datamined info for the Safi siege

[Juliane_L]

before reading, please remenber that i'm NOT the one who dicovered this information, i'm only reposting something posted by jeof96, a Gamefaqs user. original link:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/211368-monster-hunter-world/78515400

HP and Self Healing

Safi'jiiva is a weird monster even compared to Kulve: instead of having a fixed HP that you have to bring down to get the kill, he heals himself repeatedly throughout the fight with the energy drains and can only be actually killed when he has no energy left to heal.

Safi has a total of 40k HP. Every time he drains energy from the ground he heals 35% of his total HP. There are two exceptions to this: 1. in A1, he will always heal to full no matter what; 2. in A3, if he reaches a critical amount of HP he can pull out an emergency "super heal" of 70% (the conditions to trigger this are still unknown, but it seems to be tied to having too much energy left in the area). He will also heal 15% at the beginning of A2 and A3.

Safi will also heal all of his parts every time he drains. Specifically, it will heal the flinch values of the parts by 50% and NOT the total HP or break value (unless a part has only 1 flinch like the back).

For instance, the head has a flinch value of 2625, but you need to flinch it 5 times before the first actual head break; in this case, Safi will only heal a maximum of 1312 HP on the head on a drain.

It's very important for this reason that players are focusing the same parts together: not hitting a flinch threshold before a heal means setting yourself back by a lot (especially the chest - if you don't hit its flinch value before a drain he will heal back a whopping 1750). However, when you hit a flinch threshold he will never be able to heal that chunk back, so not all work is wasted.

Tail and Chest

Tail flinch value will heal with energy drains, but the tail sever value will NOT. In other words, cutting work is never lost even if you stop hitting it through several energy drains.
Chest hitzone does not exist AT ALL if Safi is not in supercritical state (you would hit the "abdomen" instead). Stop trying to hit it if he's not glowing white!

Area Drains and Transitions

This is the most mysterious part of the siege yet. What follows is highly hypothetical, though we will run more tests to confirm it later today we already did some runs to verify a couple more things.
All 3 levels of the map have separate energy bars. Safi himself has his own energy meter - you can consider it as his own "stamina" in a sense. All 4 bars start at 10k at the beginning of a fresh siege.
Safi's transitions from an area to another ONLY when he fully drains the energy from a certain level (which is different than the energy levels that are shown in the menu). You will know that because the handler gives you a notification that the energy of that level has been fully depleted. Likewise in A3 Safi CAN'T actually be killed until he fully depletes the energy from the area.
Safi therefore has to heal once and ONLY once in every area, but he will heal more than once (up to 4 times per level) if there's still energy left in the area.
The following things are known or supposed to cause him to drain more energy off the level:

raw damage - more exactly, taking damage is what forces him to heal himself through the Everstream. However if you only deal raw damage to him without anything else he will do a considerable amount of drains (up to 4 in each area from our tests), which is a huge time loss.
vine traps and boulder traps in the first area - they seem to deplete 5k energy each, which is why you can make him deplete all energy in one go if you chain them together;
part breaks - they will each deplete a very small amount of his energy;
using Sapphire Star of the Emperor (see section below);
gaining and maintaining enmity (see section below);
Elderseal procs (see section below).




Sapphire Star of the Emperor

Safi's nova/ecliptic meteor is tied to specific conditions which are mostly tied to his HP level. Each Sapphire Star will deplete a significant chunk of Safi's own energy/stamina.
In A2, Safi will nova when he's at 50% HP or below. He will normally only do it twice and heal right after every time. It is possible however that if too much time has passed without enmity Safi will start performing novas beyond that.

In A3 he will nova only after reaching supercritical state (triggered by a set amount of damage). This is because right after he hits supercritical state he will follow up with an uninterruptible laser beam attack that drops rocks from the ceiling that you can hide behind.

After Safi completes the first nova and the area changes (= when the gas puddles appear), once he gets back in supercritical state and reaches a critical amount of HP (around 5%) he will start chaining rock spawning attacks and novas back to back. At this point he will also start using an AoE ground waves attack to spawn rocks instead of the laser beam.

Unlike the laser, the AoE attack is NOT uninterruptible: if you flinch him out of it, Safi will follow up with a nova without any rocks, which leads to an inevitable full party wipe.
[Update] It seems that near the end of the siege Safi is programmed to just keep doing novas back to back if certains conditions aren't met. It's still unclear what makes him enter this state or how to prevent it. The main hypothesis is that it's tied to enmity.
Note that NONE of the novas are scripted - you can theoretically finish the siege before he even gets the chance to pull out a single one. In practice, this is impossible without cheats.

Enmity

Enmity is triggered in A2 and A3 automatically by doing a certain amount of damage on Safi when he's not aggroed to anyone. It's unclear if a flinch is required for that, though aggro often seems to follow one.
He seems to always be giving enmity to the player who dealt the most damage since the last "checkpoint". Even while enmity is already initiated, Safi will check periodically who is dealing the most damage and could switch aggro targets to the person who is currently dealing the most damage.

Following the in-game tips, maintaining aggro seems to make him expend more energy during his attacks, which likely means he will drain more energy off the level when he heals. According to various reports, having enmity also prevents him from doing repeated novas back to back (not confirmed yet).

For all the reasons above, it's best to get aggro ASAP as you enter A2/A3 and to regain it immediately when you lose it.

