There's no lv50 sets for everyone?

[Mr Fantastic]

crafting is super confusing and grindy as hell, this is not an mmo is it? XD

[Kaysoky]

You can tell there are some design elements which are MMO-like. But they ultimately did not complete that part of the design vision. Shooter St. is basically an MMO hub area.

[TheGrouch]

It is very convoluted yes. But it is not as grindy as it looks. However having dozens of different materials is really unnecessary and obnoxious to deal with at times. But it is what it is.

And no there aren't level 50 sets for everyone. Just like there aren't complete sets for everyone. Sets are more meant to be mixed and matched with other gear. The terrible base stats and the often awful 5-piece bonus really emphasize that. There really isn't any set that I would use all pieces of because of how bad the base stats are compared to decent purples or legendaries.

[Mr Fantastic]

Seems the game had a lot of ideas and most were unfinished, and instead of fixing this they keep announcing more dlc.

[TheGrouch]

Ambitions were big. Development doesn't pay itself. That's pretty much it. I think everyone has learned what to focus on. Multiplayer including PvP and the pseudo MMO features were never a thing that a team that small could handle with a game this complex.

To say that nothing has been fixed is very unfair though and you may want to look through the patch history before you make such a claim. The devs definitely work very hard on the game.

Anyway, that's pretty off-topic. Hope your question is answered.

[Mr Fantastic]

Originally posted by TheGrouch91:

Ambitions were big. Development doesn't pay itself. That's pretty much it. I think everyone has learned what to focus on. Multiplayer including PvP and the pseudo MMO features were never a thing that a team that small could handle with a game this complex.

Anyway, that's pretty off-topic. Hope your question is answered.

Yea I guess, so what are you using at lv50? Do you farm red items from bosses? Or just craft lv50 epics?

I'm getting my S handed to me on the mission where the clowns surround you, when you're looking for crabs. The random starting position and the overwhelming number of enemies

It's super weird to see the skinny kicking guys being able to kill my highest defense characters, that face tanked all bosses until this point, in a single turn.

Maybe the problem are the tier 3 collector and tanner sets which are much weaker than most blue items.

Having to spend 80% of the time in battle watching enemies moving around is really destroying my motivation to even try again and it's on max speed.

[Kaysoky]

Sets have rather limited use at late-game, which you seem to be at. There are a couple of partial sets which might still be useful, but if you're wearing farming sets in hard fights... it's not unexpected to get destroyed by the clowns :D

[TheGrouch]

Originally posted by Mr Fantastic:

Originally posted by TheGrouch91:

Ambitions were big. Development doesn't pay itself. That's pretty much it. I think everyone has learned what to focus on. Multiplayer including PvP and the pseudo MMO features were never a thing that a team that small could handle with a game this complex.

Anyway, that's pretty off-topic. Hope your question is answered.

Yea I guess, so what are you using at lv50? Do you farm red items from bosses? Or just craft lv50 epics?

I'm getting my S handed to me on the mission where the clowns surround you, when you're looking for crabs. The random starting position and the overwhelming number of enemies

It's super weird to see the skinny kicking guys being able to kill my highest defense characters, that face tanked all bosses until this point, in a single turn.

Maybe the problem are the tier 3 collector and tanner sets which are much weaker than most blue items.

Having to spend 80% of the time in battle watching enemies moving around is really destroying my motivation to even try again and it's on max speed.

That's unfortunate. I believe gear sets are a big newbie trap. It is not very clear that just equipping them will nilly is not a good idea. Especially the ones you get from quests as they are mostly meant for farming and other niche things.

I personally use a mix of 2-3 set pieces and good craftable purples and legendaries. Which ones are good and how to mix and match them is something that takes some time figuring out though and there is no cure-all setup that works for everyone. Although one such set is the melee Golden Leather set to some degree. You can put the 2 or 3 piece on pretty much any frontliner and it will be good since it has decent base stats and its set effect is very strong allowing you to skip Veteran in your support slots as well as giving you a huge amount of speed and HP. It is however a little lacking in terms of block. Also one little tip is to never use set weapons when you want to deal damage with them with the exception of Kylie (that one's effect is too good to pass). Weapons in particular have terrible stats and the affixes on purples and legendaries are too valuable with the best ones giving you 10% crit rate, 30% crit damage as well as another supplementary stat. No set bonus can keep up with that. That's the most general advice that I could give. Anything else requires looking at builds and whatnot to really round out the setup.

