Wait... (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, March 16, 2016, 15:26 (3268 days ago) @ narcogen

I've been playing the crap out of The Division, so I'll shed some light on the situation:

First, to the original topic, Destiny's guns are the best feeling guns from any game ever. I consider that an objective fact.

Moving on:

The Division has level-based enemies and items, which means that if you shoot a level 10 bad guy with a level 1 gun, you're pretty much not going to hurt him. There are a whole lot of other things involved and I'm really oversimplifying here, but that's the general gist of it. Against same-level enemies you should generally be able to down basic (red health bar) enemies with a single sniper headshot, two DMR headshots, two shotgun blasts (or one if you're point blank to the head) or 4-8 rounds from your automatic weapon of choice, depending on range.

Against purple health bar enemies (armored), you have shoot down their armor first, and then they have about twice as much health as red health bar guys. Against yellow health bar enemies (heavily armored), you have to shoot down their armor first, and then they have about three times as much health as normal red bar guys. I don't have real numbers for this info, it's just what I've witnessed during gameplay (I'm currently level 29, the cap is 30).

So the yellow guys are definitely bullet sponges. They're a lot like yellow health bar enemies in Destiny. The purple guys can be spongey, but more often than not they're really just able to take a couple of extra shots, but not so many that they feel overpowered. It's like shooting a captain instead of a vandal.

One last note: Enemy health scales up as more players join your party. I can one-shot body shot when I play solo, but in a group of four it takes two headshots to kill a guy. This is good, as it keeps the encounters interesting instead of just having you and your team mowing down hordes of enemies that stand no chance.

As for the gun feel, it's actually really awesome. Not only do the weapon classes themselves feel good (sidearm, shotgun, smg, AR, LMG, DMR), but within those realms the individual weapons do have fairly unique feels. The way that feel is achieved is that the weapons differentiate more as they increase in level. A level 2 MP5 feels almost the same as a level 2 MP7, but a level 20 MP5 is noticeably softer hitting with smoother recoil than the chunkier level 20 MP7. The SCAR-H DMR at level 2 feels like a sniper rifle with a 20 round mag, but at level 20 it's clearly not going to be 1-shotting anyone (more like 3 headshots per kill) whereas a level 20 M44 is a true sniper rifle (bolt action, even) and will dome any red bar with a single round.

The result is that, as you play, you're encouraged to experiment early on as almost all weapons are interchangeable, but as you progress, you find that you like how certain weapons feel to the point where you're just not going to swap them for something with higher DPS because it doesn't handle the way you prefer.

Last note: There's not cannon about enemies being tougher as a result of the plague or anything like that. Those baseball bat guys are "rioters" who are the most basic enemy faction (all of the other factions' rusher type units have shotguns instead of baseball bats), and in the videos you're seeing, the player is in a full group and is a little underleveled, which is why that baseball bat guy can soak up two full mags from an SMG.

I hope this explains things!