Jackleg Joe

It's been a while since I wrote about Defiance.  At last writing I was at an EGO rating of about 200, which apparently was a little problematic for beating Jackleg Joe, the boss of the last mission or Marin called Bullet for a Badman (which apparently is a Western movie title). In this mission I was stuck by not having enough capability to inflict damage on the enemies, so off I went to grind a bit.

I suppose that this was actually not a bad thing because it allowed me do some unstructured playing in the Defiance world and participate in some ark-falls with other people. This turned out to be a lot of fun!  Even though I wasn't on the top of leader-boards when the ark-fall events ended, I didn't do too bad (at least I am not always the n00b) and it was a lot of fun to be on a game map with another 20 people working toward a common goal.  It's also nice to be able to be revived by someone on the map when your health is down to zero and to not have to spend scrip to be extracted.

After a few weeks of playing only ark-fall events, I gained enough EGO (427 to be exact) to theoretically be able to beat the stage. I had also leveled up on my VBI Inflector (or is it an "immunizer"?) and a Votan Rifle I had acquired through previous missions (one of them was in an ark-fall event). So off I went to the Dogtown Mine alongside Rosa. I was after Joe who had the ark-cell (that Von Bach is looking for) and who Rosa wanted dead, vengeance for her father's murder.  What I didn't realize before was that the infector (immunizer?) is actually quite an effective weapon.  It seems to leach energy and health of the enemies, even when the shields were up (important for Joe at the end), and it gives your own character a health regeneration bonus (also important when Joe starts shooting at you with grenades).

When I finally got to go mano-a-mano with Joe, without his minions, it was really about sticking to constant motion, away from the explosions, and away from him so he wouldn't rush me (which inflicts a lot of damage).   It took two tries to get through this stage.  Each try was at least 60 minutes, which makes this level probably twice the length of any one single previous level in Defiance.  I've played a few Sausolito levels now, and each one is at most 30 minutes.  I wonder what the boss level at Sausolito will look like.

So, with the defeat of Jackleg Joe - I'm officially more than half-way through the campaign in Defiance.  I did notice that a Silicon Valley location was added when I was looking at the map this past weekend. I wonder if that's free-to-play or as part of an expansion pack.