Phantom Warfare - Psychedelic Mortars and MOAR!

What Ghost up, must come down...
say like...  psychedelic floating mortars.

By: George Argyropoulos

a/k/a Dragon_Bane

Bad pun? Yup. Absolutely. I need some levity this morning. After playing around with some things, I need to giggle at something stupid rather than cuss.

So- Kixeye has released the Phantom Warfare TLC for us to strive against. My overall impression was that it was O.K., and that's about it.

Let me start with my own personal pet peeve, and... ok, live edit: I'm going to put both rants at the end of the article. If you want to see me rant, read through.

The progression was a little steep in that the first 2-3 levels were, well, exceptionally easy (depending on your tech). The next two offered reasonable damage, and the last was cranked up (as expected now). I'll do a quick run-through of some of the targets, but like most players I've spoken to, I'm going to focus on target 5.4. I am including a few vids from different players. Jon (a/k/a Specs) has vids for me of the first three levels (hopefully the 4th soon). He did it a little differently than I which is great as you will get to see alternatives.

I've been told be several people that they could do level one with Punisher tanks and Rhinos. Not exactly the point of the targets, nor what Kixeye wants to see- and that is something to discuss later, somewhere else. What I did below for the first few levels was just use the first targets of each level so you will have a grasp of the difficulty progression of the targets.


This is Target 1.1 and the damage I received:

You can in fact run through almost the whole of the campaign using one Hellwraith. In the last target, 5.4, I can't recommend that. Personally, I did the whole thing using my not-as-yet ranked Hellwraiths and cycled through them using my best ranked one for the last targets. Jon did it a little differently than I in that he brought in more than one sub and stacks. No significant deleterious effects for this run doing that.

Specs running through to get the Phantom 'Cuda.

For comparison, this was the target and results of 2.1:

As you can see, a little bit more in terms of target and difficulty as well as damage. I had all sorts of bad luck on this run- I think I triggered just about everything, but again, minimal damage to your sub. Expectation-wise, the entire level is on par with this representation. As before, Jon's vid:

Specs running through for the Phantom Spectre.


Level 3.1 was more of the same:

In this, I happened to try it with no kids around, I had some patience and hit it perfectly. The same can be said for the rest of the targets. You can take a significant amount of damage here, but generally speaking, another easy-ish set. Jon's run again for live action footage!:

Specs run to the Phantom Nighthawk.

Level 4.1 we see the difficulty mount precipitously.

Yes, I took the wrong screen shot. It was about 32 minutes of damage. I drove a little like ass in this, I'll admit. Things did not go well again, but not too badly. This is the level in which I started swapping out subs in earnest.

I'm going to have the videos linked from here on in open in the article. This is where it is worth the time to watch and familiarize yourself with the targets and see what you would do the same or change. Jon's run for the Phantom Tiger Shark:

Now we get to the doozy level. Level 5.

Break out the earplugs for the kids and tell everyone to leave the room so you can concentrate (Yea, this annoys me as well).

This was with some pretty damn good driving. The level requires swapping or stacking. Either way- 8 coins for the level. Might have been just 6 if I took the damaged hulls in and died off, but I wanted to be at full health for some of the shenanigans I was planning.

Level 5.4.

The new Elite target. With my favorite psychedelic floating mortars.... this is where Rant 2 goes..... anyway...

Let's start with shenanigan number 1. I'm sure this is going to be a big hit soon....

How do you mitigate my faaaaaaaaaavorite mortar? Let it hit something else. In this case, I have two HW's at the top of the target while this little beauty takes the mortars and the Hellwraith behind it deals with the annoying damn drones.

The other way to mitigate the mortars, aka shenanigan number 2, takes advantage on one of their mechanics - they can't hit underwater. Now, there is a good reason for no pic of this- it's a PITA and you are doing so much at once... yea, no picture, but it works. You drive close enough to the drones so that you are seen when the morts are either activated or are in the air and they will target the closest thing to them. If your sub happens to be submerged at the time... no damage. The timing of this is seriously aggrevating and I literally was fed up with trying all of this so I went and activated everything while killing off the big boats firing the mortars. Took a lot of damage BUT, with the combination, I would have gotten through on the one fleet. If I didn't get a call.
And instinctively stack my fleet up against the edge.
And not realize the subs were closer than the Vanq.
And answer the phone (it was the school).
And die.
So I had to coin a sub (3 of the gold) to finish this ghastly abomination of a target. All said, in complete honesty, it wasn't THAT bad. For having to do it once. I have HUGE reservations having to do this for three days...

