Once again, this is a rant, but I feel this needs to be said. Yes I'm whining about danger mission difficulty, but not because I think enemies are inherently OP or that status strengths should be nerfed or any of that jazz.
I'm here to state that the current elements are great, but the way they are assembled by OOO archetype mappers just makes me want to cry. As an indie game modder, I can see bad design choices from a mile a way, and it seems many danger missions have these, if not all.
Legion of Almire (Prime Example):
Alright, so I've been close to being able to solo LoA for some time. Got a dread skelly set, an awesome tag-team of Cryo Driver and Volt Driver, and an avenger between my thumbs. Usually I get killed in the final ambush of the 2nd floor, final wave. That crep is pretty hardcore, and although it's pretty borderline slanted due to overspawn of enemies, it leans more on good challenge than bad.
Now what I bumped into 30 min ago that made this post mandatory, was an insanely tiny room carrying 4 Almirian guards, 2 skull turrets, 5-7 zombies, fire, one Über zombie, and 3 silkwings all at once. How bad was it? MSPaint Illustration here > http://imageshack.us/f/23/dangerroomilustration.png/
This room was so rigged, I only got to down 2 of the silkwings including one energy rev, I was being drowned in lead from the turrets nonstop, the uber zombie could rez zombies in any half of the room at any given point in time, and I was getting 2 to 3 ply walled by enemies nonstop. What the hell. The tiny room plus some good balanced enemies would've been fun, the uber zombie and turrets would've been fun, some zombies, uber zombie, and a silkwing or MAYBE two would've been fun. This is just immature.
Part of the job here of mappers is to assemble a challenge that is dangerous yet not total Armageddon 5 times a second.
Example?
Heart of Ice:
Heart of Ice has been consistently frustrating for me on the first floor due to a room that infinitely generates either greavers or silkwings, with the opening waves also carrying 3 or so natural greavers, I have yet to test this again with my shiny new Dark Thorn Blade. Pre-patch though, this area was absolute BS, mostly due to bullets not registering at point blank and elemental droppings. Skelly set has UV's for anti-frost and this is still a strong issue. Then greaver patch rolls in, and none of the greavers are downsized in numbers or replaced. What the hell.
Regardless, I've constantly attempting HoI to learn things and push myself further. It's worth noting I'm not very good at fighting fiends, but through practice I've recently learned a lot including mastering the method for fighting devilites.
So one day while I'm re-attempting, trying to learn, I notice the infamous greaver spam room of death isn't there. I'm delighted, yet puzzled, to find this nice alternate room in its place. It's a 2x3 [?] grid of rooms with respawning freeze skelly turrets. Killing the turrets temporarily opens the gates to the linking rooms and there's a narrow pass at the end. Contained within this room is 4 waves of gritty fighting.
About a half hour later, after slaying all the enemies, I note that was incredibly fun, yet not necessarily super dangerous every second. Regardless I've used all my medical supplies in the room set and had an awesome time doing it.
This is where this differs from these BS rooms I keep ranting about. The room presented challenge through larger numbers of balanced enemies in a gauntlet-like fighting method, not any super tiny rooms, overly dense placement, or general OP conditions. It was perfect.
Compound 42:
This is a nice example, since I'm currently spamming UV's on my soon-to-be umbra driver in attempts to swear vengeance. Toxoils are an interesting alternative for trash enemies since they are very powerful and well rounded, which is also kind of their flaw. They are, in many senses, Mary Sue type characters because they possess no drawbacks.
Regardless, this one gets me a lot. On the first floor there's a fire-ridden room with a very nonchalant ambush, but one of the waves spawns 3 polyps at once. This breaks down 50/50 as a BS situation, depending on luck. The polyps can either be cool bros and fire spikes and oil at you, but are challenging since they are quite tough due to poison overlay nerfing your damage... or they can be total jerkwads and just keep spamming toxoils over and over and over again. This becomes an issue that they don't wait for their current toxoils to die before spawning new ones, and don't seem to carry any feasible cooldown for spawning toxoils.
Once again, this can end quite badly due to the poison dampening your health, especially after the entire room is constantly on fire due to literally more than a dozen toxoils all at once, plus polyp fire (if they actually choose to shoot spikes for a change) This isn't so bad, if you're lucky you can best it, but the fact they sometimes do this at all is just ridiculous.
Ghost in The Machine:
GiTM isn't a particularly wowing danger mission for me to begin with, but I'm sure anyone that's reached floor 2 remembers the CPU-smashing room with the bombies.
For those who haven't, here's it in a nutshell: Über zombies and other competant enemies charge you in a room with many electrical hazards. However, any time you cross into the upper half of the room, 6 bombies spawn. Electrical bombies. This kind of mirrors the poly thing in that they don't wait for the current set of bombies to expire before spawning more. This wouldn't be so bad if the Über zombies didn't have the dreadful resurrection effect; so depending on your party or how much you derp, you can have literally 30+ electrical bombies attempting to explode all over you at any given time, and when they go down they are almost guaranteed to respawn from the Über zombie res effect.
I play on a pretty neat-stuff type computer. Better than average, can play all sorts of stuff with parties of friends and eat the least lag out of any of us by a longshot. Even my computer gets reduced to 0.2 FPS if this happens, which literally makes the situation unbeatable if you trip the bombies enough. Yea game-grumps, I know. So don't trip the bombies. Unfortunately, I happen to give a flying frank about the fact this can happen to begin with, this will destroy any player's ping, frames per second, and anything remotely comperable to fun all at once. This is game-breaking.
I understand challenge is a must for Danger Missions, it's the entire point of doing them. They have to challenge even the best equipped T3 players as much as possible, but "by any means deemed fit" is not always a good solution. Some combinations just lack balance, and moreover, THEY AREN'T FUN!
I'm pushing end game content here and trying out danger missions frequently, but running into stupid OP crap like this is just killing the game for me. I'm not saying nerf it, I'm saying distribute the challenge in a more fair sense. I like challenge, I like long fights, but I hate tiny rooms like the one in the MSPaint Fail I linked earlier. Mature Challenge is best, not something like that, that a 9 year old would make and call "super awesome challenge" by pushing borderline impossible depending on luck.
P.S. I hate greavers. Gorgos are cool though.
P.S.S. I hate people who say "get a blitz needle" to fight greavers even more. If you need to grab the single most OP weapon in game to fight an enemy properly, there's something fundamentally wrong with the enemy.
/Rant.
Am I correct that you are doing all of these solo? There are a lot of players who can run DMs solo with no problem (I am not one of them), however I will say that higher level content like danger missions and shadow lairs are really intended to stress teamwork, and that sounds like what is ultimately giving you fits--you're not SUPPOSED to have so many baddies breathing down your neck because your teammates should be there to draw fire and thin the herd. C42 is a breeze (a stinky breeze, perhaps, but still a breeze) with a teammate alternating between shivermist and dark ret, for example. If you want to take on DMs without a party to back you up, that's fine, but blaming the level design--designed for a party of four--for your having trouble soloing feels a little disingenuous.