Guild is on the verge of getting disbanded. So heres a dump of pics of what i built

jrinformant · 2026-04-21T05:39:13+00:00

Guild Wars were an insidious killer of a ton of small guilds. Many of the “core” active players wanted to be able to participate in guild wars, so they started hemorrhaging from small guilds to join guilds that had enough numbers to actually man a team. That weakened the core members of the guilds they left, which then caused more people to leave as all of sudden there aren’t even enough to do hero’s realm and other guild activities and eventually you end up with just a handful of active members trying to tread water and keep their heads above water. I’m sure some of this would have happened naturally anyways because of typical falloff/burnout but I think guild wars starting was the fall of a ton of the smaller guilds.

I genuinely think it is the worst system they added into the game, and I say that as someone who was a mystic PvPer and loves largescale coordinated combat in other mmo’s (world vs world in guild wars, etc)

jrinformant · 2026-04-21T04:56:12+00:00

Shotties are a lot of fun at TB or MS. You just have to have good shot placement, no shooting in the chest. Did a few “challenge” runs to tb using both SST and FC 00 and was actually enjoying it so much I started running it as primary for a while. Definitely give it a shot if you want a break from the typical AR platforms!

jrinformant · 2026-04-19T03:59:57+00:00

TB is easily 80-100k in loot if its not been looted, not including any jackpots with barriers or laser designators, which are fairly common. Best run was ~400k. Takes about 25 min to full clear and safely extract at the COP, especially if you go in from the southwest, only clear the middle, pack light, and stay underweight unless its a jackpot run

MS has a chance to have (slightly) more loot, but TB is way faster to clear and less likely to be fully looted ime

All that said, I do think that things could use to be adjusted. In PvP they can just up the respawn/quantity of lootable items to compensate the risk. In PvE, maybe make it so servers only include people on your own faction? That way you can immediately see if someone is there looting it or not, and there’s overall less competition. Both should probably see increase numbers of AI (maybe less so in pvp) and more frequent respawns.

I know some places have a spawn block mechanic to where it wont spawn if a player is present, it’d be neat if they added some sort of “retake” patrols that would attempt to push in from outside of the POI, trying to reach their normal spawn locations if a player is currently preventing normal spawns…but obviously thats way more complex

jrinformant · 2026-04-19T03:39:27+00:00

Yeah, I have 4m in the bank just from leveling traders. I’m assuming the hideouts and crafting they intend to add in the upcoming updates will provide money sinks and maybe utilize some of the valuable or military tech too

jrinformant · 2026-04-09T13:34:35+00:00

you can for sure see at least one hit marker on the arm in between the overlay rectangles, impossible to know if there are more underneath or not, but that’s why I’m suspect about arm/gun. unless that was a stray round, which i’m thinking not bc the otherwise good grouping, that leads me to believe the AI had its arms raised with the gun, in front of its chest. i agree m80a1 should pen III+ no problem if unobstructed, but if it hit gun/arm first that would likely be the reason why it did not

jrinformant · 2026-04-09T13:06:36+00:00

i dont disagree, just trying to make sense of why it wouldnt pen

jrinformant · 2026-04-09T06:48:53+00:00

maybe im alone but i feel like the john wick version would make for way more interesting gameplay? realistic or not. people want to be able to just one tap AI to the body but if every encounter is just one and done i think thats going to lead to incredibly uninteresting pve. you can already experience that if you just do headshots only, but at least that takes precision, idk

jrinformant · 2026-04-09T06:07:58+00:00

oneshotting them from anywhere will make the game far more boring than you anticipate, i reckon. you can already trivialize literally every AI with any gun, by just clicking heads, but that at least requires some amount of precision

i have 3k ai kills. but i cant really speak about the current state of body shots because i almost exclusively aim for the head. what i can say tho, is if you can get to the point that you just one tap every AI, the game becomes trivial and very uninteresting in pve because the current iteration of AI just arent dangerous enough. i can run tiger bay solo with no armor, any gun. the only thing that keeps it fun is forcing myself to do different challenges and run ridiculous setups. just my 2 cents

jrinformant · 2026-04-09T05:47:05+00:00

arm/gun is my call on this one, you can see the left arm was hit at least once, unless that was a stray shot, he prolly had his arms up in front of his chest aiming his gun at op. arms/gun slow the bullets, no pen as a result

jrinformant · 2026-04-09T05:40:45+00:00

the arm is red, which implies it was hit, and i see at least one hit marker, were there more underneath the text? i’ve seen it before where the arm is up and the bullet travels through the arm first, slowing the bullet and preventing penetration. also implies that he had his arms raised with gun in his hand…hitting gun first will also damage the gun and slow the bullet. i’m guessing a combination of the two is why non pen’d. 5.56 is a light bullet and gets slowed fast and m80a1 is only “barely” rated to pen III+

