BumblingB's Ep42 Review

Hi everyone! BumblingB here. You can call me B or BB.

The new DLC has been out for a few days now and I feel comfortable posting my review on it. Please note, this is not about the glaring bugs, glitches, and exploits that are happening. This is strictly about the content provided for the Legion of Doom DLC 42.

I'll start off with my overall review of it. I found it lacking in every regard of the game. I don't know if it was because of how much work had to go into Ep41's clamp, omnibus, and save the universe or that they needed to get it in before the year end, but the whole DLC feels less than Ep40's. Which, based on content should be about the same.

I'll start in order of the pointer quest. (Open World > Duo > Alert > Raid)

Open World

• Visually pleasing. Really well done on the map overall. I've never been to the city, so I can't comment on that part, but it's really well done. With that said, the city feels very "empty". It does have some random civilians that aren't part of the skirmish encounters, but if this is supposed to be an everyday area that is being tempted and/or controlled by Perpetua's Doom that Lex was spouting out, it just feels empty. Like the emptiness Doom gives its followers.
• We have 3 daily tasks and 2 weekly bounty tasks. I don't know, I'm getting burnt out on the open world stuff. I miss the days of old, like South Gotham, where there was a lot to do, but it didn't feel like a chore when doing it. Having 3 daily quests just feels like we are being cheated because of the throttling of how many marks we can acquire a week. I know in a month, we get that bonus content, but overall, I'm disappointed with this.
• Open world feats just feels like too much same-oh, same-oh. Do X a lot of times. More times than the life of the DLC doing in average gameplay. Why can't there be unique feats that would get us to come back. Like we had with Home Turf? I know the RNG of each mission was annoying, but at least we had a unique tasks system for each of the daily quests. Considering we have 3 task givers, we could have had several different tasks to do for each. (Like the doomsayers, tagging, terminals, etc.)
• The bounties feel like you were planning this to go in line with Wonderverse and Legion, but ended up pulling that idea because of the negative feedback. That model of development was NOT BAD, it was the fact that it was the direction you were going for each episode. Having a secondary currency wasn't terrible, but the fact we wouldn't even get prestige from open world, it was killing the players. Having one every few episodes would be unique. It could be a good time to reintroduce the elite jewelry and weapons again. Just don't make it the focal point of the DLC model.

Duo

• This by far is the most interesting piece of content for me. Which is still lackluster. I really enjoy the overall theme of it. We have two new model skins for both Sinestro and Luthor. We have the story plot progressed. The map was unique. Spacelex is amusing. It was not a bad instance.
• The downside to it. It was short. The skirmishes were spread out needlessly. There is no unique development. The boss fights are very much button smash burn.
• In elite, there are more adds and more damage, which really doesn't help the overall feel of the instance.
• The first boss fight was only unique because you decided to use the stun and teammate lunge thing you added to FP's elite duo. You know, that's cruel for normal and event, right? When your teammate isn't going to lunge and doesn't understand the mechanics, you are sitting there like, lunge please and they are just tapping. That's something that should not be in event and normal, just no.
• The second boss has the mechanics that matter. It has phases. It has special things to pay attention to, like the adds, the bubble, etc. It just... meh fight though. Maybe it just feels long. I don't know.
• The last boss is the least interesting, by far. In the event and normal version, just pew pew. In elite version, you have to deal with extra adds and the bunker buster. Which has some complexity to it, but really, it's a dps check, because you can get overrun by adds and the turrets just endlessly respawn.
• Story wise, I've read the plot line that this followed with Sinestro and John and Lex. I kind of feel you did the character dirty here. Very anticlimactic.

