So I restarted my game on Nemesis mode.
Up until now, I hadn't been super challenged by it. Guys are more aggressive sure, you spend the majority of your time rolling around large combats because standing still for more than 3 swings means you're going to need to roll dodge, and basic orcs take like 8 hits to kill without crits sometimes. But all in all I hadn't been that impressed with the Nemesis combos I was seeing or the Nemesis events (although to be fair I'm not quite to the point of the game where they really turn on.) I've cleared out Nurnen and am just waiting to take the fortress. Things have been going more or less like normal.
It wasn't until I ran into a 22 Cursemaster Terror Tank with Savage Counter though that shit got real. I just had almost a 30 minute attempt to do a Vendetta against him, and 90% of that time was spent in combat. I killed no fewer than 4 enemy captains while this bastard would take the knee at every opportunity to heal. One hit from him was 30% of my life. Freeze stunning him lasted all of 5 attempts before he adapted. Same story with daggers and vaulting. I went through 5 batches of Elf-Shot at 8 shot capacity. He enraged on beast kills and a few other things. And he was immune to executions. 8 headshots did about 2/3rds of his life.
In the end I was reduced to literally waiting for specific attacks, rolling to his back side and getting one hit off before he'd turn and savage counter anything following after, dominating hunters to fill him full of spears and single glaive strikes. He killed somewhere on the order of 50 orcs I summoned or dominated using Curse Bombs and Roars, usually when he needed a heal, so they never quite finished the job. For myself, I kept getting stung by his attacks because I'd try for the counters and missing the timing when it should have been a dodge. (Not that it mattered eventually because he became immune to Stealth Ground attacks....I didn't even know that was a thing you could adapt to.)
So I was out of Wrath due to constant cursing, and because I'm using the skill mod that builds Might super fast but takes it all away when you get hit...I had no might either. I spent minutes tediously dealing damage to him and interrupting his heal attempts, only for more captains and orcs to show up, body block him so he could heal to full and the whole vicious cycle started over again. It kept going until we'd emptied the entire camp of followers, arrows, beasts, grog explosives, flies, spiders, fire pits....
In the end it wasn't poison, or minions, or back hits, or Glaives that won the day. It was stealth. Along the way I'd overlooked that he was dazed by it. So after this epic 30 minute battle to kill this prick, I retreated from combat, returned, stealth attacked him, dazed him long enough to whittle all his health down, at which point more orcs showed up. The fight moved to a cliff side and in a moment of inspiration I grabbed him while he was broken and threw his bitch ass in to the sea.
Now that it's over I'm kinda sad he was just a Vendetta target. He was a worthy foe and I'd remember him if he showed back up in my world.
So yeah. Nemesis mode. Definitely puts the challenge to you, in specific places. That is the single hardest fight I've had in this game, bar none. While most of the orcs in Nemesis mode are just about as easy and you start to adapt to the tighter timing required due to their AI eventually, the sheer # of captains they throw at you, the damage they do and and the rate at which they adapt to attacks makes all their traits way, way more meaningful than on normal. When one guy's freaking smoke bomb will take half your life and apply an effect to you, your margin of error in Nemesis mode is tiny.
I also started feeling the limitations of the controls. There are a lot of pauses and delays I feel like in many animations. Some parts of the game are super responsive but other parts are not. Like dagger throwing locks you in to this long straightening animation that leaves you sitting there like a moron to get clobbered. Never came up in Normal, those guys are too slow. But in Nemesis where the attacks are constant, you start finding several little limitations that will totally get you killed in combat.
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Topic: Middle-earth: Shadow of War (Read 76334 times)