*SPOILERS* The New War - Some Thoughts and/or Suggestions

[Soul.Fire]

Alright, let's get into this. This is has some light-ish spoilers for certain parts of The New War, so if you haven't played and wish not to be spoiled on those parts, I advise not reading this post.

First off, I would like to say, A++ writing, this mission gave me feels and a ton of stuff to think on and theorize about. The characterizations are top tier and most of the missions are both interesting and enjoyable. I've played this quest once already and am working on a second playthrough.

Now, on to what my one (and only) problem with it is. And oh boy is it a huge one, comprised of multiple little ones.

The Archons. Yes, I realize they are bosses. Yes, I realize they are meant to be difficult. But when it takes me many, many hours and more tries than I care to count to beat one of them, never mind two, I feel that is a tiny bit excessive. I wouldn't say I think they should be changed a lot, far from it. I like their overall design and the mechanics are at least somewhat interesting for the most part. But I definitely feel that their healing should be heavily reduced when they use it, or that they should use it less frequently. They heal entirely too much for any given use of the ability compared to how often they use it and compared to how much damage (or more accurately lack thereof) you can actually do. Either they need a reduction in healing, your damage needs a fairly substantial increase, or your own healing ability needs the cooldown reduced, I would say by half at least. Not all three, but one or another needs to happen.

Another issue is this. Many of the attacks, while they're technically dodgeable their hit scanning seems a bit off and dodging is more often than not completely pointless. Given how the Drifter handles, and that animations are forced to complete before you start moving in your chosen change of direction, I feel that either the attacks need to be slightly recoded so the hits don't ignore your dodge, or the Drifter's animations need some tweaking, possibly speeding up. I'm leaning more toward speeding up the Drifter personally, because the slowness and clunkiness of how they actually handle effects not only their movement from place to place, but their ability to use Nataruk. Try to pull the bow too soon after a dodge or any other directional change and you're sitting there holding your trigger key with no charge on the weapon. My reaction speed is a lot faster than the Drifter can keep up with, it gets me killed a lot more often than it should, and it turns an otherwise fun and interesting fight into a time sinking slog that I end up despising long before I've anywhere near finished it.

Final issue: Hunhow more or less tells you to dodge/don't face them/get behind cover etcetera, etcetera. The problem with both the not facing them and getting behind cover is the same. Things that are supposed to keep you from being hit don't do that. Solid objects, although they are meant to, do not block the archons' attacks. You will, about 3 times out of 5, end up being hit by their attacks, no matter what kind of solid object you have between them and you. They do not have to obey the same rules you have to obey.

Again, my issue is not the quest itself. I love this quest. Every single mission set is well paced and well written, and if it weren't for the archon fights breaking up the pacing so bad it would be one of my favorites of all to replay. Something has to give, Amar (wolf) had me almost in tears before his scruffy butt finally shoved off my mortal coil on my first playthrough, and it was more accident than skill on my part due to how the Drifter absolutely does not respond to direct input about 80% of the time. This... This makes the quest unenjoyable. I don't want these to be easy. But they're rather more difficult than they should be due to things just not behaving as they supposedly should.

A final note: I put this in feedback, but looking through what I highlighted I'm starting to think it may belong in the bugs section. I will leave it here for now, but I'm fully willing to move it if necessary.