Elite Armour set finished, woohoo!

This damned suit of armor took more than a month to find.

I obtained the last 2 pieces of the Bio-E elite armor on Sunday. It was a win and it pulled me out of my farming hell, but a little disappointing at the same time.

I was travelling from the start of WS3-4 to the usual spider farming area when a lowbie joined me - he was about L17. I had a bit of trouble with his accent at first, and I was still mid fight with about half a dozen dark elves and 3 missile goblins, so I told him to just hang tight.

Eventually when it was calmer, we had a bit of a discussion. He was asking me to powerlevel him from 17-20, which he felt was a dead-spot, and he was offering whatever I wanted in payment for it. So I told him what I was looking for - the rest of my Elite Armor set, so I could get out of the spider farm.

He said he had a Bio-E and a full set of Elite armor. (Actually he said he had 14 characters spread across a few memory cards, all with elite armors) Imagine my surprise when he said he was willing to part with whichever parts of his Bio-E armor in exchange for the power levelling!

I was stunned. This stupid Elite armor that was giving me grief for the past 3 weeks was being offered to me for about 15 minutes worth of powerlevelling.

So I did it. I think the fellow had a special technique with the trading using his multiple memory cards, so that the items went into my inventory without getting deleted from his. I guess that the game doesn't tag each piece of armor with an ID.

So now I have all the armor, even though it was kind of a cheap way to do it. However, it means I'll be spending weeks less of mindless spider farming because of it, so I guess it is a good thing. (the wife will probably be happier too)

I got the completion for the Elite Armor achievement when I put the last piece on. (completing all 1000 points for the game, my first complete game 8)

I dyed the whole set a nice red colour to get rid of the default green/blue scheme.

Maybe I'll post a pic of it later.

The skills on this armour are all along the wrong skill path, sigh.

Upsen.

Elite Armor - Getting Closer to Completion

Last night I picked up the leg armor for the Elite Armor set, which brings me up to 5/7 pieces now. Just 2 more to go - the arm and hand pieces.

The success of the spider farms really do depend on a patient and stable host. I've been in a number of them where the host is a non-talker. I've even been in one where the silent host looked like they were about to die, and instead of biting the bullet and respawning, decided to quit the game (and so it automatically kicks me out) So much for helping them stay alive numerous other times getting to the spider farm.

Anyway, this probably means that I will be hosting more often than joining farms... and only till I get the other 2 elite bits. :D

Upsen.

Head Mainframe of the Flesh Architect
Chest The Flesh Architect's Sterile Core
Arms The Flesh Architect's Grim Reach
Gloves The Flesh Architect's Digiclaws
Legs Metal-Shanks of the Flesh Architect
Boots Balance Augment of the Flesh Architect
Weapon The Flesh Architect's Incisor

Co-op Spider Farming

Goes much faster in co-op than in single player. Why? Cause one player can rush into the room to pick up the items while the other player holds the door open. No need to wait for the items to reach their timer limit and automatically go to your inventory. Also having some human company changes this farming from mind-numbing to tolerable. (not to mention possible trading with them)

Anyways, that's what I spent a couple hours last night doing this with some online player commando. I kept him alive through some of the more dangerous pickups with my bio-e, clearing status effects etc, and he beat down the spiders like a hot knife through butter. In the 2 hour span we played, we got at least 12 different red drops, mostly runes, but included my 4th elite armour piece - the Flesh Architect's Sterile Core. A lot of health on this piece at 30%, maybe it will help me through some of those missile barrages? (probably not, haha)

One thing I noticed about this farm is that you definitely need some ballistic range boosting, otherwise you will set off the whole room. A Commando has no problem, nor does a Cybernetic who has some ballistic range increase in his Cyber skills. Some runes could probably do the trick as well, but if you don't have any, then you are not going to have a lot of success with ranged fighting. You'll probably have to rely on running in to melee the spider while the whole room goes active on you, and have a co-op player holding the door open in the back. (risky but possibly more exciting, and probably not as fast as a Commando doing it.)

Gears of War 2 comes out soon, I may have to get that.

Upsen.

