How to be Defiant

The best way to start playing Defiance, in my opinion, is just to jump in feet first. The game's wide open sandbox practically begs you to go racing through the San Francisco area's entire terrain. Although the enemies close to your starting point are easier to kill, this isn't a typical RPG where you have to grind your way forwards.

Defiance automatically gives you and your gear a boost to match the "Threat Rating" of any mission or event you're in. I describe this in greater detail below, but starting out, don't worry.

Loot comes and goes like crazy. You're going to be gaining ego (this game's version of player level) fast enough that the loot from an hour and a half ago will be useless to you now.

I like to think of Defiance has having a few stages of progression.

Early Game - You're below 1000 ego and figuring things out. You'll get an idea of how fast you sell scrap gear to vendors and develop a feel for your playstyle, trying out weapon types, learning about pursuits, and seeing the terrain, as well as unlocking the fast travel locations.

Mid Game - After the 1000 ego mark, you've got an idea of what pursuits you want to do, in what order you want to face them, and are beginning to plan out character progression, and spending ego points on carefully selected perks, getting you the things you actively want, and passing over things you don't. Mid game lasts through most of the entire ego grid, and probably your weapon skill categories. You'll find yourself done here somewhere around the 4000 ego mark.

Late Game. Facing the last dozen or so perks, and max skills, you begin to finally feel like you're powerful. Your xp gains to gett more perks is also beginning to feel kind of grindy. Now, you stare at pursuits to find another 5, 10, or even 40 ego, taken a little bit at a time. Racing games and exploration have to get completed in order to ease your way somewhat into the highest ego tiers, which is ego 5k to 6k.

End Game: You've completed every pursuit you're able, and some might well remain out of reach due to skill or luck. Nothing but more time and luck can push you through to the 50,000 kills mark, the kill shot achievements, or the complete set of gold medals in the racing games. Now you are running Expeditions to farm those precious Orange (legendary) items to make sure you've got everything maximized as far as you can. You start really caring about getting cyber rigs from the expeditions, and hope for the best you can get.

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Things you need to know:
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1 - If you are too low of an ego level to participate in an event or mission, you get temporarily boosted to make sure you can still fight alongside other players.

2 - The Upper left hand corner has a number, this is your current ego rating (which can be adjusted for the mission).

3 - During events, you'll see a Threat Rating number in a small circle next to your Ego. Threat ratings are a difficulty scaling system based off of how much "player strength" is in the area. Threat 10 mandates a minimum ego of 4750.

4 - Money is called "scrip". Premium currentcy is called Bits. Vendors accept both.

5 - Salvage is green hexagon stuff, which is used on in game items to add mods and mod slots.

6 - Keycodes are earned through completing missions and events. Use keycodes to buy from the lockboxes (which look like futuristic torpedo pods, near most of the vendors)

7 - Arkforge is earned by completing events and arkfalls. It is used to upgrade ego of gear, and rarity of gear.

8 - You will get Spikes and Stims during gameplay. On the ground, you only pick up Spike Charges and Stim Charges. These are effectively "ammunition" for the spikes and stims you buy and equip.

9- Some vendors have a "reputation" system, and missions appear on the map with their icon. Completing the mission earns you reputation points for that vendor, which you can cash in at their vending machines for weapons and titles. Some Vendors are DLC locked, but their gear isn't "more powerful" or anything. (or if it is, it's really only marginally better)

10 - Weapons get more powerful with rarity, but only slightly.

11 - During the course of playing this game, you will discard hundreds of weapons that you probably will never get to shoot, or shoot very briefly. You gain ego too fast to justify holding on to most of your outdated gear, especially in early gameplay.

Escape brings up a radial menu screen. Here you can claim items, view the store, check goal progress, change game settings etc.

At any time during gameplay, press "P" (for Purchase) to take you to the Defiance market, allowing you to spend premium currency on things.

L takes you to the loadout screen, which you'll visit a lot to adjust what you are carrying and equipping.

I takes you to inventory, which is important to let you see how much stuff you have, and precious inventory slots are rare.

U takes you to the Social Screen.

From the inventory, at the top, you'll notice other icons. Many don't have quick keys, but the bar graph takes you to your stats, which tells how much money, salvage, arkforge, and reputation you have gotten, among other stats. Consider it your progress tracker in many respects.

The Ego System:

First: You can go anywhere at any time, and participate in any mission. If you are below a mission's ego requirement, rather than be excluded, Defiance simply gives you a temporary, boosted ego rating.

Character Levels are represented by an Ego score. As you rank up character XP, Weapon Skills, Driving skills, and complete goals/challenges, you will continually build this score up.