Elderseal

As you may or may not know, Elderseal is an ailment exactly like sleep, KO or mount that is applied by using weapons with dragon damage or dragon ammo on bowguns.

Proccing Elderseal on Safi will cause a flinch with a small blue aura "explosion" around the body. [Update] Every elderseal proc will make him lose a chunk (15%) of Safi's own energy, so that when he heals there will be less energy left in the area (thanks to Deathcream for pointing me out that Safi's own energy and the area levels are separate values).

Realistically you will proc elderseal only twice per run, maybe three times if every single player is running a dragon weapon. Having high elderseal won't give you more elderseal procs than you would get with average elderseal regardless of how many players are using dragon weapons, so don't waste your slots on Elderseal Boost.

With that being said, elderseal seems to always be worth running, as it will speed up the runs by making him potentially deplete all the energy one heal sooner.

Note also that elderseal buildup is independent from how much dragon damage you deal and is only dependent of what type of weapon you're using and the level of ES on the weapon (low/average/high). Bow and DB have the lowest buildup per hit, while dragon ammo on bowguns has the highest; yet the former are obviously better at ES than the latter given how little dragon ammo you can carry.

There finally seem to be special situations where you can't proc elderseal no matter how much you hit him (the threshold stays stuck at maximum for several seconds), but we haven't clarified yet what causes that to happen.

Supercritical State

Supercritical state triggers 60 seconds after Safi reached A3 or after he lands from an uninterrupted nova (there is no known way to shorten this timer). During SC state, the HZVs of all of Safi's will raise dramatically. This is also the only situation where the chest hitzone becomes hittable.
Safi will do a Sapphire Star of the Emperor in A3 only in this state. If nothing is done, Safi will exit SC state as soon as he lands from the nova.

However, if the nova is interrupted in any way (flash pods, sleep/para/KO dunks, bomb pods) Safi will stay in SC when he resumes attacking. You should try therefore to interrupt the nova by any means as it allows the team to deal much more damage to him.

Note that if you dunk Safi with a flash pod during a nova he will still go back up and perform the nova, but it will also still extend his SC state when he comes back down.

Finally, once Safi is near death in A3 (you see the skull on the minimap) he will never get out of supercritical state anymore until you finally kill him.

[Juliane_L]

i also want to add that i read somewhere that Safi can do Shaphire of the emperor twice if someone with the enmity farcast out of the area but this isn't sure, and i don't really want to waste a run to test.

[Juliane_L]

bump

[Sery]

The health thing is something one can easily see when using a damage meter

[Juliane_L]

Originally posted by SerYreS:

The health thing is something one can easily see when using a damage meter

most people don't use those kind of mods.

[Sery]

Originally posted by Juliane_L:

Originally posted by SerYreS:

The health thing is something one can easily see when using a damage meter

most people don't use those kind of mods.

"most" is a strong word

[mewlynx]

Originally posted by SerYreS:

Originally posted by Juliane_L:

most people don't use those kind of mods.

"most" is a strong word

There's not really any way to say for certain, but I would be inclined to say that there are more people who play without UI mods than those that do.

[Seamus]

Originally posted by maelynx:

Originally posted by SerYreS:

"most" is a strong word

There's not really any way to say for certain, but I would be inclined to say that there are more people who play without UI mods than those that do.

While there are a fair few people who use the UI mods, I do have to agree with you. More don't than do.

[CourtesyFlush09]

Originally posted by SerYreS:

Originally posted by Juliane_L:

most people don't use those kind of mods.

"most" is a strong word

Why? Because it's true? lol

[Dauntless]

The latest updated UI mods have around 200k unique downloads, so I suspect a significant amount of players use them and simply don't post numbers.

[cruste]

Originally posted by Dauntless:

The latest updated UI mods have around 200k unique downloads, so I suspect a significant amount of players use them and simply don't post numbers.

iceborne broke the 5 million sales barrier so it is still a pretty small number
4% is called minority

[Hamez]

Originally posted by SerYreS:

Originally posted by Juliane_L:

most people don't use those kind of mods.

"most" is a strong word

Its funny the amount of people playing mh like a mmorpg.

[Grisnir]

Supercritical State

Supercritical state triggers 60 seconds after Safi reached A3 or after he lands from an uninterrupted nova (there is no known way to shorten this timer). During SC state, the HZVs of all of Safi's will raise dramatically. This is also the only situation where the chest hitzone becomes hittable.
Safi will do a Sapphire Star of the Emperor in A3 only in this state. If nothing is done, Safi will exit SC state as soon as he lands from the nova.

i saw once that he did a Sapphire of the emperorer right after the first one, he lands and right back in air to cast the second one, but i don't know if he left the SC stats before casted the second one

and the first one was, the one that blasted the stonewalls away

[Chadwbacca]

Originally posted by SerYreS:

Originally posted by Juliane_L:

most people don't use those kind of mods.

"most" is a strong word

No, it's not, just look at how many unique downloads the mod have, and how many people played the game in total.

[Kremlibot]

Originally posted by Juliane_L:

i also want to add that i read somewhere that Safi can do Shaphire of the emperor twice if someone with the enmity farcast out of the area but this isn't sure, and i don't really want to waste a run to test.

Yep, this is a great strategy if you're looking to Leeroy a run.

[River Victor]

This is extremely informative. I love it. Thank you for alerting us.

So we learn that we have two wipe conditions. Low damage and too much damage that makes Safi skips to the next nova threshold.