I honestly have no pics that would give you the true scope. I suggest watching a video of the target on YouTube, of which I have conveniently linked one herein...

Price is Wrong from the Battle Pirates on BV page was kind enough to let me link to his complete run through of the entire campaign, so you have a one-stop video reference if you need:

That's it. Rather straightforward targets but for the last. That one requires some skill and a lot of patience or a bunch of coin and swearing.


Below are my rants. You can feel absolutely free to skip them. In fact I encourage you to skip them. I just needed to let the words ooze out of my brain and onto 'paper'. Relieve the pressure of thought from my brain. They are my rants, my opinions. I really don't think I am going to debate them in comments below. You can find them elsewhere in a better avenue for discussion and debate.

RANT 1:

I have posted this up on the Forsaken Council's wall on Facebook. I did not cross-post it on the BV page or the Battle Pirates Crib page because I didn't want to look like a wacko and I didn't want any of the pages getting mad about spamming their page. That said, begin rant (IOW: you can skip this if you'd like):

There has got to be some solution to the retreat button. The excuse given that Kix does not want us to 'game' the system by exiting and re-entering until we get a good 'drop' of cavitator fields is a pretext. It does not hold true under scrutiny. You still have to drive and time your entire engagement. From the players perspective we have:

- Forced into a playing style that many players outright disdain.
- Continued backlash from the player base with regard to the deathsplosions.
- The need for a much higher level of concentration / less 'wiggle room' for errors in targets.
- Add the absolute hate towards the psychadelic death mortars that no one wants to see in the raid.
- The grind-y feeling of every damn target.

This makes the frustration levels that are already high even higher. Into that mix you throw in a little bad luck in a target and this is what the players feel when that happens and there is no retreat button- it exacerbates that bad luck so you can easily go from bad, to worse, to smashing-your-keyboard-because-you-died-pissed. PARTICULARLY if you do not have the built in protections of a Hell Wraith.

Without a retreat button, you now have zero mitigation of errors while easily compounding them. It is a mistake, plain and simple, in not making it available in these targets (raid included). We won't even begin to mention the difficulty of prepping a target for others... When, as a company, you weigh the benefits of not having one against the player psychology of having one, particularly given the current environment, it seems a rather simple equation...

RANT 2:

The psychedelic floating mortars- their existance and their peculiar timing...

It was interesting trying to come up with a way to mitigate these abominations. If this is the result of our endeavors on the test server to try and break the targets, it makes me contemplate not trying as hard next time. Sorry Robot, I do love fencing with you vis-à-vis ideas, but damn man, why you gotta mug me now??

As we are driving subs-
- This mortar has splash (duh).
- You are already multitasking your ass off (and no in-game control macros).
- They have a 'shelf-life' of over 12 seconds (longest I could find) of floating magically in the air.
- There is no retreat button to easily mitigate this mechanic.
- You have dead fleets if even you are a tiny bit off on your timing and stacked or, heaven forfend, you encounter lag... in this game? Perish the thought...

I am vehemently opposed to these things, just for the above reasons... but I found another rather insidious looking reason:

The timing of these things struck me as a little odd. Rather than fire off immediately upon entry, there seems to be a 3-4 second delay. From what I could gather in the target, the mortar goes off approximately every 40 seconds. Tracking from the start of the target (because I can only muti-task sooo much) I have times of 9;57, 9;17, 8:37 and 7:57 for launches against the game clock.

The initial delay struck me as a bit odd, until I looked at a Hellwraith fitted with a mimicus system (or un-retro'd SAS-IV or Naut Batt.). The surface time for that is 9:09 against the game clock (~9:08 for the other two un-retro'd).
That's 8 seconds. Trying to mitigate the mortars by letting the scouts see you is a rather difficult exercise while concurrently watching the drones, your location, your positioning and anything that you may have activated or could activate. See the complexity? Was this intended? Idk, but I know if I were coding it, this would not have been a random decision.

Can it be done? Yes, of course. Does it add yet another layer and time on to the already grind-iness of the target? Undoubtedly. This is not what we have come to expect of an S/Elite target.