jstout

I hate to complain again (actually, I enjoy it quite a bit), but here's how a $100,000 "reserves pack" works for me: 1. A rare assault or sniper rifle variant I will never use 2. A booster for a weapon I never use 3. Another rare assault or sniper rifle variant I will never use 4. An uncommon assault or sniper rifle variant I will never use 5. An ammo pack So essentially, I paid $100,000 for an ammo pack. Anybody got any game recommendations?

Played for maybe an hour and a half just now, and I really thought freemode would be all these exotic weapons and crazy vehicles, but it wasn't. It was just like it was before the gunrunning thing. People constantly send you invites to heists, and there's a little scrapping going on, but mostly people mind their own business. There were 2-4 guys running drugs and guns, usually not getting hassled. I was mainly attacking people on the game chat just for fun. There was one guy who gave me trouble, but we got separated and decided to share the BMOC title as it was mainly just him and me killing people. One guy climbed up into my shit and paid for it with five straight Allah Akbars - you think he would've caught on by one or two, but nope. He eventually found another place on the map to be. The game is really good for such a laugh when you're kicking someone's ass. It's just so satisfying to hear someone call you a bitch after their third consecutive death. But I have a feeling that at about 1-2 a.m., it's a different game. It still pisses me off that I still know the map so well. And I swear, I dunno if they juiced them up or I forgot how fast they went, but every car seems to haul ass now. Even the Mini-Cooper. They're damn near impossible to drive.

Usually, they offer the massive loot box as a prize for finishing an APEX mission over the weekend. It usually doesn't pop up this early. It's 10 cards, five of which are experience booster IVs, so I think it's overpriced at $600,000.

Phil, I didn't care as much for the Dawnguard DLC, but Dragonborn is really, really good. Maybe you can revisit it after Destiny fever wears off.

Got the new Shorty shotgun (ultra-rare). Fun gun. Fires semi automatically in bursts of 3. Does 300 or so damage, I guess that's each shot so a burst of 3 would be 900 (just guessing). Downers: Takes a while to reload, but holds 15 shots (five bursts of 3). It's got a really big clip, too. It's also a shotgun, so it's not the most accurate gun ever built. Big downer: Damn thing weighs a ton - it has to be one of the heaviest guns in the game. If you're counting on keeping your weight down to keep your power recharge speed up, good luck. The weight's gonna keep me from using it in serious games - I gotta have that recharge speed at 100 percent. There's no weight reducing mod that I know of for shotguns. Also testing using a sniper rifle with the Avenger. I can cloak and be invisible to enemies while I line me up a nice, juicy headshot. Problem is, I lose my melee damage boost that comes with the shotgun, but I'm trying to think in terms of how to play this Avenger in Platinum where frequency of enemies makes the running melee style a bit more difficult than it is in Gold.

Yeah, there's several of us still playing on the XBox One side, three or four with some regularity. My gamertag is jstout423. A correction: Screwed up my post about the ammo boxes from a while back. There's four power cells in ammo boxes for whatever you need them for. My Angara Avenger uses power cells for sticky grenades and cloaking. Her capacity is four each. So let's say I use all four stickies and all four cloaks before going to an ammo box. When I go, both will be refilled to four, but that box is empty for the rest of the wave. Let's say I use no grenades (four left) and I use all of my cloaks. If I go to an ammo box, I'll get no grenades (I'm full up on those) and four cloaks (filling my supply), and that ammo box is empty for the rest of the wave because I got four power cells for cloaks. Let's say I use three grenades (one left) and two cloaks. If I go to a box, I'll get filled up to four apiece, but since it gave me three grenades, there's only one cell left in the box. So let's say I use two grenades and two cloaks and go back to the same box. I'll only get one of each and the box will be dead for the rest of the wave. And Robert, this is more of a tip for you because you're the only other one I know playing the Avenger, but in a sequence where you melee someone and then cloak to prevent damage from other nearby enemies, try jumping in the air and cloaking in mid-air. I read about this, but didn't really see it in action until tonight. The enemies shoot at the last place they saw you. If it's mid-air, they'll be shooting in the air while you're on the ground. I got in the habit of doing that early. I also know that my enthusiasm for this game has about been ground into dust by the constant variants of guns I'll never use. I have the Venom Bulwark up to VIII, but the Venom's a sub-par shotgun. I have tons of these things up to VI and VII, but they're all guns I'll never use. I'm using a Scattershot Siphon V right now. According to some of my online reading, apparently the Siphon models are the way to go unless you're really disciplined and all about staying together as a team, which would make the Bulwark your best bet. EDIT: Me out loud to teammates who couldn't hear me during a game Sunday afternoon: "Do I finally get to kill something now, or am I just gonna run around reviving you assholes for the rest of the wave?"

Because all the blue ones are wildcats in the sack?

Never thought of it that way. Of course, I suck at deathmatches.

I'm going to buy Hydraulic Joints, but I'm not sure about using it. Robert has me interested in the one that gives you three more power cells capacity, but that 20 percent shield boost on the juggernaut shield is hard to give up.

Yeah, I noticed you were on, but I wound up hashing out some bullshit on Facebook and not playing. I did fail the One Life to Live silver mission when I found I had somehow used all five of my band-aids without knowing I had used one. Probably should pay more attention to what I'm doing.

