Been a while since my last post, apologies! Been busy irl.
Came back last night and had a great sesh. Finished the ending of the game and have gotten quite close to starting to farming the Chrysler Building. Spent an unbelievable amount of time farming junk on the second playthrough for the P90. Just finishing up the story on EX before I start heading up the Chrysler Building.
I have some tips and useful info I've gathered online about how weapons work and the best options for them. This comes from multiple different sources and I might be incorrect about some of it, but it's what I understand so far.
Basically SMGs are king in this game due to how fast they fire. One thing I was super confused about is that the weapon's actual rate of fire is different than the info you see how when you look at the "rate of fire" modifier on any of your weapons (typically they're x2 or x3). That modifier is actually the amount of bullets you shoot at an enemy for each bullet spent. For example, the MP5 starts with x7. When using that weapon, you'll shoot seven bullets into an enemy for every single bullet you use per turn.
This sounds really beneficial at first, since you're shooting a ton of bullets per turn, but it's actually not great. The longer you're sitting there firing, the longer you're stuck in that animation and cannot dodge enemy attacks. It seems the best option is to put that modifier at x2/x3. Nothing higher than x3.
If you're not into the idea of using SMGs, your next bet is to use a pistol. Rifles, shotguns, rockets are all not worth getting into. Upon first reaching the final boss, I was unprepared, so I threw a x7 from my MP5 onto the AT4 and thought it'd be a sick cheese. I was wrong. I would shoot like three rockets before getting hit. Just a funny thing to throw out.
Also, being restricted to not using any parasite powers through any of the boss fights made the game far more difficult than I imagine it would be otherwise. It was a lovely challenge so far. Just going through the standard pre-endgame grind now. Relaxing.
how do you use xp for stuff?
Press Triangle, and then click on BP. Takes 100BP to increase something by one point. However, I did notice that when I went into EX mode (New Game+) that all my bag space points disappeared. So effectively those points were wasted. Throw them on weapon damage or weapon range. I would recommend not putting any points onto anything other than damage or range.
NYC is so full of junk that's crazy. My goal on this run is to pick it all and spend all the XP on backpack space.
There's a huge junk farming method I found that's EX-mode exclusive. But it saves you literally like 10 hours of wasting time running between the police station and the park. Basically, get to Day 3. Get the Club 2 from the weapons store. Go to the police station and go towards the room where everyone's desks are and the chief's room is. You'll be attacked by two crows and a dog. Hit the crows with the baton, it'll steal junk from them. Once stolen, press Triangle and Run from the fight. Run back to the trigger and it'll reactivate. Crows' inventories are refilled. Steal and leave again. Go downstairs and give the junk to the dude at the counter. Rinse and repeat. Don't kill the fight otherwise the guaranteed encounter will be inconsistent. Make sure you've got like 110 Defense on your armor before you try this, and also see if you can get your PE defense up as well. Otherwise the rat's fireball attack will mess you up.
Oh. Once you're sure you've donated 300 junk, finish the mission. Then donate one last junk in Day 4 and you can select the special weapon. I probably donated over 1000 junk, confused as to why I wasn't getting anything. Turns out that you need to wait until the next day.