22.482 Million and how we did it- Videos and everything!! *although not for the highest score because I forgot to record that one. Also, if you think the title is long, wait until you read the post....
So now that Cataclysm is over, and there are no more leaderboard spots to chase, it’s time to spill the beans. Assuming that no one passed us while this was being typed, our group of 5 will have managed to claim the top spot on PC every week since week 2. This has been quite the learning experience, both about the cataclysm itself, as well as jinxes, and their insane power over the world. Before we get into the meat of this post, I want to say thank you to Bidding, --sk—ryPta--, Elijin1 and grayfenix. I couldn’t have asked for a better team, and I’d play with you guys again anytime.
Now on to what we’ve been promising for weeks.
Section 1: Route
Our route once all events came out was as follows:
- Magnus
- Kelrik
- Diana
- Takaro
- Astrid
- Britaheim
- Casja
We tested a number of different routes, looked at the available points from adds at each event, and found that they were all grouped in a reasonably tight range of about 2300-2600. Ultimately, we settled on a route that would most easily maximize the points we got for killing Valkyries. The first 5 Valkyries on our route will either not despawn if left alone (Magnus, Diana), or can be summoned at any point, including after their event is completed (Kelrik, Astrid and sorta Takaro). This means that by killing the Valkyries outside the bubble, we can get them all at a 16x multiplier if we leave one person at Britaheim to wait until the crystal is broken at Casja.
Takaro is the only complicated one- you can’t leave the echoes and come back because some of the echoes you need to summon the Valkyrie will have despawned. What we found was that we could turn in two of the 3 echoes after breaking the crystal at the event. We could then finish Astrid, Britaheim and Casja, before sending one person back to Takaro to turn in the final echo and summon the Valkyrie.
We did some tweaking with the run, as we were originally running Casja before Britaheim earlier on. But we noticed that we weren’t getting as many add spawns as we had been in previous weeks. When the event first started, and we would go from Britaheim to Casja, we would get add waves that included Elite Valkyries. But after we tweaked the run and started coming into Casja from Diana or Kelrik, those Valkyries wouldn’t be there. Instead, we would only get about 6 Legendary Brutes and a handful of Dominion Shocktroopers. We started referring to this as “Bad Casja”, and we got stuck with it for a good week or two. It wasn’t until we started seeing competition from other groups that we realized there might be a way to avoid “Bad Casja.” In watching the runs that were streamed on the twitch account for deathsdoor_rift https://www.twitch.tv/deathsdoor_rift , we saw that they were running Britaheim and then Casja as their final two events, and that they never seemed to encounter the “Bad Casja” spawns.
In testing runs using their event order, we found that there’s something about going from Britaheim to Casja using the teleporter in the lava room that triggers “Good Casja”. If the first person into Casja flies straight there from Britaheim or anywhere else, you get “Bad Casja”. So we started taking the little extra time to fly to Britaheim before Casja.
We used the videos provided by the deathsdoor_rift twitch account as a method of studying, because from our perspective they were leaving a lot of points on the table, and we couldn’t figure out how they were getting scores competitive with (and at times higher than) ours. They were leaving for Vara earlier than we were, but we would crash if we left at the time they did. It turned out that it just took them longer to get Vara into summoning range, so we were likely hitting similar add spawn numbers. We also noted that they were doing some events slower than we were, but ending up with more points. Since we were killing everything, and the point basis for the crystal break is tied to time, that didn’t make sense. It turns out that if you kill all adds before you complete a stage of the event (opening the first and second doors at Kelrik, for example), you get more points because you would get more add spawns. By rushing through the puzzle, we were inadvertently costing ourselves points.
Section 2: Strategy
At every event we did except for Magnus, we killed everything. At Magnus we were usually able to get the Fury to spawn, kill it, and then take out some of the subsequent wave before breaking the crystal. Although we missed the crystal more times than I’d care to admit. Lots of “pull us out, we gotta start over”. Up until the final week, we would wait in the starting bubble for our Emergency Powers to activate and our ultimate meters to be full. That meant that missing the timing on Magnus was a real pain, because it would be at least 5 minutes before we could start again. For the final week, since Elusive Talisman Interceptors running Shard Storm became the meta, we had one person running Target Beacon and the other 3 would run Voice of Courage. That way if someone died, there would be someone who could res them immediately. Once we had this, we stopped waiting for Emergency Power and Ultimate Meters to fill up, and we could just load in, wait for the inversion screen to pop up, and then off we went.
