Defiance's first DLC, titled "Energie Castithanne", introduced a new (single-player) game mode: the "arena" mode. For the record, told by a new protagonist, Ferik, a castithan of the dissident liro named "Apex", will call for the uprising of his people against the different castes in place because of their corruption and their methods considered too "ancestral" . To do this, he offers you to fight in turn in his five arenas (for the 5 castes) and thus prove your worth.
Combat technique
The arenas are instances in a "closed" environment, divided in terms of time into 4 phases of two minutes each. This mode is quite "nervous", namely that you will have to move all the time or almost (not made for campers then?) And in a fast way. The precision in your shots and your speed of movement will depend on maintaining the multiplier coefficient (combo) of score which resets if you do not chain the victims quickly enough. It is therefore a matter of moving quickly in the arena while carefully monitoring the mini-map at the top right which will indicate the location of the enemies. Try not to shoot "scattered", but to wait as much as possible for the regrouping of enemies which will allow you to achieve interesting combos and increase your multiplier coefficient. Finally, as the most powerful enemies (and therefore more resistant) bring more points, the trick is to start weakening them well (up to about 10% of life remaining) then to chain the victims easy around to raise your multiplier coefficient and finally to finish them: big score guaranteed?
Configuration
After a lot of testing, here is the configuration that I chose to play the arenas and achieve interesting scores (and especially to finish the story with the Shanje arena, the last and more "difficult" therefore, obviously). This assumes that you have unlocked all of your character's trump slots in order to be 100% effective. Otherwise, it will be necessary to adapt: to do this, I will list the assets in order of importance.
Weapons and accessories
For the weapons, I use a detonator, the FRC Launcher BAM, a weapon with great damage potential and which also has the advantage of being manually triggered, which will allow to choose several targets of the group and to make a group shot, therefore ideal for quickly increasing your multiplier coefficient.
In high school, I use a powerful submachine gun, the VOT Pulseur (I didn't have a Tachmag with specs interesting enough to use, but if you have that, it's even better). This submachine gun has a very high rate of fire and a good damage compromise (177) for this rate. The magazine has a capacity of 55 rounds, which is sufficient in many cases.
Mod level for these weapons: I didn't mod anything specially (just a sight on the Pulser, which I use very little in arena, but which gives me +8 damage reduction), it is not critical here in my opinion. No synergy either.
Finally, combat accessories level, I use frag grenades, damage dynapods and healing dopas. The latter are particularly useful for the later arenas which will see relatively strong enemies enter the scene, and where it is impossible to hide to reload the shield without wasting precious time for the score.
Shield, ability and assets
For the shield, it is important to use one which recharges very quickly after having "fallen": for this I use the Halo IV Last Resort EX, which triggers its reloading after only three seconds after its deactivation at height by 40% per second.
In "capacity" (main asset), I use overload. In fact, I play overload on all my setups except PvP where I prefer camouflage.
And finally, the strengths, here is my configuration:
- Cellular armor, rank 3
- Surplus energy, rank 3
- Detachment, rank 3
- Gunman, rank 3
- Stoneskin, Rank 3
- Feedback, Rank 3
- Murderous Madness, Rank 3
- Munitions express, rank 3
- Low blow, rank 3
To conclude, this example setup is just one of many good for playing arena mode, but as I said before, with this one you are sure to complete arenas on your own two legs while still getting a score. particularly interesting :).
