Warmaster Guide

[OldestGamer]

Checkout this new video of the Warmaster Defeat, just watched it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=Q45thKNTGWk. Great job with lots of team work!

[maverick07]

Mod the wolfhound with crit, movement accuracy, mag size, and recoil/bloom.

Mod the thunder with movement accuracy/accuracy (no zoom - it will kill you lol), Damage, burst mag, and recoil/bloom.

I'm not sure which the VBI LMG is, maybe I'm brain farting atm, can you be more specific?

Didn't even think about the Burst mag on the Thunder does it really help? I put a Radiation Converter on my EL Thunder last night but if the Burst mag ups the fire rate I may give that a try today.

[Nilxain]

Didn't even think about the Burst mag on the Thunder does it really help? I put a Radiation Converter on my EL Thunder last night but if the Burst mag ups the fire rate I may give that a try today.

Yep it's a flat 20% rate increase. Radiation may be better for the group though - I know I love the people who run it.

[Tekrunner]

Yep it's a flat 20% rate increase. Radiation may be better for the group though - I know I love the people who run it.

Did you find that number yourself? When I experimented with that mod I found that the lower the base fire rate of a weapon, the more a burst mod would increase it. I measured about +20% on a SAW, something like +12.5% on a VBI AR, and no effect on a tachmag pulser.

As for sights, I don't think a stabilization sight is very useful for a thunder, as you should never shoot it while moving or from the hip. You're always going to aim it, so I'd say an assault scope is the best choice.

I'm pretty sure that using weapons like a Typhoon or a Northstar Flare on the arms to bypass armor is a bad idea. Their critical DPS is much lower than a wolfhound's, so unless maybe you could somehow get everyone to do the same thing (and kill the WM without ever breaking his armor), it's better to break the armor faster, and start doing more serious damage afterwards.

I'm unsure about the ground pounder. Sure you can pull crazy damage numbers on the scoreboard, but that's because you're damaging all weak spots, which isn't that helpful. It's probably not a terrible choice, since it isn't affected by the armor's damage reduction, but some maths would be needed to see how it does compared to an SMG.

Right now on PC EU I would say that the biggest problem is that people aren't switching to a high crit weapon once the arm is exposed. I've been in a couple of instances where the armor is blown off after less than 3 minutes, but then I hear far too few pistol sounds around me.

[RextintorZ]

Has anyone else tried the Volge Thunderer Pistol? I was using one when we were trying to defeat Warmaster before the server went down moments ago and I was getting almost 3k crit damage on its unarmored right arm and it reached almost 8k in some cases (damage spike, maybe radiation).

I was mentioning in the in-game chat I got 1M damage using only the Volge Thunderer Pistol (it was mostly from the Warmaster because I entered the instance near the end of the phase that we needed to kill those regular enemies) and some guy named TWITCH REFLEX (it was all in caps) typing with all his might and Caps Lock to rage about my weapon being a crappy one and the only one worth anything was the Wolfhound.

[royal]

Easiest way to kill him is to catch the bug where he leans panting against the wall.
Did that about thirty minutes ago.

[Nilxain]

Did you find that number yourself? When I experimented with that mod I found that the lower the base fire rate of a weapon, the more a burst mod would increase it. I measured about +20% on a SAW, something like +12.5% on a VBI AR, and no effect on a tachmag pulser.

Yeah, it was a while ago, but yeah. If you time the time it takes to empty a base thunder, then time the time it takes to empty a burst mag thunder it takes less time. Then if you take the number of rounds 120 and divide it by the time for completion it give you the RoF which comes out to be ~20% (my timer is only seconds so I had to do some rounding :-( maybe it's not 20% even and I just can't tell because of my timer. Test it out and let me know if you get the same result - I always like confirmation.

As for sights, I don't think a stabilization sight is very useful for a thunder, as you should never shoot it while moving or from the hip. You're always going to aim it, so I'd say an assault scope is the best choice.

Yeah but it still gives accuracy which is why I recommended both for the thunder - basically whichever is easiest to get.

