MARK of the VOID... Seriously needs altering

Ok… I am going to say it, so cover your ears! MARK OF THE VOID is just BULL SHIT!!! How for the love of God are you supposed to kill a freaking billion point creature if you can’t get close enough to shoot it! SERIOUSLY it is really pissing me off, that is not what makes a good game! The shields NEVER give you an opening (some games if your lucky) and it is physically IMPOSSIBLE to maintain the squad past the final gate while you wait for the possibility to take your 2 million shots needed to kill it! THIS need to be FIXED… The creature is hard enough without this BULL@HIT mark of the void that stays on your men even after the turn ends, WTF is that all about? It DOES NOT make it interesting it makes it frustrating and you lose interest REALLY, REALLY fast, in fact it is a game breaker! I have played this game many times and EVERY time I get to this part it really pisses me off no end. SO… FIX it PLEASE! It is just WRONG on to many levels!

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Or rather, make it easier on Easy/Vet.

I play on Heroic, and the last time I got there, I killed the Big-E in 3 or 4 turns. I think one of my guys got MotV’d (maybe 2, I don’t remember - I know my Aspida took one of the hits, which is what it was supposed to do, as did a Turret).

While I acknowledge that the Final Mission is not as engaging as that in other X-Com-likes, I personally would resist making it any easier on the harder difficulty levels. Once you’ve figured out how to deal with it, it really isn’t that difficult.

Try having your Tech throw in a handful of turrets as your opening gambit, then rush the thing with Jet-Jumping Heavies and Dashing troops - it only takes 2 turns to get there. Have a vehicle out in front, which can take the first hit, then scatter your troops (and move the vehicle out of the way). Make sure you have a Rage Burster on either side of the Big-Yin and a Sniper ready to Mark him for Death.
I tend to have a couple of Assaults on the flanks to help the Turrets keep the other Pandas down and provide Onslaught to my executioners.

Then a couple of turns of RB+Turrets+MfD usually deals with the Big-Yin pretty quickly.

It’s all about speed and timing - don’t go in piecemeal, and when you do go in, make sure you can pour on a significant amount of damage each turn.

So I disagree that MftV should be nerfed on the harder levels - but I see no reason not to nerf it on Easy/Vet

If you stay back waiting for the shield to open it becomes much harder. Here is everything there is to know:

http://wiki.phoenixpoint.com/Final_Mission

It should not be made “easier” that is true - it should be completely reworked. The last mission is by far the worst. The least entertaining, most cheesy and therefore least engaging one.

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Your all forgetting that every turn it also throws in Zombie acid launchers, snipers and a hole host of other nasties to prevent you from getting your shots off at the main monster! The Mark of the void should not “stack” AND it should not effect others around it, not when the main creature is so well armored! The shields need to rotate more often I spent 4 HOURS straight trying everything and they just did not ever change position except to put Mark of the Void? Maybe I was unlucky with that but it sure did not make for a happy day! So needless to say I did not bother to complete it, I have seen all the endings anyway… But a rework would be nice, it is getting boring now… I have never tried it with a tank takes to much room on the aircraft, but that sounds interesting, how many men does that cost you in the final mission? I have taken two aircraft before and it does not let you take them all in…

You can field 9 soldiers or 1 vehicle and 6 soldiers (1 vehicle “cost” 3 slots also in battle as in aircraft).

An Armadillo can take the most damage with his 1250 HP and can bring 4 soldiers very fast close to the big boss. Just as a hint :wink:

I agree that this mission is probably the worst in the game. I have no problems to finish it, have done it already several times, but it is just not a good tactical experience for me.

No I’m not. As I say, I have completed it several times, and now that I know what I’m doing I can take it down in 3 or 4 turns from the starting gun at the gateway.

The trick is to move fast and hit hard, concentrating your biggest hitters on the openings as they are presented and using snipers + assaults to keep the Little Nasties under control, while your Heavies & Turrets concentrate on the main Big Nasty.

An Aspida will cost you 3 men, but gives you healing and limb restoration at the other end. other vehicles can get you to the Big-Yin quicker, but you have to bail out after 1 turn cos it’ll have taken the MotV unless a Turret sucked it up.

But most experienced players will tell you to dump the truck and go in fast with 3 extra fast-moving heavy hitters.

Look, it’s not a great mission - it could be a lot better - but nerfing it isn’t the answer, because once you know what you’re doing, it’s not that hard to take down.

That said, if you want it completely neutralised on Easy, be my guest. It’s no skin off my nose.

