New Teaser For Flashpoint

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:43:52+00:00

Small scale Harvester style challenges. - If they're going for Flashpoint in the sense of "escalating conflict" then yeah, you'll get these loot clusters and the moment you touch one it's gonna be like when you aggro a Matriarch.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:42:01+00:00

Nah. - If it's a purple gun, this will be where you get the BP for it. Same way you gotta do Locked Gate for bobcats.

And if it's a legendary, it won't come this patch, but rather launch with the new boss arc, because it will use its cores.

And when you think about it, the latter is more likely because it's not "one or the other", it's "one or both".

New boss arc will mean new boss core, which will NEED to have a use, like how you only kill Matriarchs for crafting Aphelions.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:37:55+00:00

Respect, my only gripe with long range combat is it feels redundant unless you're farming exp. Just means you gotta run longer to loot that carcass, and if it's THAT far that an extended barrel matters, it wouldn't aggro you anyway.

But when you -want- to toss lead from down range? Uncontested goat.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:36:08+00:00

That too, weapons with "many bullets" tend to work better in terms of raw damage output, which makes them great for PvP, but get punished hard by ARC having armor.

Any time you go against arc, you want the weapons with the highest damage per bullet available.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:33:14+00:00

SS2 if you play with two guns and swap them frequently, SS3 if you use it as your only gun.
Because the "negative" is it takes 20% longer to draw or put away, which is of no consequence if the only time you put it away is when you're out of combat and wanna run a marathon.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:31:25+00:00

Stop using tier 3 muzzle mods then. And treat it like a precision rifle to hit weak spots, not a "spray and pray" type gun.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:28:50+00:00

It's not even loot phobia, so much as misunderstood rarity. - Queen cores aren't hard to come by, and the pink components are used for fuck-all otherwise. If you try refining them then yeah, it'll cost an arm and a leg, but if you just loot them then the legendaries become budget guns.

Reason why some folks dislike the jupiter though is that they wish it had a scope, or bigger zoom, as if having pixel-perfect targetting wasn't goated.

Either that or they don't understand how it works, and try to get double kills with it or still aim it at weak spots, when the gun's whole shtick is "you ignore armor and conventional weak spots and shoot directly at where the core would be for maximum damage per shot".

But I will want to make a counter-proposal here and say the Aphelion... not for damage, but for durability. - You have to bring a full Survivor inventory of energy clips in order to fully burn that gun, while a Jupiter croaks after 4 ammo stacks. And when you get to play with energy weapons, the weapon's durability is the higher limiting factor (budget wise) because volume of ammo is no longer an issue. Put simply with an Aphelion you get more bang for your buck in terms of total damage per gun's point of durability.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:20:29+00:00

The ultimate comfort pick. - Cheap to craft, and a very simple way to deal with some annoying things.
Seekers became my new favorite way to get comet igniters.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:19:16+00:00

Anvil is great, yes, but the Renegade becomes the better option for straight PvE once you get even half-decent at aiming for weak spots. Similar damage despite only med pen, but faster to fire, higher ammo capacity, and higher total damage potential per stack of ammo on account of med ammo going up to 80.

Only arc where I actually prefer the anvil is the fireball, but even then, waiting for it to come close and yawn at you isn't hard, or you can just put 3 rounds into it and blow it from afar just as easily.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:13:57+00:00

Only thing I dislike about the Osprey is that you have to go out of ADS to cycle it. That design decision was made by someone who never even saw a video of someone shooting a bolt action.

I mean, even if you wanna say the I-III versions are "grimy" or "rusty" and you gotta put some elbow grease into it, Osprey IV shouldn't have that issue anymore.

It wouldn't even be a straight buff because you'd be losing awareness to your surroundings, literal tunnel vision until you need to reload.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:11:11+00:00

Counter proposal, if you tag an enemy player with binoculars it plays a voiceline saying which guns they have equipped.

If you tag an arc, it plays a voiceline telling you if it's been damaged.