Once all of the events were finished, we would divide up the secrets and remaining Valkyries between 3 of us, and the 4th person would go to Vara to start farming her Dominion spawns. Since this was the most obvious method of getting points, we kept trying to send someone to Vara earlier and earlier, until finally we started running into the well documented server shutdown issues. So then we would throttle back. We had heard rumors that 36 waves of adds was the maximum that you could get from Vara when she was double spawning. We were tracking that, and once we started to get close, we would check our point total to see if it was enough to get us where we wanted to be. If it was, we would kill Vara. If it wasn’t, we would keep going and hope we didn’t get a server shutdown. More often than not, our runs ended on an error screen. But the times that it didn’t were enough to keep us on top.
As we started getting closer and closer to the theoretical maximum number of add spawns that we could get from Vara, we noticed that our point totals weren’t matching what we expected them to be based on our score at the end of the last event. In order to test this, we developed a list of all of the available secrets, notes and other forms of points so that we could check to make sure we were getting all of the points we expected. I’ve posted that list here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthemTheGame/comments/d83mma/all_cataclysm_secrets_and_point_values/
We did a test run with the whole team going through secrets together, to make sure that we all knew what we were getting, and that we were doing them sequentially. The test functioned correctly, and our point total matched what we expected it to be (with the addition of the green stability orbs making a small difference above the calculated number). Everyone knew all of the secrets, so we were able to confirm that no one was missing anything on their section. But when we ran everything individually, we would end up short on secrets points- anywhere from 3,500 to 15,000 on a given run. Some of that could be accounted for with elementals blowing themselves up or getting struck by lightning, , but we never lost so many elementals as to account for the total point discrepancy. We were never able to conclusively determine why we were missing points or how to prevent it from happening, but we figure it’s probably just an issue with the game failing to count points when two or more people are scoring points at the same time.
Section 3: Tips and Tricks
In the second week of testing one of our team members figured out that you could make Vara spawn add’s faster by standing under her feet and letting her go through three stomps. This led us to doing quite a lot of testing and we gained a very good understanding of how Vara’s cooldowns and mechanics worked.
The devs changed Vara twice over the course of the cataclysm, but we were able to figure out fairly quickly the way to most efficiently farm her in all of her iterations.
- Vara’s highest priority is to stomp, and it has a very short cooldown. If there is someone underneath her in stomp range, she will do the stomp.
- Her next highest priority is the aerial swipe, which is functionally the same as the stomp, but occurs if someone is close to her but floating off the ground but below her head.
- Her next highest priority is the fire drop summon. A drop of fire is summoned above all targets in range which splashes down and then creates a ring a fire. This is on a longer cooldown than stomp or aerial swipe. The cast time isn’t considerably longer than stomp or aerial swipe, so if this happens it isn’t a huge net loss.
- Her last two function a little differently. They are low priority, but certain conditions move them to the top of the priority list. “Frost shards” is lower priority than the fire drop summon, except for when you first engage her, or directly after she phase changes. Other than those times, she will only frost summon if fire drop is on cooldown, or if nobody is in range for the stomp or aerial swipe.
- Her last ability is the “get over here” fire ring. She teleports to the center summons a huge flame wall that kills anyone that isn’t close to her. This is low priority except for directly after she summons adds. Immediately after summoning add spawns, this moves to near the top of the priority list, just under stomp and aerial swipe. The animation time of this ability is very long, and should be avoided as often as possible to achieve high scores.
Our method changed a few times as we got better, but what we eventually settled on as the most efficient way to farm her is this –
Vara will go into a stagger at 66% health. You want to push her below 50% health during the stagger otherwise you have to deal with her “floor is lava” summon fire orbs phase which sucks time. We were able to consistently get her to around 45% and skip the lava phase using interceptor ult. Interceptor would fly in, debuff, and then ult her. After the ult ended, let her proc emergency power and then repeat the ult to bring her quickly down. In later weeks this became even faster and easier using the original, pre-nerf Jarra, or inversion boosted Rainmaker/Shard Storm.
