/tg/Station 13

Bottom post of the previous page:

I've played this game a few times, I didn't even know about the free DLC stuff. I thought this game was terrible and only had like 8 levels. lol

Yeah, join the community group and you get a fuckton of free stuff. Some of it is REALLY good.

K-64 wrote:I'm wondering how viable a frenzy/anarchist setup would work. I mean, I'd only have about 15% of the total health but considering frenzy makes it 30% anyways, the extra armour should make it more than worth it.

If you're going to try it, ditch the dodge stuff since not using Crook/Rogue breaks it anyway.
Put them into the Tank tree instead and hope you make out ahead.

FWIW I think the Sociopath is better than the Anarchist deck in every way. Let me know if you figure out how to make it work.

Well, I tried the Anarchist Frenzerker build with the ICTV and I felt like a goddamn bulldozer through a test bank heist. Out of the whole thing I was just wading through mowing down the assaults. Didn't even lose half armour. It does need a different way of thinking than the other perk decks, but really the only things you have to even consider worrying about are the cloakers doing a fuck-you dropkick on you. Not even snipers are a concern in the slightest which is a refreshing change

Double posting to say that the Anarchist Frenzy Berserker build is absolutely broken in the same way that sentries are. With silent killer I'm killing everything short of a bulldozer in one shot with even melee attacks. Dozers usually take 3 shots to the face to go down. I would say that it's much better than Sociopath since the regen procs less often and you don't get the extra boost. Although the half-health that Anarchist has probably would make it less viable for a general build rather than my retarded min-maxing. But the prospect of having 400 armour is too ridiculous for me not to go for. Granted, I'm doing this in Overkill difficulty, so DW may be a different bag of fish.

But yeah, it doesn't work so well with the suit or LBV since I wasn't sure whether it was a percentage increase or fixed.

The anarchist deck doesn't hold up to DW so well. Enemies fire way too much and too accurately in giant packs that even your huge reserves of armor get chewed up, and here the ultra-slow regen murders you.

I've tried playing prettymuch the exact same build with different weapons and it just doesn't work.

I think the only deathwish viable builds center on either dodging/negating a ton of damage (via crook or maniac) or having so much constant regeneration they can weather the beating (via grinder or sociopath). Take the exact same build you've got and swap for something like Yakuza instead of Anarchist. All the Yak perks will trigger if you're running Frenzy anyway, and that ICTV will got a ridiculous 60% regeneration speed AND you'll pick up a 20% movement bonus.

The regen really isn't an issue with a full deck as well as bullseye though. With Anarchist you really shouldn't be doing the whole hiding behind corners thing. I mean, with DW you wouldn't be walking into the fuckpile of cops, but it's still feasible enough to nail a bunch to get your armour back up at a reasonable pace. Especially with the various damage boosts that are provided by Berserker, the shotty skills and silent killer

I literally never have used the grinder deck, but when you all were using it with me you kept flopping about on the ground. I don't think a deck where your tank depends on everything going well is exactly viable, you are super vulnerable to even slight disruptions like a taser.

I built a HUEG build today for the hell of it and had fun. I miss being able to run, but I'd never used LMGs before and being able to practically drown people in lead is great. Not gonna main it, but it was a fun experiment.

DW is a drastic spike in difficulty over Overkill. It's really pretty insane. Drastically more enemies that mass fire at you and don't miss. In addition all headshot damage is cut down.

The way to survive DW is playing footsie with cover. If you are exposed even briefly you get slaughtered, so you only expose yourself for a moment to thin the hordes of dudes and immediately retreat so your armor can fill back up. Anarchist doesn't do this. You will take damage much faster than any ability you can slot will replenish it, and then be stucking waiting longer than anyone else to replenish it. A higher initial armor value doesn't end up helping you, as this play of hot/cold taking damage/healing damage eventually fucks you because of the super slow return. Anarchist is not DW viable. To get that 25 armor return for the headshot requires you to be in line-of-sight of at least the guy you are shooting at, who will easily hurt you for more than that in return.

Like I said before if you're building around anything that isn't Muscle, Armorer, Sociopath, Crook, or Yakuza I'm skeptical your build is actually DW viable and not just-really-good-on-overkill-tier. In testing and brewing with the new skills set and playing on nothing but DW, I'm kinda tempted to say scratch Crook and Sociopath off that list. I am finding that dodge builds, with the nerf to overall dodge rate, can't put up on DW anymore and end up just getting mutilated. Similarly Sociopath, even with its potential 85 armor return every two seconds if you can keep headshotting people, does not survive open engagement with THE HORDES.

Somehow when I wasn't looking Crew Chief received a lot of buffs. The new hostage-taker tree also benefits a Crew Chief player very nicely.