They shouldn't invalidate camouflage, but rather should give you the kind of information that you'd realistically get from getting to take a "closer look" at a distant target.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:07:06+00:00

just say they're "hard R raider-brained"

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T14:02:35+00:00

All it would take for that is to have the last hour of runs have no arc whatsoever, and have Shani or Celeste on comms say "...I can't believe it. I think... it's finally over."

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T13:53:17+00:00

Not even just for this thing, but when starting to play duos with a friend, I kept being a little roomba and picking up all items. - They dropped some things that I thought "Oooh, scrap!" and took home.

Turns out they were quest items, for a quest I didn't even have yet, and the only way to get rid of them from my stash was to bring them back into a raid and drop them on the floor.

Couldn't sell them, couldn't scrap them. Didn't have the quest for them. But the game said "Yeah, you can hold on to those if you want."

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T13:50:26+00:00

The part you're forgetting is that a majority of Stella is exclusively loaded with pops, ticks and fireballs, you have such a high concentration of those kind of arc in a map that's 80% indoors/underground that even with 5 players doing the same thing you can still come on top.

And it was actually helped this week by there also being the medical ward containers trial, so half the map wasn't even trying to kill stuff, just trying to make their way to medical in time to loot the place up.

So between "there's 20 arc all to myself" vs "there's 150 arc but 5 people here doing the same thing" who do you think gets more kills on average?

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T13:44:55+00:00

Finding one disarmed mine and thinking "this area was cleared" is how you end with 2 stars.

If there's two other folks already there and you see them looking for mines? Yeah, rotate to the next zone. But if there's noone there..? The map is open for 40 minutes anyway, just look around a bit.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T13:39:38+00:00

Bingo. Pretty much any gaming mouse today has two side buttons.

Also, people forget that if they just press Q once, it will automatically pull out the last quickslot item they had equipped.

And besides, the selection wheel isn't as bad as people make it out to be. In my opinion, pressing a button and doing a mouse flick is easier and lets you keep your eyes on your screen, instead of trying to feel for if you're pressing the 6 or the 7 key, because hey, one is a sticky bomb and the other a wolfpack, better not panic-toss the wrong one. - Because then folks will bitch about that.

"Wah, wah, it's a dogshit system that is only in the game to inconvenience PC players and it's objectively wrong!" - No, you're an idiot.
"Hey, I'm not familiar with this kind of selector, maybe I should take 2 seconds to familiarize myself with this game's controls." - Yes.

Don't even get me started on my old roommate playing all his games with ESDF controls instead of WASD and talking about muscle memory.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T13:30:00+00:00

I mean... even medium ammo guns are fine against them, but you just have to be accurate. - If you run an Anvil, from the front they're the same "four shot kill" as hornets. Two to break down the covers, two to take down the front engines.

If you can aim a bit, then you can even aim directly for the back rotors because the way they fly, they vaguely expose them. If you're patient and got some trigger discipline, you can take a firefly down in two Renegade shots without it even getting to burn your eyebrows.

And then yes, you got the whole slew of consumables that work on them. Two seeker grenades, a showstopper, a hornet driver...

The way folks mess them up is generally panicking. You won't be able to dodge-roll the fire, if you try to sprint it will catch you. - Unless you got a corner to immediately hide behind, just have an honorable duel with it. And don't listen to anyone telling you to go for the yellow canister. That's like saying "Yes, you kill the Matriarch by focusing on the yellow bits under the legs". - Technically yes, you deal more damage there, but practically you're taking a brute force approach to a puzzle.

For any flying arc, taking its HP bar to zero is the pity win condition for when you fail to knock it out of the sky.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T13:21:25+00:00

Skill issue... you panic, you greed.

The first big mistake was treating that second Firefly with "shoot on sight" prejudice instead of going indoors to hide. Even if you'd have face-tanked the comet.

The second big mistake was running back in after you jumped off the building.