Too Human Online Co-op

I wasn't having much luck with finding the elite red armour on my own, either in the Campaign mode or online mode hosting a solo game, so I decided to join in a few public games on the match making system in the game. Selecting custom match to pick out fair Round Robin games, I checked what L50 games there were going. There were a good page and a half of matches, though it would have been nice to have an option to filter out the ones that were too low level.

One thing that surprised me was the lack of talking in the game. Some didn't speak English, all right, so the game doesn't really NEED you to always be chatting and talking about something, as long as you could say "lets go this way" or "help!" or something.

Other players were totally silent, as if they didnt have a microphone plugged in at all. I mean, how are you supposed to be co ordinate a co-op game?

As a matter of fact, when I finally heard someone actually say "Hello there, watch out for the trolls", I was surprised enough that I did get hit by the troll's ice AOE. :D It was my 4th game and about 5th hour of play over the course of a few days.

Still no luck with the Elite Armor, but I did pick up a necrotizing Weapon+Armor based rune, and I traded a purple rune for a red weapon based leech rune. (They needed a particular purple rune and I happened to have it - very generous of them!)

Upsen.

In the NORN's Favor

I finally found time to hunt down the last well* I'd been missing. It was actually near one of my favorite spots to fight in Hellheim - there is one part where there are 2 parallel walkways, a low one on the left and a high one on the right. The left spawns regular undead when you walk on it and the right high path spawns a lot of polarity undead etc. Once you are almost at the far end, a dragonhead ship pops up and unloads a bunch of goblins to fight you.

Anyways, just after you finish off all those foes and grab the spire loot, instead of heading for the door, follow the right edge of the walkway, and go down the short ramp. I've looked down the ramp a couple times before at least, but somehow missed that there was a well down there. Maybe it was cause of the fighting that always goes on at that point.

I'm just one achievement away from getting an all-clear on the list. :D

Upsen.


* Well #15 from the other day's list

Farming is getting to me

I am getting pretty sick of farming for red drops. Last night I drifted off a number of times while resetting the spider, and I'd only done it for about an hour or so. Maybe I'll just start playing normally again and see what comes. The game's become pretty easy at this point - either the foes drop like flies, or you get dropped by a crazy missile swarm, or for those non Bio-Engineers, any dot-capable foe, especially ballistic immune trolls, and polarity explosions.

I am seeing necrotizing in virtually EVERY fight so that's probably another reason I'm getting an easy time of it.

• Bio-E elite spear
  (The Flesh Architect's Incisor from the Cyber Bio-E set)
• maxed Submunition Distributor skill
  (from Cybernetic skill tree, increasing proc rates)
• a 3rd tier weapon charm called the Epic Necrotizing Focus
  (ranged necrotizing!)
• an orange rune that increases status effect chance by 1% while using a 2-hander.
  (couldn't find a web source for this one)
  

Whatever the game is, when I have a character hit max level, and all that's left is to complete equipment, I find I lose a bit of the playing enjoyment. I mean, I'm killing off all these foes that are worth no points, and might drop usable loot once every week of daily playing. I get a bit of a rush I guess, when I see the xp meter going up, the whole carrot on a stick thing maybe. At least at some point, I will get more points to spend, guaranteed. This loot collection thing is really random and irritating, it just gets to me.

Anyways, I haven't seen the usual bunch playing this game and there's rumblings from my friends about playing the next game coming out, so that might be it for Too Human. But dammit it would have been nice to have a full set of elite armor for that missing achievement.

In the Norn's Favor seems to be well covered in this thread, still have to do this one too:
http://www.toohuman.net/forums/showthread.php?t=5525

Hall of Heroes (4 wells total)
Well#1: Compulsory
Well#2: Opens the 3 doors to the two arenas and the obelisk
Well#3: Below the balcony 2 rooms further in from well#2.
Well#4: Compulsory

Ice Forest (4 wells total)
Well#5: After first jump, break the wall to your right
Well#6: Compulsory
Well#7: Compulsory
Well#8: After speaking to Hod, turn around and go back the way you came, it's behind you.