Ending up with two strong bodyguards, 4.5% health regen, 24% damage reduction, a couple HP increases, and more goodies could really make a difference on DW.

Crook got even tougher m8. I ran the numbers and everything that made the crook good got better because our armor is now universally higher.

The crook's EHP went from 514 to 549 HP, assuming you take the tank capstone and the aced skill that grants 20 armor, and in addition they got the ability to now finally effectively use primaries, better hp regeneration, and have more stability due to a slightly greater portion of your EHP coming from a regenerating armor that always works. Hell, if you go and use a full ballistic vest now, you can get up to an EHP of 559, which is extremely high and still fast, and if you want to be the ultimate objective taker you could use the heavy vest, which can maintain an EHP of 526 while stationary, 567 when running, and 1052 when interacting.

To put those numbers in perspective, the combined tactical armor has an EHP of around 530 when completely maxed out for armor, 1060 when interacting.

I think the balistic vest is going to be the crook standard now, instead of the lightweight. Going down to 45% dodge isn't a big deal, and the ability to carry automatic primaries is helpful. Heavies also fail to dodge big attacks a lot, even though their EHP is high often times the attacks that would get you as a crook were a chain of lucky sniper shots, and the extra armor isn't enough to be worth it against extreme damage attacks.

I think pure dodge builds did just get dumpstered though.

EDIT:

Highest dodge chance for LWBV with Crook is 40%.
This goes up to 50% while sprinting, or 55% while on a zipline (whoop dee doo).

Building around the LWBV you can get the armor on it up to 136 by investing in Tank perks that up your armor% and armor of ballistic vests.

Since you're already in the Tank tree you may as well get Bullseye while you're there for some added survivability, which actually helps a fucking ton for this build as 25 armor every 2 seconds...when it's a coin toss whether that armor may take a hit or not anyway, is fuckin' huge.

Still...I'm just not seeing the survivability needed for DW. At least not by itself. With a Crew Chief or Maniac player nearby this guy becomes stupidly tough, layering more damage mitigation ONTOP of the dodge chance seems really good. But by itself it doesn't seem tough enough. Especially not tough enough to consider Frenzerker, but really nobody should be doing that on DW anyway.

Armorer in an ICTV + damage mitigation is tougher and not a gamble whether you're going to be a tough guy or kissing the pavement because you got screwed by RNG.

It is there. Everything that was good about the crook got amplified, because the multiplication equation got more balanced if that makes sense.

We moved further away from 2 times 7 and towards 5 times 5, it always was about multiplying your dodge chance into your armor and health, meaning it is even tougher now than it was before... and... well.. crooks didn't go down a lot before. Remember, the best part about being a crook is that you get to use both your health and armor as tank, and you never have to be exposed to fire if you don't want too. So that is why we out-tank the fatsos.

The main issue I am currently having is that I am level 59 right now and thus can't get my damage and stability boosts yet, which absolutely sucks when you have to use high concealment weapons, either it sprays like crazy, does almost no damage, or is a handgun. I am currently using a concealment Raven and the classic megahuge crosskill, and its working out great. I am doing the same stuff I usually do on DW, mostly running about trying to find specials to blast in the head.

Also, and this was true before, you do suffer from having all crooks, though it isn't like you are doomed. The crook is the ace in the hole, but they aren't the best when doing static objectives or major waveclear, they excel at taking out specials and reviving people. They basically are the god damn Flash running about like an idiot most of the match getting the lowest kill count, until they dash in and save the day when the more static tanks fail.

I guess what bothers me the most about the build is that unpredictability on DW. There are times when you just get smeared out of nowhere. It's usually pretty consistent. Sometimes it almost seems OP.

Then you go from having full armor, full health, to being floored in half a second because two shields sprayed you, or a dozer halfway across the map looked at you. Situations an armor build would at least have time to panic sprint in a direction towards new cover.

The trick is to never treat your health as part of your actual tank IMO. Once your health starts taking hits you sprint out. Unless you are facing down 6 snipers you will never go from even half health to 0 before you get in cover.

That doesn't prevent the happening I described. It just happened during a test game on DW.

Plinking at a skulldozer from a block away, full health and armor, crouched in an alleyway so the only things that have a shot on me are the dozer I'm looking at and potentially someone who has snuck up on me from behind (there wasn't anything there, I found out after being revived).

Suddenly screen is dark red and I'm tilting over in slow-motion because I just got dropped. No snipers around, just obliterated because a single skulldozer decided I generated enough threat. From full to floor in an instant.

While a dozer can deal 450 damage on deathwish, that requires you to be at complete point blank range. As long as you aren't hugging the dozer you will always have time to run. At a block away the dozer capable of one shotting you is only dealing 50 damage a shot. Other dozers can still pack extreme damage, but at 320 actual health even with a LWBV you can't actually die in one hit.

