I recently got a new Apple product from work, and then promptly installed MPQ on it (yay company resources!). Since I’m primarily a Steam player, I had to start from scratch on the new device. As a new old player, I think it’s really interesting on having to start over with the newer features, which makes the game fundamentally different from when I initially started in December of last year. Here are my thoughts:
-Team-ups for new players are AWESOME. We bitch and moan a lot about them on the forums, but they really do help out new players. I used the Iso-8 Brotherhood loaner nodes to farm some Iso and Moonstone TUs, and using a Moonstone Photon Blast or Gravity Warp to beat freaking Juggernaut way earlier than you should be able to is great for making the game less grindey. I think some of the older players remember how the prologue had a ridiculous brick wall at some point that makes progression really hard. Getting randomly wiped by Rage of the Panther or Power of Attorney during PVP is annoying, but you take the good with the bad I guess.
-CHawkeye/MWidow/Loaner is a great team for taking down low level teams in PVP. Stun the main guy and take out all the match damage output, use crit tiles to pump out mad damage (really your best bet for burst damage early on) and hide behind the loaner all day. Good times. Bad for defense though, though I did get some hilarious defensive wins. Both chars were lvl 1.
-At some point, I got attacked by a 166/166/249 LDaken/Sentry/Daredevil team. WTF?! I should have screen shotted and posted to shame that person for tanking that much. I also lost 40 points from losses after grinding seed chars up to 100. Each loss at that point was only 1-2 points, which means I literally got attached 25+ times. I suppose I was asking for it. The matchmaker also thought that some level 100+ 3* teams were a good matchup for me. Again, tankers are jerks (which means I’m a half-jerk).
-Heroic Venom early nodes are a cakewalk when your chars get boosted to lvl 48 and the enemy nodes are lvl 15 and below. Managed to hit the 25k progression reward and get Patch to utterly house the rest of the nodes I couldn’t clear. The “new players have it easy in PVE” theory is alive.
-The 400 HP for 3 roster slots after 7 slots is bullkitty and are a clear cash grab. The next 3 slots after that are probably equally bullkitty. Knock that nonsense off, D3. Covers definitely come in faster than you can make room for them, but this approach is still obscene in my opinion.
I think apart from the cover slot bit, D3 has really done a lot to make the game more friendly and fun for new players, and I think they deserve some praise for that. Sometimes those changes are at odds with the vets, but I think with the character balance changes (FINALLY) they really are working hard at improving the game. The sky is not falling.