World Serpent (4 wells total)
Well#9: Compulsory
Well#10: Compulsory
Well#11: In section 3-4 it's in the first room after the indoor bridge, down a ramp at the far end on the left.
Well#12: Compulsory

Helheim (5 wells total)
Well#13: After the APCs blow the front doors off, enter and keep left, it's at the far end.
Well#14: Keep following the long walkways to the next open area, it's down a tunnel to your right at the far end, or you can reach it earlier by taking the first turning on your right which leads to the same tunnel.
Well#15: Next open area has two walkways turning left at the far end. Cross them, turn left towards the next set of doors, then keep to the right, there's a craftily hidden very short ramp going down to the well on the right hand side.
Well#16: After beating Garm and riding the lift up, blast open the wall on the right side, the well is in the room revealed.
Well#17: Compulsory.

Aesir (1 well)
Well#18: Leads to Cyberspace in the Hall of the World Tree.

Elite Armor, and Farming blah.

Only 2 things left to do in the game - find all the wells (I guess I'm still missing some secret area well or something, I think my stats chart says I've found 13) and get a 7 piece Elite Armor set.

I guess I can find a walkthrough some time and get at the wells, but the Elite Armor set now, that is a different story. I was occassionally getting red drops off Grendel, but it doesn't seem to happen often enough to play through Hall of Heroes over and over again with the intention of completing a red armor set.

I found a little trick off a youtube video of how to farm a particular spider. Basically what you do is you take a (laser) rifle or cannon into level 3-4, and fight through until you get to a smallish reverse-C shaped green room. There is an optional well at the bottom of a ramp attached to the far end of the C. The other way to describe it is the room before the conveyor belt room. For me, I usually find a Troll - Spider - Troll set of foes in that room.

From this C-shaped room, you step up to the next door so that you are looking into the belt room. Standing on the grey pad is best, the farthest spot you can stand while getting the door to open. As the doors open, you'll see a spider standing at the base of the robot arm. If you time it right and start firing/aiming as the doors open, the spider doesn't respond and just calmly stands there and eats laser fire. Nothing else in the room will spawn either if it's done right. Occassionally the spider will arch back from the damage and the damage stops briefly. It takes my Bio-E two rifle clips (330ish damage) to take one spider down this way. Either way, you will find that the spider will die and drop loot. Sometimes it drops RED loot. If you want the loot that it drops, just wait around a bit, eventually the dropped loot will come to you automatically. You can laser the goblins and elves that spawn while waiting in the C-shaped room, or you can back up a bit so the doors close and you're not at risk from getting hit by some evil status effect. (as a Bio-E I didn't really care)

Here's the trick part - if you back away from the belt room door and head down the ramp to the well, the belt room resets. You have to just get both feet on the ramp and you're good. When you head back to the belt door, you will find another spider waiting for you. Kill it, check if the loot is worth waiting for, and reset when ready.

Things that can go wrong:
- You get too close to the door and you activate the whole room. They won't run into your room, but you will have to deal with the spider shooting arrows at you and random artillery fire from 2 dark elves. If any of they are status effect guys you'd better have a heal+status effect fix on hand to save yourself. Which leads to the 2nd point:
- If you die, you appear in the conveyor belt room with the door locked behind you. (just as a side note, a laser *rifle* is able to take out the spider's arrow automatically if you are locked on the spider - the firing paths intersect and your laser can deal enough damage to take it out. the cannon isn't in a high enough position to do this.)
- If you do try to take out the spider after it's active, you have a limited amount of time before the game decides to despawn the spider. I don't know if it's cause the spider is standing too close to the robot arm base and gets pushed in somehow, or if the spider can't reach you, I just know it happens when the spider is active.
- You fall asleep while farming and accidentally run into the room.

I did it for about an hour or so one day, and I got a set of red pistols (yuck) and 2 red runes (bleh). No Elite armor yet for me. I did find a red laser cannon in the shop though that looks like it can do the spider in 1 clip, at about 470 damage. Though I dont really know if it makes any real difference.

I wonder if having all the section tokens helps? I didn't have the Hall of Heroes tokens when I was trying this.

Upsen.

Unstoppable: Ice Forest

I finally picked up Unstoppable: Ice Forest a couple days ago, by playing a new character with my improved skill ability of having played 3 characters to 40-50.

What I did was start a new bio-engineer character and ran him through Hall of Heroes (world 1) - I skipped optional areas and if a door opened I didn't bother sticking around to finish off all the foes. This was to keep the character level low. Thus, I get to play Ice Forest at a low level as well. Ice forest took this particular bio-e from Level 7 to Level 18 at the end.

