Tell us your favourite story mission in a 82,600 word essay… or you could just, you know, use the poll below.
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Have fun!
The heliophage is one of my all time favorites if i have a good team lots of stuff to shoot 
The Sentinel. Long raid, beautiful and diverse terrain, tough enemies and long battles, environmental hazards, and of course three bosses with great loot pools.
Edit: Was 82,000 words the minimum or maximum for the essay?
Um… The minimum I believe…
It is the minimum. If you’re looking to get an A+, I recommend hitting somewhere around 100,000. Don’t forget to spell-check.
The Prologue ?
I knew I forgot something. I’ll try and get it added.
The Algorithm had the best dungeon/instance flow to it. Felt like a 5 man dungeon or mini raid. Very well narrated, good number of bosses and “events” to pass.
The Voids Edge - Not quote as good as the Algorithm IMO but not far behind at all. Also it has mainly the same plus points. The bit where you have to send 2 team mates “up” via the pads to open the shard gate whilst 3 stay “down” to defend is also a nice inclusion.
The Heliophage - Like the fact that it has a timer and that on normal mode you can split into a 3 and 2 and take a side each for speed running. LOVE the relentless boss fights and the fact you fight 2 bosses at a time on Advanced mode. A good challenge and always fun to run.
The Sentinel - Again has a good dungeon/RAID feel to it. Love the traps and progress through the instance. Only downside is the 2 mini bosses are the same and just min versions of the final boss. The mini bosses should be more unique and have their own mechanics.
I guess the more like a WoW 5 Man Heroic the instances are, the more I like them! 
I only chose the essay because I wanted to explain that I’m the most excited for Attikus’ new DLC mission. It’s supposed to cover the Thrall Rebellion(s) against the Imperium.
I didn’t answer because I’m not sure I have a favorite. I like (and dislike) each mission for different reasons.
Algorithm: ISIC’s dialogue is amazing and the progress through Fort Ocoban has a nice cinematic feel to it. However, Ronin are the devil’s children and the final phase of the ISIC fight is a bitch and a half if you’re melee (ran it yesterday with a friend of mine; he played Boldur and I played Kelvin; we spent like 5 minutes jousting with ISIC’s head as he repeatedly juggled one of us and constantly kept out of melee range otherwise).
Void’s Edge: There’s a Wolf Sentry in this one. Automatic win. But the mission feels like it’s missing something, and I’m not sure what. It’s lacking that je ne sais quoi.
Renegade: So much stuff to kill and fun to fight but doesn’t really have the level of awesome dialogue that I come to expect from Gearbox (and is present in all of the other mission; they can’t all be amazing).
Archive: Wolf Sentry means awesome. Difficulty is right on target, but it’s stingy with loot (only one boss and just a few 6 chests). Just like Void’s Edge, there’s something missing to really push it over the top.
Sentinel: I have run this an almost insane number of times so it has kind of gotten old to me. On the plus side, the chests are all in predictable places and it’s got some of the best legendaries so it’s a great dungeon for gear. On the negative side, the dialogue/story is kinda boring (at least, for me, now it is; I remember enjoying the story back when I hadn’t run it into oblivion because of Nova’s monotone reading of the Sentinel’s messages) and those damned golems are the most annoying enemies in game (they’re immune to crits, including the bosses; have copious amounts of knockback so it sucks to be melee; they can only be hit from the front in the center of their chest but love to run at an angle so you can’t get to their chest unless you stun them).
Experiment: The dialogue is superb, but the difficulty is annoyingly high, not because of the enemies (though it does spawn Ronin /shakefist) since you have to guard the same location multiple times and it never gets healed (unlike Archive, where the Librarian gets healed during the minion phase). It’s also light on gear, in my experience (2 bosses and I can only ever find 1-2 6 chests), though it does have some nice drops from those bosses.
Saboteur: A lot like Experiment, the dialogue is amazing, but the mechanics of play make it less fun than it could be. It also feels light on loot.
