Regale me with tales of Nemesis mode's cray.
I've still only technically died twice, and neither ended up as a Nemesis death. In normal at ~Lvl 31 I can steam roll many captains in about 40 seconds. When I want something dead, it's dead. So I'm tempted to change to Nemesis mode but I kinda don't want to ruin my record, even though I know there's a bit of Nemesis junk attached to dying.
Figured out how non-real money side of the Market works thanks to doing about 12 Vendetta missions now. I'd stayed away from the tab for the first 20 hours of the game or so, not wanting to even really dig in to it. And the game didn't go out of its way to explain much of how it works either. But now that I've messed with the non-RM side of it, it's got several uses.
-Vendetta missions earn you Vendetta Chests which have Rare (and only Rare so far that I've seen) gear that's either at your level up to 10 levels lower. You get two pieces. You also earn 50 points toward earning a Spoils of War Chest, which I believe contains at least one guaranteed Legendary Orc. You have to do 20 Vendetta missions to earn one of these. You access these reward chests in the Marketplace.
-Silver War Chests can be bought with Mirrian. A Silver War Chest contains two random Orcs, one of which is guaranteed to be Epic. (Out of like 20 chests I think I've gotten one where they were both epic.) It also contains a training order. The Silver War Chests cost 1500 Mirrian which, while not free, isn't expensive.
Training Orders are pretty important to Follower customization. They're one shot consumables that:
-Can grant the Follower the "Gang" ability.
-Can grant the Follower the "Caragor Rider" ability.
-Can grant the Follower the "Flame Weapon" ability.
-Can return the Follower to the Garrison.
I assume there are more. But that last one is really important. Got an orc you love? Sad you can't take them with you after you're done with a region? Well now you can. In the same section where your earned Vendetta war chests are stored is the garrison. Any orcs you get through the market (or got as part of your preorder package) go to the Garrison. From the Garrison you can deploy these guys to any region you have access to, where they become part of the Orc hierarchy. So you can move orcs around using the training order, and pimp them out with caragors, or give them a gang to support them (which seems very important during Arena fights. Especially Caragor Packs.) If there are no open slots in a region for your guy, trying to put them there immediately creates a Nemesis challenge as they try to make space in the hierarchy for themselves.
Pretty cool feature all around IMO. Either I missed them talking about it due to my disinterest at the time over the MTX and DLC drama, or they did not pimp this feature at all. I wish they would have. And I feel like game journos are really, really fucking lazy these days. No one explained how any of this shit actually works in their write ups. Remember when game journos actually used to explain how game mechanics work in their articles? Now all we get are fucking "impressions" because everyone thinks their unqualified opinion is worth it's weight in gold. It's called information, you cocksuckers, do your jobs instead of cranking out a 20 minute article.
*ahem* Anyways.
So while MTX are MTX, there are some perks to using the market even if you don't want to spend any money.
And now for the hilarious bit.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/pc-shadow-of-war-players-cheat-to-get-around-loot-box-grind/While it has no direct impact on the cash economy, it's still funny and is exactly what you'd expect gamers to figure out. Monolith were smart enough not to have your real money currency stored locally, at least. There's debates about whether it's a hack or a cheat code and what the impact is on the perceived value of the market when you can exploit the free side of it to infinity and back. Will WB and Monolith even try to stop it from happening?
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To address Kagus' post:
-The bloat IS real. Can't deny that. But it isn't as bad as your garden variety aRPG like Diablo. Everything you get can be cannibalized in to something that, at worst, gets you a re-roll to get something you do want. Trash gear can be recycled for Mirrian, trash Orcs from the Market can be recycled for gear, or used in the Arena to either level up or get a shot at seeing another Orc generated you do want to capture. And Mirrian is used to get new gear and orcs. So there's bloat but it's not insane levels of bloat and at least you can recycle and refine the crap you get in to something you might want.
-The reason there feels like so many captains is because you're juggling so many regions. SoM was two regions that it took ~10 hours to see. By ~15 hours in SoW, you've already seen a third more captains than you have in SoM and you're just getting started. It's natural I think that it becomes overload, your brain simply can't obsess about that many captains at once. Not like SoM where you were looking at the same group of 30 for pretty much the entire game. It's a natural consequence of the changes to scope and scale. I feel it, occasionally, but I wouldn't say it bothers me so much it's detracting from my game. In fact, fuck it, give me MOAR orcs.
