Composition:
Helvian - Gu/Ra
Boxes - Fo/Br
Shira - Br/Fo
Cerish - Te/Wa
I was proud of this run, then I watched it back, and realised this is basically a diamond that I dropped into a turd. I'm too sick of yellow balls to wonder what we could have gotten otherwise.
GENERAL STRATEGY
Our general strategy was to do as many respawns as possible on wave 1 and 2, and only once on wave 3. This allowed us to gain more points, and then clear the following wave faster since we had Photon Blasts and Compound Techniques. However we didn't start out like this, there was a gradual paradigm shift:
- Originally we didn't do any respawns, as I came in with the assumption that the respawn timer was 25 seconds (from my few solo runs) and that left you 2.2 seconds to kill and grab (because a respawn wave is worth 272 points, and 1 point is worth 0.1 seconds).
- I worked out via watching our runs that waiting for respawns was actually worth doing if we optimised our grabbing of the balls and killing of the mobs; you actually had 5.2 seconds instead of 2.2
- We found that wave 3 was nearly impossible to make a profit of score on, so scrapped all but 1 respawn on that, the 1 respawn's purpose was to allow everyone to be in position and start at the same time
- I realised I had Photon Blast by wave 2 and that it was due to me hitting the targets constantly, so I urged everyone else to try charging up via Talis; we then decided to do as many respawn waves as possible to facilitate charging Compound Techniques and Photon Blasts
- Shira changed from Br/Fi to Br/Fo to use an Evolcoat Talis (didn't have a Kaizaar), Boxes switched to Fo/Br to take advantage of Compounds
- There was a day we went double Te, but none of us re-read the skill tree...Te has no bonus on these targets.
- We had some issues balancing Talis positioning and ball grabbing, so we switched to Zonde to charge up instead, allowing everyone to stand in ball grabbing positions.
- I tried charging my own PB with Homing Darts but I didn't have enough free time to use enough of them, so scrapped it. I didn't want to go Gu/Fo since I got a lot of mileage out of Rifle WA and Spread Shot (Rifle).
- We started using Wulfen Demolition and Brave Combat to instakill some respawns where I was unable to (the first group of mobs of each wave); Rifle Mine was too slow.
- I started calling out the next probable respawn times on voice comms to help the others know when to stop casting so they dont get animation locked out of picking a ball up. You can't hear it on this video though.
WAVE 1
This was the best wave 1 we ever did, with an exit of 4169 points, and roughly 32 seconds spent fighting. We found gathering all 4 pettas on the last half of the map together for a grand beatdown via Chain Finish, Rod PB and Fomelgion was the quickest way to handle it. Quite reproducible too, the only variable was the lone Pettas Axe deciding not to run fast enough.
WAVE 2
The strategy for my half of wave 2 was to grab aggro of the two Deser Gunblades, then jump onto a lower platform. As long as it hadn't been too long since they aggroed, they would follow me and jump down next to the Deser Launcher there. They would then get blown up by the same combination of moves as before, and I'd finish off the scraps while Boxes ran off to kill the last Signogun.
In this run, Cerish got bonked by the Gigantix, the two Deser Gunblades jumped extremely late and then one of them smacked me off the platform during a Chain Finish. The simultaneous blunders made us both finish at nearly the same time, but overall slower, with 47 seconds spent fighting. Our "good" time was about 43 seconds.
WAVE 3
I think I did okay up until the moment that I tried to finish off the Zams Gunblade at the top level. I hoped my lock-on would target him as I seemed closer to him and was pointing my camera at him, but as soon as I lock on I spin around 180 degrees and almost get shot in the back as a result. This caused a massive butterfly effect: it could have died far sooner, all the targets would have been broken sooner, so Fomelgion would have went off sooner, plus I would have been in a better position to grab aggro of the top-level enemies so I could condense them into the middle of the room, so that one Fuwan would not have lived. This single lock-on blunder cost us a lot, in fact if this didn't happen I'd wager we would have completely leapt over 15.3k and planted ourselves comfortably into 15.4k.
Anyway, I'm extremely proud of my team for coming this far. I know this score can be beaten by probably 200 points, but it'll take some luck, some good servers, and absolutely no blunders.
I'd prefer in future if we didn't have to smack targets for 4 minutes, or the quest just failed if there were no balls and no enemies left.
Timestamps:
0:00 Wave 1 pre-fight
2:10 Wave 1
2:45 Wave 2 pre-fight
5:03 Wave 2
5:51 Wave 3