Jump to content

help Huge difference in difficulty between Gamma and Alpha?


Jeebusu

Recommended Posts

Hello everyone, I am a new user in this forum so please teach me the ropes, thank you. 請多多指教!🙏

I've only been playing Ark on the Island and on single player, and recently I've gotten to taking on the bosses.

I got through gamma megapithecus with ease, going with 19 rexes and 1 yuti. They were bred and start at 5k hp and 320%dmg after imprint, starting at level 71. (I didn't know about difficulty settings and stuff when i started so I have wonky max levels, it is set at 0.6 and dino spawns max at level 78. Also single player settings is checked). I leveled them all to around 20k and 718%dmg. 

Now I didn't get on with the megapithecus fights because I had difficulty finding spino sails, so I went to the broodmother with 19 megatheriums and the same yuti. The megatheriums were bred as well and start at 4k hp and 320% dmg, starting at a bunch of different levels because i didn't bother with dealing with food and weight stats. Leveled to mostly around 15-17k hp and 740-800% dmg.(Got a bit lazy with the leveling, terrible idea) Got through the gamma fight with ease as well, but then the Alpha fight happened.(I skipped the beta fight, another terrible decision)

I won the Alpha fight, but lost 12 megatheriums in the process, and almost the yuti because I got a bit too close. (I was in so much shock I forgot to pick the saddles of the dead ones back up) So now I'm back to breeding up more, and being terrified that my rex army will suffer a similar fate.

What surprised me was the Alpha did damage in the 700s while the Gamma only did damage in 2 digit numbers. Was the difference always this huge? Or is it because of my wonky settings? 

Thank you again for your time and sorry for the long post.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Jeebusu said:

What surprised me was the Alpha did damage in the 700s while the Gamma only did damage in 2 digit numbers. Was the difference always this huge? Or is it because of my wonky settings?

Hi Jeebusu, yes, the difference between Gamma and Alpha is huge, but it seems to be even bigger than it really is because of how saddles affect the damage that your animals receive.

If you look at the wiki page for the Megapithecus you'll see that the Base Damage for Gamma Megapithecus is 400 and the Base Damage for Alpha is 1200, which is only 3x as much as Gamma. If your saddles are even reasonably good then they will be good enough for Gamma and will significantly reduce the Gamma damage, but you need very good saddles to get enough damage reduction on Alpha. I don't remember the exact formula for how much damage saddles prevent, but it's available on the wiki somewhere if you really want to look it up and learn more about it. But even if you don't want to do that, just remember that you want really good saddles for any Alpha boss fight.

 

Also, agreeing with what you said about Beta, I personally think that it's better to try every boss on each difficulty, that way if you're not ready for Alpha you'll figure it out when you do Beta without losing so many animals & saddles.

 

And finally, I recommend that you use a Daedon in your boss fights that it set to follow your Yuti.

1) Put all of your rexes into a Tame Group

2) Put your yuti and your daedon into a different tame group, then turn on Passive Healing on the daedon just before you begin the boss fight.

3) When you do the boss fight, make sure that you have selected the Tame Group for the rexes before you use any whistle commands. This will guarantee that the rexes all follow your whistle commands but the daedon will keep following your yuti no matter what whistles you use.

If you have not used Tame Groups while you've been playing the game then this is a good time to learn about them and practice using them. It's a very useful feature of the game, especially for solo players.

https://ark.gamepedia.com/Megapithecus

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree with pipinghot, got to get the really good saddles for alpha fights, and you got to get a deadon to help passively heal. However I personally like to ride on the deadon and have the yuty following me....this way I can keep the yuty behind me and screaming at everything while I force heal the guys doing the hard work.

Iv never lost a megaptherium with this method.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

Hi Jeebusu, yes, the difference between Gamma and Alpha is huge, but it seems to be even bigger than it really is because of how saddles affect the damage that your animals receive.

If you look at the wiki page for the Megapithecus you'll see that the Base Damage for Gamma Megapithecus is 400 and the Base Damage for Alpha is 1200, which is only 3x as much as Gamma. If your saddles are even reasonably good then they will be good enough for Gamma and will significantly reduce the Gamma damage, but you need very good saddles to get enough damage reduction on Alpha. I don't remember the exact formula for how much damage saddles prevent, but it's available on the wiki somewhere if you really want to look it up and learn more about it. But even if you don't want to do that, just remember that you want really good saddles for any Alpha boss fight.