If you have an ego of 1000, and the mission requires ego 2000, you get a temporary +1000 ego. Your gear gets the same 1000 point-boost. This means that the grind never impedes your progress, and never stops you from doing things in the game.

If you are still using a shotgun with an ego rating of 500, it still gets the same numeric boost, +1000 ego. Your shotgun "becomes" ego 1500, (the 500 it had, plus the 1000 temporary points, making it only ego 1500.)

So don't use out-dated gear. Your gear doesn't get to become the ego rating of the mission, it only gets boosted by the same amount you got.

Your character levels up and gains access to Ego perks. A large grid allows you to buy and upgrade perks and install them on your character.

In your loadout screen, you will see empty boxes next to your ego power. These boxes represent the game's perk system, and each box can have one perk equipped. Once you reach ego 1000, you will have all ego perk slots available.

Ego points come from gaining XP to unlock perks in your grid, from mission challenges, gaining skill ranks, and from a huge list of goals in the game's radial Escape Menu. Lots of these goals tend to overlap, so as you work on completing one, you also make progress on others.

Skill ranks give you bonuses to entire categories, assault rifles, pump shotguns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, or even the vehicle types.

It is possible to reach Ego 6000 with only using the kill XP system, and ignore several challenges. (You'll still complete many just because you are participating in missions.)

Weapons all have rarity ratings, and in this case, simply copies the same pattern used by Borderlands. White, Green, Blue, Purple, Orange. If you need to remember the order, just think of the following sentence: When Grandma Burps, Patrick Obeys.

Weapon rarity has a small effect on damage, as listed below:

Green weapons = 3% Damage increase
Blue weapons = 6% Damage increase
Purple weapons = 10% Damage increase
Orange weapons = 15% Damage increase

You can see right away that the game is not going to make anyone severely overpowered. Even if someone was handed a full set of Orange gear from Day 1 of play (and it somehow matched their ego), they'd only have an edge over other players

Weapons can also have nano-effects, or "elemental" effects. The basics are covered here, Acid, Fire, Electricity. Elemental weapons do less raw damage, just like every other game, but the nano effects are very valuable. Electric damage shreds through shields, Blue Bio will corrode armor ratings, Green Radiation punches through and ignores 3 armor plates, Fire does high damage to hit points.

Weapons all can have between 0 and 4 mod slots. You can spend ark forge to add a random mod slot, allowing further boosting of your combat power. Then, as you buy and collect mods from missions, you can install them on your weapon. Removing mods will destroy the weapon however, so think carefully about how important a mod is.

Finally, weapons have "synergies". If you equip a full load of gear sharing the same synergy, you get additional bonuses.

All weapons do a few different types of damage.
Weapon damage is clearly indicated on the stat screen.
Nano effects (or elemental effects) bring a 10% penalty to damage, so there is a slight hit. Nano effects offer other bonuses to enemies usually making the damage penalty very well worth it.

Shields ignore 25% of damage recieved, so you only do 75% damage to them, unless you have an electric weapon. Enemies suffering from "electrocution" have compromised shields, and suffer 125% shield damage while being zapped.

Electric damage does 150% damage to shields.
Bio damage applies sludge, and does 150% damage to armor plate durability.
Radiation damage punches through, and bypasses 3 plates of armor.
Fire damage inflicts 150% damage to health.
Syphon damage heals you for 5% of shield damage, and 10% of health damage.

Armor Plates:
Armor plates each represent a 10% damage immunity. (An enemy with 10 plates is 100% immune to damage, so they are very tough to kill)

However, each weapon also inflicts a secret extra "durability damage". Matching that, each armor plate has a "hidden durability HP" As you do damage to the enemy, you break down the plates in sequence. Your weapons slowly break through the armor plates, and the enemy will start to suffer damage to their body and shields.

Most weapons inflict approximately 10% of their damage as extra "armor plate durability" damage. Bio weapons inflict 150% of their damage as extra "armor plate durability" damage. Therefore, bio weapons quickly shred armor plates to nothing, opening the enemy up to the full impact of other bullets.

Okay, this isn't written down anywhere because... everyone wants to do 10 minute youtube videos to say the following:

Arkbreaker DLC adds a series of quests. They are, in order:
New Information.
Drawing a Map
Dark Crystals.
An Obvious Trap (Muir Dam)
Nowhere to go but Up. (Golden Gate Bridge)

Yes, it takes TEN MINUTES TO TELL PEOPLE THIS ON YOUTUBE.

WHY? THIS IS AN EASY LIST.

Hash tag ragequit.