Apex Task Force Strategy Discussion

I keep reading that there's supposed to be some advance warning before one of those Cheating Circles of Death appears, but I never saw any such indication. I just got blindsided by them over and over again, as did the rest of the team, until we finally gave up. I'm glad some people are getting enjoyment out of it, but you couldn't pay me to run through that meat-grinder again.

The ATF really isn't that hard imo. The first run I did was a failure, we couldn't kill Battle Maiden, but that had more to do with the fact that the team didn't mesh at all and that 2 people had sneaked on board without a slotted alpha boost.

The second run went a lot better, only 2 people (the leader and me) having done it before, there were still just over 50 deaths though. But I personally only died twice, both times to the blue death, once because I wasn't paying attention, and once because I was completely blocked in by three patches and the wall, so I had nowhere to run when another landed on top of me hehe.

Just pay attention, and don't queue up your attacks so you aren't stuck in overly long animations when you should be running. Also don't run across the map as a spastic monkey to avoid the patches as I see some people do. Just moving a bit to the side works just fine.

About the ambushes: There are five (if I counted right) ambushes with BM's goons after you defeat her for the first time, after you killed the third BM spawns for the second time. If you kill off the group with BM and the final ambush they should stop. The swords however keep coming as far as I've seen. New ones only spawn after you've killed all the previous ones. So if you keep 2 or so bosses alive, but kill off all the rest, the secondary tank/brute/scrapper can keep the 2 bosses on himself so your squishies don't get mangled anymore while no new swords will spawn.
(Just observations based on 2 runs, if I'm way off base anywhere just point it out. )

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Originally Posted by JKCarrier I keep reading that there's supposed to be some advance warning before one of those Cheating Circles of Death appears, but I never saw any such indication. I just got blindsided by them over and over again, as did the rest of the team, until we finally gave up. I'm glad some people are getting enjoyment out of it, but you couldn't pay me to run through that meat-grinder again.

You get a blue nebular glowing effect around your feet a few seconds before it hits. Make sure your particle count is high enough in your graphic settings. I have heard that seems to influence the visibility of the warning effect.

Finished this yesterday as well as Tin Mage.

playing as a fire blaster slotted with nerve radial(end/range). Moving my camera to give me a slightly top-down view and sniping battle maiden was my plan so i could see hte pulsing blue from the blue plasma. It looked alot like what the War walkers do with their oribtal lance. only blue. Our ,main tank staid on Battle Maiden, and one scrapper took care of swords. everyone else pretty much moved around. I noticed that sometimes the blue plasma fires directly after you shoot soemthign off, and other times I was able to fire two or three powers at once. We may want to take a look and see exactly how many blue patches can be spawned at once.

IMO, it was the scrapper holding hte sword aggro that left me untouched pretyt much the whole time. and a blaster who can fire off snipes and debuffing melt armors is a happy, and deadly blaster.

we had one troller who kept the main tank from dying. But other than that , watch the ground, or patch of sky directyl nbelow you, and move out of the way before it shoots you. that is all.

Dunno how many there are supposed to be, but I only ever saw 2 at a time. Well, I guess technically 4, but only 2 warning patches (still safe to be in for a couple of seconds), and 2 patches of the last attack.

So far from my two runs at it on live, both successful (in fact, Masters of Apex Badge on second run)...

Range is handy for the pylons. Melee should likely get ahold of some orange inspirations.

The rest is pretty easy.

Pull away towards the truck at the bottom of the stares, if you're trying to avoid having the poilice drones killed by the nuke for the badge (of not using the drones, but not letting them get destroyed either).

Second mission. Tackle the swords. When you see that blue patch appear, I can get off a qued up attack and jump out by the time it's used.

You have to keep moving.

BM, don't immobilize her. She seems to immobilize easily (had a Dark Melee using Midnight grasp immobilize her easily), you want to beable to pull her out of the blue patches.

Constant AFKers and laggers will not like this TF.

When I was on an apex team, we didn't generally have trouble avoiding patches of doom (not to say there weren't related deaths), but we seemed to be a rather melee heavy team, and we had trouble coordinating where we dodged to. Basicly when there was blue to be seen, everyone scattered in 6 different directions. This had two side effects; it prolonged the fight against the waves of enemies, and made the AV (who was far too content to sit in a patch of doom and use her crossbow) take longer as we couldn't always coax her out so we could resume beating on her.