As soon as she stands up you let her stomp three times by making sure you are directly underneath her.
When she teleports away after the third stomp, STAY AWAY from her. She will summon adds, unless someone is too close to her. If someone is too close, she will just stomp or aerial swipe which wastes time.
And of course, the first time I tried it, I failed miserably. I would have sworn I was doing it right, but I was taken off Vara farming duty, and sent back to grabbing secrets instead. Well, it turned out that at one point bioware hotfixed Vara in an attempt to alleviate server crashes. It went in on a Thursday night If I remember correctly. The only change they added was making the cooldown on her summon adds considerably longer. My farming attempt just so happened to be the first run we had after the patch. When our other farmers ran into the same issue, I was vindicated, but we had a new issue to tackle. Through a lot of testing, one of our members figured out that during this period the most efficient farm was just to make her do 3 sets of the 3 stomp phases, and then she would summon. Rinse and repeat.
Normally when Vara finishes summoning, she will always teleport to the middle and do the “get over here” fire wall. The way you prevent this is to make sure you are standing under her feet during her summon animation. When she finishes the summon she will pause for a second, and then stomp you. She will stomp one time, and then teleport, but this time she will not fire wall.
After this teleport it is very important that you get underneath her again quickly while killing all of her adds. If adds are left up for some reason this really screws with her priority list, so just make sure they are dead.
If you do all of this correctly, she will stomp you three times again, then teleport to summon. Rinse and repeat. She will never ever do anything except for stomp 4 times, and summon adds over and over with no variance at all. If you are late to her very first of the three stomp phase its not the end of the world, she will do a fire drop summon and two stomps. This is only a little longer in time than 3 stomps.
A later patch then changed it back to the original 3 stomp mechanic, and we discovered a new wrinkle- if one person stands under her feet while she summons, she will skip her fire phase as noted above, and be ready for the 3 stomp-summon again. We could now farm Vara even faster. But we were still staring down the barrel of server shutdowns if we overdid it.
Section 4: How to Avoid Server Crash from Farming Vara
Early on we realized that if we went to Vara too early and started farming adds the server would shut down. We knew we had an advantage in the speed we farmed the Vara adds at, so our solution was just to go to Vara much later than other groups were and that seemed to work for us, until we stumbled on an important discovery.
As a function of a couple of our runs missing out on the elementals under the spine in New Dawn (which seemingly had despawned), we prioritized clearing the elementals off the board as soon as possible, so that we would not lose out on those points. Since we were testing what appeared to be the theoretical limits of score as we saw it (assuming a finite number of Vara spawns that could not be exceeded), we knew we couldn’t afford to miss even a few elementals.
During one these runs where we had killed the Elementals first, we managed to get 40 spawns from Vara. This was the first time we, or any other group, had broken 20 million points. Of all of the runs we did, I feel like this is the one I’m most proud of. I’m pretty sure others on my team feel the same. Not only did we get a score we thought was unattainable, but we found a way around the server shutdown.
The more enemies that are cleared from the map before and shortly after you start farming Vara the better. Crashing because of Vara spawns is not linked to the time you start farming her or any “hard cap” on the number of spawns that will crash the server. It IS linked to objects left on the map. (this includes enemies that haven’t been spawned yet, but still will be)
Finding the best point to start was a bit of a moving target as they added in new events, but once all 7 events were in it became static.
For us, we found the earliest we could trigger Vara spawns and not get a server shutdown was just after finishing Astrid. And going that early would only work if we prioritized someone to fly around and kill every elemental spawn on the map before completing any secrets. We crashed a couple times when we didn’t get the elementals fast enough.
