Damonta seems a bit unbalanced...

[GAMING_Alligator]

Did I miss a few stages between leaving the mad monks temple and arriving at Damonta? The difficulty has jumped up through the roof compared to the fights I've had before (not the individual enemies specifically, but the sheer number of groups of them that I need to get through is draining my resources).

Was enjoying the game, but I'm closing in on what I'm assuming is the graveyard everybody keeps talking about and seeing yet another even bigger group of robots that I can't get by without engaging them in combat when I've long since run out of grenades and rockets (seriously, didn't ranger training include sneaking??) has made the game distinctly un-fun.

I've read on the internet that if I go back to the wasteland to resupply / grind a few levels everybody in the town ends up being killed, so well ... meh!

[Gillsing]

I suppose there was a jump in difficulty, but before Canyon of Titan you had the chance to test your mettle against robots and slicer dicers in the Abandoned Railyard. So that should have showed you what to expect. Personally I used VAX against most of the bots. He's very vulnerable to their energy weapons, but if you position him so that he can't run closer to them, and then lure them closer with a fast Ranger with high Combat Initiative, then VAX gets the first attack, and that's usually all he needs. And even without VAX you could set up some kind of ambush where you lure robots into positions where all the Rangers can open up fire at the same time, while the enemy group gets split up so that they drop in one by one.

If you don't have VAX I can see how it might cost a lot of ammo. In that case I would once again rely on a fast Ranger with very high Combat Initiative to keep the distance while firing a sniper rifle until all the targets are dead. I would not engage in fair fights, because Rangers are not Knights. If you don't have any Rangers fast enough to outrun slicer dicers, then you'll either have to figure out some other clever plan, or suffer the consequences for your choices during character creation.

You could also start over from before entering Damonta, and then stock up on explosives which you can drop in a large heap once you've entered the Damonta map. After you've recovered his supplies, Sabot Rockets from Holliday give the best bang for your scrap. Just enter the Atchison map to reset his store inventory.

[Boneyard Bob]

Originally posted by marclev:

(seriously, didn't ranger training include sneaking??)

It was f-ing supposed to, but that didn't make the final cut. If they don't step it up on stealth and split party tactics/mechanics for WL3, I may just give up on these devs.

Don't get me wrong, I love WL2 for what it is. I've put ~700 hrs into it (vanilla & DC), but combat wise it's still lacking in many tactical features that were present (and well done) in similar games nearly 20 years ago or more.

Sorry for the rant. Anyway, on to your problem. Damonta is robots, robots, robots. Then more robots. Some might say skills like Energy Weapons or Computer Science are a waste, but this is one of a few occasions where they really come in handy.

Yes. If you leave Damonta before finishing, everyone there will die. If you feel too under equipped to continue, and it sounds like you do, you should do as Gillsing suggested and load an earlier save. There is a decent vendor in the Canyon of Titan. Sell what you have to and buy as much as you find useful.

[GAMING_Alligator]

Well, I ended up getting the hint and going back into the wasteland to explore and level up a bit more. Turns out I completely missed the Rail Nomads, and by the time I finished that area, along with Dawin, and found Vax, coming back to Damonta was much less punishing.

Turns out, not everybody dies by leaving the area anyhow. The only people that died were the water traders, everybody else was as I left them.

[Gillsing]

The water traders die if you take too long to get into the building they're trying to get into, which has nothing to do with leaving town. (I reloaded, but the first time I tried that quest I went around the building in the wrong direction, and that was enough for them to die.) Maybe the whole town only dies if you attach a Repeater Unit to their radio tower and then leave town before killing all the robots? Good to know, since it opens up some options for people who need to resupply.

[GAMING_Alligator]

Originally posted by Gillsing:

The water traders die if you take too long to get into the building they're trying to get into, which has nothing to do with leaving town. (I reloaded, but the first time I tried that quest I went around the building in the wrong direction, and that was enough for them to die.) Maybe the whole town only dies if you attach a Repeater Unit to their radio tower and then leave town before killing all the robots? Good to know, since it opens up some options for people who need to resupply.

It's worth noting that I left via the exit at the top of the map, for anybody reading this wanting to try it. It could well be that leaving via the bottom exit (the one you enter from) does in fact kill everyone.

[Gillsing]

Well, did you or did you not attach the repeater unit to the radio tower before leaving? I highly doubt that the choice of exit matters.

[GAMING_Alligator]

Originally posted by Gillsing:

Well, did you or did you not attach the repeater unit to the radio tower before leaving? I highly doubt that the choice of exit matters.

No, I attached the repeater after clearing out the robots.

[red255]

If you did Canyon of the titan killing lots of people you should have ended up with the Charged round Sniper rifle and multiple M16 assault rifles.

its also got a depleted uranium toaster item you can bring back to ranger citadel for the gamma ray blaster. which is an energy weapon that toasts robots.

there aren't alot of robot threats there. there are the high HP easy to hit armored robots which you target their torso to drop their armor, and you target their legs to kill their move speed. or just shoot them in the head.

the smaller faster units especially the killer robots are High priority.

a slicer dicer seems intimidating but they are easy to hit, and a head shot can lead to them wasting their turns.

Basically Robots are easy to hit, use targetted shots.

[Whirl]

I reccommend explosives in Damonta, and make sure you get as many in the collateral as possible. The Monks sell a lot of bang-bang.

[Papa Shekels]

Good to see you got through it. I agree, that place is a pretty big spike up in difficulty. Especially on higher difficulties, where all that extra damage and health are amplified, it feels like a massive jump from canyon of titan. On all my saves, I always did the junkyard/darwin/rail nomads/prison (up to the turrets) before going through to the canyon, and even then in supreme jerk it's hard to avoid any casualties.