Alert

• I HATE this instance. Capitalized, "HATE".
• Story could have been left out. The whole Batman Who Laughs in it really just felt like you had to shove him in there because he was somewhat connected to the Year of the Villain, which you didn't even touch on. The Mxyzptlk encounter was very much NOT a boss fight. Heck, there was only one boss fight and it was the second one with BWL. No, this instance was just not fun nor really felt like it was helping the story.
• First encounter (not even a boss), was interesting at least with the whole phases and what not, but is there a reason why there are so many "tentacle" monsters in almost every DLC in the last few years? I mean, I understand GoM and to an extent, JLD, but there are way too many hentai boss fights out there... >.> I did enjoy the Portal infinite loop traps though, I was like, "You are now thinking with portals."
• Second encounter aka First Boss, it being designed the way it is just kind of leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. There really isn't a lot there compared between each of the versions. (Event, normal, and elite.) Just damage is different. I think the normal version may be a tad over tuned, as there are some problems with doing it w/o a healer. (And some cases, with a healer.)
• Third encounter is just bad and I know, the whole Mxy needed to give us the doorway to the 6th dimension story thing was what happened in the main plot line, but this felt like an event. A joke to do once in a while, not every day to get your progression marks. Heck, why couldn't that be a solo? Sort of like Wonderverse's solo, that advances the plot, but doesn't force you to do silly game tasks with 4 other players. The balls at the end are just annoying. Not fun at all.

Raid

• This was just disappointing. It was not the level of quality that it was hyped up to be by Jackster's comments on that interview. It was 4 back to back bosses. No real unique complexity that older content had, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
• Story wise, it was somewhere in the middle in what it does for the DLC. It loosely follows the comic story that dealt with the 6th dimension. I did enjoy that part, especially when DILF Superman appeared. Lois looked good (though I still think she looks like Gally from Battle Angel Alita.) The boss encounters were good, at least. I never got a chance to play elite yet, so I don't know that part. But yeah, as a raid, it was "okay".
• The reason why I found this disappointing was the fact that it was hyped to be the whole team working on it as a 4 boss raid. Which, I was really looking forward to, but when I played it, it was literally just 4 bosses with a few hallways skirmishes. And by few, they could have left them out and it wouldn't make a difference to the raid. I was expecting something in the way of mechanics to get through. Like the hallway splits in FOS2 and Nexus. Or maybe even Assault and Battery's mechanics, where there was splitting, a really enjoyable puzzle (I know I'm in the minority there) and the final room needing to have your roles. What we got were 4 bosses with very little in the way of mechanics. (I think Antimonitor was probably the most unique with the whole blue pools and no orbitals. Probably better in elite.)

In the end, I feel that this whole DLC was lacking. Like it could have or should have been more than what we got. I'm starting to lose steam when it comes to wanting to play it as well. I was actually hyped about this (I went and read Year of the Villain) and avoided doing a lot of testing, so I wouldn't burn myself out early, but come to reveal, what I did test was a big portion of what we got.
Please understand, I really like this game, but this DLC is kind of a disappointment overall. :/

slowly but surely losing me. of course they could care less. but for us to have gotten no new content last dlc I thought everything would have been new this dlc.

The Elite content has definetly seen a big improvment imo the difficulty of the elite duo, alert and raid are above what we usually get good to see that but other then that i did expect a larger raid with more depth and content inside of it considering that it was a „raid focused“ episode like a very big raid with more bosses since we have only 1 instead of 2 raids.

The openfield is way too large and has 4 bounty bosses imo for a raid focused episode thats too much.

It could be that the elite + take alot of time away if thats the case i definetly recommend to only have 1 elite + not multiple just keeping the most difficult elite + up.

I largely feel the same, which is part of the reason I opened that UGC thread this morning. Everything feels just “okay”. I don’t dislike any of the content, but nothing feels special here.

The open world IMO is pretty boring. The Hall of Justice is obviously pretty cool, but otherwise it feels empty and too “Metropolis-y” without any unique spin. The open world bounties are just close your eyes and burn type deals, with nothing feeling overly threatening about them (outside of cheetahs Whirlwind).

The Duo I do like a fair bit. I enjoy it mostly because I really love Lex and Sinestro as villains, but as far as duos go it does feel just “okay”. Duos and Solos are just mark earners for me and I prefer to be in and out as much as possible with those. Give me a cool location and cool villains and I’m kinda sold as long as I can finish it in 5-10 minutes.

The alert is pretty meh. I do wish the first boss was…a boss. The Batman Who Laughs is a disappointing choice considering I feel like he’s just thrown into everything these days. He’s very much become my new Brainiac. Please throw him on the shelf for a bit before we dust him off again. The Mxy boss is something I enjoy today, but can very much see myself absolutely hating it after like 5 more runs. It’s too long and you don’t fight and that’s a bad combo.

