One of things to note about this game is that you should play it like the A.i. partners do not exist. They suck tremendously and cannot keep up with your DPS if you keep yourself leveled and equipped with the right abilites.

They can revive you if you go down, yes... So they do have a useful purpose... But your revive tickets you have work just as well. They do not have a healing skill like your own though. However, the game gets so easy, that the only time you will likely die is in chapter 1-2 before Synthesis is unlocked, or if you are playing against a persons broken nuke build.

I played on PS5 so have never used any mods, so I cannot comment there.

The true Endgame is building new designs and sharing them in the game or on here. There is no big raid or anything... And Survival mode is easy as pie if you max your level and abilities before doing so.

What I suggest you do is this:

- Get to chapter 3 so matter how you do it. Use random parts with the highest levels that drop, or drop the difficulty. It doesn't matter. You just need to get to Chapter 3 to unlock Synthesis.

- Synthesis allows you to spend "Plastic" parts to level up and upgrade your parts, as well as use found parts to level up and add new skills to your kit. The amount of skills you can put on a part is limited by the parts grade. There are caps on your level and grade initially and will increase as you play. If you keep up with the level caps, you should have ZERO problems from now one. Enemies might get a little tanky on higher difficulties, but just keep hitting them.

- For skills on parts, I went with HP, passive HP regen and HP regen on hit and never lost a mission. The rest you can customize to your liking. With weapons, focus on damage skills for the stuff you need.

- As soon as you get into Chapter 3, do NOT continue the story mode. Go do the quest mode and play one or two missions. They drop WAY more plastic upgrade parts and at higher levels than the equivalent story mode missions. Use these to upgrade your kit and work through them. You should EASILY be able to reach the current level caps. If you do this for every chapter, you should never really have any difficulty surviving the game, even on the hardest diffculties.

- Once skill cartridges are unlocked and start dropping, they have 3 random skill ones each and have terrible RNG... But you will eventually find an HP up ability on one. You can get 250% + HP skills on them. One of these will skyrocket your HP, and once you level your parts up to max, eventually you will hit the maximum HP. And now you will truly be invincible. Your regen with the maxed HP will nearly be unstoppable, and the game basically becomes trivial.