The Division 2

Vorph said:

I've been meaning to put a Tempest build together since I got the BP from one of my first retaliations. What did you go with? I was thinking 3 Core Str, 2 IA, Ninjabike with striker drone and bulwark shield. Only reason I haven't put it together yet is because getting the IA pieces that can be turned blue is such a pain in the ass.

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When I say I made a bulwark build what I really meant is I put on a crappy IA mask and holster. Never bothered to mod anything or look for better drops. I only played it for one mission to check it out. In hind sight I probably should have at least tried to put some skill cores on to boost the shield and artificer. It was early in my return. I've since collected basically 3 sets of core strength, one for each core color so I can play around more, I just haven't gone back to tempest since.

I don't know if it's real or not but it "feels" like the various reward caches give stat rolls at least on par with challenging. I guess it makes sense since the caches themselves aren't tagged with difficulty tier. Following the quantity over quality idea you could speed run cache rewarding projects and objectives on an easier setting, especially if that activity's named loot isn't something you care about.

All those charts are missing the best combos - Saturate / Cascade / Split or Convert. I don't get it either.

mkopec said:

I also finally put together a core strength/Capacitor hybrid build using the striker drone and turret and its pretty fun never having played anything like this before. 3 pieces of core strength, ninja backpack, picaros holster (Brazos) and a pair of UA gloves for that 5% ROF and 20% AR dmg.

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That's still my favorite solo build for the season (group I am a big fan of Bluescreen/Catalyst/OD support). Just make sure you use yellow cores and not red. I don't know why all the builds online show a bunch of red but the math is wrong that way. Yellows give you a much stronger Capacitor and 1 skill tier is more or less equal to 11.25% skill efficiency so that's basically a wash for your drone and turret. Efficiency sucks for crusader shield though, so running red cores removes that as a real option for harder content.

This is the setup I run for it:

mkopec said:

No shield on mine just drone and turret.

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Ah, a bit different from mine. I like having 55+ CHC and everything else in CHD, since I'm going for max Capacitor damage and the skills are just there to pick off stragglers. Even gimped the drone can solo a kill squad member on challenging so it still works well enough.

I switch them up a lot. Running from one CP to the next during a retaliation shield is less hassle than dropping the turret and picking it back up every half block. Since it's max skill tier it's safer against the kill squads too. Once I get to the CP I quickly swap back to turret to clear faster.

I like running Gunner over Tech too. I'm already at 6 skill tiers with 3 Core Str, Ninjabike, and Picaro so I can leave the UA red and swap to Gunner for 10% AOK and the ammo regen which definitely helps in retaliations.

For striker I've just been running the most cookie cutter version. All red, striker mask/backpack/holster/knees, Equalizer, Overdogs, and St. Elmo's. Been having some fun with Big Alejandro during this event though. I was hitting over 35M dps in the shooting range last night. And in some content (Countdown mainly) it's even crazier if you swap the Striker pieces to Negotiator's. Spray a whole group of enemies and they just melt, even on heroic Countdown. Tried Backfire too, but I hate it. The 43% HazPro you get from modifiers turns on and off during every fight because of the red glowing enemies so you never know whether it's actually going to work or not, and the thing is just useless outside of point blank range.

Yeah, at some point I need to farm up a MK46/249 too, but so far I got nothing that can roll both DtA and Killer. I don't think I even have one with decent primary stats right now.

His Backfire build is pretty close to what I was using, and I got a Chill Out while farming my Quickstep so I gave it a shot in a challenging retaliation. Not bad overall, and the PfE on top of decent hazpro is nice. I'm definitely not a fan of using the Striker chest though. I swapped that out for a Ceska with Obliterate and put on my Ninjabike, and tried it in a challenging Countdown. Definitely an improvement, but there's still issues. Personally I'm not a huge fan of Striker there to begin with; there's too many lulls where you have nothing to shoot and you lose your stacks. Backfire is even worse since you lose all the stacks at once if you stop hitting for 10 seconds. Fully stacked I can hit just under 20M dps in the shooting range, but let the stacks drop off and it craters down to 5M.

The PfE is really nice against the hunters though, definitely the tankiest build I've brought in there by a large margin. I think it would be interesting to try it out with Negotiator's (but not interesting enough to farm up three pieces with hazpro).

New event starts tomorrow your chance to get those named items lexington turmoil quickstep. April 21 - May 12. Pretty much like the christmas event.

Damn, no Stack Broker is sad times. Guess it's a good thing I farmed DZ resources over the weekend and bought the well-rolled Rock n' Roll that's for sale this week. Already got Quickstep and godrolled Harvest + Handbasket from the Bloody Houndsman bounties, but at least I'll finally be able to get Lexington, Turmoil, and Caretaker.

Caches/keys sound way more stingy than the bounty events though, so this is probably going to be a hell of a grind to get everything. Lexington always comes godrolled with DTOOC so you can put Killer or Optimist on it, and I believe Turmoil always comes with maxed CHC and CHD and weapon damage that's 14.9-15%. You'll still want at least 2 Turmoils though, one to use as-is, one that you drop the CHD for HSD, and maybe one to roll to a blue core. Hopefully the drop rate isn't as bad as it was in previous caches (10% chance for the 'rare' items and then 5% chance for a Turmoil or Lexington).