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Yeah, but… as you can kill it in 3 - 4 turns regardless of MotV (well regardless of anything), why are you against nerfing MotV? I mean, you’re playing on a self-restricted highest difficulty level and you obliterate Big Nasty before MotV even have a chance to become a threat to you. Even if they would remove MotV entirely you would still obliterate it the very same way without any changes to your tactic, right? Because the way you are dealing with it is absolutely not related in any way to MotV. :stuck_out_tongue: Just think about it, does existence of MotV change anything about the way how you deal with it? :stuck_out_tongue: Because as far as I am concerned, if you don’t know what you are doing, you will struggle, struggle badly, but if you know, you don’t care about actually almost anything what is happening inside.

Actually, it is, and this is precisely why the OP is struggling with it. The MotV makes it so that you have to close the distance to the boss as fast as possible, instead of hanging back waiting for the front shield to drop to snipe it.

Now, I’m not a fan of this mission, and I have said so many times. It’s an ‘old’ map and if there is one aspect where there has been unquestionable progress in PP since release is in map design; just take the infestations maps for comparison…

Of course for OP is, but I asked @MichaelIgnotus. If you know what you are doing, MotV is irrelevant and therefore it doesn’t matter much if it will be nerfed. You will still rush Big Nasty and obliterate it, with or without MotV.

Of course you are right. But my point is that getting close fast is not only necessary because of MotV but is also actually the fastest way of dealing with boss. If not MotV, ranged approach could be seen as safer but getting close ASAP would be still far more optimal way.

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I would say opposite. He is dealing with boss exactly like that, because how MotV is working. :slight_smile: If it wasn’t like that, then he would probably use another tactic.

Would he? I mean, is there a way to kill it even faster if it wasn’t MotV? :slight_smile: Because it looks like you could use more fun and interesting ways of doing it, but not a “better” way of doing it.

I do not try to tell you what is better and what is not. I try to find out how MotV affects fun and difficulty factor. :slight_smile:

It is fact that you can kill the boss in few turns if you rush heavies and turrets. During these turns MotV is more of a nuissance rather than threat as fight doesn’t last long enough. This is true regardless of difficulty level, works equally well on easy as it works on legendary. The challenge comes from the fact that you have to rush ugly bastard, but usefulness of MotV is very little if you would want to rush him anyway.

Not asking to remove MotV, but just a food for thought: what would happen if they would remove it? Would it still be viable to rush and end the game within few turns? Would there be other ways of dealing with the boss? Can you think of any way that could be min/maxed to something better and faster than rush? Is the rush way fun? Could other ways be fun as well?

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EXACTLY… This MotV FORCES you into ONE and only ONE way to end the game! In every other mission there is always “other” ways you can try (if you so chose). But the MofV (while I get the idea) just means you must take men in you may not want to. I usually like to have a variety of men and skills in the team and not “all” or close to all of one kind as needed for this mission.

Actually, yes I would. @VOLAND & @Yokes are quite right. I use the tactics I’ve suggested to @Spagetman43 because after facing the Big-Yin a couple of times and analysing what it does, those seemed to me to be the best way of defeating it.

It’s classic repeat TBS player-evolution. First time I fought it, I hung back with snipers and tried picking it off. It took forever and I lost a lot of guys before I was able to take it down. Second time, I tried rushing it, but didn’t do it fast enough or with enough in the tank to deal with its defenders. That one also ended messily (if I remember rightly, the Exalted picked her way over the bodies of all but one of my crew to trigger the endgame maguffin).

So I sat down, analysed what I needed and went in the next time with 2 Jet-jumping Heavies, 2 Dashing Assaults with RC, a Tech in an Aspida chucking Turrets like confetti, and a Priest with a Protective Aura MC’ing the biggest thing that got in the way. That worked: the Aspida & turrets took half of the MotVs (as intended), the Heavies and Turrets laid down a hail of fire on the Big-Yin which was doubled cos the Heavies were a multi-classed Snipers with MfD, the Assaults ran crowd control and fed extra APs to whoever needed them, and the Tech ran around Healing like crazy.

And that’s precisely how a TBS/TBT should work imho. You come across a seemingly undefeatable enemy and instead of screaming for it to be nerfed, you experiment and evolve your tactics until you find a way that works. That’s the challenge of this type of game - that’s the fun.

TBH, while I’m not a great fan of this mission, bc I think the final missions in XCOM and other games of this genre are less static and more fun, I don’t hate MotV. It’s an interesting obstacle that you have to overcome, and in that respect it’s welcome in a game that is so skewed in the player’s favour that you have to tie one hand behind your back not to walk all over it on Turn 1.

