So I originally said that this game was a grind-fest and in many ways I still believe that to be the case. This doesn't necessarily mean that it is boring though. Like a lot of online multiplayer games, it all depends on the kind of people that you end up with in your group.
For me, I play with one family member and one friend and none of us are too serious about the game so normally we just block other people from even entering the game at all. There are several reasons for this but the main one is that if someone else joins the map, it makes the map more difficult. While I am by no means an expert at this game I can hold my own, so if someone 15 levels lower than me (There are only 30 stat-driven levels) enters the map, not only are they going to make the enemies more difficult and plentiful, but they are going to be dying a lot and not contributing very much to damage output.
I don't really know if there is any benefit to them joining the map in this way because they don't appear to get extra experience points for doing so. Normally I will get around a million or two million XP but a guy who joins that is 10 level or more lower than me barely gets 100,000 even though we ran the same map.
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When running maps with my friends and family, we don't really prioritize completing the maps intended objectives but instead will hunt out all the optional stuff like bosses (called hitmen, I think) or these certain bits where you have to survive a certain number of waves of monster. These aren't generally all that difficult but much of this has to do with the fact that we only play the maps on the first two difficulty settings. I am quite certain that it can become much much more difficult.
One of the main and I would say only attractions of doing this is to gain XP and pray to the RNG gods that you end up with good drops as loot. It doesn't happen very often but when it does happen and you get a legendary drop, it is quite a thrilling experience.
This is one of the only legendaries that I have ever received in the, I dunno, a hundred or so maps that I have done. The others I ended up with were lower level items, so even though they were pretty damn amazing at the time, they end up getting surpassed in quality and DPS but even common items 5 levels higher than them.
This is a 9-socket Legendary, which from what I have read the highest level of socketst that exist are 12-socket items. I'm not going to cry about not having the best of the best, because this is by far the highest level of sockets that i have ever had in any weapon that I have ever found. You can play around with how the sockets are laid out, but you have to kind of be willing to accept that this could end up burning a lot of resources and you aren't necessarily going to end up with something better. One of the best perks about this particular legendary is that if you hit anything, it also drops a grenade around them and this is absolutely amazing as far as dispatching large groups of enemies.
At first I was rather disappointed that my legendary drop was a revolver, because it was one of my least favorite secondary weapons in the game. However, once that thing is fully kitted up with the socketed upgrades, which it is not in the image above the stats get much much better.
My apologies for the poor image quality but I find screengrabs on the PS4, and transferring them to a USB in order to get them on here to be an overly cumbersome procedure. I think you get the point though.
Even if you don't know anything about the game you can tell by the colors of the slots what I have upgraded there. The yellows are magazine capacity, reds are damage output, and whites are critical chance. There are also blues and these increase rate of fire but honestly, this is not something that is much of an issue for me because this weapon already fires as fast as I need it to. In all actuality I will likely go back in there and swap out the one and only blue for another red in the future.
Now I could re-roll the socket setup in the hopes of getting more red slots in a row, because linked slots give even larger bonuses. I will admit though, that I am afraid to even try to do that because I am worried that by re-rolling the socket layout that I might end up losing the auto-grenade perk and for me at least, this perk is absolutely amazing. It is particularly useful for taking out snipers and any stationary things that must be destroyed. The auto grenade enables me to take out nearly every enemy in the game with one shot and if they are in a group such as the dreaded hordes that come at you every now and then, it makes quick work of sometimes 20 enemies at a time. This would not be possible without the grenade.
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There are, of course, much better versions of the same weapon that exist especially if you get them at a later level. You will never get a drop of an item that is above your current level, and since leveling up actually takes quite a bit of time unless you are gaming the system, I don't advance more than say, 2 or 3 levels a night. I am really happy that I have the grenade perk instead of what this one has on it because I have had this "knockdown" effect on another weapon of mine in the past, and I thought it was really stupid because your melee attacks are either something that kills most things with one hit anyway, or it is a rather stupid method of attack that is much less effective than simply shooting whatever it is that is attempting to hit you.
You can see how much better the last weapon is compared to my own because whoever that belongs to hasn't even used any of the sockets yet and it is already more powerful than my fully kitted up one.
The point of all this is that finding a legendary weapon is just a wonderful experience and it makes the running around and shooting stuff in a game that you can't actually die all the way in, a lot more fun than I originally thought it was going to be.