PSA: Pandora's Box Signature Arc, Episodes 4 and 5

[Extor Prime]

First off, if you haven't done Who Will Die? yet end to end, I highly recommend that you do. It is perfectly soloable, it is pretty decently written and it deals with the death of Statesman (like him or not, he was one of the cornerstones of our universe) as well as some substantial changes to the world in general.

 

Then comes Pandora's Box, which deals with my two favorite subjects: Incarnates and Nemesis, and it is actually more challenging in places than Who Will Die?. But two missions stand out as ridiculous due to bugs, and if you haven't experienced them yet, here's a PSA for you. Minor spoilers. This is blueside only, not sure that the same thing happens redside.

 

Part 4, "Parental Ambiguity" section, mission "Meet up wth Doctor Harvan". The mission includes a countdown of sorts that triggers an ambush every so often. Well, in my case at least, the countdown jumped all the way to the end and triggered EVERY AMBUSH AT ONCE. This, at team size 8, meant a hundred or so enemies overall in a relatively small indoor map with zero cover, with a generous portion of enemies being flying melee bosses with a Statesman-like "lightning of Zeus" AoE. I grinded through them over the course of several embarrassingly quick deaths and by burning two signature tank summons.

 

Oddly enough, Part 5, "The Powers that Be" section, mission "Investigate Harvan's Lab" is even worse. In this mission, you have to survive 4 minutes while fighting enemies and clicking glowies to prevent more enemies from spawning, and in the end clear out whatever is left. And you are playing on that same small lab map from above. Well, at team size 8, the additional spawns are so enormous that in under 2 minutes, the map was literally CLOGGED with Nemesis Warhulks. Needless to say they killed me very quickly. I said "screw it" and "kneeled on the ball", waiting the timer out before entering the map. This in turn spawned MORE warhulks. Seriously, there were so many that they couldn't get through the doors anymore and couldn't really walk around without bumping into each other either. Even before the adds triggered, while fighting unavoidable reinforcement spawns, I could not possibly click the glowies fast enough to prevent these "adds on top of adds", which created a literal Nemesis traffic jam. I was so shocked I forgot to screenshot it. There must have been easily over a hundred of Warhulks alone, plus fake Nemeses, plus various human troops.

 

Anyway. Even if you have enormous brass balls, I highly recommend that specifically for these two missions, you drop the team size difficulty setting to 1.

Edited November 3, 2019 by Extor Prime