Clowns are definitely a difficulty spike. The Skeleton Masks in particular have a humongous amount of damage increase in melee and from still stance in particular rivaling that of Black Mages. They also stack armor break in no time making even the tankiest tank rather squishy. So my best advice would be to not just facetank them willy nilly and definitely do not get into a prolonged brawl with them. If they ever get to attack when they start their turn right next to you they will deal damage in the thousands even to a tank (think their one stomp attack get's somewhere like 300% damage increase when from still stance). Applying hit-and-run tactics and using mostly ranged attacks to kill them is best since they are Martial Artists and that class is specialist to beat other melee classes to a pulp however it really lacks in ranged defense (has basically none). The fatties in particular though have a lot of block. So some extreme measures have to be taken to overcome that or you have to make do with Breakthrough and pray.

Don't really remember what I had during that mission but here's a later mission. The video will not be useful for you since it is probably spoilery and if you don't like how slow the game is you will definitely not like how I play lol. But you can find the builds that I have used in the description. Those should be very close to what I used in the mission that you mentioned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGcUtoTPUUs&t=579s

[Mr Fantastic]

Originally posted by Kaysoky:

Sets have rather limited use at late-game, which you seem to be at. There are a couple of partial sets which might still be useful, but if you're wearing farming sets in hard fights... it's not unexpected to get destroyed by the clowns :D

It's sad I spent so much time farming the mats for them, and the so called set bonuses are all trash even in the tier 3 which takes tons of rare mats

[Mr Fantastic]

Originally posted by TheGrouch91:

Originally posted by Mr Fantastic:

Yea I guess, so what are you using at lv50? Do you farm red items from bosses? Or just craft lv50 epics?

I'm getting my S handed to me on the mission where the clowns surround you, when you're looking for crabs. The random starting position and the overwhelming number of enemies

It's super weird to see the skinny kicking guys being able to kill my highest defense characters, that face tanked all bosses until this point, in a single turn.

Maybe the problem are the tier 3 collector and tanner sets which are much weaker than most blue items.

Having to spend 80% of the time in battle watching enemies moving around is really destroying my motivation to even try again and it's on max speed.

That's unfortunate. I believe gear sets are a big newbie trap. It is not very clear that just equipping them will nilly is not a good idea. Especially the ones you get from quests as they are mostly meant for farming and other niche things.

I personally use a mix of 2-3 set pieces and good craftable purples and legendaries. Which ones are good and how to mix and match them is something that takes some time figuring out though and there is no cure-all setup that works for everyone. Although one such set is the melee Golden Leather set to some degree. You can put the 2 or 3 piece on pretty much any frontliner and it will be good since it has decent base stats and its set effect is very strong allowing you to skip Veteran in your support slots as well as giving you a huge amount of speed and HP. It is however a little lacking in terms of block. Also one little tip is to never use set weapons when you want to deal damage with them with the exception of Kylie (that one's effect is too good to pass). Weapons in particular have terrible stats and the affixes on purples and legendaries are too valuable with the best ones giving you 10% crit rate, 30% crit damage as well as another supplementary stat. No set bonus can keep up with that. That's the most general advice that I could give. Anything else requires looking at builds and whatnot to really round out the setup.

Clowns are definitely a difficulty spike. The Skeleton Masks in particular have a humongous amount of damage increase in melee and from still stance in particular rivaling that of Black Mages. They also stack armor break in no time making even the tankiest tank rather squishy. So my best advice would be to not just facetank them willy nilly and definitely do not get into a prolonged brawl with them. If they ever get to attack when they start their turn right next to you they will deal damage in the thousands even to a tank (think their one stomp attack get's somewhere like 300% damage increase when from still stance). Applying hit-and-run tactics and using mostly ranged attacks to kill them is best since they are Martial Artists and that class is specialist to beat other melee classes to a pulp however it really lacks in ranged defense (has basically none). The fatties in particular though have a lot of block. So some extreme measures have to be taken to overcome that or you have to make do with Breakthrough and pray.

Don't really remember what I had during that mission but here's a later mission. The video will not be useful for you since it is probably spoilery and if you don't like how slow the game is you will definitely not like how I play lol. But you can find the builds that I have used in the description. Those should be very close to what I used in the mission that you mentioned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGcUtoTPUUs&t=579s

Thanks for the long reply, I think the game has a lot things that make no sense, one of them is magic having to pass block, and block can decrease it's damage to less than 10% which makes no sense at all.

Sion makes an attack, it hits for 20k, then some dude blocks and does 100 damage, this is trash game design.

I like the core gameplay, but the way they did crafting and classes, and how long battles drag because they couldn't make enemies move much faster, really makes it feel a waste of time.

[Kaysoky]

I think the gear progression should go something like:

Levels 1-45) Anything you pick up with high dodge/block, with speed, hit chance, and crit chance being the next priority stats. But really anything will work.

Levels 45-50) Craft Purple items of the highest available tier (i.e. Draki or Crabmit stuff). You'll often craft multiple of the same item to roll 4-5 Star stats of a particular prefix/suffix (like Boots of Twilight Guide). This is a gradual process, as this crafting is material intensive. So you have to be mindful of what items will give your characters the biggest relative bonuses.

Levels-50->late-game) Once you've unlocked and are capable of defeating bosses in 46V, 50V, and/or 54V; you can run those missions to get legendaries. Legendaries are generally better than crafted gear, but there are a bunch to choose from and it is much harder to get good rolls of them (since you can't just craft 10x of them at once). So you just opportunistically replace Purple items with Legendaries if you happen to get ones that are better.

[Kaysoky]

Originally posted by Mr Fantastic:

Thanks for the long reply, I think the game has a lot things that make no sense, one of them is magic having to pass block, and block can decrease it's damage to less than 10% which makes no sense at all.

Sion makes an attack, it hits for 20k, then some dude blocks and does 100 damage, this is trash game design.

I like the core gameplay, but the way they did crafting and classes, and how long battles drag because they couldn't make enemies move much faster, really makes it feel a waste of time.

I'd consider this a transition point in the game, where Block becomes more important than Dodge as a defensive stat. There are a couple such transitions in the game, but due to how this makes enemies feel substantially tankier, it is probably the one that most heavily forces the player to adjust builds.

You end up requiring both high hit chance and block shred. Large critical multipliers are no longer valued as much, since crits are harder to achieve; and overkill means you are "wasting" potential on excessive outlier damage rather than consistent base damage.

In the case of Sion, that usually means moving from Black Mage with insane maximum damage, to Battle Mage with obscene tankiness. (But both still work, and it is ultimately your preference as to what role each character should play.)

[burningmime]

Originally posted by Mr Fantastic:

It's sad I spent so much time farming the mats for them, and the so called set bonuses are all trash even in the tier 3 which takes tons of rare mats

Dude you shouldn't ever need to farm mats. Literally everything except Draki Heart can be made by buying base components (flame fragments, mostly) and then working up from there. Always buy the lowest-level component and combine them.

Originally posted by Mr Fantastic:

Sion makes an attack, it hits for 20k, then some dude blocks and does 100 damage, this is trash game design

If you hit and the enemy blocks, you do 50% of your base damage and can't crit. For example, if you have 300% crit damage and 100% crit chance, then a blocked attack will do 1/8th the damage of a non-blocked one. So, yes, it has a pretty big effect, which is why block shred becomes important late-game.

You can always see exactly the percentages(*) and what's contributing to it by mousing over the block chance on the attack screen. There are ways to interact with the block percentage via masteries, equipment, abilities, etc. Sion in particular has several fairly decent lightning masteries for block shred, as well as the ability to get such high base damage he can basically "power through" block without needing crits.

(*) (Actually, a few things like Final Resistance don't show up annoyingly)

[The nameless Gamer]

Originally posted by Mr Fantastic:

Sion makes an attack, it hits for 20k, then some dude blocks and does 100 damage, this is trash game design

That just means your build isn't good enough. Black Mages do at least a 1.000+ damage on block. There is a whole lot of masteries allowing them to do extremely high raw damage as well as bypass ESP resistance. Battle Mage Sion with 20 stacks of Concentrated Magic Power does up to 8.000 damage on BLOCK with his Flash Kick ability.

[TheGrouch]

The damage formula is a little wack favoring block to an extreme extent. The fact that it both halves the damage by default and also prevents crits is just extremely powerful. That paired with the fact that in general damage scales way better naturally when going up levels than defense makes it so that you basically have to be able to block an attack or you will die in a single hit because crit damage scales indefinitely leading to exponential damage growth throughout the game while armor becomes very inefficient and cannot keep up with it. Plus damage increases are generally stronger than reductions. So a character either is a megatank and does not care or has to stay away from damage and play smart and use some "oh sh*t" masteries like Second Heart for emergencies.

Also just a heads up that legendaries are not always better than craftable purples. Not even close actually. There are a ton of purples who are way better than legendaries. Which ones are good is another topic since you would think that higher level equals stronger but there is some high level gear in particular that is just much worse than something as low as a level 20 craftable (the lowest level you can craft) because the high level stuff gives weird stats like an extra 100HP and 20 vigor which nobody cares about. And with armor being so weak and inefficient the base armor of an equipment rarely matters. (plus right now many enemies just delete your armor from equipment anyway...)