Mission Objectives

As of Issue 6, the mission objectives are one or more of the following:

• Find crate/box/equipment

  

  Gotta find that study!

  These are easy if you have stealth powers. You just run around, find the Glowies and click on them. You can also hear the glowies from a decent distance away and with good speakers or headphones can tell its direction and distance very well with practice.

  Note that later missions are a lot trickier with their objectives. This particular example just says to find the study, but it also had several desks that needed to be protected.

• Destroy crates/boxes/equipment

  

  To complete this mission, I also have to destroy the altar

  You must find and destroy some in-animate thing(s). These are not the same as glowies because they don't glow and they don't make noise. You must actually target all crate-looking things and hope it's the one you want. If it is, you will see a life bar like any other enemy and you whack on it until it explodes or is otherwise destroyed. These can be a total pain to locate and enemies are usually stacked around the object making these missions not much faster than a "kill all".

• Protect crates/boxes/equipment

  

  Some guys hanging around a desk.
  

  Where are they going?Back to destroy that desk of course...

  You must find and save some in-animate thing(s) from destruction in some cases, the enemy is standing around the thing and won't attack it until you come close and in others, when you get near the thing, it will trigger waves of attacks from enemies who will head straight for the target unless you get their attention.

  This is a newer mission element and makes things more interesting, but is still a little buggy as of Issue 6. Sometimes the waves don't show up for a long time and you leave to see what you missed only to find that they snuck by you somehow and destroyed the thing anyway.

• Kill leader and crew

  

  Nuons are weak! Ha ha ha!

  You will go to a warehouse/cave/lab and have to find and destroy the leader and the people closest to him. The leader is usually in the furthest place from the entrance (highest floor, deepest cave, furthest room) and they will almost always talk when you get near them which causes his name to appear in your global chat box (which should match the name listed in the mission goal). Even if they don't talk (as they often don't in the later levels), you can point at each enemy with the mouse and it will show their name.

  Sometimes it just says "kill leader" in the mission goal and doesn't give you a special named enemy to look for (usually in later levels). You can try to guess which one it is or if you're lucky, they'll have a special (non-generic) name, but this will usually become a "Kill all" mission at this point.

  If you've killed the leader and the mission hasn't ended, first check to see if there was another mission task you hadn't completed yet then start clearing the mission from the location of the leader. Usually it's because you missed one of "his men" and as soon as you kill them, the mission will end.

• Rescue Hostages

  

  Rescue 3 generic NPCs

  You will be told how many hostages to find and they're pretty easy to spot by the behavior of the enemies standing in front of the hostage. There are always between two and three and they act in a "we have a hostage" kind of way. You will pick up on this very quickly.

  

  In this case, the hostages have names

  These can be good because you only have to rescue the hostages, but depending on the density of the enemies and the difficulty of finding some of those danged hostages, this kind will often become a "Kill all". This is because you will sometimes not be able to extract the hostages without attracting the other enemies or because there's a hostage hidden so well, that if you don't kill everything, you'll never be able to keep track of where you've been and where you haven't.

• Escort Hostages

  This is the same as a hostage mission except that once you save them, you have to actually lead them to the mission exit. This really sucks because you not only have to go all the way back to the beginning, but you get ambushed a few times on the way.

  There's no way to tell ahead of time if a rescue mission will require an escort or not. You just have to save them and see.

  The only good thing about escorting is that sometimes the NPC will help! For example, the fortuneteller mission used to be a simple rescue and is now an escort, but she uses powers to fight with you on the way. It makes the mission much more interesting than it used to be.

• "Kill (arrest) all" missions

  

  Mass destruction! Whee!

  These are the "if it moves, kill it" kind of mission and are about the most aggravating when you're trying to get through quickly for a mission bonus. If you're playing a Squishy character type, you may need the help to complete the mission at all.

  To make the most of it, form a quick team. You will be able to move quicker and get better experience by bringing along more people. This is particularly important if you're trying to get it done in a hurry. For example, if dinner is starting and you suddenly find that you took timed kill all mission, you better get some help if you want to finish it without drawing family Aggro

  Note that in "kill all" missions, most other mission tasks don't matter anymore. This is because if you kill everything, you'll have rescued everyone, found all glowies, defeated all "leaders", and protected or destroyed any objects.

• Simultaneous Action

  There are very few missions like this, but they require a certain number of team members to complete. The goal is to find the glowies, but you and your team have to touch them at the same time. The story is usually something like having to disarm two bombs at the same time or hacking into a computer system using three terminals at the same time.

Special Topics

Timed Missions

Time is running out... One hour and 9 minutes remaining.

Timed missions are a real pain because you can't walk away from them and finish later (which busy people with real lives might have to do now and then). They're really not a problem as long as you don't have to suddenly deal with a family issue (like the kid just wet their pants or the wife is burning the kitchen to the ground).

For example, there was one time I didn't realize I had a two part mission. At the end of the first one, a second timed mission began automaticaaly. I finished a different mission that had been waiting and checked for the next one and saw that I only had 8 minutes left to finish the second part of the first mission that I didn't know I had.

Oh, hell no!

Even then, because I had stealth powers, I was able to get to the mission and finish it in time. The challenge comes later when the time limits get smaller and the mission gets tougher. For example, in the figure here, you see wolves. Lots of them. As a defender, there's no way I can take that many alone.

As it was, only with the help of a higher level tank who worked really fast was I able to complete the mission (barely) in time.

I recommend avoiding timed missions whenever possible unless they're part of a story arc.

Also keep in mind that the timer runs from the time you accept the mission. If you discover you need to form a team, the time will keep running.

Train missions

To get to these missions, you go to any train in any zone and click on it like you were going to go to a different zone and your mission will be listed there. You will be taken to a small section of a normal city zone which is walled off with a blue force field where you will do your mission (which can have any combination of the objectives above).

This is hard as heck because a warehouse/lab/cave mission is very linear and well mapped, but in these missions, stuff is even harder to find. I've circled around for long periods of time trying to find that last Glowie or the the last enemy in a "kill all". These missions are easy to Sneak, but can take a really long time.

On the other hand, one advantage to a train mission is the lack of travel time. If you put together a team, they can go to the nearest train rather than come to your zone. When you've finished the mission, everyone goes back to the zone they came from which helps them resume where they left off if they don't want to stay with the team after completing the misison.

Police Band Missions

A police scanner is one of your contacts now.

To be able to do these, you need to get a Police Band Scanner. Once you have it, you can just listen to the scanner to get a mission. The missions are random, but you get to choose from three possible options (so you can skip those annoying rescue missions for example.

There's no story plot to these, but once you've done three or four in a zone, you'll get a Safeguard Mission mission. The best parts of this is that the missions are always in the same zone and you never have to run to a contact for them.