The Jackal and Mineospreys

[khimera]

Specifically in an alert that was on Appoladorus in Mercury my friend and I were forced to fight a level six Jackal as the boss. Now, this was not unexpected as the mission objective was to eradicate the elite corpus personnel. The issue was my friend and I are both ten to eleven ranks above the jackal as a whole, weapons and all, and it took us forty minutes of intense work to finally kill him.

As reference, my friend is a Loki and I am a Volt. My shock ability significantly saved us time due to how much damage it would deal.

Now maybe i'm wrong but the Jackal I fought at Fossa with a proper team was much higher than this alert Jackal and it gave up prizes (only reward from the alert was a little credits which I see as a slight rip-off given how nasty the final battle ended up being) compared to this Jackal giving up nothing. While I had a proper team for the 'real' Jackal and it was still difficult, the alert Jackal was insanely more difficult. This may have been due, in part, to the mineospreys which I will get to now.

There were four mineospreys with the Jackal, which I don't think was different from the actual boss. Kill them and they came back, also normal, but my friend and I needed to focus on the jackal's limbs since they regenerated so quickly that constant fire was mostly what did damage/down it, so removing the ospreys became secondary. This causes mines to build up and the explosions to constantly rock the screen or near-constantly. I can understand needng co-op but having two people together with at least moderate skill should've been able to pull off killing a rank six Jackal without dragging the battle out forty minutes.

Long story short: I feel that perhaps the explosions shake the screen too much or perhaps screen shake could be made optional for solo players at least so they aren't basically forced to forfeit due to constant screen-rocking and inability to fire straight.

Perhaps it was the alert but the Jackal was abnormally strong for its rank, taking a great deal of damage just on the limbs to down it and it regenerated seemingly faster than the regular Jackal boss. Slight regen nerf maybe?

Mineospreys can extremely swiftly build up mines in this boss fight and their explosions when stuck to the Jackal do nothing to it while it's mobile, not even damaging the limbs a little bit. The amount of mines and explosions can cause intense lag and screen rocking which can make the boss fight overly difficult for solo and duo players in my opinion. In general they're merely menaces but all four of them together in the Jackal fight unattended is the issue since focus is generally directed to the Jackal since he can quickly kill you with or without the ospreys there. Maybe for an alert involving the Jackal fight reduce the ospreys to 2 rather than 4?

all in all, this is just my feedback on a particularly long, agitating, though still engaging and fun overall fight. (it lost the fun after the first twenty minutes then it became tedium, tiredness, etc.) I don't expect anyone to like my feedback or reply to this. Just putting that out there.

[Cakes]

I for one curse those osprey mines and wonder how the ground isn't left with more craters.

[SpiderWaifu]

Use melee against Jackal. Victory is assured.

Edit: I didn't read the part about the abnormal strength, sorry.

This thread may be better suited for the glitches subforum.

Edited February 7, 2013 by SpiderWaifu

[Sofiel]

FYI: As a loki you can Radial Disarm ospreys and they won't respawn.

[khimera]

I forgot to mention, and I thank Sofiel for reminding me, my friend did not have Radial Disarm yet. I don't have a reactor so I don't have access to overload.

[Volume]

I don't have a reactor so I don't have access to overload.

I see this as a design problem, on top of the actual topic.