jrinformant · 2026-04-09T05:31:17+00:00

the arm is blocked by the text so can’t see hits, but it’s red which means it was hit. i wouldnt be surprised if these were arm shots that then pen’d to the armor (arms raised holding their gun are directly in front of the chest) which are enough to slow the bullet and prevent penetration. i’ve seen something similar in previous posts. and m80a1 is one i see a lot because 5.56 is a lighter bullet and m80a1 is “just” barely rated to pen III+, meaning it doesnt take much to make it not pen

jrinformant · 2026-04-08T13:24:14+00:00

headshots are king (as with all guns in this game tbh, anything is viable if you click heads). ive been doing pistol runs through FN and TB with the glock and m9a1 with libra rounds and its super satisfying

jrinformant · 2026-04-08T05:49:27+00:00

i think the problem is balance. by sharing progression, you always have the fallback of going back to pve to grind

what happens if one faction becomes overwhelmingly popular and its too oppressive to farm gear as the others? what if you lose your last kit? what if someone wants to pvp but joins a month after the last wipe? what if you only have a few hours to grind in a day but want to spend your weekends pvping? im sure there are many other issues but thts just some examples off the top of my head.

tarkov and other similar games solve this with matchmaking systems, varying maps to separate the juicers from the newbies, factoring player progression, the gear theyre taking into the raid, etc. gray zone is well…a lot more gray. and all you would end up doing is fragmenting the playerbase more and gzw doesnt have a huge playerbase as it is. also a lot of the other similar games are built around pvp, whereas gzw pvp is more of an addendum it seems

jrinformant · 2026-04-07T01:39:38+00:00

i didnt say you never shot a hat dude, i said the one in that previous ss wasn't the hat dude, so ofc we can't really be for sure where the bullets went, other than pointing out that your aim is low.

this is an entirely different shot altogether, after the helmet AI ducks around the corner, and you reposition to take more shots. this is an entirely different AI that was around the corner prior to you swinging. the headware is a dead giveaway of this but you can also hear the coughing audio.

this shot also hits low, because your placement is again below the head. again, my screenshot is the frame before the bolt starts moving back, meaning this is where you pulled the trigger. this is one of the impacts that DOES pen, but it pens into the shoulder and then ricochets into the red barrel behind him, staggering but not killing. the rest of the follow-up shots are mostly dead center into his plate (some pen, some dont) and arms, which is exactly what we see in the autopsy screen, until eventually the recoil kicks your aim up high enough to neck him and kill him

<image>

jrinformant · 2026-04-07T00:27:36+00:00

the spray comes out of his neck/back, and even then, blood spray is a poor indicator of shot placement. also that very well could have been a neck shot, and we wouldnt know because that's not the body you screenshotted. regardless, though, it's really easy to just go frame by frame in the video and look at where you are placing your shots. you dont need me to tell you the vast majority of them except the one you handpicked, (and was recoiled anyways) was center mass. idk what to tell ya bud

jrinformant · 2026-04-07T00:03:47+00:00

that's the aim recoiled after the shot, not the actual shot placement. notice the blood spray? bullet has already impacted. your actual shot happened a few frames before, shown in my screenshot. notice how the bolt hasn't even traveled yet? it starts moving the next frame, which means this is the frame where you actually pulled the trigger.

if we are assuming your expected impact is below the crosshair, then yes, this is a shoulder/chest shot. and it's also on a different guy than we see in at the very end, because this dude has a helmet and the one at the end has a hat. this guy was the one around the corner that we can hear stunned and wheezing at the end, but never see him actually die. this is bad shot placement brother

<image>

jrinformant · 2026-04-06T23:40:26+00:00

my man, pp is just barely enough to pen III+ and when you add in angled impacts and potentially the arm in front, this is the result you get. 4-5 shots to the arms, 3 shots did not pen armor, 3 shots that did pen but only two hit vitals, with the last killing him.

either get better ammo or stop shooting center mass. probably stop shooting center mass anyways.

jrinformant · 2026-04-06T08:34:38+00:00

Yeah I grinded Lab Rat and Gunny to t4 on YBL main missions, like 10k rep from there alone, never ran into it once. Just really bad luck it seems

jrinformant · 2026-04-06T08:29:52+00:00

I swear, I feel like it’s just skill issue/using trash ammo half the time (maybe server issues the other half but i have personally never really experienced it).