The raid is by far the most disappointing thing for me. I didn’t really expect much in the way of a unique hallway mechanic like you said, but I also was expecting SOMETHING unique. Considering the lack of other content here, I was really hoping for a couple of cool boss fights, or maybe an optional boss we couldn’t tackle till we had more gear or something. But all 4 fights are pretty uneventful. It’s a “fine” instance, but when coming off of an episode with zero new group content and putting out a DLC with only 3 pieces of group content, I was hoping for a lot more here.

Overall it’s a 6.5/10 for me. It’s the Amazing Spider-Man of DLCs. There are some things I like about it, but as a whole package it’s just so Meh. Side note, I can’t really stress how disappointed I am that this is a “Legion of Doom” Episode, and you don’t fight them as a group. You fight them individually across an open world and Duo.

I only disagree with the alert comments. While the myx fight is very annoying after like the 3rd time and we are back in the league halls, the alert feels fresh and interesting. And the Batman who laughs becomes literally the main character of the plot on the comics, so there is no way to leave him behind.

Now the raid was a big disappointment, there are no new mechanics that matter and the boss fights have no big moments (Like Zeus lunge/lightnings in FGS, Darkseid's omega beam in DWF or Hades teleport in ToTD), plus there are no map mechanics like HoH or LoLs. It could be just the boss fights in a blank room and it wouldn't have made a difference. I think it is pretty well balanced considering there are multiple difficulties, but mechanic wise it wasn't great at all.

If this was just a typical episode it wouldn't be a problem, but the last episode was just a event that won't be available anytime soon, so the only really relevant piece of content is this one.

I would hope so. I don't expect anyone to always just agree on all my points. This is my review and an open discussion. I'm happy you voice a response. <3

And yet, he seemed like an afterthought. In the comics, he was a HUGE plot point and had his subplot story in the Year of the Villain. He gets a tiny part of the alert and that's it.

There was a mechanic in Anti-Monitor where you had to stand in the blue pools otherwise you would be w/o power and if you hit an orbital, the boss would retaliate in one of those blue pools. But yeah, I agree with all you've said.

I know I complained about the reusing of content that we already did en nauseam, but save the universe was more cohesive than this in regards to content. Especially when everything was up at the same time. 2 solos, 1 duo, 3 alerts, and 3 raids. It was very much like old DLCs, which we haven't seen in years.

I stopped here.

Thanks for posting this.

Open World

This is a great DCUO version of the National Mall area of Washington, DC. It's far from accurate (for instance, the White House IRL is just north of the Washington Monument) but it doesn't have to be accurate. The big issue with it is the lack of population you mentioned, this zone feels incredibly empty. This was a complaint made by many even when it was on Test and I find it quite disappointing that it wasn't addressed. Flashpoint felt far more alive, almost all of the street-level areas were crammed with enemies.

The issue with the limited daily/weekly tasks is a gripe I've had for many years. DLCs simply do not offer the room for deep, expansive questing so we end up getting stories told at a somewhat high level with the player feeling like they are just another faceless minion rather than feeling that their character actually matters (as opposed to the original 1-30 game which did an excellent job of making the player feel their character was making a difference). In content like Episode 29: Riddled With Crime, there was a rotation of dailies for each mission-giver, in Episode 36: Metal II we saw the same thing. This allowed for a feel of somewhat greater variety. Instead of moving towards more of that, we've returned to less of it.

I don't mind the bosses in the open world, but as higher "do them X times" feats are being assigned to them I would rather see them being small-group (or even soloable) as the issue invariably becomes "zerg them with everyone else during the first week or two of the DLC or struggle until you can overpower it a year or three from now".

With all that said though, I find the story is being told far better in this DLC than in at least the last few.

And now on to the queueable content.

Duo

To me the Duo does the best storytelling. It's not a terribly complex part of the story so it's kept pretty simple and direct.

The Duo itself is short, very short and suffers from the same empty feeling as the Open World. The art itself is fun (SpaceLex... lol) but I would like to see at least 2x the trash mobs (via increasing group size) in the open areas between boss fights and an increase in boss difficulty as you progressed. I like the mechanics of the first two fights (not too difficult to figure out) but the last fight (Lex) feels like a generic pew-pew fest.

