I'm going to give up on the NF campaign; the mission design, the constant grind, the long slog through areas and quests, as well as the absolute min-numbing stupidity of the heroes has beaten me.
I have reached the ruins of morah but the effort in doing so has just sucked my enjoyment of the campaign from me. Too many quests involve tramping endlessly through areas with stupid numbers of high level mobs. THis involves fight after fight which gets tedious, and, at level 20, pointless since there are no rewards at all (other than another 10 units of the same salvage material you don't need). These mobs are concentrated together that any kind of pulling strategy is impossible (heroes don't help since they invariably aggro everything and never follow orders). What makes this worse is when these groups are close by since yoru heroes will wander to the next group by mistake (mobs don't stand still). Or, even worse, when the mobs are next to the resurrection shrine.
Death Penalty is an incredibly bad idea which punishes you for dying (which is itself pointless) in a way that makes it progressively more difficult to actually carry on. If the quests and missions were shorter there wouldn't be a problem, but to get close to the end of a quest but be totally hobbled from completing it because you are at -60% is just utterly stupid. Death Penalty also impedes heroes as well so your entire team becomes even more useless.
The missions are often long winded, which further exacerbates this problem, and include poorly explained objectives. Half the time you arent even told what the bonus objectives are until you've finished the mission. Great. Worst of all they are cheap; the mission at morah, to kill varesh, is predictably so. Varesh herself is stupidly difficult to kill because she is high level and, well, because she's a main boss. Unsurprisingly when you first kill her, back she comes, harder than before. On top of that the game just throws at you about 10 other mobs to help her kill you, which is exceptionally easy. This is cheap.
The game doesn't function properly because it assumes you know exactly how to kill these high level mobs, or that you have the 'right' skills. But of course how can you know what they are? And if you don't have them you have to then find the money (money is scarce compared to the cost of things in normal mode) to buy these skills. Or, yet worse, trawl the landscape with the signet of capture hoping to stumble upon the right boss to get the elite you need. Cheap, cheap, cheap.
There is little strategy as a result and no room for such (unless constantly doing the same mission over and over works for you). You fight large groups of powerful mobs, that's it. You hope your heroes obey your order to fight your target and heal you (and each other), but they rarely do. And having ti nursemaid (with the mouse as well, since hero commands are not keyboard controlled or shortcut-operated) them is hopeless. Flagging positions is a waste of time since mobs just ignore your attempts at flanking or guarding and run around to whoever they like (by the endgame mob groups will outnumber you). So instead of playing a game where you can concentrate on playing yoru character, building him up, tuning him, and having fun, you either have to tolerate the appallingly controlled and fucntionally impaired ai characters, or stand in line spamming for other players to help.
It just doesn't work, at all.
w
