The Freakish Lab of Dr. Vahzilok

[Terenos]

I just finished playing this new arc and the storyline was a lot of fun - it was really interesting to revisit this old contact and see the Vahzilok and Freaks in a whole new light. The varied enemy types were a lot of fun, and the twists and surprises (especially the Crey one) were great! I'm going to do my best to give feedback with minimal spoilers to the arc since my only big complaint was a mechanical one (and could possibly be a bug).

 

The flow of the missions themselves were fine - while each one was fairly same-y (beat up EB/AV, steal something), the differences in environment and lore didn't make them boring.

 

My biggest complaint for the arc comes in with the ambushes that happen throughout the arc, especially when fighting the EB/AVs. For some reason the spawns seemed to double up whenever an ambush was called in any of the missions. As a solo 33 Brute (SM/Inv) running on 0/2 (with bosses, EB) (I've run several other missions around this level/notoriety range on this character without issue), it was incredibly tough and these double ambushes caused a few jumps to the hospital in almost all the missions they appeared.

 

At first, I thought I might have accidentally pushed the bosses through two health phases (causing a second ambush to spawn before the first found its way to me), but by the second EB, and paying closer attention to the NPC dialogue as I fought, I realized that there were indeed two ambushes spawning at once.

 

The only time this didn't seem to happen was in the penultimate mission - the number of freaks who spawned during the boss fights seemed normal.

 

Because I didn't want to hit the hospital too hard in the final mission and concentrate more on the story than surviving, I dropped my notoriety to 0/1 (with bosses, EB), This helped (I did die once, but that was to the triple bosses and some unlucky big hits on their part), but on the final escort mission, the double spawns happened again, along with ambushes spawning well before the first ones were finished.

 

In this case, the double spawns made sense, since it's two separate enemy groups attacking, but the spacing between ambushes seems too short. While I didn't have any trouble with them this time (no EB/AV to fight alongside them and the reduction in my difficulty settings), it was still surprising to be half finished with one group, and then the next two sets are spawning in.

 

Overall, the arc was a lot of fun, but the upward shift in challenge level compared to similar arcs at this level range because of the way ambushes were spawning made it incredibly jarring (and made me glad I was playing it on a fairly survivable character I'm familiar with).