One gripe with this game, if I'm to have one serious one... the combat on a lot of the side missions is not so "assault" build friendly. I have some stealth, enough to get by. But this time I wanted to run and gun a bit. Cover play and crafting nice powerful guns.
Plow through main story quests like I'm playing on easy. Run through like I'm stupid going pow pow from the hip with a pistol half the time and don't die. Game approves. Side missions? There is almost always a sniper WAYYY off that will kill you with a headshot the moment it becomes visible. I've lost count of how many times my head was pointed exactly where I knew he was, and he still got me before I was out enough to see him again.
I dunno if it's just me, but it's a major pet peeve. Because at that point, you are locked into one strategy... which is to follow the path they want you to take to cover the distance or stealth and get the drop. There's no working your way up the normal shooter way, playing all that cover that is in fact there, like you're clearly supposed to use it. It's placed perfectly to advance in a head-on firefight. And it's not like there's a middle ground. Often to get any closer than where the cover starts, you're getting within melee range of the normal fighters. Often, the ONLY way I see to complete those is to sneak through the bulk, or try to find a way around to the sniper if he can be isolated enough for a takedown. That can be reliably EASY... but also tedious.
Just not my favorite kind of difficult in that it's not actually difficult. It's the 'don't do it' strategy. It's no different from those special bosses where fighting them the normal way is actually impossible, but the way the game wants you to do it is almost too easy. In a game with a wide range of possible builds, that kinda sucks. If I wanted to creep my way up, I'd do a stealth build. But maybe I don't want every side mission to take 20 minutes for maybe 500 square meters of space and a little bit of not-even-special stuff. If I had known it was consistently going to be this much of pain just to get in range (forget counter sniping, you won't have time before you're either headless or getting swarmed by the rest while dealing with the god-tier camper,) I wouldn't have bothered trying to rely on guns for my main attribute. No point if there's always gonna be a sniper there to wreck your shit before the fight even starts.
Doesn't even seem to matter how much I boost defense or how good my weapons are. I've been pushing those areas as much as possible for like 5 levels and if anything it is worse. Every shot I *can* squeeze out on that guy tends to amount to ~20% of his health by the time I'm dead. And he's always there, wherever I go. Side-missions with tiny rewards... or even the police shootouts with no given rewards. I gotta fight THAT guy, every time, for loot that's only good as scrap and a few hundred ennies? Why bother at that point, you know? If there was something awesome at the end of those dragging fights, I'd keep trying until I could fuck that shit up every time.
I'm almost not sure it's really supposed to be that way. But if it is, it seems like you pretty much have to run a fully balanced build to do a lot of the side missions. Like, your stealth cannot be just average, and your hacking has to be good. I was planning to play that way at one point, just not this time. Might just have to scrap this and play with different builds. And here I was thinking "ooh, don't wanna min-max, better keep pace with the hacking and sneaking stuff." I keep hoping it'll get better with more leveling, but it's almost like an enforced thing and I can't level or stat my way out of not even being able to entertain firefights with random groups of thugs who I will mostly wreck shop on, the 10th time, when that sniper finally doesn't get me the 3rd or 4th time I pop out to try and finish him off.
Granted, I haven't been playing long enough to feel out builds and I have been going sloooooowwww. Still, it reminds me a lot of a sniper fight in Metro Exodus, where you wind up on top of a big crane tower fighting guys almost at the edge of what you can hit. And you have to hit them several times, with the most powerful ranged options available to get a single kill. Meanwhile there are at least 5 others ready to take you with one quick headshot from their half-shitty revolver rifle. You've got a couple of seconds scoped up before another one gets you. It's not a fun fight. It's a battle of attrition. But in that game it's just one battle like that.
I dunno at this point... just me sucking? Maybe there's some trick to bagging those fucks. Or is the combat just hard in a not fun or legitimately challenging way in weird spots? Was I *supposed* to min-max? I can't remember the last RPG I played where that was actually a dominant strategy. To do that first go you are either a noob or an RPG master. There's no way you're supposed to just meta it. I have to missing something.
EDIT: Alright, this mission is just fucking with me, they're all sponges with super powers. I can land 10 AR headshots and barely make a dent in any of them, while I'm lucky to survive with 30 HP left getting plucked with one stray burst. I'd wager it would take a couple dozen grenades to kill them all.
I get that they include a ton of stealth options and those are really cool, but I have never understood why bullet sponges are fun. I managed to kill one of those guys before the second one got me just as I started chipping in. Only took around 3 minutes to kill the first one. I managed to stagger him twice by sticking him with grenades. Yes... two direct grenade pegs and he just falls over, eats a couple clips, and goes back to cover. Unless all 6 or so of them are bosses. But they look like scavs. Only the sniper has a skull. It really doesn't feel like it's supposed to be that way! Every weapon I can muster on an assault-dominant build is chip damage to every group of enemies not directly on the main quest path. Imagine playing Street Fighter, but all you have are chip attacks. That's about the experience I'm having.
