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Okay so Dodge 8 is very good, but it's not game-breaking-good. I still get shot. Against melee it's better because AI melee generally has lower hit chance I think. The elite HKPF are damn good shots. If I increased Dodge in the first campaign it might have been a different story and I could very well be invincible. As it stands I would estimate Dodge 8 is reducing damage taken by 75%! I should be struggling more than this.
[Edit] Potential exploit indeed.
[Edit2] Well the first campaign finale WAS hopeless for me until I raised Dodge to 8.
One thing you didn't mention: How did the Magnet Arm work out?
Now that I've seen it through and I know it works, I'll go over some of my choices and how effective they were (including Magnet Arm).
This is the final build I had just before fighting Krait:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1701832327
The extended campaign extra karma went in to SMG's (6) and Summoning (3) to get Fish. I also spent my last 0.5 essence on Enhanced Articulation to max Dodge (9).
The grenade launcher is swapped for an Ingram SuperMach(Smartlink) SMG.
After that there is nothing left to spend money on apart from advanced medkits and drugs.
Final Showdown:
With Dodge 9 and Fish I was able to tank a lot of enemy fire if I stayed in cover. Again I won't say that high Dodge is game-breaking but it most certainly helps! Enemies with low natural hit chance (like SMG's at middle range) will hardly ever hit. However, rifles and pistols, or anything with better accuracy WILL get through. The shock troops will still hit you in melee about 33% of the time. Magic is also a problem, or anything with area effect (that isn't a grenade). I wish I could give you more definitive numbers on what Dodge does but this is my general experience. I think someone will need to run a proper experiment to know more.
After countless reloads I found the best strategy was to kill all high accuracy humanoid targets as soon as possible and leave the Spider Drones until last.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1701833300
Decking 7 meant I could take control of one of the Drones and use it as a massive distraction while I chipped away at the meat targets. Once everyone was dead I sat in medium cover where the drones couldn't outflank me and weathered their fire. The drones were hitting me about 25% of the time because, seemingly, they have much lower accuracy, and when they did hit me it only took around 12 health despite my armour being stripped.
Once Krait came out I hightailed down to the medkits on bottom screen and quite easily dealt with her.
EQUIPMENT:
SMG:
The SuperMach(Smartlink) SMG is a mean beast. It can reliably drop a single target every turn. 1 AP to flush from cover, max 3 AP to drop target even at fairly long range. Mages and anything in medium armour will likely drop for only 2 AP (sometimes even 1), so you can often kill twice in one round. I don't have a lot of experience with 'extended' weapons so I can't give a fair comparison in terms of what is outright best, but this gun certainly worked for me.
Drugmule Drone:
Early on the drone was extremely helpful in ways I've already described, but as the game progressed it became less so. Having said that, that little drone came with me on every single run right up to Krait - we formed a bond. It just so happens that most vents you can access occur before the 'main firefight' anyway, so by the time the drone dies it's usually served its purpose. Quite often I would find myself hiding the drone out of sight before battle because the little guy would attract so much fire he would die in one round.
Fairlight Excalibur:
Having high Decking throughout made my life so much easier. Decking tests come up frequently and they are always extremely helpful when they do. Also, having access to paydata on early runs is a much needed leg up - like the restaurant job where you would otherwise have to leave it behind. Prosperity Tower must be HELL without it and so high Decking should be considered just for that alone. Once again I tip my hat to you on that one.
Armour:
I used the "Last-Gen Lined Coat" you can buy from Whampoa (because it's the best looking outfit in the game) right up until Armour 8 became available.
CYBERWARE:
Autoloader:
Absolutely required for the early/mid-game grenade launcher, but stays valid right until the very end. With added +1 Quickness and a price tag of only 1,000 this is a MUST have for any build that uses a gun (except obviously magic builds).
Magnet Arm:
Very good early-mid game when the drone can actually stay alive. Park yourself and the drone in cover and watch as the enemy grenade themselves to death - much fun to be had.
Late game it becomes less useful because the enemy will not chuck grenades so frequently without the drone being there. It does make you immune to all grenade launchers though which are fairy common in the extended campaign. I would say that overall the Magnet Arm is optional.
Datajack, Hydraulic Jack, Wired Reflexes, Alpha Eyes, Enhanced Articulation:
All self-explanatory really. Hydraulic Jack is very useful for kiting melee enemies and for dashing to jack points (like in Prosperity Tower). I prefer the Mk1 because the Mk2 has an awkward extra essence cost which doesn't seem worth it.
