Meanwhile on Foreas, I've been joined by my long time Guild Wars N00b Club comrade. I thought they might like it, given that this was the person that managed to convince me, a post-Rallos Zek Traumatic Syndrome sufferer to try Planetside, all those years ago. Revenge is a dish best served cold and all that, and despite having a PC that barely meets the minimum spec for Tabula Rasa, the three-day trial Refer-A-Friend thing seemed to be enough to make something of a convert of them.
(Incidentally, I think I still have three of those left, so first-come first-served on those...get in touch, with an email address, via the Contact bit at the top and I'll do the necessaries. No obligation to sign up and get me free months or anything. Hell, you don't even have to say hello!)
It took a bit of juggling about with the cloning system to settle on two characters suitable to enter into a N00b Club Style Pact, although we're not setting any particular night of the week for all this. In the end, I went with a Ranger, cloned at 15 from my previous main Commando, now Grenadier.
The Ranger seems to be a kind of fire support type, offering air-strikes and the ability to call in short duration NPC reinforcements, and will eventually lead into Spy and Sniper. Not decided which to go for yet - probably Sniper; they've just had a big nerf so will be safe for a while, and Spy seems far too popular! Plus they seem to get lightsabres, which is a turn-off for me. Previous comments here lead me to believe they're somewhat overpowered and are likely to be next on The List. Mind you, one of the nicer things about the way TR has done the branching skills system is that Sniper, OR Spy, I'll always still be a Recruit, Soldier and Ranger, and continue to have access to their stuff too, little of which fades into obsolescence as the levels go up.
In short, have Minigun, will conquer!
My accomplice has opted for the Specialist support line, and is currently an Biotechnician. Having already been a Specialist, they've still got access to tools that do the conventional types of healing, and from here on, its on to more advanced things like resurrection, and a great many 'orrible things involving viral damage. And again, everyone is a Recruit, so can always use the Pistols, Shotguns and Rifles, which to be honest, I still use often on my L35 Grenadier.
Its all very clever, and means that instead of the usual 'LF1M - Need Priest!', fully half of all character classes can perform the healer role, with equal potency. Whether that means half of all players is a different matter, but makes for far more flexible grouping. The other half get the MCG, so its all good!
Much general missioning and instance work later, we found ourselves being sent into Torcastra Prison, a Bane facility holding many of our P.O.Ws. TR's instances are very much in the WoW mold; small group-only maps with stories and set objectives inside, all of which lasts only as long as you're in there. If anything, the instances in TR are more numerous (Typically three per normal zone) and although perhaps a little more generic than Wow's in scenery reuse and such, are just as compelling for the story-obsessive like me. They also offer a slightly less demanding challenge than the ones in WoW, in keeping with the general level of difficulty of the game, I'm finding.
Tocastra is a bit of an exception though, and one you often see LFGs for. Spoiler Alert, and all that.
The referral sends you into the start of the place, and like all the instances I've seen, this starting area comes complete with spawn point hospital, ammo vendor (Handy..no need to leave for repairs or more ammo!) and various AFS folks who have jobs that need doing, developing the story of each as you go.
In this case, its full frontal prison break; we need to get our guys outta there! First stage was to clear a path for our dropships, by taking out various mortar cannons. These are accessed through a winding set of canyons, and Bane resistance is pretty heavy along the way; the usual Thrax grunts, along with the Caretaker Healers, and a smattering of Lightbender snipers too. So far so good, and pretty standard clearance.
Then we reached the gates of the prison compound and all hell breaks loose. The giant mechanical Strider takes a hell of a beating, and can put out some quite ferocious damage blasts, lasers, all that. This is where the EMP Chaingun is a must, although my accomplice was doing sterling work with an EMP Rifle too. Once that monster was brought down, its inside and off go the alarms. The principal difficulty of this particular instance is this stage. From the moment the alarms go off at the main gate, we only had twenty minutes to clear all four bunkers, otherwise the dropships fly right into the firing zone and get destroyed.
Lots of hefty squads defending, which aren't too bad if you have time to take them out methodically, but in here, we didn't and it all got a bit manic during this twenty minutes. The Machina robot zombie things were quite a pain; a unique kind of monster in my experience, in that if you don't loot it quickly enough, it just gets back up and keeps on coming. Must loot faster! The real pain was the mortars themselves; mechanical turrets that have a shocking rate of regeneration, and required me going berserk (literally - Rage IV going the whole time), running up onto the roof of the bunker and giving it hell with the EMP Chaingun, while my Biotechnician partner desperately shot at me continually with the Repair Gun thing. Explosions, bullets, mayhem, death, Bruce Willis-Like Antics!