When a low character plays, you never see ballistic immune trolls or super missile swarms, nor do you get 4 trolls in one hallway. So the low level character going through Ice Forest only had to deal with dark elf bosses and at most, ballistic immune polarities that could be taken out with a laser rifle (basically the KLOBB rifle when it became available). The worst of it was probably one of those platforms where there would be a hammer troll, assault troll, and assorted dark elves and goblins, but it wasn't too bad to just keep them all at range, build up combo meter with air juggles on the trash, and just bio-e healing to correct any status effects or damage.

HOD's jumping platforms went down easily with a slug rifle, laser takes too long against those platforms. The last fight was just a series of dash attacks/finisher and roll away, zap him with the laser to keep him rolling and not shooting. His defeat came in short order.

Anyways, it took a while due to the length of Ice Forest, but it worked.

Going Commando

I tried the commando once near when I started playing Too Human, got one up a few levels to get the achievement for playing all character classes to Level 10. I remember dying a lot to stupid things. I thought meh, it's okay.

However, this time around when I tried it, knowing the enemies made a HUGE difference in survivability. The only trouble comes from certain resistant trolls, especially if they have a bomb launcher. Aside from that, the game is a lot easier since you dont have to worry about polarity foes blowing up next to you as much, since you can blast them away. I found that a lot of polarities are immune to gunfire, but not immune to the laser rifle's secondary blast. 3 ticks and they are dead. This makes the laser rifle extremely appealing even though there are no specific commando bonuses for laser rifle. I just use the bonuses off Rifle Damage from the commando plasma right path, and the reload bonuses off the Human skill list. (I'm going to get a few more points in to get the additional combo level at the end of the tree, can always use that.) So I guess I'm a plasma commando, more of a 80-20 split between laser-plasma, since sometimes plasma is easier to use on trolls in tight spaces. If it was multiplayer with no pausing I'd just stick with the laser, I'd think.

I haven't really had too much trouble with combo levels - Normally the commando kills so fast that a combo level will build up, and in a pinch, I can juggle something and lase it to death since we get more points off an air kill.

One of the best bonuses for me seems to be ballistic juggle time - with about a +30% or so bonus, I can do a single juggle long enough to take a goblin boss from full health to dead. Unfortunately I upgraded past the piece of armor that I'd slotted the juggles in, and I'll definitely have to build another one once I find some more.

I picked up Unstoppable: World Serpent with the commando - Ice Forest is still a bit too rough, the length of stage 2 has always meant an unlucky encounter with a dot-effect death. (usually from a ballistic-immune troll) One of these times I'll luck out and get away with it, or maybe try it with a friend some time.

Necrotizing Goodness

Yesterday, in the weapon shop, I found a red spear, worth something like 1.4 million. Luckily I hadn't been spending much so I had more than enough to cover the cost of purchase... I could have bought 2 even.

Anyways, it was meant for cybernetic classes and was called the Flesh Architect's Incisor. It was totally worth the purchase, as it made fighting the masses of foes SO much easier. Soon as a proc occurs, a good sized pool of toxic liquid appears where the foe is, and they die. Other foes touching the pool take damage and then die too, leaving behind their own pools of necrotized toxins. I've seen this pool travel along the length of a room and around a corner due to the new foes coming in and getting necrotized while I'm just standing there watching. I can probably say goodbye to ever getting any Combo-meter=50 charms done though.

Even better is that I now have a Necrotize charm about 60% completed too, which should make for even more frequent proccing, and proccing at range as well. (the spear based necrotize doesn't affect the ranged weapon it seems)

I ended up getting rid of the Skuld's Embrace skill and putting those points into more points for the Cybernetics tree. I went down both sides of the Cybernetics tree. :D more Procs/Spidertime and more ammo/range/penetration!

Upsen.

Too Much Too Human

After hitting 50 with my cybernetic bio engineer character, I went back and started playing my cybernetic defender again, to try out some of the melee techniques I'd learned while playing the squishier BioE.

