Upgrading crew member skills is kinda wasted potential

[lol232]

An afterthought, Rockstar made it so what we can improve skills of crew members so that they perform better next time and have a smaller cut.

 

This really only applies to two hackers and one driver. 

 

So, crew members that you can upgrade:
Rickie Lukens, two level ups in order to max out skill

Christian Feltz, one level up in order to max out skill

Karim Denz, one level up in order to max out skill

 

You have 4 heists, if you do the Bureau Raid on Firefighter Approach and The Big Score on Obvious Approach, you'll never really need a hacker again. And if you do the Firefighter Approach on The Bureau Raid, you can skip having a driver once. There's also 2 more heists that don't have any crews like Merryweather Heist and Blitz Play but I didn't count these.

 

It's basically gunmen who are most important here since you select them in 4 jobs, but you can't really upgrade them if you want them to be useful, and while you can upgrade gunmen once (The Bureau Raid, roof entry, or if you take the Fire Crew approach one of the cheap gunmen will survive), it also makes no difference whatsoever if you upgraded them once and if you select them in The Big Score, they'll still do just of a crappy job is they were unexperienced (moving gold slowly in Obvious approach and not packing enough gold in Subtle).

They could've been creative too and allowed us to find a way to save them albeit make it difficult. I mean okay, In The Jewel Store job, the cheap gunman will die because he can't drive for sh*t and he crashes. Makes sense actually. 

 

But in The Paleto Score, it is not because he shoots like sh*t, but because... A car just runs him over in a special place, and it never happens otherwise because it's not scripted to happen with an expensive gunman (as if anyone would survive a car pinning you to the wall). That's honestly pretty cheap and doesn't really corelate with the gunman's skill, just Rockstar's crappy way of conveying "HEY HIRE BETTER GUNMAN" even though it's a [SCRIPTED] accident.

 

The other instance of a gunman dying is in The Burau Raid Fire Crew approach, that if one of them is cheap, the cheap one will die, and if both are, the second one you selected will die. If both were expensive (Packie and Gus) the one who gets blasted will survive it, and hey that makes sense, they are more experienced so they are tougher. Usually, if both selected are cheap, or both selected are expensive, the second gunman you select will get the blast. But if you select one cheap and one expensive, it will always be the cheap one to get blasted. Couldn't they have made it so that the expensive one, who will survive it, get blasted? 

 

It just seems like a forced design.

 

You can only upgrade Karim once after which he'll be high skilled, do it on The Jewel Store job, it'll be good enough since it won't make much difference even if you're driving in the mud, you're playing as Franklin anyhow. But then you can unlock Taliana Martinez who is high skilled from the get go and is cheaper anyway.

 

Hackers? The problem is, in the Jewel Store Job you can just as well take Rickie every time regardless of skill, the gold medal objective requires you to do it in 50 seconds and Rickie gives you 60 anyway. So it doesn't matter, other hackers give you more time that you don't need. On the bureau raid, it's really trivial and an unskilled Rickie will just not know what to tell you what to do, meaning it'll make no difference if you already did the mission before or you look up online or just f*cking figure it out yourself since it's easy, plus an unskilled Rickie and Christian won't be able to turn off sprinklers but it makes no difference. A skilled Rickie, can on occasion turn them off too and sometimes not. Christian that was in only one job will be as good as Paige, and Rickie, if he was selected twice, will also be as good as Paige. And on the last job, even if Rickie wasn't selected before, if he's unskilled, the lag in changing traffic lights really doesn't make a lot of difference either.

 

Overall... It seems like the entire "upgrade crew members" feature is useful for Rickie Lukens, and minorly for other crew members. Plus they all gain skill at the final heist even though you'll never use them again since the game ends.

Edited April 7 by lol232

[Lemoyne outlaw]

yes i agree. i do love the new heist feature. but it still was not perfect. and as for crew members. if i am replaying the story. i usually just go for the skilled crew. because money is no problem. sometimes i might do a playthrough with only using the worst crew. but even then its not that hard. there was also a cut heist the sharmoota job. and i assume we could hire crew members. its also the only heist that had three options. which i think is cool. i was so sad when i found out about this heist because the whole premise sounded fun. instead we got caida libre which was still okay. but not as cool as the heist would have been. i hope gta 6 will bring back the gta 5 heist system. but expand on it.

[Ser_Salty]

13 hours ago, Lemoyne outlaw said:

yes i agree. i do love the new heist feature. but it still was not perfect. and as for crew members. if i am replaying the story. i usually just go for the skilled crew. because money is no problem. sometimes i might do a playthrough with only using the worst crew. but even then its not that hard. there was also a cut heist the sharmoota job. and i assume we could hire crew members. its also the only heist that had three options. which i think is cool. i was so sad when i found out about this heist because the whole premise sounded fun. instead we got caida libre which was still okay. but not as cool as the heist would have been. i hope gta 6 will bring back the gta 5 heist system. but expand on it.

I hope we get the ability to pull heists outside of story missions. Give us a list of targets, you know banks of varying sizes, casinos, jewel stores, armored vans, museums, mansions etc. and 2-3 approaches for each. Hire crew, pull off the job and boom, money in the bank.

[Lemoyne outlaw]

10 minutes ago, Ser_Salty said:

I hope we get the ability to pull heists outside of story missions. Give us a list of targets, you know banks of varying sizes, casinos, jewel stores, armored vans, museums, mansions etc. and 2-3 approaches for each. Hire crew, pull off the job and boom, money in the bank.

yea exactly. even michael teases this to franklin. he tells him that one day he will be able to pull off his own scores. but sadly we never get the chance. maybe in the cut story dlc he was meant to be able to plan heists.