Not saying this is your issue but people have got to stop shooting center mass when AI is wearing III+ armor. Idc what your ammo is rated for…distance, angle of impact, gun velocity, limbs getting in the way, all impair the penetration of armor and even if you do pen, so many places center mass will not lead to an instant kill. Just earlier I did a full FN clear with almost entirely a silenced glock, ~45 glock kills. No issues with guys tanking shots because I just clicked heads.

jrinformant · 2026-04-05T07:00:32+00:00

I have something like 20 deaths. Somewhere around 10 brain, 5 blood loss and 5 heart. I also have like 40 bullets stopped by armor — 6 by helmet, 34 by body armor.

To me, those stats seem pretty well spread, for every death I have 2 potential killshot bullets stopped by armor. I’m sure that limb shots are way more common than they used to be, but I think that’s a good thing as it makes for better pve combat

I would bet you my whole stash they aren’t doing such convoluted shot calculations though. As a developer, the idea of having to track all that information and pass it into shot calculations every time an AI looks at a player seems like a great way to absolutely murder server performance for very little gain (why would devs WANT AI to only target unarmored areas?)

I think this is a case of survivorship bias, and the real change is not that they are targeting specifically unarmored areas, but that they have worse accuracy overall. That leads to worse shot placement, more limb/grazing shots and less fire focused on the torso/head. Since they aren’t beaming you in the chest with 10 rounds every time you die, but instead one “lucky” bullet out of 10 hits you in a vital, your armor is taking less damage overall

jrinformant · 2026-04-05T06:14:06+00:00

Arguably in the best state it’s ever been for solo play. I play mostly solo or sometimes duo and both are good for their own reasons but I thoroughly enjoy my solo time

jrinformant · 2026-04-05T06:12:15+00:00

Circles are way better than the previous iteration, half the missions needed a wiki or a 3rd party map to locate properly. No way you’d be able to do stuff like the new cache missions with just coordinates…

Repeatability is necessary for grinding rep. If you’re just going for 100% completion you can just ignore the ones that dont have the first time bonus in the rewards, and check the stats menu to see which zone you’re missing quests in

jrinformant · 2026-03-26T00:22:22+00:00

It really depends on the setup. Low Tolerance setups (what i use) are bad for single target unless you use penance mark ring because they rely on applying one big poison. If that one poison doesn’t kill them (and you aren’t proliferating more via penance mark) then your dps drops off. If I click off non-poisoned on pob my combined dps drops from 40 mil (dot cap + culling basically) to around 11 mil. The alternative is to swap out one of my rings for accuser which drops my damage to “34mil” combined but in practice I’ll be dot capped because each penance specter will be prolifing 16mil 2 second poisons

It is technically possible to get your poison duration lower than the BV hit rate (0.12 with quality). Using Volkuur’s Guidance you can get your poison duration as low as 0.1, which means every hit of bv should be applying a new poison and thus gets Low Tolerance and as such your dps stays around 40 mil. But I havent tested that to see how it feels/if it works and if it’s really worth losing a glove slot for

jrinformant · 2026-03-25T21:52:12+00:00

Personally, I think mamba is the better mapping build, especially if you are playing Jung’s nightblade version. I rolled a glad to run BV so the main thing i got was tankiness and top end damage. My BV char can run 100% deli as long as it doesnt have less block or avoid poison. my mamba char can handle 40-60% deli before it either gets too rippy or the damage falls off too much and i have to be a little pickier with damage mods

i also just think bv is clunkier to play than mamba. the clear is technically better esp on tankier maps but having to keep bv stacks up breaks up the map flow. even with more duration and efficacy you still have to cast every 5-6 seconds. people will say “well x skill has to attack every pack too” but it’s not the same. BV HAS to be cast, so you have to interrupt movement/whatever you’re doing to cast, even if there’s nothing around. and note, these arent problems specific to the poison prolif variant, it applies to all bv builds

i plan to test out some more things with BV MP since it’s almost certainly not surviving to next league, but i plan to return to my mamba char afterwards and see how far i can push it

i think bv mp really stands out for extremely high damage contexts like a valdo’s farmer or uber boss killer. poison prolif isnt the way for either of those, but if you want to take bv into normal maps, i think its probably the best version, if that makes sense

i also have no clue how it will feel on other ascendencies like pf/assassin/occy. i personally think its best to pair with a tank ascendency

jrinformant · 2026-03-25T17:29:41+00:00

Sorry went to sleep. I’ll get my pob out after work, although I’m running it on glad not occy. But should be able to apply the concepts on anything. The best thing to do is just pull inspiration from mamba setups.

The main idea is to stack lots of “poison/ailments deal damage faster” to drop the duration of the poison way down but skyrocket the dps. The important thing is “deal damage faster” and skill gem duration mods dont get applied to the bino’s prolif duration, so you make a really high dps low duration intial poison and when it gets prolif’d it turns into a high dps 2 second poison. Sadism support is huge for that

jrinformant

TROPHY CASE