-This game is built for people that want to live in the Nemesis system. Literally, live in it. With so many regions, so many ways to acquire orcs, so many ways to build them up, this game wants to be a Pokemon-like sandbox and I think it does a good job of that. Does it feel like a grind as you make your way through the game? Yeah, no denying that, because you can't help but see all the "work" ahead of you. For me though, I'm not discouraged or disappointed or annoyed by this. They've made the core thing the game is about as broad and extensible as possible. The only people I think this poses a problem for is completionists who don't want to play the game for 100+ hours.
-Your lvl. vs. the orc's level. There are ways to game the system, although it does end up taking time. Sure, you can't dominate an orc above your level. But you can shame them. They lose 5 levels. Then you have gear and gems which automatically level a captain up when you dominate them, restoring those lost levels. (Or you just repeatedly Death Threat them then either fail or let it expire, then do it again until they're level reaches your's.) Later on, when you're say level 50 and the orcs from one of your starting forts are level 20, you can use the Fighting Pits to level them up very quickly (assuming they survive.) I've watched orcs gain 7+ levels just on the basic, first tier fights.
Wasn't the whole idea behind branding these fellows the ability to have someone beefier do your fighting for you in order to overcome an otherwise insurmountable foe? Sure, that concept got kinda ruined in Shadow of Mordor by the fact that Talion was a wrecking ball with legs, but that was more of a balancing mistake than an official contradiction.
My experience has been that the followers are incredibly effective. When I do a Betrayal mission (where at least two of the Warchief's bodyguards are under my control) they often kill him before I even manage to get to the fight. At least in normal, against a really tough captain, all you need is a decent captain as your backup to tip the scales in your favor. The simple act of the enemy captain not focusing on you 100% of the time is enough to give you the edge you need to kill them. (I.e, circle around to a defender's back and hit him.) The damage is often just an additional perk. I've fought captains hard enough now that occasionally I've stepped back and let my followers kill them because I was maybe low on health and had no one to drain.
I suppose I'm still just generally disappointed that the nemesis system wasn't used for more of a "wage a shadow war by manipulating the key powers to destroy themselves" game, rather than the current "Callabimbo: Tales of a Superpowered Orcish Accountant".
I mean, you basically said it yourself. No offense but this wasn't the case in SoM either so it seems a little negative nancy to be disappointed the sequel didn't change that. SoW is no less than SoM in any way. FWIW, your followers are fairly active in targeting hostile parts of the orc hierarchy with their time, and there are some fun Nemesis moments where followers coordinate their attacks or crash a duel between two other orcs or something.
But I do hope they take another pass at some parts of the Nemesis system. It does seem really dumb that no new Warchiefs are ever elected, and that you can do pretty much fuck all with Warchiefs once they're appointed. There seems to be absolutely no consequence for demoting a warchief. In fact it seems necessary due to eventually needing to level all these guys up to withstand Sauron's counterattack.
If there's one thing I will ding SoW for, it's that the Nemesis system has not lived up to the hype in some ways. I expected more traits but I see the same handful of weaknesses, immunities, mortal weaknesses, fears and Epic traits pretty much constantly. If this is all I have to look forward to for the rest of the game I will be disappointed, because I'm starting to feel like I've already mined the depth out of orc combos. And I'm just 4 regions in. I feel like I don't get as many Nemesis events either. I've been betrayed by a Follower exactly once in like ~25 hours, I don't get many back from the dead guys anymore, fewer ambushes. I'm also hearing some of the same dialog (the poison captain dialog, the maggot captain dialog especially) repeated way too often. Makes me think the "Deranged" and "Crazy" and "Broken" captains all probably have the same lines as well and that's a little disappointing. You know that point exists in every game but I didn't expect to hit it this soon in SoW.
And I honestly wish the game tracked the history of orc captains. I think my Nemesis from SoM, after getting killed by me in the Fighting Pits, then killed by me outside the city, came back as Venomous, looking all fucked up, with a different class. So I recruited him and he's now one of my top orcs. At least I think it's him. It's hard to keep track of dudes who are revengencing themselves on you when there are like three other orcs out there with their first name and their titles and looks change constantly.
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Topic: Middle-earth: Shadow of War (Read 76211 times)