Behind the Mask: Lighting the Lantern part 2

OK, what about the actual content

As mentioned before, a friend and I played on two builds: one built heavily around the new energy mechanics; the other badly hurt by them. Thus, we were able to see the upper and lower limits of the various changes.

The misconception some people had is that Serpent Lantern would be similar in scope to Revelations before it. That is not the case; Serpent Lantern is a miniature story arc and takes a few hours to play through. It is repeatable, and as I'll mention in a bit, there are quite a few reasons to play through it more than once.

The first thing we noticed was a striking difference between the new VIPER enemies and the old. The new VIPER enemies have deadly new attacks, employ blocking and often try to escape melee combat with your characters. We were playing on the new "very hard" difficulty, which made things even tougher.

Many people on the forums feel that the new VIPER minions are too difficult. I liked the challenge, although since I relied on many melee-range attacks, it was sometimes frustrating getting to enemies. My character also didn't have any flying powers, so often I'd have to rely on my ranged taunt in order to affect the battle at all. As I mentioned before, I had severe energy problems. I had a lot of fun messing around with the updated AI Fire Snake, and while it was up, Thermal Reverberation kept me going.

My teammate, built for Regen, had to play much more cautiously as pulling tons of extra aggro with Gigabolt is very easy. He often got in over his head and nearly died, but with Force Shield and high REC, he always had energy to fire back.

The overall path of the story was pretty interesting, starting with recon missions and moving on to more aggressive attacks against VIPER firebases. I felt that the firebase missions were uninspired and boring, even if fighting lots of improved VIPER was fun. In general, the feeling I had from doing the firebase missions was that clearing them once was fine, but three times is probably too repetitive.

The first big fight talked about in the preview text is Draconis. Of all the boss fights, we actually found him to be the hardest. One of the biggest problems with the Draconis fight is the electric walls. Constraining a player's movements is fine, and even having a boss with lots of knockback to slam players into the electric walls is pretty cool. However, my friend got knocked into a corner and was knocked back infinitely against the electric wall, unable to fight at all. Even using Rebirth to self-rez didn't help, and he was quickly killed again, forced to respawn at the map entrance.

I'm told that the devs are aware of this problem and are working to fix it.

The next big battle we faced was Viperia. Prior to this fight we'd needed to gather some collection items to open a door, so when we went to face Viperia, having to use them again to win the fight flowed naturally. Unfortunately, the Viperia fight felt very repetitive. Even if the fight is played correctly, it takes many long rounds of battle in order to defeat her. Furthermore, Viperia doesn't get harder or trickier as she is damaged, even with the difficulty ramped up. At first, the fight was pretty fun, but after ten minutes or so, both of us were getting bored. As a side peeve, Viperia dumps her aggro every phase of the fight, meaning a tank has to be very aggressive every time she resumes fighting.

And lastly, the secret final boss. I won't spoil the fight for you, but I wanted to go over a few things.

The largest complaint I've seen with the Serpent Lantern content is that the content is that either a team or a very specific build is required for level 40 characters to beat the final boss. I am not sure whether people were trying to solo it on "very hard," or if the final boss is that hard normally. However, on the highest difficulty setting, the boss has an ability that is very difficult to handle unless you have one of a very small handful of abilities. If you are in a team with very high DPS, you'll probably be OK. However, soloing the final boss is very hard, at least on the highest difficulty. Also, if you do not have a healer, you probably don't want any team members in Avenger mode, as the last boss does a ton of area-effect damage that is hard to stop with self-heals.

Final thoughts...?

Overall the new energy changes are very harsh, and the community hates them. The devs have proposed a few changes, so we'll have to wait and see how they turn out.

The new difficulty system is interesting. I don't think it really makes enemies that much tougher, other than big boss-type enemies. The rewards are mainly measured in resources, although boss-level enemies also grant a ton more experience. I think that the new difficulty system is great, but we'll see.

Another facet of the new difficulty system is the loot. Players are extremely excited about the new loot drops, as they are far better than anything the game drops currently. Poz has stated, "Once we decide that the scaling and values are where we want them, we expect to expand this feature to most (if not all) bosses that live on instanced maps." I think the drops are a little too good right now, but as long as they remain competitive with existing top-end gear, high-level players will turn up their difficulty whenever possible.

The new teaming rewards are OK, but I'm a little disappointed. In a team of two, each character gains 60% of base experience (versus 51% on Live), while in a team of five, each character gets 25.2% (versus 22% on Live). I'm afraid that while the change is in the right direction, it's simply not enough. The buff to crossover missions will help a lot, but it is also still kind of weak, too. Still, all of this is movement in the right direction.

The Serpent Lantern itself is very hard on melee characters. The new VIPER foes flee, fly high, and otherwise impede a melee character's ability to fight. A pure melee character will also have a very large problem with many of the boss fights, for various reasons. Also, the Viperia fight needs tweaking. I'd like to see her be a little tougher when she's been damaged a lot, especially with the difficulty cranked. Also, she should probably take less time to kill.

Overall, I really like the new VIPER enemies, and while I hated the energy changes, they are getting altered to something more tolerable soon. The story arc itself is reasonably fun, although your mileage may vary. It is a lot less fun for melee characters, and characters with ranged AoE attacks like Gigabolt are much more effective. I think that in general, the large number of flying enemies really hurts melee characters more than the enemies that run (I find chasing them down to be entertaining rather than frustrating). And lastly, as a min-maxing type of player, I absolutely love the new loot.

I look forward to seeing everyone inside UNTIL HQ when the patch goes live!