Danger Zone Anniversary Mission

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by NameAlreadyInUse, Mar 17, 2019.

  1. NameAlreadyInUse #CactusGate

    Spoilers.

    These are my notes from my attempts to solo the bugged final mission. Knowing some of these mechanics might save your group a lot of frustration when the grouping bug is fixed.

    Known bug: Only one player may do this group mission. No mercs.

    Event breakdown: Start event by attacking boss. Boss flies away and adds spawn. Kill adds to loot scrap. Hand in scrap to repair guys to fix ballistae (there are four). Ballistae are supposedly used to make the boss targetable (I never got this far).

    There is a ground AE that you must avoid. There is also a toon-targeted AE which I was able to ignore. Presumably, this AE would hurt any group members standing close (run away from group?).

    Features I witnessed (may or may not be bugs):
    • Two adds initially spawn after starting , but continue to spawn throughout the event.
    • The scrap dropped by the adds (different quality for different adds) is Temporary AND No Zone. If you loot scrap and can't get a rez in zone, the scrap is lost.
    • A partially repaired ballista will reset (completely break down again). Unsure of when this happens - I found no emotes or log messages.
    • The adds do NOT reset. I had up to 9 up at a time.
    • The adds appear to be agro-linked.
    • Some adds were immune to snare.
    • If you are not standing in the right spot (main platform?), you will be one-rounded by Deadly Restraints (~500k/second).
    • Deadly Restraints makes kiting or trying to separate the mobs seemingly impossible.
    I managed to burn and kill up to two adds before my discs gave out (got a third down to 8% once). Leaving the scrap in the loot window until you have enough to hand in seems wise. But with 20 minutes between burns, it's a real challenge to collect enough to repair a single ballistae.

    It will be interesting to see how a full group handles this. More DPS might actually trivialize it (if you can keep all the adds dead so you never get more than 2-3). If the adds are mezzable they would be easily managed. Boxing the "run away" emote in such a small area will be fun.

    Based on the odd resetting behavior (mobs don't reset, but ballistae do), I'm not sure why a real group would not drop and restart the mission after any failure, especially given the /ach requirements.

    I am curious to see if the boss is HP locked and requires the use of all 4 ballistae.

    What have you found?
  2. Morthakia Augur

    Great write-up! I also attempted to solo the mission but couldn’t keep up. A couple observations in regards to your comments:
    - A partially repaired ballista gets destroyed by one of the add types if the add type isn’t killed quickly enough. There is an emote.
    - The quality of the scrap dictates how much of the ballista is repaired. So while it will take many pieces of low quality scrap to repair the ballista, it will take much fewer exceptional quality scrap. The quality of the scrap is in its title.
    - Adds appear to be time based. Soloing on an SK I fell behind, but I could definitely kill a single add before the next set of two appeared.
    NameAlreadyInUse likes this.
  3. Derresh Augur

    Soloed it as a berserker, event doesnt reset (but his hp will regen if ooc), you can just farm scrap and fade wait for discs repeat until you got enough scrap to repair 1-2 ballista, once your discs are up again and you have ballista repaired just say fire and burn boss, repeat as he begins to fly up again.

    His hp is locked at 70 at engage but once you shoot him down once i believe it is fully unlocked. Does not require all 4 ballista, I only used 1
    NameAlreadyInUse likes this.
  4. NameAlreadyInUse #CactusGate

    Congratulations! I was talking to monk who also got very close. It definitely seems like soloing this event is all about big DPS - I think you melee DPS have the edge here. As an SK (and fairly good DPS for an SK), I just couldn't kill them fast enough to stay ahead of the spawns. With full discs, I could still kill a couple even when 8-9 were beating on me, but just couldn't kill 2 before the next ones spawned.

    It sounds like, if you can kill two and then fade before the next wave spawns, you're good to go?
  5. Drogba Augur


    yeah.

    You can actually burn the adds, fade and wait for discs to pop back up if necessary.

