Going to borrow Arquebus' method of splitting up the review.

Look

This area looks great. Seriously. There's toxic tubes everywhere, and it looks kinda like an outdoors laboratory, as little sense as that makes. Not sure why it's a clockworks level, but the fact that they added the dying trees justifies it somewhat. Besides, indoors spaces with gas hazards is probably a terrible idea.

Play

Okay, so I've done this mission 3 times, all duo'd.

Play #1 on Wednesday, 7/11.

Mad bomber set, shiver, stagger, DR, Nitro, 1 bomb focus, 1 bomb damage trink, dragon scale shield.

I'm in a pretty ragtag set of armor, mostly because this was my first time on the test server, and I wanted to play with the new toys, like everyone else. So I'm full mad bomber. This was a -terrible- idea. There wasn't a single time where I wasn't poisoned and on fire. Forget trying to use remedy capsules, because you'll just get put on fire again, and poisoned, and killed. Literally, I was pushing 1k CE revs already in the first room. I was on skype with my duo partner, and we were both raging out of our minds at how insanely difficult they made the area. The nuclear oilers would literally dash past you from offscreen, and one of three things happened.

1) You were not blocking, and the nuclear oiler wasn't on fire. Enjoy your instant poison.
2) You weren't blocking and the nuclear oiler was on fire. Enjoy your instant poison AND your instant fire. Also DIAF, as you will be doing in 7 seconds or so, because the poison makes fire hurt more.
3) You were blocking in either of the above two scenarios. Enjoy your infinite blockstun until your shield breaks, unless if you're using dragon scale.

But really, I could chalk up a lot of the above to me being extremely stupid with armor/weapon choices (I am not a bomber at heart, really.) The boss nuclear toxilargo at the end.... was dissapointingly a joke. I had just laid a Dark Retribution bomb to kill some of the other nuclear oilers, and the boss charged me.... and promptly died after a second or two on the bomb. Completely and totally dissapointing.

Play #2 on Wednesday again.

skolver set, voltedge, acheron, polaris, sentenza, bts, 2 sword focus modules (normally I have CTR on my voltedge, so this is to get that back)

Okay, so against my better judgement, I do another duo, but this time I pack the sword/armor set that I have made on the real server, mostly, minus UVs/heat of course. As I'm playing, I'm still not finding places where I could skillfully move to avoid the crazy nuclear oil dash that either instapoisons or instasheildbreaks THEN poisons. And there are a couple places where due to how the nuclear oilers move/lay oil, the ENTIRE ROOM was on fire. Even with my partner on shiver duty all the time, we still had cases where the entire room was engulfed in fire, and not much you can do about that aside from... well... dying in a fire. We only got to the end of the first floor, then I had to go to bed, but by then, I was already at 160 energy/rev, mostly from getting set on fire after shield breaking.

Play #3 on Thursday.

Same set as #2, but using a Gran Faust instead of Acheron as I'm used to it more.

Apparently after the update, they nerfed the frequency that the nuclear oilers use their crazy dash move. Also seemed to lower the number of puddles from 6 to 4. It made them a lot more manageable, but if anything got set on fire, it quickly devolved into the previous scenario, where it is IMPOSSIBLE to see anything, let alone move anywhere, without burning a fiery death. We got to the end, and had used a 40 and a 80 energy rev.

Suggestions

Compared to LoA, it feels like Compound is much more a suggestion in frustrating deaths than anything else. In LoA, at least, every time I took a hit, or died, it felt like it was completely and totally my fault, and failure to move/block/dodge/kite correctly. In Compound 42, not at all. A lot of the status/hits I was taking felt very unavoidable in comparison, especially with the whole "OH GOD THE ROOM IS ON FIRE" factor. The worst thing is that it takes literally 2 nuclear oilers to make it miserable in a room, from them doing oiler dash past you into another oiler dash past you into dying and spitting out more oil. Simply zerging the enemies isn't much of an option due to the fact that when you get poisoned, it's... about a 60% damage reduction. Shooting and staying out of range isn't much of an option unless spamming the polaris, due to the fact that the nuclear oilers take the first opportunity to oil dash behind you, allowing them to also cover the room in oil/fire. And simply trying to focus fire the scorchers doesn't work either as menders + you being poisoned = must kill the mender first, which means now the scorchers have time to set things on fire... most notably the entire room.

Thanks to Rawrcake's suggestion for using fire/poison UV stuff to nullify the oil. Will try it when I get home from work, but before that... actual suggestions.

Nuclear Oilers: Why does the oiler dash dash past the person, and put them in blockstun, and instantly poison/fire? It'd be much more managable if they dashed up to you, kinda like lichen colonies attack. Also, nuclear oilers spike spin attack, if you're hit/blocking the close to it portion, the knockback is tremendous. We're talking like Kovorod levels knockback, like across fire traps knock back.

Nuclear Polyps: Why do these things SPAWN NUCLEAR OILERS?!? Otherwise, I'm not sure if the nuclear polyps can inflict fire. The spines they shoot suggest that they can't, and can just poison, spawn oil, and spawn nuclear oilers. They're pretty alright as is, but the spawning nuclear oilers is a -really painful skill-.

Flamethrower trap things: From a flavor perspective... WHY do these even exist? Like, the trap literally makes no sense at all to me.

Oil from Nuclear Oilers: I would reduce the potency of the fire/poison to low, instead of moderate, not for nerfing how powerful they are (well kinda yeah), but because as it stands, you MUST bring poison/fire armor with either a UV on it, or use trinkets. It'd also be nice if shields didn't catch on the fire OR if the oil didn't poison unless if it was set on fire. At the moment, the nuclear oilers being able to pretty much instantly poison you or instantly shieldblockstun you is seriously a cheapshot. That also said, it feels dissapointing that if you bring the right armor, it takes the mission from OH GOD HARD to pretty simple from what people have been saying, rather than from extremly difficult to hard. Because at the moment, if you don't bring armor that can nullify the oil poison/fire, the entire mission becomes this steamroller of sodomy. The bad kind of sodomy.

I will say that the bosses STILL need to be buffed, as they still kinda act like... well... a vanilla lichen colony + a few new moves, and a scorcher that looks cool, with extra HP.

Recommendations on stuff to bring here

Shadow weapons of all sorts.
-shudder- Shivermist... because putting out the nuclear oilers is the best thing you can do short of killing the scorchers to avoid spreading the fire.
Polaris or Supernova, as tight corridors = great place to infinite shoveback enemies.

Overall, after the changes on Thursday, the mission was a lot more fun, but still really REALLY painful to do.