Fortress assaults suffer from the same problem as attacking a warchief in SoM: you can make it too easy on yourself by doing all the work. If you dominate every captain in the region and take out all the warchiefs before your assault then yes, fort assaults are going to be an exercise in point capture and killing grunts and little else.
In all the videos they would take out a warchief or two but leave the rest intact. When they have siege beasts and poison/fire wall spouts and active beastmaster captains, or any captains with gangs for that matter, then assaults are a little crazier.
But as with SoM, over preparation is kind of the death of fun in SoW.
As for whether or not SoW is easier than SoM.....it's yes and no to me.
On the one hand, your average captain is harder to kill than in SoM. They adapt, they often have gangs even as low level scrubs and every other motherfucker in this game is carrying a Defender shield.
On the other though I feel like you have more room to breathe. I remember just getting chain struck in SoM to the point I couldn't escape. Guys would hit me in melee, spears and arrows would come after, and so by the time you decided you needed to get out of there it was already too late sometimes. In SoW, that feels like it happens less often. For one, I don't think grunt ranged troops are as nasty in SoM; they do less damage for sure, and so there's less of "Three hunters at the edge of the fight sniping you and taking all your health between them in a few seconds." I feel like I ignore hunters and archers for longer in SoW than in SoM. Secondly, between bodyguards and Forgrim or whatever his name is, there's a good chance of surviving "no chance" captains. (Hell your backup tends to kill the enemy captains every time anyways.) Thirdly, last chance is just straight easier to do in SoM. You just have to hit a button prompt during a generous window of opportunity. No more moving the joystick and hitting a button. So you almost never fail those. Fourth, you just have so much more mobility and escape velocity. Click left stick to burn a trivial amount of focus so you can wraith sprint on command? DON'T MIND IF I DO. Getting to a higher elevation and double jumping your way out of trouble is super easy. You rarely get caught while climbing anymore because you can wraith jump up walls so much faster than you could climb in SoM. The only time I ever get shot or struck off a wall is when there's an aggroed enemy standing next to the ledge; you can't stealth kill him or grab him from the ledge during open combat, so he basically body blocks you from climbing up off the wall.
And lastly, being able to summon a beast or your best orc captain gives you breathing room in SoM you're not used to having. I've been trying to avoid summoning backup until it's really necessary, and for the most part it hasn't been. Unless the captain is a real, total SOB.
So in balance it feels easier to stay alive while not necessarily being easier to kill captains. Any fight I have with a serious captain tend to take a good few minutes, I'm often having to run away and heal or am kiting him, one or more additional captains and 20 grunts across the area as I whittle them down one by one. 1v1 fights against an adapted captain with a defender shield are kind of nail biter affairs because almost nothing works on them. You have to start relying on environmental hazards once he's adapted to half your wraith shit. And if they decide to enrage, well.....good luck trying to do much of anything while they continually rush you doing unparryable attacks.
That said, it is far easier to fight a captain to the point they're ready to be dominated than it is to try to kill them outright. Dominating in general is stupidly easy now even before you get all the upgrades, and I swear some captains that are on that last bit of life take an inordinate amount of damage before they'll actually die. And then they might defy death right there on the spot and regen half their life. They might be a self-healer as well. By far the hardest fights I've had are when I'm trying to kill captains rather than dominate them. And I feel like it was the other way around in SoM.
Unrelated question: has anyone seen the DLC Slaughter and Outcast tribes? I got the silver edition but haven't seen them anywhere. Their legendary gear sets don't even show up in the inventory screen alongside the rest of the tribes. Do they only show up later in game or in the end game or is it not even released yet.....? So confusing.
Lastly, can anyone get a handle on region bonuses based on who you've made overlord of a region? I know every tribe grants a visual look to everything, some totems or beast objects or whatever....but they mentioned several times during the livestreams that the Marauder tribe gave you a bonus to all cash that dropped in the region. I don't see any of this info listed anywhere though and I assume the other tribes have to grant some sort of passive bonus as well....right?
As I've been playing through and putting the stuff hyped in livestreams to the test.....I'm finding a lot of it feels incomplete or woefully under-explained.
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Topic: Middle-earth: Shadow of War (Read 76368 times)