Tag: The Talon of God

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The Final Showdown – Borderlands 2 S03E08 – True Vault Hunter Mode

The road to the final confrontation with Jack and the Warrior provides for some classic Borderlands 2 combat.

Wave after wave of Hyperion soldiers and robots (some very high-powered) provide excellent opportunities for some very enjoyable sequences of death and destruction.

With some experimentation going on with weapon loadouts (primarily finding the best sniper rifle to use!) we soon cleared out everyone that had been put in our way, and headed in to the Vault of the Warrior for our final showdown with Jack and his new-found friend.

The final battle was a bit of a slog, but amazingly we both managed to make it through without a single death. I came incredibly close at one point when I found myself underneath the lava in Second Chance for a significant time, but just about managed to get a kill to revive myself.

Once the Warrior and Jack were gone, the big reveal gave us a hint as to what might be to come in Borderlands 3. So come on, get it off Epic Exclusive and on to Steam!

In the meantime, what’s next?

The final stage of the main B2 story mission comprises three stages. First, you have to fight your way through the main gates protecting the vault compound. Then you have to fight your way through several layers of security leading to the vault and then when you’re in the vault you have to kill the Warrior, which is big and mean and breathes fire.

As the first two stages are all about taking down Hyperion robots my slag sniper and the golden corrosive gun did the job nicely.

Just inside the second stage, there’s a blown-up bridge you have to jump over which for some reason I regularly fail if I’m in coop. This time was no exception. Very annoying. I think it was my only respawn.

Save for that there were some excellent moments, AD and me sniping from scaffolding as Brick tore into the robots was a highlight.

As you get nearer the vault the fighting gets tough and a fight for life is waiting around every corner. The rule of the day is don’t rush into anything.

In the actual vault having to fight Jack is a nice variation on the boss confrontation but taking down the Warrior is still about staying alive and sheer volume of damage. The only weapon that seemed to make any impact was my slag pistol, which I also used to kill the Warrior in the vanilla game.

I’m not sure if you get extra loot for letting Lilith kill Jack but it is quite a nice way to end the game.

All in all, only playing through the story missions was a great way to experience B2, especially in TVM. We were way too strong at the beginning but I’ve never been averse to a bit of demi-god mode. I’m already itching to get at it again in Ultimate Vault Hunter, which from a brief taster seems much harder.

See you there.

 

 

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Infiltrating the Stockade – Borderlands 2 S03E07 – True Vault Hunter Mode

After Brick and his boys blew up the bridge for us, we now had to get to the Hyperion Info Stockade to find out where the Vault was.

As ever, the expected simple route didn’t work out, so we had to overload the pumping stations to blow a hole in the pipeline to give us access to the Stockade. Cue lots of enjoyable fighting against Hyperion soldiers and robots.

Once into the Stockade, Jack threw more high-level robots at us to fight our way past, including a couple of very challenging battles against the very well armed Saturn robot, and then a Constructor. Downloading the data also led to some more enjoyable battling of robots and the like.

Nothing particularly outstanding in this session, but some pretty decent sections of combat that definitely made this a fun session. Next time we’ll be taking on the Warrior in the final mission of the story. Watch this space!

You will notice at the beginning of this episode I have switched from using the golden gun as a primary to a slag SMG. It has taken me countless hours of gameplay in full knowledge of the world dynamics to realise a slag gun coupled with my corrosive cloud is a deadly combination in B2.

The slag SMG is a great option because it gets a lot of rounds into the enemy in a short time, almost always into a slagged state as the corrosive kicks in. If the enemy is high powered enough to survive the initial onslaught I’ll then pull out the golden pistol to pile on the corrosive damage.

Corrosive works really well against robots but isn’t so effective against flesh, but that’ll take me another few hours to figure. All the way to episode 9 in fact and Finks Slaughterhouse. I believe the penny only dropped because AD mentioned it.

This mission against the Hyperion data centre is pretty good fun, with a combination of challenging robot opponents and some interesting building assaults all the way to the underwhelming data centre. It would have been nice if the kind of assault required to shut down the pumping stations had been deployed inside the data centre which is roughly the size of a three-story house and mostly comprised of a single staircase.

We now have the location of the vault and the mission ends with all our friends in Sanctuary wishing us well in the final assault. Tune in next week for that mission and the finale to the main story campaign.