 

Also, agreeing with what you said about Beta, I personally think that it's better to try every boss on each difficulty, that way if you're not ready for Alpha you'll figure it out when you do Beta without losing so many animals & saddles.

 

And finally, I recommend that you use a Daedon in your boss fights that it set to follow your Yuti.

1) Put all of your rexes into a Tame Group

2) Put your yuti and your daedon into a different tame group, then turn on Passive Healing on the daedon just before you begin the boss fight.

3) When you do the boss fight, make sure that you have selected the Tame Group for the rexes before you use any whistle commands. This will guarantee that the rexes all follow your whistle commands but the daedon will keep following your yuti no matter what whistles you use.

If you have not used Tame Groups while you've been playing the game then this is a good time to learn about them and practice using them. It's a very useful feature of the game, especially for solo players.

https://ark.gamepedia.com/Megapithecus

 

Ahhhh, I understand now. Yes the saddles I have is terrible compared to the ones I've seen in youtube videos and what other people have said in forums. I think it's because of the screwed up difficulty I have and it's affecting the quality of drops. I've only got a ramshackle megatherium saddle, which with max crafting skill max at 45%, the case is the same with the rex saddle. I've only recently changed the drop quality in settings so I might have more grinding to do.

Although Tame groups are a thing I always use so my base don't get all jumbled when I whistle.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I personally have the supply drops and loot crates cranked up really high. the reason is its a terrible pain to be slogged down just chaseing crates to get any good blueprints......best thing I can tell you is to try and hit the red and yellow drop, and to hit up the swamp cave, east underwater cave, and if you got some good yuties, the brute ice cave. These seem to have the best loot crates for saddle BP's.


Also, to help you get the best of the best saddles possible, you might want to take the time to cook up a mind wipe tonic, then put all of your stat points into crafting skill. After you do this, you have a better chance at makeing better than suggested saddles.......Iv personally done this a couple times for rex saddles. They should have had 90 armor after creating them, but with my extra crafting skill bump, I got 120's-130's.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, wizard03 said:

I personally have the supply drops and loot crates cranked up really high. the reason is its a terrible pain to be slogged down just chaseing crates to get any good blueprints......best thing I can tell you is to try and hit the red and yellow drop, and to hit up the swamp cave, east underwater cave, and if you got some good yuties, the brute ice cave. These seem to have the best loot crates for saddle BP's.


Also, to help you get the best of the best saddles possible, you might want to take the time to cook up a mind wipe tonic, then put all of your stat points into crafting skill. After you do this, you have a better chance at makeing better than suggested saddles.......Iv personally done this a couple times for rex saddles. They should have had 90 armor after creating them, but with my extra crafting skill bump, I got 120's-130's.

Oh cool, I was trying to make the game more fair and not make myself overpowered with really good loot, but it seems that having it cranked up high isn't that big of a concern. I did use the mindwipe tonics, not only that but my crafting skill bonus was set at 2 for some reason so I get at most around 100% increase. As for where I grind for loot, because I only recently got into the swamp cave I have been missing out on some loot. Although I did often visit carno island for its drops and the cave there. I'm too scared of the ice cave and I've only tried the west, easier water cave. I will give them a try when I get the chance, right now it's exam season.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Spider is a bit of a troll boss, it's presented as easiest one on the Island, but alpha spider is so much harder than alpha monkey it's not even funny.

Using sloths instead of rexes does help, but for me this method is unreliable - I'm playing solo and sloths without rider will often ignore small spiders and fight boss without buff or focus small spiders and ignore boss completely. Also I prefer to use same dinos for all bosses. Switching between sloths and rexes would be inconvenient.

And to make it even harder, my yuty had a habit of teleporting into boss arena a bit lower than ground level. Was stuck below sloth feet and died. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 hours ago, Jeebusu said:

Oh cool, I was trying to make the game more fair and not make myself overpowered with really good loot, but it seems that having it cranked up high isn't that big of a concern. I did use the mindwipe tonics, not only that but my crafting skill bonus was set at 2 for some reason so I get at most around 100% increase. As for where I grind for loot, because I only recently got into the swamp cave I have been missing out on some loot. Although I did often visit carno island for its drops and the cave there. I'm too scared of the ice cave and I've only tried the west, easier water cave. I will give them a try when I get the chance, right now it's exam season.

