I might dust off my copy and hop on tonight to try out Survival.

First time I tried it, I went in totally blind and after basically not playing at all for months. I lasted over an hour.

Since then, I read a bunch of guides and watched a bunch of youtube vids about it. Now I can't even last 20 minutes

Got this my 3rd try at Lex



Then got these from a survival cache...



It was a good day yesterday!

I haven't played in about two weeks. I may play it soon. 

You know where I'm going to tell you to shove that?

I'm close to 120 runs without one dropping

Pffft. 300+ runs and nadda.

I'm honestly to the point where it would be nice to get one but by the time I do they will nerf it.

The disappointment is real.  Really all I've been doing lately is twinking and survival.  Playing on my lvl 30 character has lost some of it's muster since all I want is that chestpiece and it's vaporware.

That's funny. That's exactly the direction I've gone too. Got a lvl 14 character with DZ 36 now. Pre 30 pvp seems much more fun, to be honest.

I've gotten the skulls gloves about a dozen times now. Did not know they were anything special other than the gold lettering so I kept a pair just in case.  Did not even know anything else existed.

Ditto. I've got the gloves and the chestpiece and don't run with either. Unless I just got bad drops, they really just don't seem good at all, unless I'm missing something.

So, I did an HVT yesterday and got rocked.  What stats should I shoot for at the 229 level?

None. You should shoot for getting up to 256 ASAP. Save your resources until you get equipment that you actually plan to keep. Shouldn't take long.

I am on PC.

My friend and I played this past weekend.  We bumped up to Tier 5 and ran a bunch of story missions together.  It was a blast!  It was challenging enough that we had to take our time but was very doable.  And getting lots of gear was really, really nice.  I think I'm in the upper 240s now.  I'm running 4pc TA and 2pc Alpha with Healing Station and Pulse.  It seems to be working well for me so far.

I sent you a friend request as well so we could run through the PvE bosses if you wanted to.

Oh, thanks!  I think I saw it pop up but I didn't accept yet.  I should have realized it was someone from AR15.com.

No worries I am the same way.  I just ignore chat and friend requests from folks I do not know.

I'm usually on from 1600-1800cst weekdays.

Have any of you guys been keeping up with the recent datamining info? Obvious disclaimer, could mean nothing, but it does give me a little hope. Specifically, I've been wanting the map to expand northward for some time, and, according to the datamine info leaking out, it sounds as though Central Park is a possibility. As well as PVP game modes, new missions, etc.

Here's hoping, anyway.

ALET ALET! So this ridiculous farming technique has been leaked on YouTube... you get 500+ items an hour via a Field Proficiency Cache every 3 minutes lol!

Items needed:
1. knee-pads with Accomplished (rewards from accolades are tippled)
2. backpack with Inventive (SP + 15% while at full HP)
3. 3 pieces of Firecrest gear with increased kill xp and lots of electronics (to get +50% flame turret range & +30% flame turret dmg)
4. Purchase the +6% increased kill xp firearms mod from the Ward safehouse on sale now and put them on all your gear. (eta: i think the cavern has one now)
5. Equip flame turret.
6. Equip tech support and wildfire talents

steps:
1. travel to WarrenGate Power Plant mission (tier 5)
2. set mission to normal difficulty
3. throw turret in the archway right before all the enemies then run back to the mission menu spot
4. as soon as the enemies die, open the mission menu and restart the mission; the enemies automatically spawn and die by your turret.
5. just keep the mission menu open and keep restarting the mission when you see your HP bar flash (meaning the enemies were killed).
6. after a few minutes run in and collect your loot in case the game bugs out and you lose all the drops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF5l2GYFuVs&feature=youtu.be

Tried it, but don't have 3 firecrest and SP is only at 175k... too slow currently. I have to replace the turret too often.

I'm going to do a boss run and see if i can get some firecrest

Was bored so I tried this.  Holy crap it works and is stupid easy.  I used a pack with Specialized instead.  200% of FA and stam to electronics. I also did not have any xp mods so I put in nothing but electronics and skill power and was able to get about 241k.  

I have to restart the mission every 3 seconds and I usually run out of space in my pack before the turret dies.  A cache every 20 resets.

I would suggest putting on your normal gear before opening the caches.

So I cannot be the only one with a complete set of all the gear sets in their stash?

I put all my gear set items in the stash and if I have any duplicates I pick the best item and sell the spare.  

I also keep 1 of each weapon type in the stash, keeping the best one and selling the rest.  Plus a ton of mods in various flavors.

To be honest I have no clue what I have in my stash beyond the alphabridge I have on my character.  It is so broken right now that I use nothing else.  Two different setups with it, one for PvE and one for PvP.

I haven't been keeping anything that wasn't within 10 points of max roll and had the main stat that I already wanted.

Finally got the warren gate farm routine down even though I don't have 3 pieces of firecrest. Once I got 270k electronics it started working as fast as the guy in the video with firecrest.