But if people are finding it impossible to handle, I’d be the first to advocate nerfing it on the easier levels, so that they can enjoy this game as much as I do. Just don’t nerf it on the higher difficulties, cos the game’s easy enough already.

But once you find the way, there is no more of a challenge, isn’t it? You can reuse the tactic over and over again during last fight in subsequent runs, and you don’t actually care about MotV anymore. The mission isn’t hard at all, it was hard to find a way that works. More like a hard puzzle, hard to find a solution but once you know the solution puzzle it isn’t hard anymore. :slight_smile:

Don’t get me wrong as I couldn’t agree more with you here.

I just don’t think MotV is good in what it is supposed to do: providing challenge. MotV may make mission impossible if you don’t know how to deal with boss quilcky, but is irrelevant if you do. And this is true regardless of difficulty level.

I know the mission begs for rework badly, and there are more things wrong with it. I just wouldn’t say the last battle is easy, or hard; it is just unbalanced and MotV is one of the (many) reasons.

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It’s not the way, it’s a way. Same as in any other TBS you can figure a way that works for you to accomplish some mission and keep using it.

All MoV does is force you to advance through the Valley towards the Boss. How you do that is up to you. If you do it slowly and bunch up, your troops take more damage, but the game is very generous on healing so you can take the attrition. Or you can use jet packing Heavies, or dashing assaults, but risking them facing reinforcements while isolated. Or you can do something between the two where you briskly advance the whole squad but keep some distance between them. Or something else entirely: the point is don’t hang back with the snipers 4 hours waiting for the shield to align.

And if you will recall that’s what was happening when MotV wasn’t working - people would stay at the start of the valley waiting for the shields to lower to sniper rage Burst the artichoke and complaining how stupid it was that the final boss was completely helpless.

And with the exception of the teleporting Avatar at the end of XCOM 2, that’s been true of every TBS I’ve ever played. It just took be a little bit longer to figure out how to beat this one, is all.

It’s why I subscribed to PP in the first place - and it’s my biggest disappointment. They promised me an ‘enemy that evolves in response to your tactics’ so that the experience never got stale. They didn’t deliver on that.

But they did deliver something that is better and more flexible than most other games of this genre, which is why I and most other people here are still playing it 2 years on - and still trying to persuade the devs to grasp the nettle that would make this game outstanding rather than just ‘better than XCOM’.

Yes. That is precisely my point. It has little to do with challenge, so I don’t understand why nerfing it would make final mission easier. Is 4h sniping somehow easier than killing the boss in 5 minutes? Because it isn’t hard to kill him, not at all. If @MichaelIgnotus concern is to not make final mission any easier, I ask myself how MotV make final mission any harder. I can’t answer to that, for me it is as easy to kill the boss with MotV as it would be without it.

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Really? I definitely find it more challenging to complete the mission having to traverse a map with reinforcements and my operatives taking damage than not. Is it challenging enough? Idk, I have played the game quite a lot…

It’s like saying that in the final mission in XCom you could just place that single boss Ethereal in front of you on deployment so that you can shoot him with your snipers, which is what you are going to do eventually anyway, and the map itself is not challenging at all on a second playthrough because it’s always the same map and the same enemies in the same place.

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Actually, it doesn’t. I’ve found taking my Heavies round the left side of the central cliff tends to keep them out of the attention of MotV until the final assault.
Mounting a big diversion down the road of the troops/machinery you don’t mind getting MotV’d also helps in that respect.

The mission definitely has some interesting aspects, and losing MotV would seriously hurt that. I just wish the Big Yin could break out of its shell and start moving around the map - possibly MC’ing my guys while he’s doing it - is all.

Then it would be a lot more scary and interesting than the static bullet sponge we have at the moment.

The best TBS endings I’ve ever had were XCOM2, which came down to a Hail Mary long-shot in a last desperate attempt to take down the Avatar before my Peeps got overwhelmed. That’s how the final mission should be, imho. It shouldn’t be a foregone conclusion - it should be something you carefully pick your best troops for and go into with your heart in your mouth and your finger hovering over the ‘Restart’ button in case it all goes pear-shaped.

Yet even XCOM2 became predictable in the end. Once you figured out that you could fall back from the entrance to that final room and set an OW trap as the Avatar came to you, it became infinitely easier to take down. Not easy, just ‘easier’ - but Voland’s right: by your logic we should all be demanding that the Avatar simply stand in the doorway so that we can take pot-shots at it, cos that’s what we’re ultimately going to do anyway.

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