However, even the toughest fighters eventually run out of steam, and despite a final flurry here, we're finally done with the Borderlands 2 DLC content, and all that remains is to dip back into the Main list one final time to wrap up the lot.
Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt takes you to the swamps of Pandora, where you link up with Sir Hammerlock for a "weekend of Big Game Hunting".
It also turns out that Professor Nakayama, a self-obsessed protagonist of Handsome Jack, resides here and wants you dead after hearing that you were responsible for his death. He is alleged to be secretly farming a cloning formula to bring Handsome Jack back to life, and must be prevented from doing so.
This pack adds a brand new main story questline, a handful of optional side missions, as well as new environments and enemies - It's very standard for Borderlands by this point, though is probably the lightest out of all the DLC packs in terms of overall content. It also still closely follows the general Borderlands 2 formula for trophies, adding 3 further trophies into the total list.
There is again 1 trophy associated to concluding the main questline, awarded for stopping Professor Nakayama, though this story is extremely short and only spans across a total of 4 missions, taking no longer than a couple of hours to beat from start to finish. There is also a trophy awarded for discovering every location. Standard.
However, despite this pack being the lightest on content - with only 13 side quests to complete for the remaining trophy - there was, yet again, another obstacle standing in the way;
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| Done That - Completed all Hammerlock's Hunt side missions. |
In this particular instance, it comes from the quest "Voracidious the Invincible", another raid boss that joins Terramorphous the Invincible and Hyperious the Invincible on the "How on earth do I beat this?" wall of fame.
I had previously attempted to defeat Voracidious during the same period of time I was understanding just how challenging some elements of this game actually were, and attempted to take the same approach of returning with better equipment and weaponry later down the line in order to beat him with greater ease.
Except, that's not exactly how it went. I'd managed to beat everything else the game had thrown at me - Somehow - and yet, I couldn't beat Voracidious with my now maxed out level 50 character, and the weapons that had served me so well up to this point. I was suddenly stuck for ideas and had no idea where to turn. What do you do when you've beaten almost everything, yet are still struggling on Raid bosses??
For greater context, Voracidious is a giant Stalker accompanied by Chief Ngwatu, a savage warrior who will transfer a protective shield between himself and Voracidious at regular intervals. Chief Ngwatu is very vulnerable when he doesn't have the shield, and will die quickly if he takes damage without it. This sends Voracidious into his second form - a form whereby he becomes enraged and his attacks are not just way more frequent, but also way more deadly.
The general tactic is to keep Chief Ngwatu alive for as long as possible, chipping away at the shield throughout this time. Voracidious will become enraged once he hits around 25% health regardless, so his enraged form is unavoidable to an extent, but you want to have the shield depleted as much as possible when this happens, to increase your chances of killing him quicker.
The reality for me was, I just didn't have powerful enough guns to outlast Voracidious. The approach was sound, but as soon as he hit his enraged form, we always seemed to be in 1-hit territory, compounded by the fact I was generally extremely low on ammunition by this stage too, as the protective shield harbours an insane amount of hit points.
I was getting into a vicious cycle of dying, respawning for a certain cost, having to spend even more money to restock ammunition and then repeating the process. There were a couple of times where I got close and knew with a bit of luck I would have done it, but there were also times I was just getting slapped around so badly, it seemed it was there purely to remind me of how this game can have it's way with me at the drop of a hat, just because it wants to.
I found myself jumping back into farming the Pyro Pete Bar Brawl side quest to accumulate money for the sole purpose of buying ammunition to have more attempts at beating Voracidous, but it was also here where I got the stroke of luck I needed.
One of the enemies I downed within a run of the Bar Brawl dropped a rocket launcher that dealt 227,000 damage per rocket. This was an upgrade on my best rocket launcher by over 200,000 points and ended up being the difference maker in this fight for me.
I headed back in, equipped the launcher, and decided to use it from the point right where Voracidious became enraged, taking down the final 25% of health quick enough to the point where his enraged form didn't have enough time to influence the outcome of this fight.
Was it lucky? I suppose it was - Nothing else was working for me, and whilst I was farming more money, I was also trying to work on what I was going to do to in order to defeat him. My reserve option was to run the Terramorphous raid boss again, which is absolutely something I wanted to avoid, and I'm so glad it never came down to having to resort to this.
This is the culmination of some pretty challenging DLC packs, and somewhat unforeseen. I knew all about the challenges that awaited me within the main list, but was never aware of how tough this additional content was going to be. I still feel like there's a possibility that I just wasn't prepared well enough for it, and hadn't focused enough on my gear throughout the game, but the random difficulty spikes are extremely frustrating. You can coast past large portions of the content across all 4 of these DLC packs, and suddenly run into a brick wall - and how exactly do you prepare for that sort of erratic nature?
Anyway, we're almost there, and I'm certain in saying at this point, that there are no longer any nasty surprises lying ahead.
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