The Cavern has the 6% xp mods for sale right now.

Now I need to look for a few good build guides because i have pretty much a full set (if not multiples) of every different set.

I've looked online for the same thing but the information is all over the place and most of it is old.  This is the best info I've seen and it's on page 85 of this thread.  I myself run a 2pc Hunters mark and a 4pc Sentry.  Probably not the best but works good for me in PvE.  Good balance between high DPS and toughness.

Im actually proud of this one, since I 99.8% run survival solo (pve though)

Nice!  I was pumped when I got that achievement, means you extracted a minimum of 17 times

My latest challenge has been trying to get 6 survival caches as quick as possible in PvP.  Did it in 1:04 last night.  My goal is to do it in under an hour.

There's a lot of little things that you can try to do to make survival fresh.  I tried a true speed run a week or so back, was extracting after 14 minutes, I got my shit kicked in by the hunter since I was in all greens and I had bad rng got a stupid smg.  That was the most fun I've had fighting one of those in a long time.  Once you get geared they are kind of boring.

Well that was a quick response by Massive, lol... Patch notes for Friday morning's maintenance.

TL;DR:
Fixed an issue where players could quickly farm experience by continuously resetting missions. There is now a cooldown when resetting a mission multiple times in a row and skill are destroyed when a mission is reset.

Time to farm your heart out until then boys!

LOL! From that thread:

Attached File

Yet, still no fix yet for the "Delta C-0-1243" disconnect issue that is plaguing some of us.  It'd be nice if the game wouldn't kick me out every 30 to 45 minutes or so.  

A new mission showed up after this morning's maintenance. Massive addressed it and stated, "Following the maintenance this week, we saw several reports of a new mission appearing on the map. We want to clarify that this is not intended or some kind of teaser."





Also, out of all the time spent farming the WarrenGate exploit before it was fixed, I only got 1 named drop:

I got spoiled by that.  It's like having a huge mega candy store in town that you loved to go to.  Then one day they closed down and all that's left in town is the gumball machine.

Shit rolled, unless you're gonna run a skill build

Lots of Patch 1.6 info being released, as well as some Last Stand details:
Patch 1.6 Info
Last Stand Info

1.6 TL;DR:
~No new World Tier
~DZ 7, 8, 9 now open. This almost doubles the playable size of the current DZ
~DZ new landmarks have multiple waves of enemies and loot that doesn't need to be extracted
~Fast travel between DZ checkpoints introduced
~DZ "Contamination" events.
~DZ Leaderboards, one for PvP and one for PvE
~New mission difficulty "Legendary" for Times Square, WarrenGate Power Plant, and Napalm Production Site.
~"Legendary" difficulty introduces new enemies into the missions with much smarter and skilled AI, not necessarily much stronger.
~Exclusive rewards limited to "legendary" difficulty missions
~Named weapons and gear are now called "Exotics" and now have their own color coding.
~Exotics each have an extremely unique talent (example: The Hungry Hog - Glutton Talent "killing a target increases your dmg dealt by 20% until you stop firing")
~Exotic talents will not work with Alphabridge 4-piece bonus
~Exotic "weapon sets" introduced (example: Valkyria named weapon is now split into two weapons, the Hildr and Eir, which give a bonus talent if both are equipped)
~Changes to named weapons are retroactive to prevent older weapons becoming favorable
~New Exotic caches that guarantee exotic items
~Gear Set Changes:
      -Alphabridge: nerfed like crazy, but will now share free talents from both weapons
      -Reclaimer: 4-piece talent will activate all 4 Support Station mods, and 2 and 3 piece bonuses focus on Support Station.
~New SEEKR gear set: 4-piece bonus is guaranteed critical hit after landing two consecutive body shots (can be spread across different enemies)
~Armor nerfed like crazy. Focus will now be on health and skillpower. Armor removed as a major bonus.
~New "resist all" stat
~Changes to resistance bonuses
~Lots of NPC and major/minor bonus rebalances
~Skillpower buffed to make SP builds more viable. New diminishing returns and scaling.
~lots of changes to skills
~lots of PvP balancing including hip fire, combat roll nerf, no reload while sprinting, and talent changes
~Unlimited recalibration
~New in-game store with micro transactions
... and tons of other stuff.

Will add a TL;DR version of the Last Stand info later.

