In the dust and magma of Crucible, lies the Stall Junkyard, dumping ground of the self-liberated Brann ex-convicts, abandoned to their own devices on the harsh world of Arieki. With the destruction of the homeworld, the remaining Brann transportees rose up and tenaciously started anew, throwing off their shackles and forging a new and more gritty kind of society; functional, mechanical, and a far cry from the spiritual idyll of their original roots. Such industrialisation creates a tremendous amount of junk, and most of it ends up here.
Not the most picturesque locations for a away-day holiday, but we'd gotten orders to head in there anyway. Seems that a hard disk of monumentally embarrassing intel had been put on a dropship, bound for Foreas, and shot down over Crucible. Being just so much scrap now, the downed bird wound its way to the same place all other mechanical garbage ends up, Stall Junkyard, and it was us that drew the short straw, and had to go in and find it.
Aimed at groups of L40-45 players, the place turned out to be quite a challenge for my Grenadier self and my Engineer cohort, not only technically, but aesthetically too. A far cry from my last combat debriefing; the lonesome majesty of the Ashen Desert. This map is brown. Very brown. The ground is brown, the tottering mountains of scrap are brown. The air, is brown. In the words of my cohort; "This has to be the fugliest map you've ever taken me to." Personally, I found it quite unique actually, but had to agree that it wasn't the sort of place I'd want to work through twice, no...
The map is actually quite large, being perhaps the same kind of size as Treebark Camp, but unlike that one, is laid out in a manner designed to drive the casual instanceer quite mad. The entire place is essentially one enormous mountain of rusting broken machinery, in places compressed into pathways, ranging from the entrance, upwards as you head north. These foothills are mostly made out of slopes which are just too steep to walk up, and of course, as is usually the case in MMOs, our super battle-hardened space troopers are incapable of actual climbing. This all means that the route through the place follows an extremely tortuous winding zigzag, back and forth, as we try to just get from A to B, let alone deal with any of the mission objectives!
The objectives were quite varied, as Cirkin, the Brann in charge of the junkpile naturally needed us to do a few errands before agreeing to help look for the missing data disk. Much of this involved sorting through the pile itself, hunting for specific bits of rubbish that he was too lazy to go and find himself. The more extreme parts he wanted were still being used by some of Arieki's ever-present insane ex-warden robots, which didn't help, although I've really got Robots down by now; Laser vs Reconstructors, and EMP vs Wardens. One or two bolts from the appropriate shoulder-mounted launcher typically does the trick, even on the orange Instance-grade robots, and my cohort's cluster of deployable turrets mops up stragglers quite well. Grenadier and Engineer makes for a pretty decent duo, we're finding; with me dishing out the big damage, and my friend keeping me alive long enough to do so. Mind you, neither of us is too shabby solo, either.
Hardly a walk in the park however, and we came close to quitting in disgust a number of times. The Thraxx were rummaging through the pile as well, of course, and took some killing, especially when we got blindisded by the 'Sentinel' type of mob. These mini floating drones are quite lethal if you aren't ready for them, as each is in fact a mini-dropship of sorts, and if it spots you, will teleport in 10 or so Thraxx infantry, which brings new terror to the panic-typed "adds"! Got trampled a few times like that!
Then there was what we took to calling 'The Shoal'. For purely sadistic reasons, the level designer saw fit to add a roaming cluster of warden bots that traverse the map from east to west, about half way up. This wouldn't be a problem apart form the fact that they are all L41-Orange, and there are at least 40 of them! We literally didn't know what hit us the first few times; en-masse, they have a horrific alpha strike, making any thoughts of 'luring', 'pulling' or other similar strategy completely out of the question, and I wonder if they're even possible to take out at all. We soon learnt to watch the minimap very carefully. You can see them coming, and if on the ball, just get the hell out of their way pronto. Luckily, they aren't an objective, and you probably are just meant to avoid them.
Near the top end of the place we had the most troubles, a section populated by 'Ultra Wardenbots', full-on red boss monsters which took a hell of a beating, with me hanging on to my EMP Dispersal Gun* for dear life and the Engineer Turreting, Shielding and Area Repairing like crazy. We could just about managed to kill one of these, but there's a whole patrol route full of them, and any adds at all here, are fatal, as we learnt early and often.
After the first few runs back up there from the respawn point, at the entrance, I remembered about Squad Waypoints, which helped a bit. A few more goes after that, I remembered not to put those where The Shoal patrolled, which helped even more!
A few more goes still, and we realised that these super-mega-death-robot Bosses, were respawning and that we were making no headway at all. There then followed a large amount of wandering about the map, to see if there was a better way up onto that section, where our mission objective was; mostly to no avail. The breakthrough came from desperation mostly, when we just decided to try legging it through the patrols, and out the far side, a comical moment with me drawing a huge amount of aggro, and the engineer trying to keep up and repair me as much as possible. Like a game of Rugby, I reached a point to the north of the main patrol route which looked safe-ish, and then desperately tried to slam down a fresh WP teleporter while my train of angry super-robots beat the everliving snot out of me, and the Engineer tried to keep me alive just long enough for the placement to complete. We both died horribly, again, but the WP finished forming, allowing us to use the WP at the respawn to zip directly back up there, and now, behind enemy lines! Possibly an exploit, but I prefer the term Lateral Thinking! It wouldn't have been possible at all if the WP placement was interruptible, but there was no way the pair of us would be able to fight our way upstream fast enough through the continually repspawning super-robots, and I wonder how well 6x L45s would cope either.
From there we sneaked round the back of a larger trashpile and managed to take out the mission objective super-robot. Well, sneaked about as well as a rocket-launching kamikaze grunt and insanely-agroing turret-dispensing shield-dome raising techie can anyway.
Noisy old day in the junkyard, but we got the foozle Cirkin needed and reported back, only to find that all his workers have now gone on strike, and need convincing to go back to work. I tell you what they do need convincing; not to rush a flamethrower down a narrow corridor, that's what! Not that I minded especially, and things were a lot easier going from there on. Predictably enough, the leader of the revolutionaries had some kind of sob story to tell, which my associate completely fell for. Me? I was too busy setting fire to people's heads to trouble myself with complex morality at that point, but sure enough, it turned out that Cirkin was playing us like fools, and had the data disk all along, so it was back to the start, and a quick tussle with his own pet super-robot. We'd kind of seen this coming, to be honest and didn't even talk to the guy that last time without setting up a massively brutal nest of turrets, shields, robots of our own, and my own small contribution, RAGE V! (I'm a bit slow these days, so have eschewed the complex micromanagement of multiple Logos abilities, and have instead, put all my points into weapons and armor, V across the board. Damnit, I'm a Space Trooper, not a Wizard! MOAR SHOOTY! Rage V is my sole exception, and only cos it makes my gunz even moar shooty!)
Bereft of bodyguard, Cirkin scarpered, but left the disk behind, which we promptly snatched. Mission complete, crisis averted and day saved! Back to the barn for tea and medals, and a very long hot bath! I hope our next assignment has more colours that aren't brown...
* An unlikely kind of EMP based flamethrower. Given that the only EMP pulses of any sort I know about, are typically caused by high-atmosphere nuclear detonations, I tend to worry an awful lot about the accompanying large yellow and green backpack I wear that powers this thing - one stray shot in an hectic firefight and I'll leave a crater the size of Concordia Wilderness! Mind you, on the plus side, it'll be over before I can feel a thing. I would feel bad about the players on the adjoining maps however, who now have a short but lingering life of falling out hair and constant vomiting to contend with. Still, as they say, War is hell!