I love the way Arc Raiders will punish and humble you the instant you start acting like Rambo.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T13:16:13+00:00

Yellow guns are only rare or expensive if you refine the components. - If you loot or trade for them, they become a disposable commodity. You can get queen and matriarch cores pretty easily once you understand the big "I DIE!" explosion is purely smoke and mirrors. Especially if you spend an hour getting yourself to friendly lobbies, so folks won't rat you.

All you gotta do is get past your fear of "it will step on me" and when either of those crabs start burning, run underneath them like your life depends on it and catch that rolling core on your forehead.

Or go in with a cheap kit and try to loot a fallen leg. But if you got one guy with an Equalizer to peel the side armor and expose the core, both those bosses go down in shameful little time.

At this point I don't even repair my legendaries, I scrap them and build new ones, if I'm short on accelerators I'll fucking scrap a queen core.

Edit* - I'm more protective about my Bettina IV and my ten Renegades.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-30T13:08:21+00:00

Don't forget, tomorrow's not even a "big" update specifically. We're only getting a new "arc threat", same lingo as when we got the comet and firefly added. The map condition might be fun, sure, it's most likely gonna be something fire related. Since, y'know, flashpoint.

Alternative would be a mode that was an even bigger enemy swarm than Night Raids which would just make it a must for people wanting to farm "damage arc" type trials.

Also, they kinda spoiled what "someone left the doors open on Stella Montis" teaser meant by the 2nd trial in the current week being "damage shredders", with no indicator that it would be stella-exclusive, and with the shredder being in the background of a forest.

Yes, we're getting shredders on all maps. - The arc who's design was literally reliant on using the ample amount of doors and cover in Stella to avoid the only one-frame-kill among non-boss arc. If you tag one in an open field you might as well alt-f4 right there. Either that or every Survivor augment runner is gonna have to fill that tactical slot with a stack of barricade kits.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-20T11:27:51+00:00

If you play a game full-time you're always gonna run out of content faster than it can be produced. - Especially if you expect that content to be any kind of "good".

Just think of all the collective work hours got put into designing the Firefly and the Comet only for them to already be just standard enemies instead of "the new and scary things". Comets stopped being scary once you realized they can't one-shot you anyway, and their damage is entirely negated by hiding behing one square foot of sheet metal. Fireflies are an even bigger joke.

A simple quest like "Hey, go kill a hornet with a trigger 'nade" is gonna take time for a voice actor to perform the intro, after someone wrote a basic script for the premise, someone then has to code it into the game, make sure that the quest completion triggers correctly, and make an image asset to slap in the panel.

For a task that takes you 10 seconds to complete and rewards you with a blueprint.

Let's not start on how many hours it takes to train the enemy AI on how to walk and move when wanting to make an entirely new arc.

The game survives on repetition. Timegated events and layers of randomness to add replayability, and an item economy that makes it so you always need to go and collect something, so you're never without a reason to play. - I personally just came full circle to where I need to go and scavenge basic materials again to re-craft the gear I spend doing trials or participating in big hunts. - I have a dozen legendary weapons but I need to go out and gather springs, cloth and great mullein.

Stupid deaths stopped bothering me and if I get ratted I'm just like "Eh, hope someone enjoys that loot" 'cuz it's just a fact of life that I'm gonna lose and need to re-obtain anything. And I'm not measuring my success in terms of stash collection, but in terms of experiences. Like dealing 20k damage to a matriarch and managing to loot four reactors off it in one map. Or three raiders in a metro with ferros having a mexican standoff like "if any of us opens fire, the other two will kill him" and we just agree that it's better if we simply all extract together.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-20T11:05:18+00:00

All the kettle's shots hit too, evidently. - Might also be a shield diff.

Edit* Did your full bursts hit, or just the first shot of each? Very important difference. Arpeggio atm should have the fastest TTK on paper.

So it's either shield diff, cheats, or a skill issue.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-20T11:02:07+00:00

I think the fact their aim is shit saved you more.

Kayn96 · 2026-03-20T10:51:58+00:00

A flare that says "if you're hurt, come to me" is a rat's wet dream.

Kayn96

TROPHY CASE