THE CHALLENGE:
Like you I played the game on Hard and I think this should be part of the 'official challenge' if anyone else takes an interest. I did do some loyalty missions because it sounded like you had done so. I agree it would be possible without doing them, but it definitely helps. I found a good compromise was to not let the NPC help you in fights and instead just run them out of sight somewhere. The only one where that was difficult to do was Gobbet's run, and for that reason I think that one should be skipped. Ractor can be told to stay at home during his loyalty mission so that leaves only DeckCon and Gaichu's Unit. It wouldn't make a huge difference to skip them for a full challenge experience though.
I had immense fun playing solo and I was surprised how much effort had gone in to the solo narrative. It feels perfectly natural. The end-game sections are horrendous and required lots and lots of reloading, but most of the levels in between were perfectly doable and very much enjoyable.
Right, I'm off to try a melee build. Time to remove my auto-grenade launcher crutches.
Feels great to beat the impossible doesn't it?
I really loved finishing that final... and the tower, which may have been easier with higher Decking of course. Just as everything else is harder due to higher Decking and its uselessness in meatspace. Namely the regular campaign's final wasn't that hard with the Ninja - the tower's final was way harder.
Good luck!
I'd be intrigued as to what your build is going to be... ;)
Of course a solo is a challenge, but it is not me challenging you - much rather you alone decide to challenge yourself as I see it. Solo'ing is a self-restriction. I'm happy if some more people join in and I believe it more fun to play the loyalty runs rather than skipping them. 8 karma each for Is0bel, Gobbet and Gaichu make a difference. That said anybody not doing them has bragging rights of course ;)
I personally agree on hard - I've always played hard and will continue to do so. Then again I also don't use manual saves, yet never mentioned it. On my 1st solo I needed saves for the DF final and consequently decided to not use manual saves from there. Also I skipped on many "exploitables" (spells) on my 2nd solo (yet found more ^^). You seem to go a similar route, trying something different. Thereby you'll be skipping on powerful tools you've used before - namely max Dodge, which would be hard to do w/ a melee.
I skip on manual saves because I want to, not because I have to. There's no doubt in my mind you could do that as well, but I don't know whether you find it fun and that's the important part. The autosaves in shadowrun are rather well designed btw, although the lengthy texts & talks in HK make its autosaves a little less good than DF's. It's probably more of a side effect of having an outstanding level design, not so much an "outstanding autosave design" in itself. It's not Dark Souls (which is founded upon the unity of save- & level-design), but level & save design simply go hand in hand generally.
It's been a major reason as to why Wasteland 2 is way less fun to solo: The inferior level design is okay (result of an open world), but the autosave design is plain horrible due to it.
If s/o wants to start off on normal it's fine imo. It would certainly enable people to do hard next off. There's many details that are best left to the player, rather than cast in stone for the community. As long as a solo is played w/o party where it can be it's a solo. Anything for comfort - I like company ;)
I think of it more like this: If there was a fourth option in the difficulty settings for a solo play, what would that option look like? You can make any game arbitrarily more difficult for any number of reasons, but I personally enjoy it when the criteria is more rigid, I like a specific challenge. Usually this challenge is set out by the devs of a game and I have it on faith that despite how hard it may seem, it IS in fact possible. In this particular case the 'community' (well just you) has provided that challenge. I very much enjoyed this play-through in no small part because I knew it was possible. I also very much enjoy the kind of meta discussion it generates - easy games rarely have any meaningful meta to discuss.
So when I talk about 'The Challenge' I am catering to other Wolf's out there who might be looking for the same thing.
Holy crap, Zadok, you just keep raising the bar! :D
I save-scummed a lot during the 'boss' fights. If I had a particularly good few rounds I would 'bank' it. Not doing that would significantly up the difficulty (and frustration) of those fights. *hats off*
In other situations, in other games, I rarely save - and if the option for Ironman is available I will always take it. I totally understand your reasons for doing that. The autosaves in SR:HK are indeed well thought out, especially because it tends to autosave before any big fight, but those end sections though ... Oh man.
I can quite imagine. For me the end battles were harder - the Yama King especially so. The balance is quite interesting in that regard because you have to build for one or the other. There's very little cross-compatibility with intelligence and meatspace (except maybe drones to some extent but I am not convinced a full Rigger is going to work). Decking earns more money which has a meatspace impact, but most of that money is spent on the deck - so it's kind of circular reasoning.
Now we know how effective Dodge is, I think there's no denying that gun builds are going to have an edge in solo. I see it as an added challenge to try melee and I am not sure yet how to go about it. Your build is pretty robust already and I doubt I could ever improve on it. It might be fun to build around that sword you get from The Dig, but I am not sure how to go about it yet. I prefer cyber builds over adept builds, so it might be quite difficult levelling strength, melee, body and CA with no loyalty runs.
