Payday 3 Update 5: Feasting On Crumbs
Functionally useless, an apology for a skill I've ever seen in hell; it's not even the first bit of misdirection we've been served for this game. I have to ask how you can create something so insanely powerful but also creative and cohesive as fortitude, yet come up with this when first tackling Dodge; it's genuinely baffling and only bothers me so much because it's symptomatic of so many of the problems I have with Payday 3's skill system, the most pressing being that they're bloated out of viability by having ridiculous conditions, and also when an update basically amounts to a few balance changes and new skills.
I think you have every right to moan when 10% of the supposed new content is effectively worthless. An example of a skill that's gone the other way, though, is precision shooting. It used to have a frustrating stipulation to play around with as it used up Edge for bonus damage when you fired while adsing through a magnified scope, but now it just requires Edge to function instead of using it up and gives your shots the ability to penetrate another target in addition.
So this skill is immensely strong now. It's obviously great on the weapons it's intended for us on in the Marksman rifle category, but honestly, any weapon that has access to a magnified scope now probably should use it in order to get access to this skill. It's simply offering too much damage to miss out on.
For reference, the r900 can now do two or three shot dozes in the face plate with it, and the SAA, 144, can oneshot even heavy swats to the body. Trust me, just give it a go with the preset Sentinel version; it's beyond overpowered. I have no idea how it made it through testing, coupled with the godlike damage resistance you can generate from fortitude.
This sort of ludicrous damage output is at the core of what's now trivializing the game. Like I said. I'm here for it; it's fun for now, but I do think it should act as a kick up the backside for the developers, telling them that we desperately need some new, harder difficulties to play around on.
Tank, the old meta skill line before Fortitude came to town, has also received some love, except this time it's for its Mastery skill, so any build can make use of it. Clean slate allows you to restore your first armor plate if you're armorless by interacting with an armor kit, which without the skill can only repair damage, not missing plates.
I understand the intention behind this change but again it's another one that favors the heist a lot more than I think the design team realized, now I don't see the point in running armor with more than say two plates because as we know armor bags are very finite resources but armor repair kits are incredibly accessible you can get them from dozers or in their droves for trading hostages which is now even easier after Buffs to the manipulator line in the last update, as you can see within just one wave you can turn High population Heist into resource treasure troves within seconds and thanks to clean slate you'll effectively be creating three plates worth of armor every other trade which is why I've become a standard lining player overnight.
While it might end up slightly overshadowed by the new foru play style, which probably prefers to use standard-lining adaptive armor, which is now in the game, as I've already explained in the past, it trades out 20% damage reduction in exchange for avoiding trauma damage altogether. This means that it'll always regenerate a full chunk after waiting for the regen timer.
Obviously, the trade-off is that you can get blown up while wearing this thing with only 5% total damage reduction, especially against dozers, but if I were to lean back into an armor play style, you can be sure I'd be more inclined to go with adaptive, as it just feels like you have so much more control over your destiny while wearing it instead of being whittled away over time without really making any gameplay mistakes.
Let's be honest, dozes chew through all armor types at close range anyway, so that should never be the deciding factor in what you equip. I found that couple with the regen offered by Plate Up, which has been nerfed with its addition to only prop once every 2 seconds. I can still play incredibly aggressively and absorb Fair amounts of incoming damage with low plate armors obviously being passively buffed by Clean slates addition I think this is going to be a go-to choice for many and it doesn't take a genius to realize why it's just armor as armor was intended, instead of the decaying second health bar we had at launch, finally for this update there were a couple of balance tweaks for two of the least used guns in the game first after its recent buff the r900, received a little more love in the field Department, it will now allow you to cycle its bolt without scoping out quick scoping is all well and good but being forced to scope in and out was always frustrating.
This weapon now feels excellent to use as like I mentioned earlier with the new version of precision shot and its recent damage and armor pen Buffs it's an absolute Beast, it's still harder to make use of than say the SA or vf7 S but it does finally fit its proper niche as the game's only true primary sniper rifle option the Z Commando also received what amounts of Buffs across the board it did get struck by a small damage Nerf over 25 M but that just serves to accentuate the Clos range Buffs it received turning into the shotgun of the SMG class this thing now shreds from up to 50 m away and also receives some much needed base armor penetration, that pesky hidden stat which virtually dictates the viability of a gun on its own, overall this weapon is now fun to use once again I also don't want to undervalue the improved feel of this thing now with faster entry to Sprint speeds pre and post fire weapon feel as everything and finally the ziv seems to have hit its Groove and has a unique purpose shout out whoever is Behind These recent weapon balance changes, they've been spoton so far.
You'll still have a nightmare finding a game server that might suck, and there are only 11 heists to play. I just think it's fundamentally not going to have the mass appeal or add enough to the game to bring the majority of that inactive player base back at the moment, but hey. Starbur, pick the pace if their analysts say there'll still be players around in 6 months time once we get to the real meat of operation medic bag.
Who am I to argue otherwise? Update 5 is fun; it's got its low points, but I'm enjoying the game more today than I was yesterday. It's something baby steps anyway; check out Apex gaming PCs; they're much more affordable than they once were, but still built to the same incredible quality.
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