Bloody bay mission xp study

When I hit 18 I decided to try out the bloody bay missions on different difficulty settings to see which offered the best xp rewards over time.

The mission I chose was listening post, where you need to destroy 3 pieces of equipment.

My mastermind is mercs/Dark. I made a couple of poor power choices (Manouveres and serum) which Im basically not using so hes not exactly optimal.

Mercs are slotted 4 damage 2 acc and spec ops is 4 damage 1 acc. They rarely miss orange and below with this setup.

Standard procedure for all fights was Tar patch and darkest night then let the soldiers do the work while I keep them alive. I have no primary attack myself. I put serum on Desmond (spec ops) for the boss fights but im dammed if I saw any difference to his performance.

Any way heres what I found.

VILLANOUS and MALICIOUS settings were very similar. Both had white and yellow minions. Gropus of 2-3 for villanous and mainly 4 for malicious. 2 seperate yellow lt's for bosses in Villanous and 3 yellow lt's + 1 orange boss for malicious. Trivial difficulty for both settings. Main differnce was more mobs in Malicious.

Xp for vilanous: 2511 in 17 minutes. 147.8 xp/min
xp for malicious: 3486 in 29 minutes. 120.2xp/min

VICIOUS and RUTHLESS settings. Again similar. Both had yellow and orange minions. Groups of 2-3 for vicious and up to 4 for Ruthless.Both had 4 orange lt's and 1 red boss guarding he equipment. Bosses could be trublesome if care was not taken, lost a soldier occasionly on Ruthless due to larger mob groups.

xp for Vicious : 3222 in 20 mins. 161.1 xp/min
xp for Ruthless : 4118 in 26 mins 158.4 xp/min

RELENTLESS setting. Orange and red minions in groups of 2-4. 3 Red lt's and a purple boss. Not as hard as I thought it might be. Boss only had 1 orange minion helping.

xp 4731 in 35 mins. xp/min 135/min

So from an purely xp perspective, for me anyway,Vicious and rutless provide the best gains.

I picked up 5 DO's in Relentless difficulty though which was nice.

One good tip for anyone doing this mission on the harder settings is that the equipment you need to destroy can be targetted with twilight grasp and it rarely misses these. Handy for the boss fights

If anyone else would care to do something similar with different builds I would be interested.

Major Look. lv 18 Mercs/Dark miasm MM. Union

Edit * Total xp gained was 96% of level 18 for these 5 missions

Why are manoeveurs and serum bad power choices?

Wait until you get yourself SO's, and them leadership powers will really come into their own. Also, Serum's great as an OMFGBBQ!!11oneone power when you REALLY need it.

Well they seem like bad choices atm as they both seem to have little effect.

Hopefully you are right and S0's might make a difference.

Currently though I kind of wish I had a primary attack and assult instead.

Just a note, slotting 4 of a kind is a waste of money... the last slot will only provide you with about 3-8% increase...

Just so you know

Yeah, previous slotting reccomendations for Tactics et al is to have them 6 slotted with the buff they give. I think having 3 defense SOs and 2-3 End Redux SOs in manoeveurs is a good way to go now. Along with Tactics, They're very good because they'll reduce the effectiveness of enemies attacking you, that extra 20% or so can really make a difference so they're not crap powers.

That said, Serum seems a little skippable, but I find it handy when I need it. Best wait to see how it looks when used on a commando.

Zach, I just took a look at my enhancemnt screen, according to that my 3 level 20 DO give +55.1% damage and the 4 give +72.4.

That seems to differ with what you posted.

He's talking about enhancement diversification. For the most part, this means anything which buffs the effect of a power to over 94% becomes basically wasted, and no amount of extra SOs will help. 3 SOs fall into that category, as they would normally buff to 99%.

You're using DOs, and to get the same effect you would need to 6 slot, giving a 99% boost, which is reduced to 94%.

More specifically, it works like this: 33% for one SO, 66% for two, 94% for three, 96% for four, 98% for five, and 100% for six. Thats why anything above three SOs is wasted. You'd best read States's description of ED for the full details.

Ah ok I see. thanks. Until I get SO 4 is fine then.

I found serum to be needed when fighting thougher targets like GM's, AV's and when things get bad. Serum gives your henchman an unbeliveble res. I had a spec-op fighting the ghost of scrapyard + around 30 even lvl scrapyarders and he lasted 30-45 seconds where the rest died in around 2. This was unslotted. The only thing is that the damage boost isnt noticible.

This is interesting as I have spent a fair bit of time in Bloody Bay and Warburg doing the indoor missions. I have found that the longbow are not good against my bots and I can get through the mission in vicious and ruthless setting anywhere between 15-20min, without any problem at all.

I also started fighting at the top lv but found as your study proves that the time taken increases to the point where the xp gained per min falls. So fighting on ruthless for me is the optimum, and with kills I can knock up 11-12K of xp per mission.

The problem is the missions are all the same and after awhile pretty dull, but they give so much more xp than the normal map missions, sometimes 2000xp more? And with fly its easy to get around the pvp maps without getting aggro.

As for the other pvp missions I found the BB meteor mission easy to collect all the 6 samples of the meteor, as i have stealth and can fly, so just drop in take sample and leave. But the bunker part knocking out the gun turrets was to tough with my bots, in the end had to employ the help of a brute. A good tactic is to go around knocking all the big guns down to a little health, then quickly finish them all of. The 4 guns on the bunker are easy.

The missile strike mission in Warburg was tougher but would have been easier if I had avoided aggro from heroes, getting into the underground bunker is fine and saving the scientests no problem but then leading them to their control bunkers on the surface always seemed to attract the attention of heroes for me so made it a bit tough. But the temp power is nice even if it is just a one timer, the BB reward is a shiven decimator pet, this is a real bonus and has got me out of a couple of nasty double red end boss's situations. Will be going back to get another one soon.