Earth Defense Force 5

[Sly Reflex]

Ranger you already know how to play. It's not complicated. Shoot and try not to get hit.

 

Wing Diver you've to walk the line of balancing energy between flying and dealing damage. The damage is really close and personal for the most. If you're feeling confident in your skills you want to be on top of the enemies all the time.If you don't feel that confident you're going to want to sit back and pelt enemies with plasma use use her sniper weapons. Getting hit is not an option with the Wing Diver, her health pool is tiny and if you over commit or blow yourself up you're going to more than likely die. In short, get in, do damage, get out. Wing Diver has a hard time against anything that flies.

 

Air Raider feels similar to the Ranger to play, except he can't roll through obstructions. Instead of using guns like the Ranger he has air raids.The most common ones are shot from a beacon that calls in a strike or a hail of gunfire. Mortars are called in with a smoke grenade. Satellite Blasters are called in with a laser designation. Air Support is called in by radioing coordinates in, the camera pulls out to show a bigger area and you rotate and place the direction and position of the strike. Air Raider has 3 types of reloads. One is a manual reload, like how the Ranger has. The second is an automatic reload, which means the weapon reloads without it having to be held after it has been discharged. The automatic reloads tend to be 30 seconds or where abouts. Finally you have credit reloads. Credits are earned when anything on the battlefield dies. If you place strikes that use credits right, you can usually earn quite a bit back towards your next hit.

 

Credits are also used to call in vehicles. Vehicles effectively doubly your armour and up your mobility, which is very poor compared to the other classes. Vehicle quality varies from unusable to invaluable.

 

To be a good Air Raider you need to sit just behind where the front line troops are and support as much as you can, thinning out swarms and fucking up big targets so the rest of the lobby has an easier time dealing with them. He's like an aggressive support. It's important to know which strikes you can call down on your team and which ones you cannot. All of them hurt when they hit, but the explosive ordinance ones act like AoE so anyone inside the red danger zone will get blown to fuck. The others that are more like shotgun blasts from the sky rarely hit because the players are too small a target to land a pellet on.

 

Air Raider also has targeting beacons and lasers. I'll talk about this more further on.

 

Fencer. Slow as fuck unless you use the equipment to hop. Can take a hit. Accumulates armour the quickest. First lot of weapons includes hammers and axes. While in the motion of swinging these you get a damage reduction.Hammer can only attack ground units and do the most damage. Axes can attack air units as well, but offer less damage overall. There's other weapons in this but they all riff on the same idea. Dangerous but satisfying. You'll often not be able to see what you're doing since you'll be getting dog piled but if you do it right you should come out more often than not.

 

Next weapons are the piercers. You've seen me use these the most so you should have some idea of how to use them. Get in the face of the bad guy and stab it. Some attacks of these can be woven into dashes and hops so you travel while they're firing. I tend to pair them up with a shotgun or a cannon and use them to poke anything that gets a bit too close for comfort, or weave in attacks to cover reloads of my other weapons.

 

Shields. Varying from tower shields that slow you right down but have the best angle and durability for reducing incoming damage right up to shields that are solely for reflecting damage. Notice how I said reduce and reflect? One is for tanking damage and the other is for skillfully pushing it back at the enemy. All shields can block and reflect, but the durability of the reflection shields is bad and the reflect window on a riposte on a tower shield is tiny.

 

The rest of the line up is guns, cannons and shotguns and you already know what they do. The biggest difference is the missiles. Out of all the lock on stuff the Wing Diver has the quickest, then the Ranger and then the Fencer. They go from smallest damage to heaviest damage. However unlike the other classes, Fencer has missiles that need a targeting beacon to get a lock on, but they do monstrous damage. We're talking 1 hit kills on queens. Targeting beacons pull all missiles towards them so it's worth noting that you can do that if the whole party is missiled up and want to smash on a tough enemy.

 

Really the biggest thing with the Fencer is learning to move with him. It all comes from dashes and hops with a sprinkling of hits and fire to reset your mobility stuff back. He's not great at things far away, a lot of his weapons will root him to the spot and it's learning what will cancel what where you'll find. A lot of his weapons have drop as well. Some of them have insanely long reload times. He's a lot of fun to use once you get him, but a lot of people can't get their head around the finger gymnastics you need to pull off to make him work at close range.

[Whiskey_chaser]

Finally got this thanks to it being on sale for £20 on PSN, and played through the first 20 missions with @Sly Reflex last night. 

 

It's pure, manic fun and the ultimate guilty pleasure game. Unleashing a barrage of missiles halfway across a map into a horde of giant ants as buildings collapse around you never gets dull. I just love how scrappy the whole thing is. Fancy falling animation? Nah - just have the character keep sprinting as they fall and the dialogue - my god it's inspired. I can only assume they dragged a bunch of school kids in to write it. 

 

 

[regemond]

Up to Mission 100 (of 111) with @Sly Reflex. Oh my god this game really ramps up the insanity.

 

Mission 93 alone is incredibly tough. Just full-on getting wailed on from start to finish.

 

Honestly having so much fun with it though.

[Sly Reflex]

Is this too hard? Yes? Tough shit, have two large anchors, you're going to earn your win here. 

[regemond]

Yuuuup. I was with a friend last night - she asked to have a go of EDF because I'd mentioned it a few times. Started a new game, showed her the ropes with it on easy.