Since I use shotguns in so few applications now, I got tired of the Ruzad's time between shots and the time it takes to reload. Now I use the Scattershot Siphon - 12 shots, shoots pretty rapidly, and does about as much damage as the Piranha while just being a uncommon weapon instead of an ultra-rare. It's also lighter and more accurate. It never runs out of ammo, but has to cool down after 12 shots. The cooldown doesn't take long at all. As for pistols, I like the Hurricane. As for the rest of them, they can kiss my ass because you can't put a melee booster on them like you can pistols and shotguns.

Got the Avenger up to X, finally. That means I've got to draw 16 ultra-rare characters (getting them all up to X) before I can even think about getting the Avenger up to XI. I would've been at 7 characters until they added the BatVan to the ultra-rare pile, and I only have him at I. Let's say I get an ultra-rare every five reserves packs. Let's say the ultra-rare I get is always a character (highly unlikely). That means I've got 90 reserve packs to go, which means I'll have to play roughly 180 games of gold to get them.

I had to finish a wave off by myself earlier today. It's amazing how much more careful I got. Y'all, don't ever play a character with cloak or it'll spoil you to the point where everything else is unplayable. The new Batarian Vanguard is fun, but no cloak, don't care.

I had one guy who died in wave 6 of that bronze APEX. We came pretty close to finishing it in 10 minutes. The gold with more shields and less health was a different story. I think my teammates died a combined 500 times. Edit: Bored reading through Reddit and picked up these two pieces of info: 1. The chances of getting an ultra-rare is the same in all three $100,000 packs. 2. People tracking the rate of UR drops put the chances of getting one at 25 percent. I think that's a bit high.

Get this: There's a bug in the respec process: when you respec at less than Rank X or less than Level 20, you may not be refunded all your skill points. This happened to me when I was re-specing the ultra-rare Asari, and it just plain sucks, beware.

That Batarian might actually be fun to play, as opposed to the first one.

I wasn't up in time to catch the stream, but the Reddit recap makes it sound like every question that people asked got answered with "we'll look into that." This includes the first statement that players need help coping with this gigantic pool of cards now. People have been complaining about the pool being overwhelming since they first changed it, and now they'll look into it? And so to add insult to injury, they add an ultra rare character and gun (which sounds particularly useless). Someone also - get this - complained that Platinum was too easy, especially when playing the Kett. They said they'd look into it. One of the devs also referred to my beloved Avenger as OP. Here comes the nerfing. I love playing the game with y'all, but reviving randoms 2,000 times a game just to inch toward another variant of an assault rifle that I'll never use is getting old as hell.

Yay, another N7 character to keep me from leveling up the Avenger! Woohoo!

I've found that if I'm at the back end of a game and the game freezes, I'll get paid for it anyway. Right now, when you try to join a game via quick start, the game says "can't find one right now, try later," which has gotta be some kind of problem on their end. Usually if it can't find a game for you via quick start, it'll start one for you with you as the host. I've also found that if there are two fiends on the screen at the same time, you're virtually guaranteed to lock up. Someone was asking a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't form coherent words to explain it: Each ammo box gives you four of the power cells for every ability that uses them per wave. For example, I have sticky grenades and cloaks running on my character. They both use power cells. Let's say I use 2 grenades and one cloak. Then when I go to ammo box A, I'll get two grenades and a cloak, leaving that box with two grenades and three cloaks. Let's say I use all my cloaks and grenades and head back to the same ammo box. Then I'll get the two grenades and three cloaks from the box, but it's done for the rest of the wave. Smartest thing to do is when you're told there's three left, find an ammo box (or two if you have to) that's gonna refill your power cell supply, because if you don't use that wave's supply, you'll lose them at the end of the wave and it'll all reset for the next wave. Any ammo trips after that "good job folks" or whatever Kandros says at the end of the wave counts toward the wave coming up. By the way:

That first change is really helpful and hurtful to me, because the last two ultra-rare character draws I got were kineticist XI and XII, while I'm still trying to bring the Avenger up to X. Problem is, once I get the Avenger to X, he's shut off while I level everybody else up to X.

The Avenger's go-to move, the Avenger Strike, is on a timer, and you don't want it slowed down by carrying too much crap. Especially since it's rare to even shoot a gun at all, much less two guns. Just get a light shotgun, equip with melee mod, and start knifing stuff.

I don't much care for the Batarian for some reason. I like his melee attack - THE BLENDERFIST OF DOOM~! - but I don't care for flak cannon on anybody. Batarians are the new hot characters for people to play gold with who are really underpowered and unsuited for gold, but screw it, he looks tough, he'll be alright. I know if there's a random Batarian in my gold game, I shall be doing more reviving than I care to.

"11 waves of Kett on gold on an unfamiliar map? We got this shit! ... OK, maybe we don't have this shit. ... Hey, we somehow all extracted! I told you we had this shit!"

The Avenger, when leveled up and spec-ed out right, is a complete beast. Anyone else look at the suggested builds on Reddit's ME:A multiplayer group? I built my Avenger from a post there ("Janice the Ripper") and it worked out well.

"I swear to God, if you die one more time, I'm reaching through the Internet and strangling you."