Alert

I agree with B on this, I F-to-the-ING hate this instance but for me the only reason is the Batman Who Laughs fight near the end. He seems to have some mechanic that I have yet to figure out which causes him to suddenly take very little damage for the rest of the fight (or at least that's how it was last week). I was in a group which spent something like 15 minutes on one engagement of this fight. It felt like it had to do with the icon which would appear of his head when he made potions, but I can't be certain as there was no messaging as to what that icon means. I was tanking so I tried dragging him around to various points, hitting him with orbitals, etc but nothing seemed to work.

I like the Mixy fight at the very end, it's unique but I would rather see more variety in that (like a bunch of possible fights with random ones being chosen each run). The only irksome part of this is players not listening to his explanation of what to do and therefore either standing around (during the emote phase) or just running and clicking everything (during the dice/number phase). Failing a test once should have some sort of Mixy derision, both visual and audio, to engage the player.

From a story standpoint I did not get why Mixy turns on us. Some writing to include the players' entrance distracting Mixy then BWL thanking us for "helping" him before putting Mixy in a "soundproof cell" or Mixy ranting about how we only lured him there so BWL could trap him... things like that would have made that all make more sense.

Raid

The story itself was just okay, it could have used a bit more fleshing. We were led to believe this was going to be a massive raid, something larger and more complex than what we got in Origin Crisis. This wasn't even close.

Lois is a few waves of enemies then a pew-fest while avoiding orbitals (orbitals inside a building...). No real mechanics, but that's okay for a first fight if you are upping the ante in the following fights.

Superman is also not bad for a first fight, but it's a 2nd fight. There's no real mechanic other than hiding behind the pillars for his solar burst. Beyond that it's just pew-pew him and his adds.

Then we get to World Forger and he has actual mechanics! Woot! Block on his hammer drop, avoid the blue areas and something else (which I forget at the moment)... okay.

Then the Anti-Monitor and now we go into the blue spots but have to be wary for orbitals an the spots going bad. Not bad but World Forager seems to be the tougher fight with the most mechanics.

I think the most disappointing aspect of this was that we never fought the Legion of Doom in the raid. I was hoping for something along the lines of the final fight in Phoenix Cannon (Episode 36: Metal Part II) but instead we get them as individual open world bosses or as a boss in the Duo.

Hey man, thanks for trying! <3 I know I tend to write a lot.

Well written and agree on most points except the open world daily stuff. What I want from OW dailies past the first few days of 'newness', is something I can hit on multiple toons quickly, get a few marks and drops and get out. I wouldn't mind it if they mixed it up like WOL2/AF1/M1 where each task 'vendor' gives you one of a few different jobs to do, but honestly even if there were 6,9 or 12 jobs to select from, after a few days we know which ones are the ones we 'want' to do and its the ones we can get done the fastest and move along. There are really only so many variations of a daily task. Break, Pickup, save, escort, close, open, knockout.... That's about it. Dress them up however you want, but those are ALL the daily jobs in game...including South Gotham. Not sure how they'd have done something all that different other than add a few more variations on the 3 jobs.

And yeah, that Mxy fight in the alert is dumb. Like the cards in DM, once you can beat it, it's just a chore like washing dishes...and at worst its a headache only because 1 guy can purposely (or through stupidity) keep messing it up, making it a painful chore....like cleaning an outhouse in August.

I felt like the story line was meh. The finale felt very anti climatic but its only part 1 so I guess that’s intended lol.
I personally loved the return to a mechanics based dlc.
We got a couple really cool new mechanics this dlc and I’m stoked to see how they are implemented in the future.
The dead bodies on sinestro, the teleporters on MM, the toxin on BWL. Lots of new challenges that I appreciate.

I can’t really say I disagree with anything you wrote Bumble. I wonder if they had not hyped it as much if there would be the feeling of let down that there is?

I definitely agree with the daily missions, I wish they would do the randomized missions again, and make more content for dAily stuff in general. It takes only about 20m and you can complete all 3 bounties, Giganta, and your dailies.
Maybe I’m the minority but the dailies are my happy place lol, it’s where I don’t have to rely on anyone else, morning coffee and dailies. Just wish that part of my day lasted a little longer in this dlc lol.

The open world could have used some more details. Not even a gripe about reused trees and grass or whatever just more of people doing things lol. It’s suppose to be Washington DC but it looks like a small country towns population.

