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After no lifing it to 30, I can tell the end game is light years beyond destiny. It is group required, but Ubi has the decency to put matchmaking on it. The main mission chain got me to about level 25. I had to do side missions and encounters to reach 30. Even after that I've still got various encounters to finish to be able to max out my BoO. There is still a shit ton of intel to collect, and side missions to do for solo play. Purple gear becomes purchasable through standard vendors around level 23. High end gear can be purchased at 30 through the Advanced Vendor that is unlocked via Security Wing upgrades. These are astronomically priced. Its a way for solo players to obtain them I guess. Purple gear will run in the $40-60k range while HE gear will run $460-480k I made 2-3 vendor purchases my whole way to 30 and I only had $115k maybe by that time. Purple gear does drop in open world PvE, boss kills, and mission rewards. Playing in a group of 3-4 makes enemy toughness scale pretty high. I played 2-3 missions solo on normal and it was way easier. The loot table didn't improve in group play, but maybe the XP was a bit better? I can't really say. We played on hard mode til about level 18 missions. It gets brutally hard in groups at that point. Rushers have shotguns that can insta down/kill you. Cover is only a formality because of this... once you take them down grenadiers can make life miserable by flushing you out of cover for snipers and heavy machine gunners to tear you apart. Playing in a group brings some good challenge. End game content consists of DZ and Challenge mode. Challenge Mode is basically Destiny's Nightfall on Steroids (but with check points). Everything is boss level HP and damage. Each day, 2 story missions are selected for challenge mode. As we had just reached 30 and our gear wasn't very good, they first one we tried was a catastrophe. . It started out with 4-5 shotgun rushers just eating our lunch mercilessly. You're boxed in a small room and leaving it will reset the mission. We settled for the other mission that allowed us to sit back and snipe our way forward. We had room to fall back on rushers. This mode took us about 2+ hours to finish because of the constant dying/objective failing and the cautious nature we took. It was a lot of fun though. We had to change our skills and weapons various times through the course of it to best fit the situation. A decent amount of purples dropped and the end reward is a GUARANTEED High End drop. (Take that destiny) You can replay these as much as you want and get the HE drop, unlike Destiny. But seeing as they are very time consuming, its well deserved. The daily also rewards Phoenix credits that allows you to buy more HE gear from a special vendor in the BoO. I think you can only earn the Phoenix credits once a day per mission. The level 30 DZ is pretty barren right now of other players. I assume this is because not many people are 30 yet, and we were patrolling the most dangerous area were level 32 enemies were. The DZ offers the most frequent purple drops and gold drops. Purple rained for days, but gold was few and far between for everyone in the party. A scavenger armor mod can increase your chances of drops I've read, but again, we just reached 30. Enemies aren't as powerful as they are in challenge mode, but they are a lot more aggressive, and they don't seem to have a limit to their chase... there is a limit, but its huge and its hard to run from them. We were able to kite a boss almost endlessly, so I assume as long as you stay engaged, they will give chance indefinitely. Dying is beyond frustrating. You drop everything in your DZ loot bag, a portion of your DZ funs, keys, and you lose a chunk of XP. I down leveled a few times because of it. Teammates cannot revive you once you have died out of down state like they can in PvE. You'll have to spawn at the nearest safe house and make your way back... this can cause problems if more enemies have spawned in the streets. NPCs are more populated than the beta and they respawn a lot more frequently. My group of four ran into another group of four and we made a truce that we both stuck to. Even a group of 4 can get wiped easily in the area we were in and it was amazing to have a truce that went super well. Since we couldn't group into 8, friendly fire happened a few times, and we just went along with it until the rouge timer went away. No one picked up anyone's death loot either which will probably be a rare occurrence between random squads. I just dont see how the DZ can be solo friendly unless you manage to matchmake your way to all HE gear. The NPCs are overwhelmingly brutal for one person to take on. I'm so happy with this game TBH. Even after beating the story, I still have a lot to do to get geared up and ready for possible raids. My only complaint is you can't play with lower level people without making a new character. Missions always scale to the highest leveled player even if the session owner is the lowest level. So it makes the mission unbearably frustrating.... I was going to run through the story with another friend using just my pistol and melee, but I can't. I wish every game had a downlevel scale system like GW2. There is no power leveling either. I did one mission with him and it only gained him 1 level... its not like borderlands or diablo where you can get people massive leveling jumps super quickly.