Heliophage: On normal, it’s a nice stroll through Tempest and the Void, smashing Thralls and Varelsi. The call backs to the previous content in the Void are fun, but it is woefully lacking on gear since Rendain is the only boss that drops gear and there aren only 2-3 6 chests. On advanced, it is a meat grinder of epic proportions; fighting 2 bosses simultaneously 3 times is rough, especially when there are massive elite Thrall spawns at multiple intervals throughout the fight. On advanced, when you beat it, you definitely feel like you earned it and, since it’s the “final” mission of the game, the difficulty is appropriate, imo.
If I had to choose a favorite, I’d probably pick Archive. It doesn’t achieve the same highs as other missions, but it definitely avoids any of the lows (associated with fun, that is; lack of loot means I don’t run it as often).
But… I’m not a vapid person who believes everything can be summed up by a poll. To the contrary, not being disingenuous requires one to often be verboxe. So I’ll take you up on that essay! I like being honest!
For me, it comes down to two missions. The Algorithm (initially) and The Experiment. The writing, design, and flow of The Algorithm is great, but the difficulty scaling and the explosive resistance on Geoff do much to sour me to it. I don’t want minibosses appearing at the very start of the mission (is it normal that henchmen can pop out of the spawners at the start?).
So whilst I like The Algorithm, it isn’t my favourite. It was sublime for a while, there, but it just got tiresome.
My current favourite is The Experiment, it keeps things simple and it’s fun to play. It feels like an old video game, it just concentrates on being fun and having fun. Boldur is a great help with that because he’s very silly and that just adds to the feeling of it. Plus, the aesthetics of Ekkunar are quite, quite beautiful. I love to stop and look around at all the great things they have going on there.
The giant shard crash zones, the huge robot, the ruins, that little underground grotto, and so many other neat places. It feels like it was designed with love, someone cared about it. A lot. I get that vibe from it and it allows me to enjoy it all the more.
Plus, it doesn’t have the wretched difficulty scaling (yet?) that ruined The Algorithm for me.
A close second would be The Sentinel. I’ve always been a fan of traps and puzzles in games. I even like first person platforming (I know, I’m a philistine). I loved that way back when I was playing Quake and Quake actually had those thumper things that knock you off platforms. That’s great. I really enjoyed the traps and stuff.
I think they could have pushed the traps further and had more fun with them, but what’s there is already really great. It adds a tension and a sense of fun. I really do think they missed an opportunity with The Sentinel though by not having a rolling boulder section.
I mean, really, gosh Gearbox. It’s the quintessential Indiana Jones level and no rolling boulder?
I like all the levels to varying degrees. It’s funny because the difficulty scaling of The Algorithm means I barely play it any more. It’s just too punishing to be fun. That doesn’t mean I don’t have fond, fond memories of when I did enjoy it, though.
There’s a lot of promise in Battleborn’s PvE. I hope Gearbox will take the time to really unlock it.
Algorithm and Sentinel are the most fun to play, imo. I can play both repeatedly and not get bored like I would with the others.
My personal favorite is the algorithm just because of the dialogue. Whenever ISIC and ARACHNIS interact, its hilarious.
The Experiment has Boldur. Case closed. Wake me when there is another mission with Boldur, then i’ll have to choose.
That is my 2nd favorite due to boldur
I chose Algorithm and the Sentinel.
I would have maybe chosen Saboteur, if it wasn’t so damned hard to beat.
Algorithm and Renegade. Mainly for the dialogue though… I made a promise to myself never to play another char than Phoebe when playing the Renegade. XD
I heard my first unique dialogue with Phoebe on The Renegade the other day and it was really funny. Does she say different stuff each play?
She has like… 4 different unique dialogues there I think?
One when you just start. She says something instead of jailor helix. (It’s about Caldy’s assault frame)
One when you protect the first generator and all the green swarmers spawn. (Damn you, science…)
One when Deande and Ghalt are talking about how Caldarius hunts high Jenerit people, and that Deande may be next. (And everything will be forgotten, right?)
And one in the final defense thingy, the 2nd wave or something? (In which the subtitles have the word ‘fella’ in them, but as far as I know, Phoebe never says that word…)
And all of this dialogue is amazing.
The Sentinel is my favorite to play but The Saboteur is the one I find most entertaining dialogue wise. Nova just amuses the hell out of me. 