I'm pretty sure that using weapons like a Typhoon or a Northstar Flare on the arms to bypass armor is a bad idea. Their critical DPS is much lower than a wolfhound's, so unless maybe you could somehow get everyone to do the same thing (and kill the WM without ever breaking his armor), it's better to break the armor faster, and start doing more serious damage afterwards.

I am currently revisiting these weapons and will produce some math later on. But it looks like it's situational and highly depends on what the other people in the raid are using - I'll explain my thoughts in more detail later.

I'm unsure about the ground pounder. Sure you can pull crazy damage numbers on the scoreboard, but that's because you're damaging all weak spots, which isn't that helpful. It's probably not a terrible choice, since it isn't affected by the armor's damage reduction, but some maths would be needed to see how it does compared to an SMG.

The Xbox kill group posted a video with highly compelling evidens as to it's effectiveness - click on the "xbox kill group" link at the end of the title for "method 2" in my guide for the post with the video.

Detonators seem to be ignoring the armor completely no matter where you hit the boss.

Right now on PC EU I would say that the biggest problem is that people aren't switching to a high crit weapon once the arm is exposed. I've been in a couple of instances where the armor is blown off after less than 3 minutes, but then I hear far too few pistol sounds around me.

I think this really is a big problem. It will make more sense later why I say it's situational, but, pending some math, I think that this will still be the best option (switching to the high crit dps weapon once the armor brakes).

My current recommendation is to run 2 loadouts 1 with Ground Pounder/High DPS white damage and one with a wolfhound. This may change after I do my math.

[Nilxain]

Has anyone else tried the Volge Thunderer Pistol? I was using one when we were trying to defeat Warmaster before the server went down moments ago and I was getting almost 3k crit damage on its unarmored right arm and it reached almost 8k in some cases (damage spike, maybe radiation).

I was mentioning in the in-game chat I got 1M damage using only the Volge Thunderer Pistol (it was mostly from the Warmaster because I entered the instance near the end of the phase that we needed to kill those regular enemies) and some guy named TWITCH REFLEX (it was all in caps) typing with all his might and Caps Lock to rage about my weapon being a crappy one and the only one worth anything was the Wolfhound.

The Thunderer is a GREAT pistol and IMO functions well above the other volge weapons in both DPS and AOE. That said, The wolfhound is so far ahead of everything else for crit dps that if you have one you should be using it once the armor is down. The thunderer's crit dps is ~7.5k (so not too bad) and the wolfhound is ~11k+ (some are FAR above that) - so ~3.5k DPS higher.

[Nilxain]

Easiest way to kill him is to catch the bug where he leans panting against the wall.
Did that about thirty minutes ago.

I'm not going to explain how that happens because it's an exploit and I have reported it to the Devs. That said, if you time your decoy just right you can make the boss just stand there and face his right arm to the group. If multiple people do this it might be possible to in effect "CC" him. I have been trying this method and others, now that we have confirmed kills on all the systems - with a nerf no longer being a threat. The decoy method seems pretty hard to do consistently so I do not recommend it yet, but if I can nail down a EZ-Mode tactic to make it work I will add it.

[Tekrunner]

The Xbox kill group posted a video with highly compelling evidens as to it's effectiveness - click on the "xbox kill group" ling at the end of the title for "method 2" in my guide for the post with the video.

Detonators seem to be ignoring the armor completely no matter where you hit the boss.

I watched the video, and while it shows that ground pounders do work, it doesn't show that they're better than SMGs. Maybe if that group had all used tachmags, they would have dropped him 30 seconds faster? As I said I'm not sure about this one way or another. That's why I think that calculations need to be made on this.

Also, I'm pretty sure that detonators are not ignoring the armor. It's just that cluster explosives ignore damage reduction from armor, just like they do on hellbugs for example. But they're still only damaging the armor itself, not the Warmaster's health. The few times I did try a ground pounder on him, I was getting white damage numbers, not yellow. The reason why on that kill video the WM takes health damage before his armor is blown off is that a bunch of people use Volge battle rifles when he's hanging (even making him fall). But again, just because that worked for them doesn't mean that it's the optimal method.