Risk of Rain UO Enforcer

The Enforcer is another class it took me a lot of tries to finally reach a successful run.

Part of this is that a lot of Artifacts are pretty hostile to the Enforcer: Spirit pretty much completely takes away your ability to keep enemies off your back, which is core to the Enforcer's playstyle. Honor means that Volatile rockets are a constant threat, making it extremely dangerous to try to use Protect and Serve. Distortion can potentially lock you into Protect and Serve if you try anyway, and the Enforcer's other abilities fill sufficiently distinct roles from each other that Protect and Serve is the only thing where it being locked is not a fairly major problem in many situations. Glass means even tiny mistakes can kill you; in conjunction with Honor, it's easy to die while in Protect and Serve to Blazing enemies just on the basis of their fire trail! Spite makes Protect and Serve dangerous from another angle, and the Enforcer doesn't have any good ways of consistently staying out of reach of Spite Bombs, at least not above and beyond generally playing cautiously in that regard.

Notice that Protect and Serve is basically dead weight as a move in an Unlocking Origin run. There are other classes that have low-value moves for an Unlocking Origin run, but the Enforcer is the only one whom has a move that's so negative in value you should probably treat it as not existing.

Then there's the way an Unlocking Origin run is already heavily biased toward hordes of individually weak enemies being the desirable roll: the Enforcer is well-suited to punching through easy mode Kin rolls, but struggles to efficiently handle the Kin rolls that are already generally the most problematic. The result is that where other classes find it tolerable, if frustrating, to have something happen like Jellyfish be your first level enemy and Greater Wisps your second level enemy, they'll probably cope okay with the Greater Wisps and potentially have better luck on the third level. The Enforcer, on the other hand, won't really be particularly better off with good Kin rolls -almost everybody can handle Jellyfish just fine, and while some classes might find Lemurians a little more dangerous than the Enforcer it's not by that huge a margin- and will struggle enormously if he ends up having to try to heal with the big nasties like Greater Wisps, Elder Lemurians, or even just Spitters. (Which aren't that high up as a 'big nasty', but are surprisingly durable and they don't lend themselves to swarming in a way the Enforcer can punish readily with his splash damage)

Another detail that it took me a bit to cotton onto is that the Enforcer needs to get Soldier's Syringes fairly quickly. While the shield slam is his only move that that has a significant wind-up, all his moves have noticeable ending lag, more so than their animations would really seem to imply. A lot of my failed runs ended when the Enforcer simply failed to respond to my inputs just a little too long after firing the shotgun or launching Crowd Control. The importance of Soldier's Syringes was fairly obvious with eg HAN-D. With the Enforcer I'd historically thought it was a low priority, and it's really not.

Still, it is doable, if one of the less RNG-resistant possibilities. And it's actually kind of interesting playing the Enforcer in such a weird way.

Comments

Popular Posts