Took a look at those skill changes

Seems to be an improvement, though it still has some useless skills and some skills that only give you a plain numbers bonus

Well, sometimes numbers matter over the more exciting stuff. And I agree, it's not perfect, but it just feels more... accessible now, I guess. Like, I have a couple of friends just picking up the game now and I think it'll be much easier for them to take a look at the trees and understand them.

Fuckit if everyone else is playing this again i guess i will too. Can i still GETTHEFUCKUP people back to life with the new skill balancing stuff?

Yup, you can still stop people from bleeding out through the sheer power of screaming.

The bullets all eject themselves from your teammates out of equal parts respect for your authority and fear of your badass yelling.

Pubs are still as bad as I remember
Diamond heist with a friend and two pubs
Pubs just stand in a corner cowering while the two of us shoot cops

Ask one pub several times to read the path for the tile puzzle for me, but they just stare at it and then at me, sometimes walks out to do I have no idea what
End up sprinting as far up and back again as I can, somehow made it to the end when the pub decides to try solving it

By stepping on a trapped tile while I'm about to grab the diamond

I'm down to play with people like...24/7.

I've got a really solid Crew Chief nanny build so you're all free to be glorious special snowflakes and papa-n0n3 will watch over you, feeding you health regen, damage mitigation, and shouting at you to get back up from across the level and through walls.

Do you usually go with DW or Overkill for difficulty? Since I haven't dabbled in DW much at all since even though Overkill is and has always been on the easy side, I do enjoy the freedom of shitty builds and weapons still being somewhat useable on it. DW seems to be a large case of "Meta or you're fucked". Except for stealth, because if you can do stealth in normal, you can do it on DW 90% of the time

DW Stealth runs are a lottery of "is X item vital to the heist in a place where we can use it or is it buried in some fucking random location/not placed here at all"

Typically we've played a lot of Overkill and Very Hard because they're FUN and still provide decent rewards.
I've been playing DW prettymuch exclusively by myself the last few days because I want that fucking DW mask and I'm tired of not having it.

I'm pretty set on masks now that the Completely Overkill pack has finally got something that isn't completely awful. So then I went with the absolute worst with the Mega Kawaii one. The difficulty masks do nothing for me really, granted I only have the hard one but still

im trying a maniac build so while an0n3 gives u his goodies ill be spraying death down hallways for dat dam reduction

I just spray death down hallways because I deal fuck-you amounts of damage and can survive an almost infinite amount of time in the open (on Overkill). I only ever need to duck into cover to reload.

Oh, I can also throw down some ammo I guess. So I'm not completely that guy who does nothing but shoot cops all day.

I actually had to tone my damage down. I couldn't convince guys to surrender without kneecapping them, and kneecapping them made them explode into a cloud of blood.

Gotta say, as much as it is my throwaway build, I'm loving my LMG setup. Today I staggered a shield and the physics made his shield shoot straight up into the air. I knocked guys into a clump of hanging pigs in Slaughterhouse and pork was swinging everywhere.

Also holy shit, Slaughterhouse on Overkill isn't that hard, and it pays out significantly, even at levels 80+.

LMG with the technician's Oppressor tree and the Enforcer's ammo perks is actually really fucking effective, yeah.

It's quite possible with all the perk benefits and mods we have access to now to take something like the Brenner and give it assault rifle accuracy/stability.

Then again if you have the Sydney DLC you can just use her rifle anyway. The lines are kinda blurry right now in terms of utility and what you end up with.

With my LMG build I'm running Gambler--it might not sync as well with the build but it's great to be able to heal and resupply the team just by running through a pile of ammo drops.

I've always been of the opinion that if you're needing a person with Gambler in the team to keep your ammo from going to shit-critical then you need to learn to better manage your ammo supply, or take less ammo thirsty guns. Something like Ex-Presidents or Maniac might work well if you're getting a high volume of kills. I mean, the health regen part of Gambler is pretty decent I guess, but there are probably better choices out there.

Granted, I may be biased since I've been using single-fire weapons exclusively for a good while now

Gambler is an interesting deck.

Base health gain from an ammo pack is 16-20 once every 4 seconds.
That's not much at all, and it's not very fast, either. You're not going to tank anything with that ability like you can with something like Grinder.

It gets interesting if you have lower health than someone else, or the lowest health on your team, in which case the healing gets doubled for each person with more health than you. 32-40, 48-60, or 64-80 once per four seconds is a decent chunk of healing. Again, it's not going to let you tank constant damage but you shouldn't have trouble staying healthy and you'll only rarely if ever need to grab a FAK. Get your ammo bags or sentries going.