I know I tend to be a fanboy, I’m ok with that,. My honest opinion is the new mechanics outweigh the lackluster story so I’m happy in general, with a lot of room to improve.
Over all I’ll give the DLC a C+, with hopes of upgrading to a B or B- upon the release of future elite content.

Thanks for posting this bumble I always enjoy reading your point of view. There is no doubt about your love of the game or your ability to criticize and critique with a sharp eye and a lot of experience guiding your words.

Here’s to 3 more months of DC BB lol.

Also grandpa Superman being called DILF almost made me spit my coffee out lmAo

God, someone hasn't called me Bumble since Kristyana did back in the day. I miss him... You can call me B or BB. <3

I'm glad you found more enjoyment on the mechanics than I did. And who knows, if they didn't hype it like that or that it didn't follow STU, it might have been a bit better, but I feel that if you 1:1 compare it to FP, you would come up short on it. Especially since FP had 2 raids. I know a lot of people are attaching the new bugs to the DLC, but really they are separate and I wish to keep it that way. The bugs make it hard to play any content and a lot of it has to do with changes they were probably not ready to implement. (Like the artifact/ally powering up system, which is the biggest issue right now.)

It would have been nice just for once to get something totally new and fresh, I know the devs work really hard and do the best they can, but so much cut and paste allllllll the time getting really old,

The open world is so lacking compared to 31st open world, it's D.C. well manicured this was mentioned during testing, lack of adds or things to kill, it is just so lackluster in the open world.

Bat-Man who laughs had me laughing as to why why is he even in the alert? like how many more times will they reuse bosses. smh

We are also getting the Anniversary event soon which will have Anti-Monitor and he is in the New Raid, isn't there any other Bosses or New Boss instead of just over using the same bosses over and over and over...

Oh also I loved playing Simon says lmao. Again something new that was a nice change of pace lol. But that’s just me

And copy that, no problem B

They could have packed this thing out. Solomon Grundy. Bizarro. Scarecrow. Toy man. Riddler. Brainiac.

I think they’re worried about the character models looking good before they include them, but they aren’t going to get perfection. The last week is anything but.

But at the very least, we should have had an arena multi-boss fight with the Legion of Doom members they did include

I like having open world-content again, but it feels underwhelming overall. Just slapping more bounty feats onto the little we got doesn't magically give us "more".

Giving us one raid with the reasoning "it's a bigger one than usual" feels like a copout when you can average a 15 minute run in it. Excluding the Elite version, of course.

I assume they will add atleast another open world-bounty later on, but as it was released it feels like a few instances & missions are missing.

Agree with most of these. Everything felt pretty mediocre. But the raid felt....not good imo. As a returning player, I really do miss some of the big, epic-feeling raid content like FOS and Nexus/Dox. I know the team is probably a lot smaller now and works really hard on this content, but it’s been falling flat for me since Wonderverse. Even though the Wonderverse raid has a bunch of long hallways with little to no mechanics, the boss fights were pretty exceptional (especially in elite). Even the Metal DLCs got most of the bosses right. But the raid in this DLC feels like every boss (besides the last one maybe) is just copy-pasted from other parts of the game.

The Lois fight is crazy (boring)! You have to avoid orbitals that periodically appear at your feet. Wow! And the Superman fight? You fight statues of other iconic characters. Wow, that’s never been done before! Anyways, it feels very derivative and uninspired. Even the environment looks boring. Granted, I haven’t read the comics so idk if the devs were going for comic book accuracy, but really? The 6th dimension looks like an office building? Huh? Why is the room you spawn in the most interesting area to look at? Disappointed with this raid, especially considering that it was hyped to be like an older, long epic 4-boss instance.

The 6th dimension is where World Forger exists. It's where things are created and placed in each of the universes.

In the comics, they had Mxy help them reach the 6th dimension. 5th is where dreams and ideas exist and 6th is where things are created. When the Justice League went to it, it was a pretty place and a future utopia was made. World Forger wanted to imprint that onto the Prime Universe to overwrite it and prevent his mother from awakening. Which was happening thanks to the JL breaking the 4th wall where she was imprisoned and Lex became her acolyte of "Doom". They made the shape of the Hall of Doom be the symbol of Doom. (If you saw the tagging in Doom DC, it's that symbol.)

It wasn't explained well in the game, but they've done that before, which is why I chose to read the story.