Damn, where to begin...
I guess the lesser cool pack,
the Joe Pack:
I'm perfectly fine with Mercer. He's a decent enough update. The 3 "repeat" Joes (BBQ, Spirit and Low-Light) will all be getting turned into fodder, to some extent or another. Not that they look bad, they just don't have much charm to them. I definitely won't be leaving a single one of them as-is, that's for damned sure. And I don't much care about Red Dog or Taurus, but they'll definitely be getting new heads when the SDS order arrives that I ordered a few weeks ago. Not that the current ones are bad... They're actually really great sculpts. They just don't fit the characters. If I cared enough about Taurus, I'd give him Red Dog's legs and find better ones for Red Dog... I just don't care about either of them that much. I will probably give Red Dog that bigass harness from ROC HD, though. Not sure, but he does need some webgear to make him at least look like a geared-up mercenary, and not some dipshit with yet another sports Jersey on. I'll maybe revisit those two later.
Falcon? Ugh, no idea what I'm doing with him, but chances are I'll retain only the head, beret (repainted), scarf (repainted) and maybe the lower arms. He now needs a body, and I don't wanna use the previous Falcon torso and legs. Chances are, the gear and webgear are the only things I'll use from the previous figure. But I want to try a second stab at a decent ARAH figure Falcon, since my previous efforts were to go with a
Sunbow deco.
The Dreadnoks:
Road Pig is pretty awesome, considering the amount of new tooling he got. All I'm giving him is a proper arm-mounted arrow and maybe that blocker pad. I may revisit his legs later, but I'm pretty happy with the build that Hasbro chose for him. Thrasher is my second favorite, despite initial misgivings about him. I did add a Copperhead belt to cover that goofy sash that 2/3 of this set seems to rock, and that immediately improved him. I may swap out the legs for more ARAH-accurate ones, and the lower left arm for Mutt's bigass arm guard, but you know what? He is a good update. Same with Gnawgahyde. He was an improvement all around, if you ask me. He looks like someone you wouldn't want to fuck with, and that's awesome. He does need the boar though, so I'll either be sculpting my own, or looking for one online. I definitely won't be using that awful ARAH one though, because it looks like melted ass. Zanzibar, I expect to just start from scratch on my own eventually. I ordered a kit from SDS, so we'll see. I don't really care enough about him right now to bother fixing the Hasbro one, but he's an okay stand-in. Zanzibar may be the worst ARAH character from the set, but I was more pissed about another one (wait for it...).
As for Burn-Out and Zanya, I would trade both of them for half a Monkeywrench. I'm not even kidding. They don't exactly look bad... In fact, for total repaints (minus the new heads) they're quite good kitbashes... I just don't give a rat's ass about either character. I'll be keeping them, and I may add Storm Rider to my Nok ranks now just to have 3 newbies, but they're back-shelfers at best.
Now, to the final "must-have" of the set, besides Road Pig and Thrasher.... Zandar.
Zandar is fucking awful. I was most excited about him, I think. And severely let down. Of all the Dreadnoks missing, I would say that Zandar, then Thrasher were the most missed, followed by Road Pig. Zandar, especially, because we now have Zarana. Personally, I wish they'd just waited for SDCC to give us a proper Zandar with new parts, but he just doesn't have the pull of Zarana for an exclusive of that scale. So we're stuck with the Dreadnok set. And he could have been much better, if it wasn't for that godawful torso they picked, those hideous Viper lower legs, and that ridiculously oversized sash. If I were to nitpick, I'd have given him new lower arms, too (Xamot/Tomax lowers) but he has far bigger issues to worry about than that.
The only good things about him? The head is a great sculpt, although I by far prefer my SDS head sculpt that Krexx did. In fact, I like that sculpt so much, that I'm not going to hack apart my custom Zandar to salvage parts. The webgear harness is also great. The upper legs are fine, although not as big as they should be, considering that they're old 25th Shipwreck legs. The upper arms are also great, and to an extent, the lower arms. They make sense though, since he needed Zartan's arms to be accurate, so this was more or less a no-brainer, and I wouldn't award Hasbro any points for that, really.
What is awful about him? I figured since they went with a muted color palette for SDCC Zarana, that they'd have toned it down for Zandar (you know, so they'd match?). The colors on him are awful. Besides his head and pants color, the two colors that stand out are the neon pink and blue, which are both just too much. I would've desaturated both colors, but unfortunately we got ARAH-accurate for the most part. Which wouldn't be bad, if they'd done that with Zarana. But they didn't, so they don't match and Zandar looks like a clown. Especially since that scarf is
so fucking gigantic. What irritates the shit out of me, is that they could have reused the
mold from the "battle damaged" Arctic battle Storm Shadow from ROC... Although they didn't, and the new head won't work with that without modification, unfortunately. So instead, we get the gigantic scarf that, for what I can tell, is a new sculpt. WHY IS IT SO DAMN BIG?!? It just throws the figure off. I could even live with everything listed so far, but the worst part is the lower legs. Not only are the Viper legs from ROC awful aesthetically paired with the upper legs that they chose (the knees gap like crazy, and the legs bow outward, which isn't a packaging error so much as a bad mold... All my ROC Vipers that I ended up being stuck with had bowed legs) but the knees themselves don't actually ratchet properly. With the construction they used, the knees are double-jointed and I can't get him to stand properly without his knees being all wonky. Altogether, Zandar is perhaps the worst character from the set, considering the amount of new tooling he got, and his "importance" to the rest of the line. I was severely disappointed.