I wasn’t able to play with the squad last week. They managed to complete Pathfinder and Sacrifice without me. Since we had gotten so very close the times I played and because they take a while to run I’m not too worried about getting them completed for me. Once we clear the next two on the tier someone can drag me into the third tier lobby.

This week we attempted Power Corrupts and Septic. We’ve been putting these off as they have the most annoying mechanic so far: the cysts. These are basically proximity mines on the walls and ceilings that will explode when you get too close. They take a good chunk of health and leave you with some infection level. If your infection goes over 20% you take damage over time until you’re at 20% health. These can be “disarmed” by shining a flashlight at them but they will regrow after a few seconds. It’s quite annoying getting hit by these when you forget where they are.

Power Corrupts has the players carry 4 batteries to put into generators across the map. It didn’t seem too bad at first. But then we noticed that most of the sleepers in the rooms were the large ones. These can’t be killed in one hit with a hammer and they take a ton of ammo to take down. We were running into rooms with 5 to 9 of these constantly. It also didn’t help that we were finding nothing but glow sticks in any of the lockers. With no resources and no way of effectively dealing with the big enemies we were not having a good time.

We reset a few times thinking we were just getting bad spawns. Unfortunately, it looks like rooms filled with big enemies is par for the course. The one saving grace was the lack of alarm doors. We ended up using our turrets a lot to set up traps and funnel the big guys into them.

Just when we thought it couldn’t get much worse, we ran into a room with 4 scouts at the end. Luckily, our objective wasn’t in that room but still, 4 scouts are terrifying! The farthest we got this weekend was setting up 3 generators. The last one was behind an alarm door that we didn’t have enough ammo to complete.

Septic features the cysts even more heavily than Power Corrupts. You’re tasked with finding a fog turbine and brining it to extraction. There were many big rooms with large groups of small enemies so this took us a bit of time. You can’t shine your flashlight at cysts in rooms full of sleepers because they’ll get alerted. Not only were we watching for stirring sleepers but we also had to keep an eye on the walls and ceilings too.

We managed to get the turbine and were rewarded with whole sections of the map with infection fog. Going in there without the turbine leads to 100% infection pretty quickly so everyone had to stay around the person with the fog turbine. To make matters worse, there are also enemies littering the dense fog. Good thing we brought a Bio Tracker or we’d be alerting things left and right.

I’d say we were halfway through the mission when discord disconnected our point man from voice chat. Perfect timing as he had the fog repelled and we were in a large room full of fog. With our communication, broken things declined very quickly. Before we knew it enemies were alerted but we had no idea where they were coming from.

Communication is key.

We didn’t end up having as much time as we usually do on Saturday night for our group game. As a result, we only had time for two mission attempts.  We almost finished Pathfinder last week so it seemed like the obvious choice. The one downside is Pathfinder is a long mission. A run typically takes 30-45 minutes depending on the spawns.

It started out really well. We got lucky with low spawns of sleepers in the first few rooms and lots of supplies. When you’re going into the first alarm door with 4 med-packs and full turret ammo, you start feeling pretty confident.

We tried a new strategy we tested out last week. Once we trigger the alarm, we have one person run into the room we think the horde will spawn in. That person then runs around the room holding as much aggro as they can while the other three chase the security circles to unlock the door.

This seems to work as long as the room is big enough and you guess the correct door most of them will come out of. Even holding off a room of enemies for an extra 30 seconds buys the rest of the team a lot of time to unlock the door. The group of three can also defend much better from waves of enemies coming through one door than two.

Our luck ran out when there were two back to back security doors in one room. When this happens, the group has two choices. Close all the doors to defend against the first border. Or  Leave a door or two open to save for the next security door. The first options gives you a lot of time to prepare for that first door but leaves you vulnerable on the second door with nothing to stop the enemies.  The second option makes both doors equally as hard.

We ended up using option two. You can place C-foam on the ground instead of the door which will freeze enemies for a short time when they enter it. Usually, we set a turret up next to these spots which make short work of the first few enemies. This part was a little dicey, we had one or two team members go down on the second security door but we held on.

After this lovely room, we needed to find some more supplies. The Bio tracker didn’t show many enemies in the surrounding rooms so we took our chances with scavenging. We a room that had a med-pack but also had two large, tanky enemies. We encountered this room last week as well so we knew how to run it.

This particular room is pitch black so it’s best to throw glow sticks around it so the person stealing can see without a flashlight. I had the glow sticks, so I started throwing them around. Fun fact, when you run out of glow sticks you’re automatically switched back to your primary weapon. I didn’t know this and miss counted how many glow sticks I had. So while our stealthy friend was halfway into the room I shout an entire clip into the air on accident. As you can imagine, that woke the two big boys and we had to spend a good chunk of ammo taking those down.

After that, we moved to a part of the map none of us was familiar with. We cobbled together some more supplies, got lucky and found an ammo pack, and made our way to the objective.

The objective in Pathfinder is to find a terminal and establish an uplink. To do this one person has to man the terminal and type in the passcode. What the person on the terminal sees is a three-character code. The rest of the group seeing a lot of three-character codes with a corresponding 4 letter word. So the person on the computer reads out what they see and the other members have to quickly find the code they were just read and read out the 4 letter word. Once it’s typed in a new code appears. I found this to be a really cool group mechanic except for one thing…While all of this is going on, you also have to fight off very angry enemies.

We must have gotten the worst spawn for the terminal imaginable. It was a very tiny hallway room with two doors on either side. We set up turrets outside the doors, C-foamed each door and the area in front of the turrets, and sent our runner out to collect as much aggro as possible.  This worked until it didn’t

We were on the last code. We had done a great job reading off codes while fending off enemies. We were in the home stretch when the first door broke. There was an intense firefight and then we heard our man on the terminal say “Last Code!” He read out his number we read out our word and then we heard “Uplink failed. Re-enter the code” He had read us the wrong code and we had given him the wrong word.

This was when the second door broke. Everyone was downed.

So close.