I hate Fear's Embrace (Found at the end of Taken War: Mars). Soloing this plain old mission as a Sunbreaker Titan with 295+ gear and weapons, I just spent 47:42 minutes on it with 19 deaths and 304 kills. Before you scream get good, I'd like to say I don't claim to be an incredible player, but a determined player who keeps trying in the face of adversity. This mission's mechanics with the Shade of Oryx boss fight is both not fun and unfairly shifted in the AI's advantage. The elements that make up the fight would be interesting piecemeal, but instead make a disgusting amalgamate of different sources of damage that both makes no sense and makes you gnash your teeth in frustration.
The things I mean are as follows.
• Pools of poison in the lower level of the map, forcing you to use less than a third of the area inside the boss chamber.
• Taken grenades/mines dispersed liberally throughout the area you have to run through.
• Blights appearing haphazardly around you forcing you to focus fire on them to stop the constant stream of annoying enemies that surround you.
• Jets of flame that randomly appear from above and inflict burning x2-3 on you, making sure you always take damage.
• The Grasp of Shadow debuff or whatever it's called when you inevitably walk near a blight, slowing your movement to a slug's pace while under fire.
• Annoying enemy spawns and enemy types that essentially have you deal with High Damage Centurions, Stealthed Minotaurs, Splitting Psions, Invincibility Goblins, and the Stupid Knock You Around Phalanxes that constantly force you into poison, blight, a mine, or a jet of fire. Can you tell I hate Taken Phalanxes?
• Oryx's Embrace or whatever that DRAINS YOU OF YOUR SPECIAL on top of all of this.
• Shade of Oryx teleporting away after some damage, forcing you to deal with a segmented battle that resets from the beginning at death.
These elements of the fight are all fine and dandy by themselves, but clearly pose a ridiculous and unfun mismatch when crammed together. This would also be acceptable as a strike but in a mission (that I play in single player, getting friends to help is hard for me as I have no mic) it's just awful.
My solution for fixing this is as follows.
• Remove the fire jets or the poison, allowing better mobility and less pressure on the player as a result.
or
• Remove the blights and vast amounts of Taken Mines/Grenades, again, removing pressure that the player has to deal with.
or
• Remove the checkpoint spawning and allow players to respawn without resetting their progress. I like this option the least as it turns a mission with potential for challenge to a trivial walk in the park, but even then I prefer it to what I just went through.
Something really has to give on this one so it can be fair to players like me, it sticks out like a sore thumb amongst other missions of reasonable difficulty. Please help me get the developer's attention with this thread- I don't want anyone to go through the pain and suffering I did.
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Did it solo, no nerf needed here, moving on.