This event seems a bit harsh in comparison to the previous ones that used the bounties.

The kitsunebi squad have a 10min cooldown between them.
The Ronin's have a random low chance to spawn.
The key drop rate is 65% on ronin, 6.5% on kitsunebi on heroic, 55/5 on normal.
So you can get the kit to spawn 5-6 times per hour, and get maybe 0-2 keys in that time.
There's 30 cosmetics, the gear cache, and the community dono...
That cooldown should probably be dropped to 5mins instead...

It's a complete shitshow, even if the keys dropped at 10x the rate they do now it would still be awful compared to a bounty-based event.

Edit: Also, zero chance for a Prototype Lexington drop. And I'm a bit confused about the 'health link' thing. I've been running around with my Lengmo Pest build and they're just dying like a normal kill squad in an escalation. Doesn't seem like the health link actually does anything so might as well just use a normal (tankier) build.

First key I used:

So fucking gay, apparently that was me hitting the 0.05% chance "jackpot".

BTW if you want to make the event spawns super easy on higher difficulties, just use a Backfire build. I started with the one above and modified it for 71% PfE and 78.2% HazPro, and that's with season mods set to 129%HSD and 21.5% armor, no hazpro. The health link does work if you catch them right as they spawn and are still close together. I just pop my shield and empty mag after mag into the heavy's head, once the armor breaks he dies fast and usually takes all of the others down with him. Sometimes the sniper runs far away and you have to go chase her down, that's about it. With that much defense and a tier 6 shield they do basically no damage.

You still won't get any keys unless you luck into a bugged endless spawn (which seems to only happen when playing in a full group), but at least you can kill them easily. I've averaged barely over 1 key per hour in an event that expects you to donate 80 on top of opening the gear cache enough times to get a whole bunch of rare shit. I actually got a Caretaker and Lexington already, but still need 2-3 Turmoils (4.7%), and 2 Investors (3.55%). Zero apparel keys still too.

Maybe I've just been lucky on key drops but I think the drop chance is per individual kill, not the group. I've gotten at least two keys per spawn at least twice now which is why I think this is the case. So a normal 10 minute spawn gives you 5-6 chances at a key which should be around a 25% chance of at least one key.

I've gotten zero apparel keys but if you look at the vendor it looks like either apparel or gear key opens the apparel cache but I've not tried it yet.

Xenrauk said:

That cooldown should probably be dropped to 5mins instead...

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That's a tough one. Sure, for the people running around with the sole intent of farming Kits a fast cooldown would be nice but there are people trying to do other things open world. It's easy to say "they should want kit spawns anyway even if they don't think they do" but think how annoying it is to get across the map during a retribution and now imagine those all being named enemies.

I think I would rather the same, or even lower untriggered spawn rate, but add more triggers like the lanterns to spawn kits at will.

Downhammer said:

Maybe I've just been lucky on key drops but I think the drop chance is per individual kill, not the group. I've gotten at least two keys per spawn at least twice now which is why I think this is the case. So a normal 10 minute spawn gives you 5-6 chances at a key which should be around a 25% chance of at least one key.

I've gotten zero apparel keys but if you look at the vendor it looks like either apparel or gear key opens the apparel cache but I've not tried it yet.

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3-5 chances, from what I've seen. It's 5 most of the time but I've had several with only 3. Never seen 4 or >5.

Compare that to a bounty event like Houndsman. There's 7(?) mini-warhounds in the first area. Every single one drops 1-2 named items and a couple pieces of random loot. I think there was 5 more in the second room with the boss, but generally you just do the first room and reset it while farming that stuff. This event could literally drop one key per dude you kill every time and it would still be far worse than a bounty event. (Ignoring the bug that some people have figured out how to abuse to endlessly spawn Ronins.)

And yeah, apparel keys are what you get if you pay money to skip the grind. I didn't realize that before. So if you want to complete this event you need 80+30+____ keys. Probably around 300 total in order to have a reasonable shot at getting the things I am still after. No chance in hell of that happening at somewhere around 1.2-1.5 keys per hour on average.
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People have found all the lanterns already too. Here's a good map for finding them if anyone is interested. Note that they don't do anything besides have a small chance of spawning a squad immediately after you examine them. Should have been a key for each one your find, but no, it's just an armpatch for collecting all 40.

Downhammer said:

That's a tough one. Sure, for the people running around with the sole intent of farming Kits a fast cooldown would be nice but there are people trying to do other things open world. It's easy to say "they should want kit spawns anyway even if they don't think they do" but think how annoying it is to get across the map during a retribution and now imagine those all being named enemies.

I think I would rather the same, or even lower untriggered spawn rate, but add more triggers like the lanterns to spawn kits at will.

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Well I guess it doesn't matter since they have a bugged out infinite ronin spawn happening anyways...

Finally got in one of those infinite spawn groups and the dumbass who started it had on Heroic with Fog of War and Ammo Hoarders going.

Edit: Time to play the slot machine --


LOL, my first two were back to back Turmoils and after 15 more I got the third Investor mask I wanted.