Tales of a Mythic Journey, Part 2

"All who walk the blessed path will find salvation… even in death."

1 Down, 8 To Go

I finally bested Winter Contingency on Mythic difficulty Friday night - what a rush! I turned to my wife with a huge smile after pegging the last Zealot from afar and received an enthusiastic, "Did you get it?!" Yeah, she's awesome.

It only took 10 attempts to knock it out, and really, after the first 3 or 4 you generally know where every enemy is and what to expect. The worst part was all the running you have to do at the beginning of each attempt on this level. A small handful of failures at the river attempting to splatter zealous grunts, a single glitched falcon failure (see my previous post), and the rest of the times I fell to the unforgiving attacks of the final 2 Elites. Extremely frustrating to spend 40 minutes on a level, fall to the last enemy, and see the opening falcon cutscene again, but once you see that last Elite drop, it instantly validates it all - and gives you hope for the journey ahead.

The final run through was fairly unextraordinary, but of course the last battle was tough. The first few times, I tried the trick of luring out the sword Elite for an assassination, then peppering the concussion rifler with the peashooter to no avail. Finally, I got lucky enough to get a perfect angle on the two of them in the room and drop them both with pepper spray+DMR headshot from a distance.

I did encounter one point of particular interest, which occurred on my second to last run. After surviving the assault on the courtyard with Kat closing the heavy doors, a single Elite Ultra managed to follow Noble team through as they retreated. A small wave of excited panic flushed over me, being in such a tight space and such close proximity, but as soon as the door was shut everyone stopped shooting him, he stopped shooting back, and he stood perfectly still, as though he had been an undercover member of our team. I cautiously paused and surveyed the scene, before deciding the gamble to go on with him in our presence was not worth it, and I went for the assassination. I later wondered whether he would have stood there indefinitely as we moved on, or followed us, or eventually opened fire. I guess I'll never know. He was a brave soldier.

Tips for other Mythic adventurers out there:

1) If you happen to run into the Golden Ranger Elite on this level, keep your distance and don't engage him. I tried to splatter him at one point and his salvo of concussion rifle fire quickly ended my run.

2) As per my previous post, if you do manage to procure a falcon in the first half of the mission, make sure you exit it before it's time to EVAC to the comm station (i.e. the last enemy is killed in defending the EVAC zone).

3) After you encounter the 3 Zealots in the cutscene inside the comm station, you respawn with just Jorge, ready to advance down a few hallways. I discovered you could do some heavy damage on the crowd of jackals and grunts by immediately heading for the opposite side of the room (after swapping your AR for a DMR, of course), waiting for them to push forward against Jorge's chain gun fire, then popping the three huge fuel tanks along the right wall of the room. The subsequent explosions clear the tanks for your safety, and help Jorge put a big dent in the approaching forces.

4) The other members of Noble team are invincible (sans cutscenes). Let them do the work wherever possible and use them as shields, distractions, targets, whatever. At one point, Jorge was being attacked by the sword wielding Zealot, and I helped out by sticking Jorge with grenades to get them close the Zealot while he was out of my line of site.

5) Perhaps the most vital tip of all for me was to use the tape trick to compensate for the missing reticle. Place a piece of transparent Scotch tape in the middle of your screen, and mark your reticle (either in a pregame session with the Blind skull off or in game by firing one of your more precise weapons at a wall) with a marker. This gave me the ability to finally headshot the last 2 Zealots after dropping their shields.

6) Patience. This is the key to victory. Good luck!

Thanks for following along. I'll check in again as things progress!