Last Stand info so far



~Entirely new separate game mode
~Unlike the DZ, Last Stand is session based like Survival with clear objectives
~Two teams of 8 players each fight for control of objectives (A B and C on the map pictured)
~20 minute time limit for each match
~No rogue mechanic, so no XP or loot loss
~level 30 requirement
~Respawn mechanics that change during the match, so you're not always required to be revived
~Not just PvP, there will be lots of NPC's and at some points you will be forced to kill NPC's for objectives or resources
~Matchmaking has new mechanics that will matchmake based on other factors than gear score
~You will not be able to queue up as an 8 person group, only 4 person max pre-mades allowed (example, 1 team of 8 people can be matchmaked together from 2 different 4 person groups, 4 different 2 person groups, 1 4 person group and 4 solo players, etc.
~"stat normalization" introduced for the Last Stand that will limit impact of gear to prevent overpowered players
~Last Stand rank system introduced with max rank of 40
~exclusive vanity rewards
~New PvE Incursion also launching with the Last Stand expansion
~lots more info yet to be released

Can someone what rifle is best to use in this game? I'm ranked 30 in dark zone. I am using the LVOC as a rifle and a MP5 as a back up. I'm coming back to this game and haven't kept up with it.

There is no one answer because it depends on your build.

"~DZ Leaderboards, one for PvP and one for PvE"

PvE in DZ?  Will my dreams ever come true?

No. DZ is the same as before, they're just keeping track of PvP and PvE stats separately, like player kills and npc kills.

The Public Test Server has been updated to 1.6. Here's the patch notes: http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/1551900-Global-PTS-Patch-Notes-(Update-1-6-and-Last-Stand)

TL;DR version:
~Last Stand game mode
~New Incursion - Lost Signal
    -TV Broadcast center taken over by Rikers
    -3 wings with 3 different unique combat scenarios
~3 new DZ areas now open
~Weekly and monthly DZ leaderboards with rewards at the end of the week/month
~DZ Contanimation events
~Legendary difficulty for 3 missions, featuring new elite LMB enemies
~A large amount of new weapon skins, backpack skins, clothing sets
~New emotes available

Combat:
~Increased time to revive from 3s to 5s
~Bleed no longer blocks sprint, but reduces movement speed by 20%
~Medkits can now be used at full health to cleans character of applied status effects
~Medkit cooldown increased from 12s to 15s
~No more reloading while sprinting
~Hipfire stability while moving significantly reduced
~Player camera now impacted by continuous hipfire
~Cooldown added to combat rolls
~PvP body shot damage increased
~New visual feedback when enemy player uses medkit

DZ:
~Fast travel between DZ checkpoints
~Non-rogues will no longer lose DZ xp and funds when killed
~Supply drops reward DZ xp

Armor & Resistances:
~Armor removed as major bonus from items and replaced with health
~New bonus called "Resist All"
~Pre 1.6 items with health bonus will be replaced with Resist All
~Resistances to status effects reduce effect, not resist it (unless resistance is 100%)
~Status effects now have diminishing returns

~Gear talent Rejuvenated now gives 40% resistance to all status effects for 10 seconds when using a medkit
~Character talent On the move reduced to 15%
~Battle Buddy reduced to 30%
~Critical Save reduced to 20%
~Adrenaline will no longer apply Overheal

Skills:
~Changes to skillpower
    -larger skillpower curve for how powerful skills are
    -skills now scale to world tier
    -Diminishing return on skillpower will not kick in before 450,000 skillpower
    -all skills have been adapted to new scaling
~Sticky Bomb
    -Flashbang only gives flashbang effect
    -Proximity mod gives EMP effect
    -Added warning and delay to sticky bomb
~First Aid
    -Defibrillator will now heal in 2 steps; one instant burst and one over time
~Shock Turret will no longer deal damage
~Signature Skills:
    -post-use "exhaust" increased from 30s to 60s
    -players cannot trigger signature skill if under exhaust effect from previous use
    -signature skill cooldown now affected by skill haste
    -tactical link damage decreased to 10% only in Last Stand game mode
~Skill haste gear bonuses increased 100%

Lots of changes to gear sets, weapons, survival, new elite weapon class for named weapons, recalibrations, loot, etc... I'm just too tired to put them all in right now lol

I'm hearing good things from the people testing 1.6 in the PTS. Seems like you now actually need balanced characters, or at least a balanced group. The holy trinity of group MMORPG's (tanks, healers, and dps) seems to be a necessity.

If you don't have a decent amount put into skillpower, your heals do squat and you'll use all your medkits quickly.

Have you seen any of the videos with the new seeker gear set and the 2 valkyria replacements?  Guys are hitting 1m crit bodyshots on NPC's and 100k crits on players, it's hilariously sad.  Literally 2 shot players with a smg.

That is going to need some serious balancing.  It's really like massive does no testing at all.  At least there is the PTS out now, the game would be a laughing joke if it was like before where there was no player testing.

Just got back into the game here the past couple of nights...looks like I got ALOT of catching up to do...LOL

AB can suck my dick... This is my new PvP setup, both weapons also have competent in the last slot.

It hurts people, and 1v1's don't last longer than about 15 seconds.
333.0% stagger on a 102K damage 190rpm striker stacking BM SASG-12 S

Barrett chestpiece and savage gloves with 1272 firearms, 1,323 damage for both shotgun and Assault rifle and 5.0% CHC