All in all though, it was an enjoyable departure from the ever larger bags of HP they tend to send us up against.

If you get patches at the door way it is your own team's fault.

They only spawn where you were standing when Battle Maiden triggers her power.

Don't stand by the door.

In regards to the graphics settings, and not being able to see the blue fumes before the Circle of Blue Death, I personally play on min settings for everything. Next year I get to save up so that I might one day play in mid-ranged ultra mode... But I play min settings and I could see them just fine on my first and so far only time running the ATF.

Also, I kinda of chuckled at the "Lrn2dodg" Zombie said because when I was on the ATF, the only person on the team that had run the TF before only said "Keep moving". I had no idea why, or what for until I died, and then they said "avoid the blue flames". So once I, on my tank, got the idea, I started doing hit and run style and just wished to myself that I had PvPed more.

Certain AT's are at a disadvange in this TF.

Stone Tanks with Grantite.

Any MasterMind - Pets just dont dodge the blue patches. (MY Bots/traps MM felt useless - just kept killing swords and such)

Any AT Healer type that requires a target to heal with. (Kins, dark, etc..)

MY Crab with perma pets lost a ton of DPS because the pets just dont stay up long enough.

Dodging out of the way of attacks is simple.

The death patches always appear targeted on a player.

This means we players can control where they appear by choosing where we stand.

The strategy I'm intending to try next time I do the TF is to have the entire team hug Battle Maiden. Squishies only stand back about 10 feet to be outside of her whirling sword radius, and stay to the same side, all in one spot. This will make all the patches fall on/near her current location. When the warning fields show up, everyone moves out together, and we taunt/drag BM with us as best we can. Then when the next patches fall, we move again, etcetera, basically kiting her in stages all at once as we avoid the death patches. I feel this method has a few advantages:

1. It ensures you never blunder out of one patch and into another.
2. Since the whole team's together and moving together, if you see someone else moving, you know you need to move even it you miss the warning graphics. Having a macro to warn that you hit will help too.
3. It reduces the distance you have to move and thus the time spent moving - thus reducing the amount BM will regen while you move, and reducing the distance she has to move to stay in melee. That hopefully will also keep her in 'melee mode' AI, rather than indulging in her tendency to switch to ranged and park in a death patch.
4. It ensures that the field's never 'mostly covered' in patches, so there's always plenty of room to fight. This should help pets stay alive as well.
5. It makes the adds somewhat more manageable as the melees will be well-able to taunt them off the squishies, and gather them around BM, making them fuel for powers like invincibility, RTTC, heat loss or fulcrum shift, as well as probably bringing them into the effect of toggle debuff and your own team's patch/rain powers.

The major disadvantages I see with this method are that the patches will fall 'stacked' so the chance of making it out of them if you don't move in time will be smaller, and squishies who stand too close might get hit by whirling sword from BM. However, the chance of surviving a long time in a death patch is small already, and BM's whirling sword doesn't really hit all -that- hard, so even if you get winged it's likely to be more a reminder to back off a bit and give her more personal space. I don't consider them severe enough to make this tactic anything but an improvement over 'randomly running around when you see blue on the ground.'

The reason to hug BM, by the way, is more to hug your melees who are fighting her. If you're on an all-ranged team, you can just hug each other anyplace you choose; if BM switches to ranged mode and gets into a shootout with you - hurray. Her ranged attacks deals less damage, though she does have an exploding crossbow bolt AOE.

Do the flying swords have repel resist? Or would huddling up to a bubbler make you pretty much immune to the melee-only swords?

I expect that it can be easy to wind up with a team composition that is doomed to failure in the final BM battle. We had 2 Tanks, 2 MMs, 1 dominator, 1 scrap, 1 blaster, and a corruptor, and we just couldn't get enough damage to beat BM's regen rate with all the running around the mission required. We gave it up after about 45 minutes of fighting her and picking up a number of deaths each from either BM damage or Nanite storms, or both. A well constructed team should be able to manage it without much trouble at all, but the wrong PUG configuration might be doomed to failure.