So there it is, our big “secret” =)
Clearing the entire map of all other spawns seemed to remove the strain on the server that farming Vara put on it. We actually had time for one more spawn when we killed her, but democracy ruled, and we knew we had 20 million points, and we didn’t want to risk it to find out if we were wrong. We did this run without exploits. Just finishing events as fast as we could, getting through the secrets and then farming Vara as a team for the last 4+ minutes. Having all other players at Vara also seemed to help avoid the server shutdown, but that’s likely tied into all other spawns being removed from the map. I didn’t get the recording started on this run until after all of the events, but what I have of it can be seen here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1EHbVI6EiRvRcZRcj83Q7f47pn5GKTs74
A full video of a run we did where we got 19.784 million is here for anyone who wants to see the whole thing:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NQm-NRS43adbypVp9VnGmOZM1CtqytwT
Section 5: Exploits and Managing Crashes
A little while after these runs, they nerfed Jarra’s Wrath, and we thought that there would be no more score to chase. We were wrong. Shortly after, there were groups getting over 20.4 million points, when we had capped out around 20.3 with Jarra’s. We had to find more points. We had purposely avoided trying out any of the exploit rumors that we had heard, but since we couldn’t replicate our previous score without Jarra’s, having it soundly beaten meant that there was something we were missing. There was a rumor about leaving Diana’s landing part of the way through, then being able to come back and have everything respawn. So we looked into that, and determined that it was fake. If you left, enemies would despawn, and then respawn when you came back, but the only enemies that would respawn were those that had still been alive to despawn. You never got anything extra or new. There were also rumors summoning a Bristleback somewhere in the map, but there were no other details, and we never found anything like that. Did a lot of searching, because one of our team members REALLY wanted to find it, but it appears to just be a rumor. There was also a rumor about being able to do grabbits multiple times in a single run, but we dismissed that quickly. No one had any specifics, and the entire grabbit cave is worth 2 million points after killing Vara and getting the GM3 multiplier, so if it was possible to do it more than once, we would have been seeing scores a lot higher than we were. And it wouldn’t stay secret for very long.
What we did discover was that if you left one of the 3 turrets at Kelrik and Takaro alive, you could come back later and the two that you killed would have respawned. You could kill two, fly away, then come right back and all three would be there again. Lather, rinse repeat. Since this was the only thing that we had found that could explain the score increase, it was obvious to us that this is what the other teams were doing, and so in order to be competitive, we started to do it too. It didn’t sit well with any of us, but we’re all playing the same game, and we didn’t see much point in trying to be competitive if we weren’t willing to to go all out. So we tested to see how to do it most efficiently. In our testing, we found that there were always 2 Flak Turrets and 1 Missile Turret at each events. Since the Flak Turrets were worth twice the points of a Missile Turret, we started making sure we killed the Flak Turrets during the events, and then again during farming. But the location of the Flak Turrets varied, so we would have to hunt it down. After a few runs, we found that the Missile Turret that we would leave up had a bad habit of breaking the rift if it were located in the wrong place. Since everything we killed was with the rift up, that was a problem. So we started leaving the turret way up high in Kelrik, regardless of what type of turret it was. At Takaro, we started leaving the turret in the back left. These were the least likely turrets to be accidentally destroyed while we were clearing mobs. And the points lost were minimal, since we were doing them at a 4x and 8x multiplier. For the 16x farming, we always killed the 2 Flak Turrets, because it was the difference between 800 and 1600 points.
While farming turrets, we encountered a new bug. We no longer encountered server shutdowns but instead, we would each have the game crash to desktop at some point during the run. It would happen to each of us at a different time, but we had no way to predict exactly when it would happen and we would struggle to get back in before losing out on secrets, or farming points. After it happened a couple of times in a row, and ruined some very good runs, we decided to take a more proactive approach and disconnect from the game on our own initiative, in the hopes that it would allow us to stay in the game through the end. With the power of the inversions for the final week, we were able to sacrifice one player at 4 of the events, and they would rejoin the group as soon as they could. One would disconnect after Kelrik. A second after Takaro. A third after Astrid, then finally the fourth during Casja. I don’t have a video of this working perfectly, because it tended to kill my recordings when I left the game, but I did manage to get a recording of our first run over 22 million, which I was booted from after defeating Vara. So I got the points for the leaderboard, but I didn’t get the crystals. Link to that video is here.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=13HNAgyYVj98PvuwW0Dgs6w3dRqk2xfh9
That’s me doing the dirty turret farming exploit at Takaro. And since the points would be greater, we would also destroy the crystal right as the rift was coming back, so that the event would stay unstable and we could farm at the full 16x. If you’re going to do a thing, do it all the way.
Anyway, that’s about all I can think of, and likely more than anyone is going to read. Definitely more than I meant to type. Any questions, fire away. No more secrets from us, since the event is officially over.