Personally I mostly played other things, but I also gave my Qi Adept another go and ran into a frustrating Feng Shui run. Those spirits are tough. Without Qi & Thrown? Sounds pretty tough to me.
As for my Heavy: It's pretty narrow karma wise, since I might not get the Panther w/ Decking 3, Dodge is not for free and I planned to make him a gun adept... So far it's fine, but yeah: Launcher/Loader was already known as powerful :p
So err... Can't say I cut through it like a hot knife through butter ^^
I tried 2 builds : SwampDragon's one, that is early grenade launcher w/ reloading into smg for the bonus campaign, and a variant of the ninja build w/o throwing or spell casting, but instead investing in decking & dodge. I still don't Zadok how you managed prosperity tower with only 3 decking, and no dodge. Staying alive long enough and finishing the matrix part quickly was hard enough... is that where you used a lot of grenades maybe ?
The grenade launcher build is so powerful, you don't even need to have a very good aim, even a 6 quickness / 5 ranged is enough for most of the main campaign. The only thing it lacks is single target damage which can be sub-optimal in some fight (Exit / stage left). Otherwise it's very very karma and money efficient. I didn't do the bonus campaign with this build, because then the grenade launcher is useless, and the smg build, while looking very efficient, was a bit boring to me.
The "alternate" ninja build was really strong in term of mono-target damage right from the start thanks to compound attack (started with 5 body & 5 CA), and stayed really strong the whole game. The AP damage is also really useful. I couldn't afford decking 7 with this build, but 5 was enough to get the Novatech Slimcase-10 with 4 AP & a strong base attack.
I made some quick tests with dodge with the campaign editor, and it seems dodge works like to Hit chance : 1 point in quickness seems to be worth ~6% hit chance, 1 point in dodge is ~8% hit chance, and fish is a flat 10% chance to hit penalty.
A character with 9 quickness / 9 ranged trying to hit another character with 9 quickness / 9 dogde & fish has around ~40% to hit (not sure if difficulty settings impact this though)
In game, it seem to have a big impact too. Having a good dodge stat change a lot of things and is really efficient even in the bonus campaign.
Concerning cyberwares, I used Cross Dermal Sheath with both builds which allow to gain 18hp over 3 rounds for 1 AP. It was really nice, it is often usable in long missions where it really shines (every time you can engage the enemy yourself, you can go back to full health for free). And since dodge is so strong, I didn't use the hydraulic jack legs, but instead the one that boost quickness & dodge. I'm not really sure how efficient it is, mobility seem to be powerful, however you don't always need to move that much. It is also often possible to use summoned spirit to activate things for you in fights that needs it.
You are probably right - dodge & launcher make the race. Especially dodge in the bonus campaign, where the enemy strips armor by default. Cross Dermal Sheath intrigued me due to the occasional full refill option, but I got it kind of too late to get much out of it. There's no "waiting it out" in the final, so it can't be exploited there.
As for decking 3 tower: I jacked out in between to cut down on the opponents quickly and jacked in again, with plenty combat drugs. I wonder: Does AP influence how many matrix turns you get per meatspace turn? In any case the timer progressed slower than expected. That said I didn't go for the Panther (no need for my Ninja...). Nonetheless I tried around a bit and it sure seemed very hard...
*Btw: I've returned to DF for a bit and found the Qi Adept very powerful and the Rigger pretty weak. DF can probably be said to offer more leeway for different solo builds, though I am not entirely sure - it may be due to a lot more experience playing it.
There'll be a time for more HK - I'm already looking forward to it :)
Yeah I think the armor focus is very strong in the main campaign, but since it's not the case anymore in the bonus campaign, I thought I'd go directly for dodge instead. I've seen someone mentioning that Jolt-Alert could protect from AP drain entirely, which may change things though.
True, in the last fight it's not really useful, not enough time to use a slow healing method. I guess it's a kind of safety net that allow to recover from mistakes, which makes runs as a whole smoother.
Didn't try the panther either, because theses matrix while fighting fights were still a nightmare for me even with 5 or even 7 decking. I tried not to rely on manual saves, but in theses fights... the matrix is so RNG based with low decking that I ended up using them.
As I failed the last fight in prosperity tower multiple times, I tried w/ and w/o using drugs or wired reflex and it does not seem to give more turn in the matrix. It was something like 2 turns in the matrix for one turn in meat space no matter what (and the turn when the matrix enemy notice & attack seem to count as one turn).
I felt that HK was really strict because of low money, low karma and the need to be a decker. Also cyberwares are really really good (bonus AP and stats that are otherwise very expensive karma-wise), which tend to favor builds that can use them efficiently.
I'm going to try custom campaigns in HK, but maybe I'll go back to solo later ^_^