My favourite skill there, aside from Rage, was Carpet Bombs, a Ranger trick that uses Weapons Grade Micromech thingies to teleport in a hefty airstrike on the surrounding area. Very noisy, and although not capable of one-hitting much, definitely softens up whole squads of enemies. Extremely satisfying, and a definite crowd-pleaser at Control Point Battles. I suspect I'll start getting passive-aggressive memos from HQ about my tendency to call in triple run 40m bomb pattern airstrikes on lone Thrax, a warnet (singular), and indeed, Lumins (A kind of level 1 non-aggressive firefly put there mostly for scenic value, I think), any day now. I put it down to frustrations at never having got Orbital Strikes in Planetside. Death from above!
Matters are made more difficult during this 20min span, by a Overseer Torqua, a Hunter Boss (With Alien Sonic Hound Pet) off to one side slightly, with an insane regeneration and the tendency to reflect so much incoming damage back at you that its quite easy to kill yourself on him, going full-bore with the MCG. Even with the full time repair service from my accomplice, it was touch and go, and this bit takes so long that it can easily run you out of the twenty minute span. Somewhat forearmed with this knowledge, we actually came back and sorted him out after the mortars were destroyed. He's part of the necessary ticklist involved in unlocking Forean Hybrids as a character choice for one's account, so a useful assassination, although the Hybrids aren't really my thing. I've worked hard to get the DNA I have today, and I'm not about to start mucking about with it now!
Bunkers dealt with, the cavalry arrived in dropships, and set up a forward post just outside the Prison. Next we had to bust inside and rescue the prisoners, which was easier said than done, what with the 'Juggernaut' acting as guard dog. This is an immense walker robot thing, with rotary cannons for arms, and an annoying ability to create weird gravity anomalies, that suck you into Stomp range. We've quite gotten into the 'panic mode' of attack now, where I Rage, Crouch and MCG as if my life depends on it, and my accomplice frantically repairs my armour from behind the nearest rock. Seems to be working, and I'm not even a Commando, who probably ought to be doing the tanking!
Once inside, its a rather ballistic tour of the facilities, finding various boss types to divest them of their keys, and into the control room, where a Complex Button Pushing Puzzle awaits. This took a number of goes to figure out, each failed attempt teleporting yet another squad of guards on top of us. Turns out that the visual clue provided should be inverted for it to work - i.e. The green hexagons show you which buttons should be left red. Obviously! This is what happens when you send grunts like us in to deal with complex alien machinery. Its a wonder we didn't just blow the whole place up, prisoners and all, but eventually we stumbled on the right combination, unlocking the cages and causing a rush for the exit. I think some of them even made it out past the Thrax that had survived our somewhat slapdash corridor clearance. Heigh Ho!
We never leave a man behind though, and next trip was to the Evil Alien Research Hospital, to pick up Airman Hamilton, captured en route to the mysterious Eloh Vale. Looks like we arrived a bit late however, and when we found him he was all...zombied up. Damn you Bane! Damn you to hell! Something of his personality survived however, and we were presented with a difficult choice; put him out of his misery there and then, or take him back the operation CO to see if HQ can, er, De-zombie him somehow. We're a pair of bleeding hearts really, so opted for the latter. Also, he had one of those 'boss' glows around him, so may have been quite tricky to...grant lasting peace to. I wish we'd gone for that now, as I've seen turrets move faster than him and much of the later part of the mission involved working through the emote list and comparing armour dye colours while we waited for the stricken Airman to shamble his way to the dustoff point.
He got there in the end though. A good job well done, everyone accounted for, and we hardly died many times at all in the assault!
I'm liking the TR instances a lot so far, and they seem a much less fraught exercise than my goes at the various WoW ones. They seem shorter as a rule, allowing them to be done in a smaller window of play time, or several in one session if you're online for longer. They also seem a great deal more forgiving in Party Composition; you don't need X number of this class, Y number of that and Z number of those, or its a no show. Some of them are even soloable while still in xp range. The rewards and challenge become less special, but the story is still there. I suspect a lot of my preference is that unlike much supposed group content in MMOs, in TR, you don't need a PUG if you don't want one; can do it just with one or two friends, or alone after a few levels, whichever you want. This avoids many of the worst problems of signing up with five other random muppets; a Good Thing. I'm not sure there's anything in that game (as yet anyway), which requires 40 players, teamspeak and a DKP system.
All in all, there seems a great deal of flexibility to TR's instances that I didn't find so much of in WoW. Perhaps they are Easymode by comparison, but I'm not sure that's such a bad thing really...
(Because there are just so many of them, and they take less time to do, I'm probably not going to turn this into a weekly Guild Wars type of thing, but look out for the continuing adventures of The 101st Battalion, N00b Brigade soon!)