    I did it with 3 ballista repaired and zero adds up when i decided to tackle the boss. (though a couple of waves spawned during the fight). 2 of my ballista's were destroyed during the boss fight, but the 3rd one lasted til the end (So I'd recommend going in with 4 to be safe). There is one mob type which destroys ballista's, i decided to divert my attention from the boss burn to kill that add type at one point, for fear of losing all of my ballista.

    As the boss' HP got lower, he started staying down for longer periods. At around 20% he stayed down the entire time, that may have also been when the add waves stopped spawning.

    At 3% the boss hp locks until you finish off the remaining adds.

    I made a hotkey to make life a bit easier on getting catapults to re-fire.

    line 1: /tar a_gnome
    line 2: /say fire

    Can spam hit that a few seconds after the boss flies away, while standing in a quadrant nearest to an npc that has a working ballista.
  6. Drogba Augur

    For anyone wondering if they/their class is capable of this mission:

    I recommend zoning in, and try burning down the first 2 adds and then fade.

    If you managed to do it before the next add wave, you're in with a chance.

    The hard part was working out what to do, trial/error. I'd imagine a number of classes can beat this one if they give it a real go.


    More notes:

    * Some ballista's took 4 pieces to repair, some 5 (or could be that different pieces have higher values than others).
    * You may have to bring the boss down 10+ times depending on your class/how the fight goes, which means more add waves, so be ready for that.
    NameAlreadyInUse likes this.
  7. Daedly Augur

    I don't get it, is the 1 person limit a bug or design?
  8. Tucoh Augur

    Bug. They're working on a fix.
  9. Tour Augur

    Design. It is a novel one person mission where if you are of the right high DPS class you can complete the mission, but if you're not then you can't do the mission. I see from your sig you have a zerker or sk you could use, so you should be fine. Your clr is screwed though.

    (yes, it is a bug)
  10. Morthakia Augur

    If you fade or feign death, do the adds pause their continuous spawning? I attempted to solo the mission and got the boss down to about 65% without fading. I can BARELY perpetually keep 2 adds down and need mortal coil to keep procing in order to stay alive, but diverting my attention towards the boss does me in eventually.
  11. Drogba Augur

    When you don't have any aggro, the add waves stop spawning. When you re-aggro, they start spawning again.
  12. Morthakia Augur

    This was a critical piece of info! Thanks Drogba. Probably why I was struggling to solo it. Killed more than a dozen adds going through discs / glyphs / clickies but couldn’t seem to get the time to burn the boss. Going to attempt once again tonight!
  13. NameAlreadyInUse #CactusGate

    When I ran the mission today, I noticed a few things:
    • Of the four ballistae that I repaired, 3 of them exploded literally immediately after being fixed, before being able to fire them.
    • The one ballista I was able to fire brought the boss down for less than one second. He floated down to the center and immediately flew away again. I think he took 2% damage, but he was literally in the middle for less than a second.
    • After an evac, I was unable to restart the mission. I could not attack the boss to spawn any more adds and had to drop.
    • After falling off the platform, I did not take any AE/insta-death damage. I was able to run back up to the platform and continue the mission.
    I was tired of grinding the trash mobs and watching my efforts wasted on the ballistae and boss, so I just left. It seems like it's still unfinished/broken, but I'd like to hear other folks' experiences. Otherwise, I'll just wait another month for the next patch.
  14. Morthakia Augur

    NameAlreadyInUse, I concur with a few of your observations. Some thoughts:

    - One of the adds (I forget the precise name) basically blows up your repaired ballistae. You need to kill it quickly. If 3 of your 4 were blown up quickly, it may have been you had this mob spawned or multiple of them spawned. Either way, that’s rough.
    - There seems to be a pretty meaningful (10 second) delay between saying “fire” and the boss appearing in the center. I’m wondering if the script was intended to keep the boss on the ground for ~15 seconds if only 1 Ballista is fired, but the delay is reducing this to just a few seconds. Either way, I would hope that they’d increase the duration on the ground with a single ballista. It is ridiculously short.
  15. Tackleberry New Member

    Combatbots are the ones that destroy the ballistae