Rikti Dropships

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Dropships can't be taunted, are immune to any -speed debuff as well so they will continue on their flight path meaning you have to deal a lot of damage quickly before they exit the zone.

I remember doing this on Virtue where the team eventually took out something like 25 Dropships.

Sadly you don't get anything good from them, not even merit rewards and it takes a lot of people to bring them down.

That was us, that did that. We (being the Steel 100 or what-not) discovered that you could stack holds/immobs on them and basically "hold" them in the sky and then blast the hell out of them. Then Castle came in, we told him what happened, and he changed them. Good times!

You're overthinking it.

Completing the Lady Grey TF does indeed spawn a Rikti invasion somewhere, but the zone is random, even as to side, so far as I know. You should also know that there is no badge or loot of any kind, other than inf and xp, for defeating a dropship. The rewards are not utterly terrible, but they're nothing to write home about, either. As you implied, the reward is the experience (in the non-game-mechanic sense).

As for fighting dropships, I've done it a number of times, having been around back when there were "scheduled" Rikti invasions. As in 99% of the rest of the game, you don't need to worry about something like getting enough energy resistance. Defeating a dropship requires four things.

First, you need a sufficient number of people willing to do it. Because the ships can't be slowed, taunted, or diverted, not to mention the fact that they have a lot of hit points and resist damage significantly, you need a certain number of characters to pump out enough DPS to destroy the ship before it leaves the map. The smallest group I've seen succeed was about three full teams, mostly but not entirely composed of level 50's.

Second, you need someone who knows the ships' flight paths. The ships appear for a short enough time that you need to be ready to attack them soon after they become targetable. Dropships cross zones on preset tracks, some of which are probably too short for some teams to deal enough damage to destroy a ship before it gets away. For example, you'll have more time to destroy a ship that's flying across Atlas Park from west to east (the long way) than from south to north (the short way). For what it's worth, several of the successful runs I've been on have taken place in Talos Island, which has a long, curved flight path that takes the ships through much of the zone.

Third, everyone fighting the ship should be able to fly. Having everyone purchase a jet pack could take care of this. The ships fly very high in the air, and even with long-range attacks, they're hard to hit from the ground. They move slowly enough that melee characters with flight powers can get in regular hits against them. I'm told by teammates who've tried that Superjump can't substitute for flying here.

Fourth and most importantly, people need to act with a modicum of thought. Not much, just a modicum. The group needs a leader to tell everyone which ship to target, and the group members need to concentrate fire on that ship. Everyone fighting the ship needs to keep in mind that they could get killed easily and just accept it. This isn't a situation like a high-end task force where there's an uber-buffed tank keeping some damage-intensive AV from one-shotting everyone else; this is a situation where everyone, but everyone is just piling on the DPS, and the enemy attacks so slowly and rarely that it can't even dent the attackers as a group. If you die, just get up and get back in the fight. After all, debt protection is in place during a Rikti invasion, so who cares? By the way, for what it's worth, I've taken hits from a dropship on a blaster and not been killed outright; it seems to take about two blasts to kill any character.

All that said, fighting a dropship is, in many ways, the simplest "destroy a huge bag of hit points" fight in the game. You don't need to worry about aggro, debuffs, or any of the usual things. The challenge is just being ready to act on something that's completely random in its placement and initiation. The best advice I can give is to wait until a "scheduled" period of Rikti invasions, learn the ship paths, then call for signups for a specific date and time on your server's subforum.

Forgive me if I sound snarky about all this; I don't mean to. In closing, I should say that I've been on three or four dropship attacks over the years, and it's the most enjoyable thing I've done in the game.

One of the community reps will announce it if they do it again here on the fora.

Beyeajus, the xp is "all right." I vaguely recall it as being about the same as a Giant Monster, but it's been so long that I'm not sure. There are certainly MUCH easier, faster ways to get the same amount. This is not something you do to gain xp; it's pretty much incidental.

The Steel 70. Back Alley Brawler actually showed up in the aftermath, though I'm not sure whose call it was to grant them the -speed immunity after we destroyed those first nine drop ships during I10 beta.

I got some hate mail for that raid because of those buffs.

Some point in the last year when they had those scheduled raid weeks, or days, I joined two of these things to hunt drop ships. One blue side, one red side.

The one red side, failed pretty bad, just not enough people. By failed, I mean we got a few, but mostly got blown out of the sky, over run and didn't get anywhere near the goal the person running it set.

I've never had so much fun failing something in this game.

The one blue side, was a success in that we destroyed ship after ship, and We beat or got close to the leader's goal. It was like 40-50 or something like that.

It was so much fun I can't really think of how to express it. Something about having dozens and dozens of heroes, FLYING through a zone, wiping out giant ships of alien invaders. It was liberating, it was fun and it felt SUPER. The skies were filled with heroes and the ships dropped like flys.

It was like straight out of a comic book, or comic book movie. And even when people were just hanging out, dozens of heroes hovering in the air waiting for the next announcement of rikti heading to a zone, then having tons of heroes all flying off in the direction of that zone.


Honestly, to me it's the pinnacle, The Paragon of the City of Heroes Concept. Tons of Super Heroes, being Super, being Heroic, fighting the bad guys, doing it together.

It's a ton of fun, it is it's own reward, next time raid week comes around I'm chomping at the bit to do it again, and it should be more fun since heroes and rogues will be able to go to ANY zone to take them on...

And for the record, I'd go nuts to be able to do one of these in Praetoria.... Even if it will never happen.

I believe that no single attack in game can kill - sorry, defeat, a PC outright. It's something along the lines of the max damage an attack can do is PC Max HP-1. Thus any character on full HP will still be standing (just) no matter what hits them, but the next attack is highly likely to finish them off.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

This is correct. However, a single attack that has multiple damage components can be just as lethal (IE doing S/L + Fire would kill you outright).

Right.

It's been a while, but for some reason, I remember a dropship blast as being multiple ticks of smashing and energy damage.