 

She then got cocky, said she was great at it, all that sort of stuff. I then switched over to my game, went straight to that mission, gave her two of the most powerful weapons in my arsenal and said have at it. Shockingly enough, she didn't win...

 

(Mean? Yes. Funny? God yes!)

[Sly Reflex]

If I die on a mission then it's likely hard.

 

I'm relishing going on to harder difficulties though. I've pinned my colours to the mast with Fencer which I hope will carry us both through to Inferno and beyond. I do want to complete the rest of the game with the other 3 classes but that's on You and @Whiskey_chaser being able to carry me in the times where I can't be the thing that the whole mission hinges on.

 

Also I forgot to mention that the second  DLC is now out, "Extreme Battle" follows on from 4.1's same titled DLC and it actually looks quite interesting. Variants of enemies with new weapons and tactics to beat them. I don't think we'll ever get that far as a lot of EDF veterans tap out at that point. It's hard. We might be able to do it up to hard with the limits being on but I'd be surprised if we managed to get any further than that. Be worth it to collect those OP weapons though.

[Whiskey_chaser]

I could do with a break from Sekiro - @Sly Reflex @regemond - you free Thursday evening?

[Sly Reflex]

Depends on @regemond.

[regemond]

I won't know until later on Thursday I'm afraid. I'll report back asap.

[Sly Reflex]

We're right near the end of @regemond's normal run, it's only 12 more levels until the credits drop, but those levels can be really long and gruelling. 110 took me about 40 minutes to do the first time I did it. I don't think it'll take that long this time around unless we hit trouble with being overwhelmed, but unless we have a super run at it It's probably going to have to be broken into 2 sessions. There's another one that is like 93 in terms of "Holy shit, how can I even survive this?" that we've not seen yet that's particularly nasty. It might be a bit easier this time around since I'm at armour cap, but it's been surprising how many times I've had fewer than 100hp after getting into some tussles.

 

Otherwise we go back to mission 20 something on @Whiskey_chaser's playthrough and just go on from there. I don't really mind either way but it'd be nice for @regemond's and mine completion rates if we could finish up. Once either of us get to 70% completion rate the limits can be removed and weapon and armour caps can be done away with, making anything pre Inferno a push over.

[regemond]

I'm not free tomorrow now. I can definitely do any night from Friday-Tuesday though - let me know if either of you are free between then.

[Whiskey_chaser]

Another 15 levels down with @Sly Reflex last night (would have liked to do more if not for the fact I was dozing off towards the end). I love the moments in this game where it just throughs so much at you. There was a great bit last night when I looked up to see around 100 giant wasps flying overhead which suddenly attacked. There's a real joy to unleashing a barrage of homing rockets into the bastards.

 

 

 

 

[Sly Reflex]

I was so tired last night, I was finding it hard to concentrate towards the end. In regards of the levels, as the old adage says: You ain't seen nothing yet. It's been very mild up to this point.

[regemond]

Played a couple of levels with @Whiskey_chaser and @Sly Reflex last night. I gave the Air Raider a go.

 

He definitely feels like a support character rather than someone made to get up in the enemy's faces, so it's a big adjustment from the Ranger, who I'm used to.

 

We played one level where I felt a little useless. My turrets weren't taking out enemies up in the sky, but there wasn't enough on the floor to make them useful. I had a missile strike I could call in, but that could only be used every couple of minutes so wasn't too much help there either. By the time I could use it again, Sly and Whiskey Chaser had already thinned out the crowd.

 

It was against a huge mothership, and even the vehicle I took in wasn't doing much damage. It fired homing rockets, but by the time they started to home in either a leg had got in the way or they'd fired too high and hit other parts I wasn't aiming at.

 

I can see where he'd have his uses, but in that specific mission it was just an exercise in frustration.

[Sly Reflex]

For some reason they removed the Air Raiders wire weapons. Those were good against flying enemies.

 

I think maybe next time pick a mech and see what you think about those, there's variants that have missile launchers shoulder mounted as well as chainguns and rockets on the arms. Might be a better fit for that sort of mission.

[Whiskey_chaser]

I enjoyed last night's session, managed to get through 50 levels in three sessions which isn't too bad going. Some of the enemies that are being introduced now are absolute fuckers. The creepy robots can do one. 

 

Dialogue of the night:

"we're being attacked by giant bird like monsters!" 

 

Wasps. They're called wasps. 

[Sly Reflex]

China using chemical weapons always gets me. 

[radiofloyd]

2 hours ago, Sly Reflex said:

China using chemical weapons always gets me. 

 

That belongs in the politics thread.

[Sly Reflex]

It's not what you think, but contextually it fits the B movie story, whilst throwing loads of shade at China.

[Sly Reflex]

Looking at armour caps. Here's what you should be aiming for. All numbers taken from the final mission on a difficulty. 

 

Normal.

Ranger - 1480

Wing Diver - 950

Air Raider - 1480

Fencer - 1850

 

Hard. 

Ranger - 3080

Wing Diver - 1950

Air Raider - 3080

Fencer - 3850

 

Hardest. 

Ranger - 5320

Wing Diver - 3350

Air Raider - 5320

Fencer -  6650

 

Inferno caps are sort of redundant, but here's the ones for mission 111.

Ranger - 13000

Wing Diver - 8150

Air Raider - 13000

Fencer - 16250

 

I hit the cap on hard by a margin, but I fail the others. Those are some big jumps.