Broodmother on varying difficulties, tactics to take it on.

[Colin]

greetings all, was wondering if i could get some experienced peoples knowledge on the broodmother fight. me and my tribe are looking forward to takeing her on, but we are unsure what difficulty to dip our toes into. we are gona be brining pleanty of weapons and ammo, as well as the full 20 dinos. but so far the only effective strat i see from other players on the web is Trex spam. and thats just no fun.

instead my tribe are gona be brining our own mounts to give us some tankablity in the fight, that also let us use our weapons whilst riding them, and have a front line of high HP anklyos with a backline of something hard hitting, whilst we all fire at her from a range.

even tho broodmother is highly reguarded as one of the easiest bosses, im just looking for some assurance that im not leading the tribe into assured death. we plan to take her on normal before we go to hard, but should we go to easy instead? honestly i duno how vastly different she is from difficulty to difficulty.

[devilkingx2]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Ledonev:

Last night, we attempted Hard Broodmother. Within 30 seconds, 2 rexes were dead. Another two minutes in, they began dropping like flies. 5 minutes into the fight, the pack was wiped. 3 weeks of breeding and ascendant saddles all lost. We had maybe put a 15% dent into her health.

So, I'm not sure what some people are doing (or smoking) but Broodmother on Hard is damned near impossible. When people are claiming they can take 15-20k animals in with ~500% melee... something is amiss. Also, Brood and Mega are consistently level 124 and spawning level 400 minions, not the 320s people keep mentioning.

With Brood being this crazy, I don't even want to think about the Dragon. So I'm guessing that Tek is only meant for the top 1% of the Ark population.

the hard broodmother has like 3x as much HP as the normal brood mother, meaning you need to do 3x as much damage.

the dragon's breath on hard does 20% hp damage per hit, so its breath can kill anything in 5 hits.

also the level of the bosses and their minions depends on server settings

but yeah, you're right, tek tier is meant for the 1%ers

it sounds like your rexes need way more health, get like twice as much health and try not to sacrifice too much damage

[Ledonev]

Well. We tried to do the math based on formulas available on the wiki/elsewhere to calculate what kind of mitigation the saddles would yield at 140 armor. Best as we can tell its in the 60% or maybe more range as the curve diminishes.

I'm not really sure what happened in that fight. It's just disappointing to sink that kind of time into the breeding pool from the valentine's bonus event only to turn around and dump them all on a fight that seems to be broken.

I'm guessing we'll be playing a game of semantics by even suggesting this... but whether you call it boss fight mechanics and strategy or "glitching" -- I'm just going to call it bad game design.

When a boss fight seems to be prohibitively challenging such as we (and others) have experienced, figure out a different way to do it. Blizzard figured out all sorts of creative ways to make boss encounters nauseatingly cumbersome but it somehow kept it interesting -- all without making a boss that hits like a life-ending asteroid collision or has the durability of a diamond.

I appreciate the input and suggestions. Elsewhere I read that people put upwards of 37,000 rounds from AR fire into a hard Brood to down her. Does that seem a bit excessive to anyone else?

And just a thought... when we're breeding rexes that are starting off in the mid-250s and leveling them before even entering an arena. How might one logistically get bred dinos to a 60k+ level? Random mutation? I say that because most are rolling at around 15-18k at birth. With affinity, maybe pushing up to low 20's. If I roll everything into hp, I have no damage... so same results?

[Fate (-{SoH}-)]

Personaly i'd prefer if each boss had 2 varations,

a low hp one you dont use dinos on that has interesting abilitys,

A high hp one that requires dinos but again afew abilitys no % damage, no insane damage ect.

Would be interesting if bosses were infact unique and interesting not just super hp/damage.

[devilkingx2]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Ledonev:

And just a thought... when we're breeding rexes that are starting off in the mid-250s and leveling them before even entering an arena. How might one logistically get bred dinos to a 60k+ level? Random mutation? I say that because most are rolling at around 15-18k at birth. With affinity, maybe pushing up to low 20's. If I roll everything into hp, I have no damage... so same results?

catch every 140+ rex you run into in the wild

keep only the males with the highest base damage and HP (unless it has some other useful stat really high like stamina)

keep all females

breed as many rexes as you have females

when they're grown, only breed the rexes with particularly high HP or damage (or any other useful stat), get rid of the rest.

repeat over and over until eventually you're getting rexes born at like level 300 with crazy HP and damage and you can't possibly breed any better stats because you can't find any rexes with better stats to breed into the pool.

this whole process will probably take like a week if you play a lot.

now use a set of uber rexes with super high HP and damage to take on the world (imprint them too!)

[Hobgoblino the III]

or if your on officail trade fo rthem thats how we got our sick rexs

[Isho]

We did Hard brood with just 10 rexes. All of them were bred with around 10k HP and over 500% Damage except two which were tamed. The key is to get your rexes spread out immediately and then clip inside the Brood so it doesnt attack. We managed to get it stuck after losing 2 rexes and killed it with just 1 minute and 46 seconds left.

