The State Of The Game was very good today, and most of what they said is very encouraging. The separate PVE/PVP balancing, the way skill power is respected when going into PVP, the reiteration that PVE AI and health pools are being tweaked alongside the buffs/nerfs, the updated time to kill in PVP (to allow skill play a little more, etc.). I guess as someone who was used to having to re-grind gear from the first game, and realizing how abundant it is in this game (you can get 50+ pieces of 490-500 gear score items in so little time), I'm fine with the idea that things are being re-aligned 35 days into the game's life.
My two main questions are:
- can they nail the venn diagram of reducing bullet sponge enemies/their rushing AI, while still making it so builds matter (I don't mind nerfs, but if the difference between a hodepodge build and a synergized one that is fully optimized is small percentage points here and there, it's going to make builds not particularly importnat on all but Heroic difficulty. I guess that's maybe okay, though...it just really depends on how all of the tweaks come together).
- will they introduce 515 gear score to other areas (they said it's a possibility)? My feeling is that the DZ makes sense as a place to consistently drop the best loot (as there is risk/reward), but it shouldn't be the only place. DZ extractions can be far easier and more frequent than Heroic difficulty runs and, presumably Raid runs. I hope that those activities get boosts in loot value. It was nice in Div 1 when Legendary missions guaranteed exotic drops...and while DZ runs often dropped them too at an hourly rate, it wasn't always