When I first started playing, I had no idea that rolling was a powerful mitigation power - I figured it just let you get away from melee and aoe blasts. I was totally wrong, rolling is an amazing damage mitigation tool - you don't take any damage if you time the roll correctly! Even knockdowns can be avoided (too bad you can't avoid freeze with a roll, only with a well timed jump) Anyways, back to the actual point - I was now a rolling demon with my defender, now that I knew how to avoid the extra bit of damage that my defender used to always absorb standing up.

Besides that, I found that aerial attacks were still useful for a defender even if his hang-time in the air is minimal - you can launch a foe, do an air-slide to them, and set off a finisher attack before they drop back down, and it usually kills whatever it is. The other handy part about the air-slide finisher is using them against trolls - even if you skip the launch step, you can still jump, airslide to the troll's chest, and do a finisher. It takes all the armor off the upper body of the troll in one big hit, and all you have to do is roll around to behind the troll and then mount it's head for the kill. It made troll killing a heck of a lot faster. This was a bit risky on the BioE but it was easy peasy on the Defender, cause of his knockdown immunity. You may take a spot of damage but you will always get into position on the first try.

I was able to get past a lot of things I wasn't able to handle very well previously with these 2 techniques. The Defender's now L50 as well. (and it seems to have gotten a lot more red pieces of equipment than the BioE, I wonder why? Luck?)

I also decided I don't really like the BioE mind control power (Skuld's Embrace) at L50 - there are too many missiles in the mix. Since the AI's AOEs always hit everyone (friend and foe alike) you can get screwed over by a badly timed "friendly" missile barrage as you are meleeing away. At least when all the missiles are aimed at you, you know where they will land, and you can react accordingly. If some are aimed at you and some are aimed at the enemy, you will eat missiles wherever you go - it is hard to tell where the next barrage will land.

Also it's made me time out of a couple of timed secret areas.

What else is there - oh yeah, I heard that the respec cost caps out at 1,000,000 or so bounty. It's getting kind of expensive to respec but at least I know it shouldn't get any more extreme.

Now that the Defender's at 50, I'm not entirely happy with him either. I really miss the BioE ability to heal damage, even if they took a lot more in the first place. At least you can decide when you want to heal, rather than cross your fingers for a health orb.

So the current character I'm playing now is a Human BioE - it's a lot more flexible than the cybernetic one since you can build ruiners much more quickly with the improved hit rate. It's too bad the ruiner doesn't actually siphon enemy health to you like the description says.

I may stagger the development of this human BioE with a human Commando - I hear they are the characters of choice for loot runs since they can dish out ranged damage in the range of 1000-2000 points per shot - that's just a little less than what my Cybernetic BioE is doing per melee swing. :P It takes me a good hour or two to get through hell with the regen waiting etc, but these Commandos can do it in under half an hour? Wow. Plus due to the reliance on ranged weapons, you can basically set up your melee weapon as a ranged weapon buff receptacle, since you would only be using it to set up a juggle.

I have a cybernetic commando already at about L27, who is doing all right... I'll probably build a new human one for comparison. I think the human one will probably be able to dish more damage with it's faster reloads and rate of fire, the cyber one seems to be more focused on range and sustained fire.

Upsen.

Too Human Multiplayer

Last night I had a good session of Too Human with a friend - I was on a Defender and they were on a Commando. We both happened to be L30 so we didn't have to go character juggling and finding odd alts to play, which was cool.

This game needs to address the problems it has with level disparities... The first time I played multiplayer, I logged in a L6 into a game a friend had and he was L40. I died pretty much every encounter even if I tried to stay at range... things were one-shotting me. It really turned me off the multiplayer game at first.

We went through the World Serpent stages, and then Helheim to a little past GARM. I discovered that my Fire-setting ability was locked out in his game's cyber space, which was kind of irritating. I mean, I should be allowed to use if if I'd gotten the ability on my own right? :P

The end bosses are really easy when you have 2 players, one person flees and the other one guns down whatever it is.

Unfortunately we both bit it a couple times so no achievement for surviving the whole level.

We picked up some decent equipment, and I managed to get a weapon that does 1000+ base damage. A couple pieces of red armor too, which cost an arm and a leg to build from blueprints.

Ended the night at L36, 6 levels in about 3 hours, much faster than in single player I think.