[⠀]

Hard bm (official) with 2 ppl:

Prerequesites:
- 18x 400+ base dmg (at hatch time) rex, leveled 50 times in dmg, no level in hp
- 2x 11000+ base HP rex, leveled 50 times in HP, no lvl in dmg
- at least 2 players (the more riders the better)
- 5 of the 18 rex are on a different whistle groups than the 13 others
- all rex are on PASSIVE

Strategy:
1.) The 2 players take seat on the 2 high HP rex
2.) summon BM
3.) the riders run immediately to the bm and try to lock it by running into her body (this can take some time, thats why we do that with extreme hp rex)
4.) as soon as the bm is stucked you select the 13 rex via whistle group selection and make them attacking the bm and DO NOT MOVE YOU RIDDEN REX (attacking is okay tho, i would press k and let my macro do the work while hands off my desk)
5.) you win

Hints:
- The golden moment is when you teleport into the Arena, since you only have sth. arround 30 to 60 seconds before the bm starts moving towards you, you want to mount the right rex REALLY quick.
A way to archieve a quick mounted rex is to unmount, then select ALL your rex via whistle group selection amd then turn arround 180° so you stare at the wall in the opposite side of the bm spawn point, then you whistle "all move there" and the rex will run away and at the same time archieve 2 things for you:
a) you have more time to get ready since you are farer away from the bm
b) you unbulk your rex so its ez to find the 2 right ones you want to mount

- The 5 other rex with high dmg are fallbacks, if the bm somehow gets free and starts hitting you and the glass-cannon rex, those rex will be history really quick, 5 rex is enough backup to not be screwed if this happens (it shouldnt kill ALL main rex tho)

- advice for breeding, dont imprint the rex to 100%, its not neccessary and you have a very high risk of losing them all, just mass produce them on a daily base (i recommend 10 new rex per day hatched until you have arround 250 of them, whatever fits your needs of having backup), there are also multiple bugs (i reported all of them ages ago directly via mail to jat) that enable you to only having to feed all babies only once per day (to be on the safe side, i already skipped 2 days on several rex babies), i wont post it here, but its really easy to find it, if you use that even 1000 rex are no problem

- advice for leveling the rex, dont level them manually, wait for a titano spawn, transfer as many as you can ride near the titano, kill the titano with a lightning wyvern and enjoy those 40k exp per ridden rex
if you dont have many riders tho, its recommended to hunt deathworms on scorched earth

[oldkane]

How about all Allosaur attack on the brood, or mostly Allosaurs and a few Rex? The 5% blood drain should work well from them if in pack mode.

[DarthaNyan]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von oldkane:

How about all Allosaur attack on the brood, or mostly Allosaurs and a few Rex? The 5% blood drain should work well from them if in pack mode.

Bleed doesnt work on bosses. Would be too strong.

[Ledonev]

To the allosaur thought, our first attempt at Brood on easy, we were cocky and took in a half dozen 120+ tamed rexes and 5 of our best allos. Complete wipe. Didn't help that we didn't know what we were doing.

Really appreciate devilking, samurai, taco, banaan for sharing your insights. Good thread.

I'm probably overthinking this one... but doesn't it seem kind of silly to be "defeating" a boss by glitching it somehow?

I might be wrong, but I don't think the dev(s) responsible for brood encounter were thinking to themselves "the only way people will win this encounter is if they use our ancient UE4 engine against us!"

[Hobgoblino the III]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von ibnbassem:

Try grappling to roof, and using good assault rifles?

no grapples in arena and theirs places bosses cant reach you so you dont need them anyways.

[⠀]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Ledonev:

I'm probably overthinking this one... but doesn't it seem kind of silly to be "defeating" a boss by glitching it somehow?

Try it with 10ppl and 20 tames of your choice in a legit way. You cant kill it legit, thats a fact.
You COULD beat it if they would nerf its HP into the ground, because thats the main reason you will fail the most time, we lost about 80 rex due to not being able to kill it in time because crap happened, like ppl didnt made it into the arena, rex/ppl died etc.

(fyi i have a private server set up ONLY for training boss fight strategies (with official server settings ofc) with several frozen world states each with different boss strategy preparations (dinos, ammo, weapons) where we meet to practice all the hard bosses if we have to, we practice, if we fail, i stop the server, delete the current save, copy the frozen one, restart the server and we repeat the attempt, if we beat a boss and are able to reproduce the strategy, we do it on official servers)

[Natjur]

If you have one rex with rider glitch into the brood mother so she can't do her big attack, its easy. But the boss can't be designed to be kill this way.

It seems stupid if a boss fight is designed that the only real way to bet her on hard is to glitch her. Its also like that with the other 2 bosses. Easy once you know how to glitch them.

[VoreX]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Ledonev:

To the allosaur thought, our first attempt at Brood on easy, we were cocky and took in a half dozen 120+ tamed rexes and 5 of our best allos. Complete wipe

if you want to use allos i have done easy many times with 20 bred allos. 11-12k hp, 500-600 melee, 100 armor asc saddles.
this is by no means the easiest way to do it but it works very well.

[devilkingx2]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von DarthaNyan:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von oldkane:

How about all Allosaur attack on the brood, or mostly Allosaurs and a few Rex? The 5% blood drain should work well from them if in pack mode.

Bleed doesnt work on bosses. Would be too strong.

it's not that it would be too strong, it's that the ark devs kind of suck at balance and game design, there's not really a reason that the only thing to do against a boss is rex spam other than that the ark devs made certain everything else was useless.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Ledonev:

I'm probably overthinking this one... but doesn't it seem kind of silly to be "defeating" a boss by glitching it somehow?

I might be wrong, but I don't think the dev(s) responsible for brood encounter were thinking to themselves "the only way people will win this encounter is if they use our ancient UE4 engine against us!"

one of the devs stated on the forums in some random thread that they had tested all bosses on all difficulties and they're possible with only 10 (or did they say 15) dinos

note, they didn't say how many people they brought, or what weapons, or what dinos or what stats, etc. we're just supposed to take their word for it with no useful details.

so apparently there's some secret strategy the devs know that none of the players do.