Shades of Twilight

After the release of Patch 0.7, Nightmare mode is no longer that “impossible”. They have re-balanced the mobs in nightmare mode, ie lowered their levels closer to the player’s level.

However, I believe they left out a zone or 2 in this process. My Elite character is now level 39 going on level 40. Currently I’m at Monument Station doing the quests there. Thus far, all the way up to this point, the mobs have been challenging but you still had a fighting chance to beat them.

Now, I got a couple of quests over at Upper Grounds. When I entered the zone, I found the mobs strangely “resistant” to my attacks, and my bots died so much quicker than usual. So, I took a look at the level of the mobs, and they were level 47! That’s 8 levels higher than me!

Without a doubt, I died multiple times just trying to kill the named boss Lament. Eventually, after dying countless times, I cleared a small area where I could snipe at Lament from afar. Even so, it took over 10 to 15 shots from my sniper rifle to down him, not including a couple of nukes thrown in to help accelerate the process.

I don’t see how I can survive the zone to reach Waterman’s Walk, and even if I did, whether the mobs at Waterman’s Walk would be under level 47, or higher. If they are higher, or even level 47, I don’t see how I can complete the “Explore Waterman’s Walk” quest.

However, the other zones thus far in Monument station has reasonably challenging mobs. For example, mobs at Eastcheap are level 45, where they are challenging but not “highly resistant” to attacks.

Ok I admit I’m WOLS (for the uninitiated, “WOLS” is a local online slang for “very slow”. It’s actually the word “slow” reversed, implying not only am I slow, I’m VERY slow with news and updates).

I just noticed the single player patch 0.6 for Hellgate available at the IAH website, so I updated. Yes, it’s 1 version behind the multiplayer version but hey, it should fix alot of the issues we’ve been having, especially the slow framerate thing in Single Player.

So, I loaded up with Single Player mode, went back to my abandoned Engineer which I was playing before my drinking buddy bought Hellgate and we decided to play online. After looking at his stuff and stats, I realised he was way too gimped. Yeah, now that I’ve had more experience playing in Multiplayer, I realised what I thought was good back then isn’t really good.

So I started over with a Summoner. Well, I already had a level 2 summoner in Single Player, but even then, I made the wrong skill choice at level 2, so I killed him and remade him. In under 1 hour I had gotten him up to level 6 and with only Shulgoth to go in Covent Gardens, before the dreaded British Museum.

However if I remember right, Summoners pwned the Emporer Gulkars that will spawn there. That was on Multiplayer. Single Player should be no different. The thing I liked about Single Player mode is that the minions you summoned do not disappear when you go back to the stations. I guess they made it this way in Mutiplayer to avoid lag in the stations when many players are there doing their transactions (making armour, weapons, upgrading stuff etc).

So in a sense, Single Player mode is actually easier, because when you actually zone into a hostile zone with mobs at the entrance, all your minions are already out and fighting. In Multiplayer mode we had to run and pray that we don’t get killed if we get mobbed at the entrance.

Anyway I think I will try to complete the Single Player story mode once at least, although I have already completed it twice on multiplayer. Now we’re running through the story a 3rd time in Elite Nightmare mode on Multiplayer so, I hope we’ll at least hit somewhere close to level 50 by the time we’re done there.

At 1pm or so, my drinking buddy and I killed Sydonai again. This time, it’s the Elite mode Sydonai, which is supposed to be tougher.

In a sense, he was tougher. We both died like 3 or 4 times from his one single *swipe* at us. After a few rounds of running back to Hell from the St Paul station, we finally manage to down him. Our bots were spent, his heals were down to a few, armour torn and tattared, guns smoked from the excessive firing.

But, as the pic below shows, we took him out!

So, here we are again – back to nightmare mode. Only this time, it’s “Elite Nightmare” mode, which people have been telling us, is the hardest setting of all. But hey, we never expected to survive in Elite mode, let alone kill Elite Sydonai.

Maybe we can pull off another miracle eh?