We’d managed to capture a power core after defeating Wilhelm, and when we installed this it turned out to all be a trap! Sanctuary’s shield was down, and we were under attack. The only thing for it was to ready Sanctuary to take to the skies.
Regretfully, we weren’t able to do this in time before the attack took out the Crimson Raiders headquarters. Luckily Lillith was on hand to phase Sanctuary to a new location. The only way we could get back there was to re-establish the link to the Fast Travel network by stealing a beacon and have Angel use this to reunite us with the rest of our friends.
Our final objective in this mission was to retrieve a Claptrap upgrade from the Wildlife Preservation Reserve to enable us to infiltrate Control Core Angel. We had to fight our way through the shipping yard and into the holding cells, battling lots of robots, soldiers and various critters along the way. Finally we found out that Jack had been experimenting on Bloodwing, and our rescue mission soon turned into a fight for survival against a former ally.
Unsurprisingly this resulted in the death of Bloodwing, but at least we managed to retrieve the upgrade and return it to Claptrap in Sancturary.
During the earlier portions of this playthrough in True Vault Hunter mode, I was a little disappointed at how simple things appeared to be progressing. During this session things finally started to get a little more challenging again, and I found myself enjoying the battles a whole lot more as a result. Hopefully this upturn will continue through the remainder of the Borderlands 2 story.
There is a quality to the Borderlands 2 experience that comes with having a well-crafted skill tree and weapons to complement those skills and your play style.
I’ve always preferred the sniper rifle for medium to distant targets, the fast-firing SMGs (preferably with elemental damage and a big magazine) for short to medium distance targets and pistols with sights for short to medium given specific scenarios. I always carry a high damage shotgun ideally with explosive damage for those up close get the fuck out of my face encounters.
Rarely though do you ever find it all works seamlessly and you’re constantly on the hunt for a weapon that fills some necessary need. I guess that’s good game design.
While we were rescuing Roland I picked up a gold pistol which had a fast multi-shot fire rate, fast reload, decent magazine size but low damage in both bullet and corrosive elemental. It immediately handled well and because it had such a fast fire rate it actually did a lot of damage in a short amount of time.
I equipped it soon after and haven’t stopped using it since. It works best as a secondary weapon to either the sniper or SMG, depending on the situation. Because of my additional Siren corrosive cloud damage it’s a great way to finish off enemies especially if I have them phase-locked. As the back-end of the B2 main story missions is robot heavy I felt like a demi-god as we moved through levels.
In this gameplay we did a lot, it started with the loss of Sanctuary and trying to re-unite with it, which largely involved creating a new fast travel system in Overlook and then fighting off hordes of robots. I think at several stages I said I was having too much fun and really was.
An incredibly fun session because for once, weapons, play style and skill tree all worked well together. I think this was also the first time I started to realise combining slag damage with my corrosive cloud skill was a deadly way to take down almost any opponent very quickly. It would take me a few sessions to work out but this was the first time I started to realise how powerful it was.