(Rant) I hate the Illuminate

Edit on PC since mobile sucks:

I get that there are other things that work, but the main point of my rant wasn't explained well enough, so let me try again here; Everything is inconsistent. "Grenades/Grenade Pistol-" doesn't work 50% of the time. I will grenade one of the doors two or three times and the ship won't die, then I go over to another ship and destroy it in one grenade. "Use these orbitals-" to what? Have it only break them sometimes? My problem with the Illuminate is that Harvesters and ships will absolutely tank everything I throw at them one game, then die to a light breeze the next game. It's not fun gambling on which one I get and it's not just me. My friends and I who regularly clear D10s dislike dealing with the Illuminate's seemingly jank armor. I only gave a few examples but I have experimented with a ton of different setups, and only a few are consistent.

Also another point I think people are ignoring is how fucking tanky the Overseers are. It takes half of a "mag" from a sickle to kill one when all shots hit the chest. This is fine on it's own but horrible when you're surrounded by voteless, they suddenly fly around, bombard you with extreme accuracy, and then just fly off behind a building. Meanwhile the voteless and grounded overseers are rushing you down to beat your ass in melee. "Use the guard do-" yeah if it ever actually HIT ANYTHING then it wouldn't be a problem. So many times have I seen it dump it's whole mag OVER an enemies head instead of actually hitting the fucking thing.

Original Post:

I go up to the ships. I break shield, and shoot a grenade inside. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It feels arbitrary on whether or not my grenade will pop it.

So instead, I throw some eagles on it. “110s can destroy a lot of things, surely that will work.” Nope, all three 110s fail to penetrate. “Let me try a thermite to the side of it.” Thermites bounce off its armor. A thermite grenade. That sticks. Bounces off. “Maybe SPEAR rockets, they have max AP value?” Fuck all, because apparently SPEAR gets the blue spark of shame that shows up when trying to shoot something with too strong of an armor. THE SPEAR, failed to punch THROUGH ARMOR.

Meanwhile I’m being mogged by hordes of Voteless and their obnoxiously tanky Overseers. I kill the horde, stabilize my progress, only for my eyes to be blown out by the warp lights and suddenly I’m surrounded by even more of the things I just killed with no warning. Then it does it again a second later, dropping flying Satans that are the jetpack Overseers on me, which are faster than me, while I’m trying to run away. Ludicrous health and mobility in one make for a very obnoxious experience, and now there’s 10 of them.

They run me straight into 2 Harvesters. I think, “This should be fine, I have thermites, SPEAR, and eagle 110s. Even if they can’t kill a ship, surely any combination of these can handle these harvesters.” Fuck no they don’t because thermites bounce off and apparently an eagle can miss, since she missed all three. I finally get my SPEAR locked at good distance and put a missile straight into its dome, but doesn’t kill it. That’s fine, Bile Titans can take a few If you don’t hit the head, so I just load the next missile, wait for the shield to come back, break it again with my sickle, and lock on, and fire. Almost immediately, the shield comes back up, eating my missile. HUH? WHAT? HOW. Do these things have radar to detect missiles and bombs or something? If you lock on and fire at a Harvester across the map that doesn’t know you’re there, you can see it go “nah lmao” and pop a shield up right before contact. This is fine on its own but real fuckin annoying when I JUST popped the shield a second before, and suddenly that “nah lmao” shields comes up.

Next round, I say “Fuck it, guess I’m bringing 500kg and orbital laser, how dare I have fun with anything else” but apparently that doesn’t work either since when I throw the eagle directly on top of the ship, it sometimes just doesn’t penetrate the shield while other times it’ll dumpster the hole thing. So I make an effort to always break shield after I throw the ball, so the shield goes down just before the eagle lands, and this finally works.

Base destroyed, Harvesters melted, and I’m mad that I’ve been shoe-horned into using the same loadout every match because nothing by else works. Bugs and Bots are fine but the Illuminate piss me off because they have the same design philosophy that drove me and my friends away from the game for months before the big balance rework.

You WILL use the same loadout every match. You WILL enjoy not being able to use anything else.

I know this is a lot of rant and I know I’m going to get mouth-breathing “skill issue huhuhuhuh” but like, this is genuinely frustrating. Everything I just described has been my experience with the Illuminate since they first appeared. I know how their armor works, but it’s ridiculous how tanky they are with or without it. I know WASP and Senator can one hit them, but I get real tired of only running Blitzer, Senator, Wasp, 500kg, orbital laser, and MG Sentry. MAYBE I’ll bring mech along if I'm feeling spicy and want it to get stuck on a car so I don’t even get to use it. Anything else and I just get fucked.

Oh yeah and fuck their arc pylons, those things are stupid tanky too. At least turrets and guard dogs won’t shoot them anymore