The state of this wipe.
Before I start, this isn’t meant to be a whine and therefore I’ll start with the positives first.
The biggest and most enjoyable part of this wipe so far is that about 90% of the naked timmies running to bank are gone, been asking for this for ages and it was implemented better than expected and works great. 90% people take in a full kit, PvP is better! But sadly that also brings me to my next point.
PvP is also dead. I play on European servers and sadly have to take the ping hit and play on other servers due to crazy long queue times, it’s not infrequent for me to have 10-15 min queues to get into metro to get those final tasks done. 4-6 minutes to get into the other maps. 4 mins is too long to be queueing, and when you do get in, most of these raids are dead, maybe I hear a gunshot in the distance but not infrequent for me to run 4-6 raids without seeing another player. Now don’t get me wrong. On some matches, I run into someone within the first 2 minutes and all of a sudden there are 6 guys on my screen, but it’s rare and mostly only on resort. It’s a shame, of all the PvP shooters this one is by far the most fun I’ve had but, big but, the balancing feels so off and jarring.
The ammo and armor systems do not work well. Everyone just feels like a huge bullet sponge, often tanking 15-20 hits. Healing is so quick that at distance, it’s almost impossible to kill someone’s, especially now that it’s a little later into wipe and people are running high tier stuff, especially when getting top tier ammo is crazy hard, need like 4 rare items to trade for a stack of 15 bullets.. that’s crazy, we should be trading for 30 minimum, especially at those prices. And good ammo should be found in raid too, but not in stacks of 15. Like in tarkov where you can find boxes of 30-60-100-120. The time to kill just feels so bad. Often even with not bad ammo, like 545 BT of 56a1 or even 7.51 fmj with people with mid tier kits they’re tanking 15+ hits at close range. It’s so jarring. Now a lot of people are gonna say “just use better ammo”. Sure yeah, but you don’t unlock it until like the end of the game and even then, by the time you get lvl 4 Tommy everyone has level 4 max so using t6 armor and back to even more bullets to kill someone. I’m not even going to play the realism card obviously shooting something over 20 times int he chest isn’t realistic but my argument is that it’s not immersive and more importantly not satisfying or fun. When most people can tank a headshot when they reach level 3 max and you can rarely one tap someone and that’s by design I don’t think it’s good thing. Access to good ammo that drops people is locked behind level 4 traders and even then you can’t run it unless your duping because it costs so much items it’s just a pain to farm up. If they gave you a decent amount it would be a different story but you literally get 15 rounds per. And I’ll probably end up using them to kill scavs before I see a player and the scavs will likely tank 4-5 headshots anyway lol.
The elite scavs are also crazy, I dumped a whole drum mag 50 rounds point blank of 9mm ap rounds and it only died to the last few bullets. They tank 8+ headshots and a lot of the time by the time I get enough shots in they’ll 2 tap you as they always hit your chest. Again, I think it’s good they’re deadly, but I hate that they’re just bullet sponges.
This wipe has been one of the more enjoyable ones out of my 3 I’ve played so far. But the TTK is still one of the biggest drawbacks, I love the new pouches/rig presets, would love if you could do backpacks as well with bandages/grenades food etc. but also maybe due to PvE, it also died a lot quicker than previous wipes, I’m almost near max traders and almost no one to fight with and super long queue times. Even on previous wipes I’d be full lvl 4 traders and still have full lobbies for another few weeks before the casuals dropped off. I’m not sure if it is because of PvE or what but I don’t think splitting the playerbase helped. I’m glad casuals are having fun in PvE, I’m not here to hate. Just an observation and my experience.