Team Teleport on Apex Task Force

Summary: it works, it's pretty safe, it's not very fast, it bears refining.

Detailed report:

Since my first run of the Apex TF, I'd been wondering if Team Teleport would be an effective method for avoiding the halberd drops. Last Saturday I got a chance to try it out with my usual play group. I can't recall the exact team composition (if others who were there do, please chime in!), but I was on my Stone/Stone Tanker with Team Teleport, and the rest of the team was:
- Fire/Stone Tanker
- Kin/SR Brute
- Traps/DP Defender
- Mind/Emp Controller
- Mind/FF Controller
- Warshade
- Bots/Poison Mastermind

The first mission proceeded smoothly in the usual fashion. The Minds had fun confusing War Walkers, who are apparently vulnerable to that sort of shenanigans.

For the second mission, we cleared the two waves of swords on the roof and then proceeded down to the arena as a group. From then on, we stuck to the following general strategy:
- I focused on three things, in order of decreasing priority: team teleporting whenever blue flame appeared under me, taunting BM, and tapping her with Stone Fist for Bruising whenever I was close enough.
- The rest of the team stayed within 20 feet of me, doing whatever they could with what they had where they were.

And here are some general observations of the results.
- Battle Maiden likes her crossbow a lot. She doesn't avoid melee, but she will use her ranged attack whenever it's up, and that slows her progress into melee range.
- Since halberd patches last until the next wave actually lands, I teleported in a triangular pattern: the prior patch was burning at A, the next wave was about to hit B, and I'd move to C. A more daring teleporter might get away with moving between two positions, but the timing would be awfully close.
- The advantage of this strategy is that, when the teleporter is on the ball, the patches are all in one place and the team is in another. The disadvantage is that when the teleporter is not quite as on the ball (as happened a few times), the patches are all in one place and the entire team is also in that one place. The result was pretty much instant death for everyone except the tanks, who had enough HP to merely be severely wounded (and then teleport away after the first tick).
- Assault Bot had a deep and abiding love for running into melee with Battle Maiden, standing in a halberd patch, and dying. The other bots were relatively obedient and shot her with lasers.
- Clearing the waves of War Earth soldiers was slow. Like BM, they were recalcitrant about moving into melee, and they also tended to spread out and run around and we were loath to chase them lest we spread the patches out. This could be improved.
- Swords were a non-issue. Having no ranged attacks, they flew directly into our huddle and were defeated without incident.
- At one point, one or two of the halberds started dropping out of synch with the rest. This made my life somewhat more interesting, but not unbearably so. If all 8 had been dropping at different intervals, this strategy would no longer be valid.
- We did not get the badge for defeating BM quickly. But we did defeat her in less time than our first run, and with significantly fewer deaths. Had we a team with more ranged damage and/or force multiplication, the badge would probably be within our reach.

Has anyone else tried this? What were your results? What can be improved?

Good one! Sounds like a fun and effective strategy, although a little risky if the TP'er isn't on the top of his game the whole fight.

This is bloody brilliant.

I would be willing to try this, as my Bots/Traps is a team teleporter.

Way to think creatively! Props to you on coming up with new approaches. Sounds like a really fun way to do the Apex. And you can confuse War Walkers??? Why did I never try that? I can use Deceive on my Illusion troller every 2 seconds so that sounds like a laugh riot during the big assault part of the Apex TF!

> Dechs, I'd totally be down for doing the Apex this way if you want a team mate willing to test it with you. You know my Ill/Rad is always up for wacky silliness.

I play with a group of friends every night and the first time we tried Apex together, we beat it under 50mins and got Master of badge. It says we beat her within 15mins but it felt longer than that.

After doing Apex several times, Apex is actually quite easy and fast if you have the "tools" right.

1. Lots of good Range damage. This is great against Pylon in first mish and especially good against Battle Maiden because melee can't do enough damage when they have to keep dodging blue flame. My Fortunata took Cardiac and 2nd tier for +20% range. It is so good.

2. Take Hover! Hover is so good because those Swords can't fly and you can avoid many melee attacks. However, don't Hover too high because the blue flames follow you and if you hover too high, the people on the ground may not see the blue flames above us and if they run through them, they die. Just Hover high enough to avoid melee attacks.

3. What do Melee(s)? Well, Tanker/Brute's #1 job is to taunt all those ambushes in the last battle. Those crossbow attacks can deal a lot of damage on squishies.

4. Move your screen back so you have a LARGE view of the battle field. This is important so you can see all the blue flames on the ground. And don't run to the corners and you definitely want to stay away from the Exit Door because if somebody dies and tries to come back, you don't want the flames to build up in that area. That will be instant death when they zone in.


5. When Battle Maiden disappears after her health drops down to 50%, I think you need to kill Human ambushes to force BM back out. Killing Swords don't force her out.

I've been on mostly melee teams that have taken BM down fast enough to recieve the badge.

So my question is, why the use of team teleport to do this? In my experience it really wasn't that hard to just jump out of the patches.