Frenzy has made this a lot better, actually, since now your BERZERKER BROS dont get upset with you when your perk deck is constantly healing them out of their bonus damage range. On the topic, the deck ends up giving out far more health than it does ammo. Gambler triggers an ammo pickup for 50% of THEIR ammo pickup, so even if you've got all sorts of fun ammo boosting skills it wont help your allies, and often ends up only giving them 2-3 rounds, if any. The game seems to round down on that 50%, so if your friends are using snipers, grenade launchers, or other big guns there's a lot of instances where they will roll 0 on their pickups.

Overall it's an interesting alternative to Crew Chief. I think Crew Chief can heal more in a stream as long as they have a few hostages, but on maps where there just aren't a lot of guys and shouting down cops is fucking annoying, Gambler might be a better choice. The one thing to keep in mind with Gambler is not to get too greedy with the ammo pickups. While it's great that you're gaining health and healing everyone else too, your crew still needs that ammo for themselves quite often and a Gambler is an ammo drop vacuum.

NINJA'D: Yeah like I said the ammo sharing potential for Gambler is actually not that great, and it can make bad ammo management EVEN WORSE because the Gambler is more focused on grabbing pickups for health and things that other players might need for their own ammo supplies. The real deal with the Gambler deck is the health. I'd be curious to see what four Gamblers running around together could do, since everyone sharing 100% heal off of every single ammo drop and 50% ammo off of every drop could be pretty ridiculous. Since everyone can trigger the health bonus once per 4 seconds, that's a lot of healing going around as long as everyone keeps killing and picking up ammo.

Blorp blorp fart

I'm too dumb to figure out what's good

You're fine it's just that the deck maybe either changed or might work differently from what you remember.

Unfortunately having a bunch of ammo bonuses and a large ammo pool doesn't give out more ammo for your friends.

On the plus side, the deck gives out quite a bit of health so you are still CREDIT TO TEAM.

I like putting the LMG in a LWBV and using Grinder. It's fucking FASHION SOULS tier cosplay and really not a very good idea, but the constant damage output of the LMG means I get to heal constantly. So hey, it's not MLG PRO PAYDAY 2 all day every day anyway.

I didn't actually start using Gambler until after the recent changes. It just looked different so I thought I'd give it a shot. More interesting than armorer, at least.

okay Grinder + the new sentry turrets = functional invincibility

Pretty sure I saw a guy using that Technician Jack of All Trades perk to carry extra turrets last night.

EndgamerAzari wrote:Blorp blorp fart

I'm too dumb to figure out what's good

All your points into a tree for your weapon of choice
Add some points into what you want your deployable to be to make it good
Then add a few into what you want for a special ability(Shouting up people, converting, armour penetration, drills, whatever)
Put remaining points into generally useful skills(Like +4 zipties, run speed boosts, etc)

Once you have a good feel for what's good, you can vary it. But that's basic building

Oh yeah that's easy. I'm just not really good at figuring out what perk decks work well with other things.

Has anyone played with Ex-president?

It gives +10% dodge, +40% health, killing someone banks 12 health you get when your armor comes back up, and killing people makes your armor recover faster.

So it doesn't tank as well as Grinder, it looks more focused on blitzing from cover to cover. It just all-around seems really confusing to me and I'm curious what it actually does in play.

I've heard that it's more viable than Grinder thanks to Grinder being nerfed to the ground. It seems basically like the standard form of play, just that you don't need to use FAKs or doctor bags nearly as often.

That sounds like it might be fun for a medium-heavy assault build. Maybe tonight I'll try dumping points into it and see how it plays.

K-64 wrote:I've heard that it's more viable than Grinder thanks to Grinder being nerfed to the ground. It seems basically like the standard form of play, just that you don't need to use FAKs or doctor bags nearly as often.

Grinder is fine. What?

I thought they had increased the healing interval or something so that it wasn't quite as super tanky and stand in front of 500 cops while wearing a suit kind of deal?

I played a quick Overkill Slaughterhouse (seriously, a great grinding job) and someone in there was complaining about "the new Grinder", so apparently something did change.

Just had a meltdown with one pub in it(Edit: Pub was the round before that, this one was people trying out new builds I think)

Guy takes the car and drives off, leaving half the team behind
Ends up with everyone downed except me twice
Made it to the end still, with 7/8 extra loot bags
Only ended up going down once that game
Everyone else 6+ times
Record for downs was 15

Dodge build doesn't work quite as well as they expected I think

When I use my dodge build I bring FAKs so I can patch myself up when I catch a round or dozen.

Meltdown has always been cruel to dodge builds due to the insane number of snipers around the place.