Hello fellow Defiance's, after having played Mission 9 (very easy with Jazz and Billie) and now having read Mission 10, which sounds ... doable, I came to the conclusion that my initial feeling about the background of Defiance was right: The reason why Mission 9 and Mission 10 are doable pretty well is ... there is no Cuervo Goldstein in this missions. Noone who is sending us on any suicide missions where the Shasvastii are already warned (who may have warned them? Does it starts with a "C" and end with an "uervo"?). Who made us take Victor and Aida on our missions? Cuervo. And what were they? Traitors. Who was the most annoying NPC? I am completely sure that Cuervo Goldstein is a Shasvastii Traitor. And our Team is going to fulfill this Mission only for one purpose: To come back to the Human Sphere and put to an end to Cuervo...
Waaait a minute, so you are saying that after everyone gets back into human space and put into prison Cuervo arranges a prison break via mercenaries (plausable denial!) to free speculo agents and kill whoever is left from original Defiance crew? That way he had his own agenda in this whole mission - send highly expierienced officers from all nations through the hole so they could be abducted and replaced. Oh, gawd - It means bittersweet victory ending is canon! Man... That makes a dumb Outcast plot twist not that dumb at all. Wow. Everything makes sense if we played bad guys all along!
For our own playthrough I somewhat fixed the bug with ending the mission during Round 1 Activation 1 with Jazz and Billie, so we had quite enjoyable 4-5 Rounds there. After that, 10 is indeed more or less easy, but then mission 11 is brutal, our team barely made it.
Personnaly I rewrote the mission lore and background to replace Cuervo with an anonimous 'Control' agent who follows 'procedure' and players have some choices in terms of trap to fall into
