8 traps and therefore doesn't feel the full force of 10 traps exploding simultaneously - see 8 blue damage numbers. This means he's only been hit by 2 out of the 10 traps deployed.

- This is his buddy. One shotted by a single trap out of 10. Again, see blue damage numbers on the jammed traps. This time 9 traps are jammed. (9 blue damage numbers).

Another thing that makes them so strong is that they're invisible to scanner pulses. They can be spotted by recon drones however. So without prior warning, which he had, its hard to be aware of them. I play a lot of conflict PvP and have one shotted players with it with zero skill tiers and absolutely zero specs into skill damage and explosive damage and that's not even a direct hit. Players will run through them and they'll all explode simultaneously dealing tonnes of damage. I don't know the exact numbers but imo they need toning down at low specs either by limiting the number of traps or reducing the damage they do at low specs.

@d-y-n-4-m-o So we both saw a successful attempt at defeating a trap and an unsuccessful one. Ergo they can be mitigated, by a tier 0 jammer. I'm afraid I don't see any time stamps for the parts you mention. I'm sure you have one-shotted players with a tier 0 but they probably weren't running 1.7 and a bunch of HP or shielded etc -- if they were they just suck. I agree that they need toning down at lower tiers, and argued as much at the time. Teirs six however should blow you into high orbit else what the hell is the point of investing in high skill tier damage builds. Would a gun build accept a gun that would not kill?

Personally I crack out my 1.9 - 97% hp -50% Explosive res - shield/artificer when I get that sort of thing. I kind of just blow through them in that build.

The laughable aspect is that when a team such as this holes up in a defensive position with only one or two entry points they seriously demand that you come rushing in through that entrance with a gun and only a gun. I don't know about you but if I saw a player actually do that I might just consider them the dumbest human I ever encountered. Assaulting an emplacement like that needs more than a gun.

@richardoshea

Apologies about the time stamps. I don't know why they haven't worked and have to wait ten mins to edit it to find out.

The first one is - 1:50:53
Second one (his buddy) - 1:51:54

@d-y-n-4-m-o So we both saw a successful attempt at defeating a trap and an unsuccessful one. Ergo they can be mitigated, by a tier 0 jammer. I'm afraid I don't see any time stamps for the parts you mention. I'm sure you have one-shotted players with a tier 0 but they probably weren't running 1.7 and a bunch of HP or shielded etc -- if they were they just suck. I agree that they need toning down at lower tiers, and argued as much at the time. Teirs six however should blow you into high orbit else what the hell is the point of investing in high skill tier damage builds. Would a gun build accept a gun that would not kill?

Personally I crack out my 1.9 - 97% hp -50% Explosive res - shield/artificer when I get that sort of thing. I kind of just blow through them in that build.

The laughable aspect is that when a team such as this holes up in a defensive position with only one or two entry points they seriously demand that you come rushing in through that entrance with a gun and only a gun. I don't know about you but if I saw a player actually do that I might just consider them the dumbest human I ever encountered. Assaulting an emplacement like that needs more than a gun.

Exactly

@d-y-n-4-m-o Yep, nukes him good as it looks like he pushed too soon and got it dumped on top of him. The throwing distance isn't that great so it looks like a bad play to me. The next player again successfully jams the trap and moves on. The tools are in the game to offset skills and they always have been. It took almost a year for HP to become routinely deployed in PvP and that was simply because people like skills and don't like being told how to play the game they paid for, while others don't like skills and refused to adapt and instead thought it more productive to complain over and over and over instead of just coming up with a build or an outplay.

@richardoshea

Theres definitely tools in the game thats for sure. They're usually the ones whispering hate filled messages of rage. Imagine being so upset you that want to kill someones family because you died in a video game LOL

@d-y-n-4-m-o I've heard some stuff lately coming from certain parts of the PvP community that are disgusting and should not be tolerated. I won't raise that here as it's out there and I'm not directing anyone towards that vile behaviour.

The sad part is that there are some great PvP players that you come across that comment on good skill use acknowledge being defeated and then come back with another build and another go. Sooner or later they find one and I'm now forced into that position. Which is what this was supposed to be about. Build chess complimenting skillful play.

While I enjoy all kinds of builds, and have everything from a support build to several kinds of skill builds and (also) several kinds of run 'n gun builds, I've always considered skill builds generally untenable in the DZ, so kept to tanky/high DPS builds when going in there.

The other day I came across a guy who was almost pure skill and his firestarter was literally instant death. I am a bit over 1.5M armor, but even from full strength (my armor) he'd ignite and if any part of the gas cloud touched you you'd be dead instantly. Zero chance of recovery.

I don't know how to test this in the DZ under normalization, but does this sound right? I always thought skills builds were gimped in PvP, but this was more powerful and killed faster than anything I had ever seen.

His build was all gold/yellow, so no EP pieces, and he didn't even have that much Status Effects or Skill Damage rolled on (some, but not on every piece).

I am hesitant to call "cheater" if I can't prove it...

@sock_monkey ....welcome to the DZ.

@darth_potat0 LOL, yeah. Going back to Div 1 it's a hit-or-miss thing. There have been times I met mostly friendly agents, farming landmarks like crazy. Then you have the nonsense like I described above, or four-man teams roaming around looking for solo players to "bully."

For the latter I found the best thing to peeve them is to respawn on the other side of the DZ, taunt them incessantly, then when they get angry say "come and find me!" Then I step back into the CP and FT to another DZ altogether.

@sock_monkey

Yeah that fire build sounds completely legit. There's many ways to counter it though.

@sock_monkey One thing would bring a Firestarter in a build with little status effect or skill damage to immediately kill. Were they using the artificer hive? 1.5 sounds like a lot of armour but it isn't. You can easily have 2m on your gear and then run a shield bringing it into the multiple millions range, and then throw some HP and explosive res in there and what you describe stops happening. There are also manouvres that make hitting you with that thing harder, and close the distance and they run the risk of a self-kill. You can still jam them too as a skill build without skills has no chance at all against a gun build. Hybrids alter that equation but the principle of trading this for that remains.