Ok, played a few hours last night and on the whole I enjoyed it. Here is a rundown on what I found.
For those looking for the underground, a new ad-hoc mission pops up on the map below the BoO. Go do this one (pretty easy) and then follow on to the next mission that takes you to the BoO and in to an initial underground mission.
Initial impressions;
The different modes are comparable to the above ground missions (inc drop GS levels). I did normal first and got GS163 items. Hard level gave GS182s and didn't complete challenging as we were a motley team of 4 with no coordination :8_laughing: . Where this does not hold true is with the stash boxes you get for leveling up. I consistently got GS226 weapons and GS268 Equipment from them. After maybe 3 hours I went up to level 7 for the underground.
The unique environments seems to be very much the same TBH. The feeling of "oh I've been here before" popped up a number of times over various missions. The building blocks of the levels are clearly the same, it is just the order they are joined together which is different. Not as radically different environment for each mission as I had hoped.
There are different types of Underground missions including "Find, turn on and defend generators", "Destroy weapon caches with time limits", "Search and destroy". I would imagine there are others as well. Death of the team in a mission requires a full mission restart, no respawns if all team members are dead. Different directives (nerfs like fog of war removing the minimap but giving greater XP bonuses) require various levels to unlock. There are also some mat boxes hidden around the underground which give a single golden mat. Oh and ammo can be an issue. My LVOA-C kept running out (I don't use the LoneStar 'Buff').
Some issues existed in the environment with not being able to pass through areas that had no visible blockers but these were quite minor and none were show stoppers.
You cannot group up if you are in the underground and the person you wish to group with is in the BoO or above ground. The terminal map is considered different from the above ground map. Group up and then travel to terminal or meet up in terminal and group up there. Terminal is a communal zone like a safe house so you can see the other players unlike the BoO.
I got a GS163 G36 which had a base DPS of 76k.
@ESGN's comment above sort of explains that :12_slight_smile: . I also had three LMGs drop (1x M60 and 2x 249s). I tried one of the 249s and it was ok but soon switched back to my AR. I also got a pp-19 (Bison) at GS 226 which was pretty good and a SVD Paratrooper (GS182) which I will try out tonight. 260rmp with 24.4k base damage and a 10 round mag IIRC.
Weapon recalibration is via buying weapon packs (8x gold mats of any type plus 107 Phoenix credits each) and taking them to the recalibration bench in the BoO. The process is as you would expect with just another category at the top for weapons and on choosing one, you get 3 talents (plus the original) you can choose from after rolling. One big point of note (contrary to what was mentioned by Skill-up), the talent which requires no stats to activate, if rerolled, then requires stats. If I had stable on the no stat requirement talent slot and I re-roll vicious, if I choose vicious then I have to meet its stat requirements in order to activate it. That is very disappointing. I had a choice between capable (req 2840 firearms) or stable (I met that requirement) and chose stable based on not having to meet the stat requirements only to find the information provided was incorrect. To be clear, I like Skill-ups vids and subscribe. This is no slight in his direction just that the information provided in this case appears to be incorrect.
Roving AI in the city are now lvl 30 so a slightly better challenge especially when they mob up from different directions when you are doing a HVT.
Only other issue I found was on logging in by Falcon lost, I could not open the map screen (m just brought up the falcon lost menu) until I ran a few blocks away and then the map kicked in.
Overall, pretty good so far. Logging in timeouts are to be expected but in my experience, weren't too bad. I am in the Asia Pacific time zone though which probably helped.
