Third Stronghold Revealed – and Other ‘This is Anthem: Part 2’ Info

Yesterday there was an early leak of the This is Anthem: Part 2 video via the Korean Playstation channel. When it became clear it was a breach of NDA (albeit not mine; I’m not under one) for it to be out already, out of respect for BioWare I took the content of this article down.

Welp, turns out the wait wasn’t all that long! This morning the video was officially released — I’m unsure whether this was the intended timeline or in response to the leak, but in either case — content of this post restored! :)

I shan’t hold it back from you — here you go:

I don’t normally do this, but I’m going to put in a break. Below the break is unavoidable spoiler territory, click only if you’re good with knowing what the third launch stronghold is, and the changes to Anthem’s difficulty!

Heart of Rage is the Third Stronghold

Difficulties Scaled Back

Ben Irving tweeted confirming more detail on this would be coming end of this week or perhaps early week.

But from the video the current figures (I say that, because I suspect they may change again given a few uneven percentages) it looks like:

• Easy: Not shown in video
• Normal:
  • Damage / Health: 0%
  • Max Rarity: +50%
• Hard:
  • Damage / Health: +52%
  • Max Rarity: +100%
• Grandmaster 1:
  • Damage / Health: +165%
  • Masterwork Chance: +150%
• Grandmaster 2:
  • Damage / Health: +430%
  • Masterwork Chance: +200%
• Grandmaster 3:
  • Damage / Health: +950%
  • Masterwork Chance: +250%

For some comparison, Grandmaster 3 was previously shown with 3100% damage and health scaling. That did seem a bit… excessive. It seemed out of line with what the Masterwork and Legendaries we were shown at the time would seemingly allow us to get up to, damage wise.

So I think the Grandmaster changes are possibly good. I’m less convinced on Hard, the demos had hard set to +100% life, and for the most part that felt good.

Possible exception there being legendary shielded enemies. But I think main part of the issue there was how fast they could regenerate the shield to full.

So it’s entirely possible that we’ll see some other difficulty tweaks apart from these simple number-levers when Ben spills the beans a bit later on.

Even if there isn’t though, I’m inclined to view this as a positive change. There were definitely some potential issues on the horizon with feelings of bullet-spongeyness, but guess we’ll see when we get a hands on in 9 days time!

Cataclysms and Post Launch

As mentioned in my Demo 2 impressions — the ‘event’ we saw at the end of the open demo was a tiny taster.

Cataclysms are still a thing, and intended to be the, “…most ambitious and challenging of events”.

It’s also worth noting that Shaper Storms as a concept have been wrapped up under the broader umbrella of Cataclysms, which Jonathan Warner says are a, “larger and more dynamic concept”.

The Demo also explicitly makes promises of new characters, new missions and social improvements (including guild capability), “…in the coming weeks and months…” of launch.

Now, “weeks” could still mean more than a month out, but I feel that if it was too much more than that there simply wouldn’t be a timeframe mentioned at all.