Whiteout #4: Commander Badly Bugged!

gnostromo

Here's a basic rundown of how my most recent solo encounter with the Commander went:

1) Approach Original Commander, triggering aggro.

2) Damage Original Commander, causing him to spawn 3 FULL STRENGTH clones.

3) Original Commander continues to attack, alongside his uber clones.

4) 3 *additional* clones spawn (seemingly weaker than the first 3), for a total of SIX clones.

5) Original Commander now morphs into a pile of goo, but continues to attack.

6) I die, over and over, to the small army of clones + the gooey Original.

6.5) I die some more.

7) Eventually the uber clones stop resetting when I die, and simply disappear, leaving 3 regular clones (plus the Original gooey Commander, who continues to attack).

8) I use AoE's to reduce the 3 clones' health to very low levels. At this time, all 3 clones, plus the Original, reset and respawn in the center of the room at full strength.

9) I die again and give up before my head explodes from a rage-induced aneurysm.

After venting my frustration over this in Zone chat, several other players say they've had the same buggy experience with this mission. One claimed to have had 9 Commander clones spawn at once.

"AAARRGGG!!!!" Ahem, sorry.

I bug reported this ingame, but I'm beginning to suspect that Cryptic pays about as much attention to reports ingame as they do in this forum. Which isn't much. I'm mainly writing this as warning to others: This mission is maddeningly b0rked - don't bother with it.

blkjackwilliams

Yup, had the same issue when I went through it myself. Playing on my PA/Gadgeteer, I had already lost all my stars and determined it was a bug, so why not throw myself at him a couple dozen more times to see if I could figure out what was going on. My observations were:

1. You don't have to damage the commander, just make him aggressive. He'll glow green, which seems like a power GFX of some sort, and that's when he'll summon three Master Villian clones.

2. The Clones are Master Villian rank on the targeting screen, but hit just as hard as the Super Villian Commander. I'll call these strong clones.

3. The strong clones can be killed, I wasn't quite able to try killing them before the second set of clones came out, so I don't know if he'll resummon the first set should they all die. I may try to test this out more when my Maso-kiss streak returns.

4. The second set of clones are Master Villian rank on the targeting screen, and forunately do not hit as hard as the Super Villian Commander. I'll call them weak clones

5. While the weak clones are out, it seems the Commander will not Summon new strong clones. Except for one devised situation

6. The weak clones can be "killed" and once three are dropped, the commander will return using ooze tunneling (It'll say Scarab tunneling under his bar). Once a weak Clone is killed, it will stand there untargetable (almost like a placed critter will stand if you look at it in a level editor for a mod kit) then it will ooze (scarab) tunnel and rejoin the fight.

7. The devised situation for summoning more strong clones is to simply kill all the weak clones and have them stand untargetable at the same time. For some reason this allowed the commander to resummon the strong clones. This doesn't work 100% of the time, and I suspect it has to do with the "Power" that summons the strong clones recharging while they're dead, and not being ready before they come back.

Anyway, that's just a rehash of what I put into the bug report I filed. Hopefully it helps whoever has to fix the problem. Possibly Trailturtle can pass this along himself. It will not be good for all these APs and Comic series to be bugged should a large group of CoHers come over. CoH has a very Taskforce/Strikeforce intensive community and having this game's version of that content bugged so heavily; it's just really bad for CO's chances of picking up those players.

gnostromo

Yeah, I *am* one of those CoH players, and the amount of bugs in CO compared to CoH is...just...absolutely shocking. This is the 2nd Comic Series arc I've tried, and the 2nd I've had to abandon due to bugs (the first being Resistance). I'm struggling to decide if I'm going to keep subbing, because...geez...why should I pay money for this when I can beat my head into a brick wall for free?

I like a number of things about CO's game mechanics. I really, really do. But it seems like every time I actually try to sit down and play this game, I run into an impenetrable wall of bugs that prevents me from making any progress!! :mad: