A Year Of Mothership Raids (For Max Fun & Profit)

[Eda]

I’m @Eda from Indomitable. I started running nightly Mothership Raids in the Rikti War zone in June 2019, and I am recording my now vast knowledge for posterity! I have not come by all of this information in a vacuum. Many people have raided with me in the past and present and contributed to the SCIENCE of a great MSR.

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11jyeSm58GuyU7X7AZRxG6yQyyWrYKwUtQbSxcShD7l0/edit?usp=sharing

Edited May 21, 2021 by Eda
Version 2!

[Apparition]

Great guide!

 

Just a few things.  One, two bombs spawn U'Kon Gr'ai if your league is under 25 players, and three bombs spawn him if your league has 25 or more players.  The fourth, fifth, and sixth bombs are just for the badge.

 

As for the timer itself: Destroying all the pylons gives you ten minutes aboard the mothership.  Planting the first bomb adds three minutes, (13 minutes total).  If your league is under 25 players, planting a second bomb spawns U'Kon Gr'ai, adding an additional ten minutes, (23 minutes total).  If your league is 25 or more players, planting a second bomb adds three minutes, (16 minutes total).  If your league is 25 or more players, planting a third bomb spawns U'Kon Gr'ai, adding an additional ten minutes, (26 minutes total).  Defeating U'Kon Gr'ai adds an additional five minutes to the timer, (28 or 31 minutes total).  Then, because of server lag, you get an additional twenty seconds to a minute of time.  So possibly up to 32 minutes of time in the bowl with a league of 25 or more players.

 

Thirdly, your guide is only in regards to zone MSRs.  There are quite a few differences with instanced MSR trials.  If you're curious:

 

1. Everyone in the league must be level 35+ and have the Member of Vanguard badge.

2. All of the mobs, including the Pylons, are level 54, so it's slightly more difficult than the zone MSR.

3. When the instance starts, everyone is at the Point du Hoc Vanguard compound.  There are a couple of hospital beds there, where players can resurrect if necessary.

4. Destroying the first Pylon will spawn a Drop Ship, guaranteed.  In this case, that would be Pylon 11 since we start off at the Point du Hoc Vanguard compound.

5. Since it's an instance, everyone gets rewards, including pullers.  You could literally be on the other side of the map from everyone else and still receive Vanguard reward merits and regular reward merits from kills made by the rest of the team.  As such, I don't worry about the Incandescence Destiny at all.  Instead, I ask everyone that has the Clarion Destiny to make sure that it is equipped beforehand.  I usually lead MSRs on a Beam Rifle/Sonic Resonance Corruptor and I'm often the only one at the raid with any pre-Incarnate AoE mez protection, so I find the Clarion Destiny incredibly helpful, especially to cover the sleep hole.

6. When the timer runs out, there is no teleportation back to the Point du Hoc Vanguard compound.  Instead, the Rikti retreat back inside of the mothership, leaving the players alone atop of the mothership.  That's when I begin the drop ship hunt phase.

 

I don't know if your guide is intended only for zone MSRs or not, but I thought I'd point that out just in case.

 

In any case, your guide is very well written and helpful, and certainly the best I've seen in regards to MSRs.

[Eda]

Hi Apparition, thanks for the comments!

 

I am 95% sure he spawns on the 4th bomb for us. We rarely have fewer than 5 teams. Have you collecting bomb and timing data through trial and error?

 

I admit, I'm only interested in zone MSR. We don't run LFG version very often, although I did know about many of those differences. 🙂

[Apparition]

I've done it with three teams (seventeen to 24 people), and U'Kon Gr'ai spawned with the second bombing consistently.  When I run it with four teams or more (25 people or more), he consistently spawns with the third bombing.

Edited May 16, 2020 by Apparition

[S33k3r]

Ran this last night using this document as a reference -- along with some help. That document is nicely thorough! This was particularly helpful:

 

"For the raid leader: Balancing the teams is important to keep rewards well spread across all participants. Most important of course is to have a level 50 leader for each team. After that, distribute every AT equally across the available teams. (For example, no team should have 2 Masterminds if any team would be left with 0 Masterminds.)"

 

Thanks, Eda!

[Derek Icelord]

Great guide.

 

One thing I'd like to know, what graphics settings are considered optimal for seeing enemies beyond arms length? I've tried minimal settings, but I still can't see anything beyond the giant cluster of players in the bowl. I think this is a large part of why I rarely get more than 900 Vanguard Merits in a single raid (while others in the same raid frequently get 1k+).

[Hyperstrike]

On 5/14/2020 at 7:43 PM, Eda said:

I’m @Eda from Indomitable. I started running nightly Mothership Raids in the Rikti War zone in June 2019, and I am recording my now vast knowledge for posterity! I have not come by all of this information in a vacuum. Many people have raided with me in the past and present and contributed to the SCIENCE of a great MSR.

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jd6Og5IY-EamgRjGBGV9ij13LOdtBLzjG8PrktDKmOU/edit?usp=sharing

Note: Pylons 19 & 20 don't show on Vidiots because they didn't exist on live.
They were added when the dropship event was created.
As for the dropship, I just generally ad-hoc it.  Let it come to us, lock it down and kick it's ***.
Any non-fliers can continue whacking pylons.

Also, here's a copy of the RWZ map that takes the new pylons into account.

Edited May 21, 2020 by Hyperstrike

[Apparition]

FWIW, here are the Rikti mothership raid pages on the new unofficial Homecoming wiki - Zone, and Instance.

[Clave Dark 5]

Eda's been star-tracking us?!  And here's I've been showing up for these raids without a tie!

[roleki]

On 5/21/2020 at 11:37 AM, Derek Icelord said:

Great guide.

 

One thing I'd like to know, what graphics settings are considered optimal for seeing enemies beyond arms length? I've tried minimal settings, but I still can't see anything beyond the giant cluster of players in the bowl. I think this is a large part of why I rarely get more than 900 Vanguard Merits in a single raid (while others in the same raid frequently get 1k+).

In all honesty, I have spent about 1.5 hours a night participating in MSRs the last two months, and in all that time I have only seen what I was shooting at once. 

 

Maybe twice.

 

That said, I have adopted a few tactics, strategies, and "oh hey!" ideas that I think have helped me consistently hit 1300-1500 Vanguard Merits per Indom zone run from my usual spot in the bowl; my most recent runs have put me in the 2100 range per raid and that seems to be repeatable.   

And keep in mind, I may be a real idiot so any one of the paragraphs below could just as easily be worthless.

 

 

1) Before you do anything! Go to Menu -> Options -> Controls -> Mouse -> Camera Shake and disable that.  I have gained 400% more rewards just off that tip alone.  

 

2) YMMV, but if you don't have a fly power, get one from P2W before you zone.  Not only does it keep you out of melee range when travelling between pylons, it also enrolls you in the "I Can Help Kill The Dropship" club, and that is a club you want to be in.

 

3) The lull during the recruiting phase is a good time to hit the /ah for some large inspirations of the Restoration, Escape, and Phenomenal Luck variety.  Kind of a "better to have and not need..." thing.

 

4) If you have powers that do knockback and you're not a Pusher, be a dear and slot the Sudden Acceleration KB:KD enhancement in that power or strike that power from your tray for the duration of the raid.  While KB is a perfectly cromulent soft control everywhere else, in the Bowl it is Merit Poison and literally makes everyone around you less effective.  

 

5) Open your Combat Attributes and set it up to monitor your Hold Protection.  When you're in the Bowl, Hold Protection seems to be a better indicator of when you're about to die than Defense or even Health.  If it's less than a ridiculous number, you've either migrated away from the safe spot or, you're the EA and you forgot to re-apply Faraday Cage like a jerk.  

 

6) Pylon Time is pretty straightforward, but try and avoid touching the Shield while travelling between pylons because it will TP you away from the group and potentially cost you some merits as you travel back, and, also potentially, leave you as the only target of a Drop Ship.  Suboptimal!

 

7) Bomb Time is a little more hectic.  If teams 1-6 go to a specific grate 1-6, I haven't noticed.  I generally pull up short at the lip of the saucer and click through my teammates until I identify one that is clearly heading to a grate, then follow them in.  If you have a patch or another persistent pseudopet, drop that at the foot of the grate when it is nearly dead, to take some heat off the Bomb Clicker Person when the Rikti arrive.  When the Bomb Clicker Person enters the cavity, that's your cue to stop using powers with long animation times!  When the Bomb Clicker person exits the cavity (or you get a yellow Bomb Planted message) get out of there, you idiot. You don't want to be caught mid-animation when that thing goes off.

 

Ocho) When your Bomb Planted! message comes up (or the announcement in chat is made), go straight to the Bowl.  Do things!  Deploy Lores!  Deploy debuffs!  Attack!  

 

9) When you're in the bowl, ABC as in Always Be Clicking.  You and your team get partial credit for a kill (and therefore a Vanguard Merit) whenever anything you or a teammate has damaged eventually dies.  It's important to keep in mind, ANY amount of damage your team does puts each of you in line for a Vanguard Merit when that target eventually dies, so the more things your team damages, the more chances you all have to win.  

 

10) In the context of an Eda-like MSR, my Ice/TA runs circles around my TW/Bio in terms of accumulating merits, because my Ice/TA has lots of AoEs that I can drop anywhere in the bowl without taking a single step off the badge marker.    That said, SOMEBODY has to actually kill EBs and Bosses, so as the teams get shuffled around during the recruiting phase, keep an eye on your team makeup to see whether your focus should be annoying lots of things, wiping out individual targets, or supporting the characters that are doing all that on your behalf.  The leads do a great job of balancing the teams so you can usually get away with one focus or another or a mix of all three, but if you're in the bowl and notice a Magus or Priest is in your crosshairs long enough to be hit with the same attack twice, you might want to go punch that one harder.

 

11) Set up a/multiple targeting macros; Eda's Guide has an all-in-one targeting macro which targets the next available priority target, in the context of a raid.  That approach is probably superior to mine, which I have separate macros for Magus, Priest and Rikti.  I do that because sometimes a macro will lock onto a target I can neither see or attack which means they aren't in the bowl, and I can click over to the next macro until I find something I *can* shoot.

12) If you can, bring a real live Pet, deploy it, and target through it.  If there is a target in range, a Pet will *always have a target whether its been drawn or not.  If you don't have a Pet of your own, try sorting out who DOES have a pet, and target through that hapless beast.  (*not always always, but usually always)  Bear in mind, if you're targeting through pets and chat starts filling with people imploring participants to stop Holding/Immobilizing stuff on the ramps, that's probably your sloppy handiwork, and you'll need to stop looking at chat change targeting tactics.

 

13) Failing that, find someone in the bowl who is consistently taking damage, and target through them, because they are obviously doing something to piss someone off somewhere.  Added bonus, if you're a support-type, you'll already be aimed at the person who would be dead if it weren't for your eerily prescient greenwork.

 

14) If you STILL can't find a target, look above the miasma for grey damage numbers ticking from somebody else's AoE, and drop YOUR AoE on THAT AoE before everything in the AoE is DoA and you're SOL.  The grey numbers you want to look out for are like lots of "1's" or "4's" or just a couple in the low 200s or whatever.  Reason being, with everything happening around you, it's easy to mistake someone's Absorb for damage and waste an AoE on a bunch of innocent people who were just hit by an Insulating Circuit.  Although really, in the Bowl, there is no wasted AoE.  Kinda.

 

15) Keep an eye on chat for announcements about where pullers are heading next.  They reference it by compass heading, so when someone yells Incoming South or whatever and you're facing Northeast, turn around and drop an AoE at the foot of the South Ramp.  

 

16) If you see orange numbers in one direction, turn another direction where orange numbers AREN'T and do what you have to do to make orange numbers appear there.  If there's a corner you haven't attacked in a while, throw something in that corner.

 

17) Get Judgment Ion, and hold off deploying it until a wave teleports into your midst; if you time it right, the effect is beautiful and results in many orange messages and sometimes a dialog box offering to take you exotic places like the hospital or your base.

 

18) Speaking of death, if you're a support type with some means to stave off the death of others, keep an eye on your teammates' health and do something about it.  While it is funny to watch that blaster die, rez, die again, ask for a rez, then die again, you won't be laughing when you pull into the Merit Vendor with only 400 merits because you did nothing to keep your team upright.  The more damage your team puts out, the more rewards you get, so it's in everyone's interest to keep on keeping on.

 

19) If you're a Controller-type or have access to one or more ranged holds, AND you have the Control Hybrid (because why wouldn't you?) remember to stop spamming your Hybrid power when the countdown timer hits 2:10 or so.  You'll want to save that for the afterparty, when you go kill the Drop Ship and discover its dank secret.  

Edited May 27, 2020 by roleki

[Eda]

Slight updates to the guide to include some thoughts from here and some other Indom specific rules. Thanks all for the commentary! 🙂

[Apparition]

1 hour ago, Eda said:

Slight updates to the guide to include some thoughts from here and some other Indom specific rules. Thanks all for the commentary! 🙂

 

Just FYI, on the LFG MSR Raid section, the league being shuffled and people dropping only occurs if you form leagues without working around the league bug, which also impacts zone MSRs and Incarnate trials.  It sucks and will hopefully be fixed.  But, as I said, it impacts everything that leagues are used for, and there are a couple of different ways to work around it.  I've formed and lead over a hundred instanced MSR trials on Excelsior, and what you described has never happened on any of them.

 

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/19547-how-to-form-leagues-around-the-league-bug/

 

Edited July 1, 2020 by Apparition

[Hyperstrike]

This is why I like recruiting everyone in the raid myself.
If the league bug rears its ugly head, well, I'm shuffling most off to other teams anyhow...

And I just do zone raids.  This way I'm not dinking with timers or anything like that while reshuffling people mid-raid.

[Eda]

I'm not sure what the on-a-league-but-not-a-team bug has to do with: when queuing the league completely shuffles, raid and team leaders can change, and half the league is outright dropped. We can check that everyone has a real team before queuing and it still happens.

[Apparition]

Just now, Eda said:

I'm not sure what the on-a-league-but-not-a-team bug has to do with: when queuing the league completely shuffles, raid and team leaders can change, and half the league is outright dropped. We can check that everyone has a real team before queuing and it still happens.

Are you locking the league and/or league teams before queuing?

[Eda]

It happens either way.

[Apparition]

32 minutes ago, Eda said:

It happens either way.

 

Interesting.  I form raid trials by inviting everyone to my team first, and then sending them to the appropriate team.  I never lock the league, nor do I ever lock a team.  I've lead two or three instanced mothership raid trials per week since October of last year, and not a single one has ever scrambled teams nor booted players upon zoning into the instance.  The worst that has ever happened was that the team numbers were shuffled, but that's only happened twice.  Team leaders are all the same, the team compositions are all the same.

 

Hrm.

[Lorraine of Pinnacle]

Ran with a team that had the Raid-Drop bug happen every event until the leader asked everyone to wait for everybody to load in first, before triggering any cut scenes.  Once we did that, Raid-Drop stopped.

 

BAF and Keyes were especially bad before that change.

[Eda]

Cool tip, Lorraine, but there's no cutscene in MSR so it's unfortunately n/a. 😅

 

We've actually switched to instanced raids recently and we get around the various league bugs with the following procedure.

 

One person uses LFG queue, locks the event, and zones alone into instanced MSR. They're the Instanced Leader.

One person gathers people in RWZ. (Any coop zone would work.) They're the Gathering Leader.

Once a full team worth of people is ready, that team lead withdraws from Gathering Leader's league and is invited to league by the Instanced Leader. The team lead has to accept the invite and the whole team instantly zones in. They do not get an afk check or anything.

The Instanced Leader can never lose the league star this way. Teams do zone in shuffled and often split into many one person teams for no clear reason. Some people seem to get lost while zoning and appear back in RWZ. We put them on a new team and try again! Anecdotally, I had one participant dropped 4 times in a row while trying to zone this way. They finally got in when invited solo into the raid by the Instanced Leader.

 

If anyone on the team doesn't have the badge or is not level 35+ the team leader will get the invite and accept, but nothing happens. A system message lists which character name is ineligible for the trial. Even if that person becomes eligible or leaves the team, the Instanced Leader can invite the team leader again, but will get the message so-and-so "is considering another offer" for that team until the team leader changes.

Getting stuck as "considering another offer" also happens to anyone invited solo into the instanced raid who doesn't qualify for the event when invited the first time. Relogging clears it and they can be successfully invited.

 

[Apparition]

1 hour ago, Eda said:

Cool tip, Lorraine, but there's no cutscene in MSR so it's unfortunately n/a. 😅

 

We've actually switched to instanced raids recently and we get around the various league bugs with the following procedure.

 

One person uses LFG queue, locks the event, and zones alone into instanced MSR. They're the Instanced Leader.

One person gathers people in RWZ. (Any coop zone would work.) They're the Gathering Leader.

Once a full team worth of people is ready, that team lead withdraws from Gathering Leader's league and is invited to league by the Instanced Leader. The team lead has to accept the invite and the whole team instantly zones in. They do not get an afk check or anything.

The Instanced Leader can never lose the league star this way. Teams do zone in shuffled and often split into many one person teams for no clear reason. Some people seem to get lost while zoning and appear back in RWZ. We put them on a new team and try again! Anecdotally, I had one participant dropped 4 times in a row while trying to zone this way. They finally got in when invited solo into the raid by the Instanced Leader.

 

If anyone on the team doesn't have the badge or is not level 35+ the team leader will get the invite and accept, but nothing happens. A system message lists which character name is ineligible for the trial. Even if that person becomes eligible or leaves the team, the Instanced Leader can invite the team leader again, but will get the message so-and-so "is considering another offer" for that team until the team leader changes.

Getting stuck as "considering another offer" also happens to anyone invited solo into the instanced raid who doesn't qualify for the event when invited the first time. Relogging clears it and they can be successfully invited.

 

 

Awesome!  I'm very happy to hear that someone else is finally regularly running instanced Rikti mothership raids.  They are so much better than the zone version, IMO.

 

FWIW, the person who gets stuck with "considering another offer" doesn't need to relog.  Just have him or her go to another zone, any zone.  PI, Ouroboros, Grandville, wherever.  That will clear it, and you will be able to invite him or her.

[Eda]

Updated for my second anniversary of nightly MSR. 🙂 Link is in the first post as well.

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11jyeSm58GuyU7X7AZRxG6yQyyWrYKwUtQbSxcShD7l0/edit?usp=sharing

[BZRKR]

Woot! first post after the update!!!!

[Amphetamine]

6 minutes ago, BZRKR said:

Woot! first post after the update!!!!

Well darn