For the record, I got good at the game through patience and persistence, not by forum members condemning me to death. ;)
I recognize that it seems to be part of the culture here on this site to look down on people who complain about the game being too hard or "unfair" or whatever, but personally, I think all feelings are valid and feeling upset that you lost a game that was going really well is very understandable and sometimes it's therapeutic to complain about it. :) I don't begrudge anyone for ranting a bit. (That Elite Former Captain thing looked like a frustrating way to die!) :|
There was no intention to even SUGGEST that I thought the game was too hard or unfair though =/ ? Hard or not, I just like to dramatically baw at the horrible fate of my character (provided it was horrible). Difficulty is often a selling point to me, not a problem, I'd elaborate but that tends to go into e-peen measuring territory. But you address something important...The forum culture, I'm new here and I don't really know anyone here, so if someone makes some kind of subtle inside-community-understood comment like "share mortems", and that's somehow supposed to tell me to experiment for myself or something, well, then it'll fly past my head =P.
I don't know if anyone is actually bothered by your questions, but if they are, I would suggest that they just not follow the thread any more.
I like to think that I write posts for the people who want to read em, and if you don't, don't. That said you can never be sure if a new community as a whole you don't know frown upon some things others normally would not, so it doesn't hurt to be careful too IMO.
Oof, I hope you don't mind if I hand out a few tips here, because it looks like you made quite a few mistakes here. :o
First off, Abyssal Plains is doable in AoMr, but I would recommend you only try if you have a phase device to get you out of that Agony Elemental ambush. You do *not* want to get trapped in there and surrounded by bullet-resistant enemies with only bullet weapons. Phase out, keep your distance, and take them on one at a time. The elementals only summon stuff when they can see you, (or you shoot them) so as long as they're out of sight, you should be safe from being overwhelmed.
Yeah, tbh I didn't think of phasing out, not sure why. I'll be sure to do that next time. I KNOW being trapped in there as a bullet-only spec was probably suicide as I mentioned but I wanted to see how bad it was...just so I could gauge future runs if it'd be doable or not given more or less equipment.
Secondly, it looks like you were wearing fireproof armour in there. Fireproof armour gives a penalty to melee resistance and you were wearing it while fighting enemies with melee attacks! (Extra owie!) :o
Oh, it has a penalty to melee? I didn't realize...I was only wearing it though because they already shreded my other armor to bits and I was just desperate for more protection (as in the #, which is 4 on red sooo).
Thirdly, if you must stay in that ambush, go into the corner so that only three of them can hit you at a time. Yeah, I know you were going for the fire skull, but still, being surrounded on all eight sides is bad news. :|
I actually did that, I only moved out later on to finish off and grab the fire skull which I only did because I didn't realize it would do nothing qq. It'd be pretty dumb if I didn't do that before =P...like.. really dumb! Kinda like going there in the first place as a pistol user, but like I said, that was an intentional "see how fast I die" kinda thing. Honestly, I didn't expect to kill the agony elemental at all when I started, so I considered the experiment a success somewhat.
Fourthly, I think it's worth mentioning that you really never need to use the dual-reload feature of your pistols. One of the undocumented features of the Dualgunner trait in this version is that if your equipped weapon and your prepared weapon are both pistols, you can swap them in zero time. This lets you individually reload whichever one you want at any time, which I think might have been handy in this situation.
Oh you mean it has a built in juggler thing for pistols only? I did NOT know that. Thanks a bunch! As for the Agony elemental, I never actually dual reloaded around it, I think it automatically says you dual reload when gun kata reloads for you after killing something...Unless you were referring to that bit about the elite captain, I think I manually dual reloaded there yes *hangs head in shame*... If only I knew they could have laser guns sometimes (increased accuracy at long range, bypasses my armor's bullet resistance, etc, etc).
speaking of which, I just found out for myself in this game that not only can those human dudes pick up loot (I always knew this), and use med kits (knew this too), but if they pick up armor...it actually affects their stats! I blasted a non-elite former sergeant point blank with a combat shotgun like 3 times, and he was still not even almost dead. I thought "this guy must be wearing some ridiculous armor"...sure enough he was (bullet-proof armor).
But yeah, I'll be glad to know about the free mini-juggler thing with that pistol trait.
Anyway since evidently some people don't mind (yay), Another random question, That angelic armor...It seems kinda redundant to me, is there some kind of hidden use I'm not aware of? I mean I can see it's great for melee and bullet resistance, but you get it so late in the game that you are unlikely to see a single former human at all, so bullet/shrapnel resistance is useless (well bullet good for spider queen I guess but she's a complete pushover anyway. The melee thing would be good for actual melee players I suppose but again, it's really late and just seems like a waste somewhat that you can't get this armor BEFORE the unholy cathedral.
Anyway I cleared another HMP. I chose kinda weird traits at the start (hellrunner first, then dodgemaster, then intuition, then finesse, etc). Because I wanted to be able to select gun kata OR shottyman depending on what I got by the armory. Armory had an assault shotgun AND a plasma shotgun (the cover killing part, and ammo difficulty makes it kinda lame but I actually made good use of it when I was low on shells, and for bum-rushing archvilles before they could do anything, etc), so I ended up going shottyman. An otherwise uneventful clear but I thought it was cute that on the 2nd last floor, I got a "Yes, it actually happened. Hell froze over!" event thing =P
Now I'm trying a 100 floor challenge (am at 52 atm), using the same spec, only I dragged out the "neither spec" traits for longer because it took FOREVER to get anything...finally I found a super shotgun so I went shotgun spec, if only I got a nano mod instead of this crummy old sniper mod (sniper mod for shotgun spec...yay). Unfortunately I'm now just going for staircases rather than killing everything because of ammo issues, and yes, I'm making sure I'm blowing stuff up with barrels and rocketlaunchers if I hear archvilles.
Anyway, thanks for the encouragement, I continue to enjoy the game =P