Honestly in SP mode, it is not as over powered as it sounds. Just makes the work a tad bit more rewarding. Now granted in other maps, such as scorched earth, its a bit more over the top but still. Its kinda a necessity. Now I have it cranked up pretty high, Im on console and its maxed out at 5.0. Same for fishing. But even with it all the way, I still had to go to the caves for certain things, and typically I had to make multiple trips just to find the saddle I was looking for.

And not a problem, get those studies in man. When you get around to it, here is some solid advice on the nasty caves. As for the east underwater cave, tame up a high level basil as they are immune from the jellyfish. They are very finicky when it comes to taming them, I strongly suggest using exceptional kibble only. Next get the levels up as high as you possibly can and put 75% of those level ups into health....Granted I was on a legacy server, but even with a level 135 beginning tame basil that I pumped 50k health into, I was still too worried about dealing with all the nasties to try....I was working on a mossa to bring with me for some extra muscle, but even then, I was rather shy on that load out. The good news is when you do have a fully leveled up basil or two, you can use this cave to do black pearl runs. There are squiddies and mossa's everywhere {sometimes alphas too} in here and its how I got the black pearls necessary to get all my tek goodies later on.

As for ice cave, bring yuty's. They are able to fit in the whole cave, they also have stats like a rex, and if you find a burried badger, just scream at it and it will pop up without knocking you off your mount. Just make sure you put enough points into health to survive a brutal beating.....those bears and wolves are no joke. Also, you might bring with you a deadon and a few back up yuty's in cryo pods, this way you can jump off of an injured mount in a safe area, and then get on another that has full health. As for the deadon, its kinda a last resort to get you back out. Take all the meat you gathered, feed the pig, and then turn on healing. This has helped me get out after I made a couple of mistakes. Keep in mind, all the animals in the cave are going to be over lvl250, and they will hit hard. Really hard! Be prepared to take those hits.

If your looking for some pointers on the ice cave, you can check out nooblets on youtube. He had a helper, but they went the yuty route.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

48 minutes ago, wizard03 said:

Honestly in SP mode, it is not as over powered as it sounds. Just makes the work a tad bit more rewarding. 

And not a problem, get those studies in man. When you get around to it, here is some solid advice on the nasty caves. As for the east underwater cave, tame up a high level basil as they are immune from the jellyfish. They are very finicky when it comes to taming them, I strongly suggest using exceptional kibble only. Next get the levels up as high as you possibly can and put 75% of those level ups into health....Granted I was on a legacy server, but even with a level 135 beginning tame basil that I pumped 50k health into, I was still too worried about dealing with all the nasties to try....I was working on a mossa to bring with me for some extra muscle, but even then, I was rather shy on that load out. The good news is when you do have a fully leveled up basil or two, you can use this cave to do black pearl runs. There are squiddies and mossa's everywhere {sometimes alphas too} in here and its how I got the black pearls necessary to get all my tek goodies later on.

 

Ok I will raise the loot quality and try out fishing soon. 

There's this thing I've noticed about my spawns, the underwater spawns are often of low level. I've been running into lv1-10 basils only, the highest I've seen is a 30ish. I know my levels max at 78, and the idk how to change the intervals they spawn at, they just spawn everywhere between 1 and 78. It's not a problem with the apex predators because I've seen high rexes and argies and stuff like that, it's mostly just the basils. I just have to put finding, breeding and leveling basils on my to do list along with raising more megatheriums and leveling them by farming the swamp cave.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, Jeebusu said:

Ok I will raise the loot quality and try out fishing soon. 

There's this thing I've noticed about my spawns, the underwater spawns are often of low level. I've been running into lv1-10 basils only, the highest I've seen is a 30ish. I know my levels max at 78, and the idk how to change the intervals they spawn at, they just spawn everywhere between 1 and 78. It's not a problem with the apex predators because I've seen high rexes and argies and stuff like that, it's mostly just the basils. I just have to put finding, breeding and leveling basils on my to do list along with raising more megatheriums and leveling them by farming the swamp cave.

Iv run into this problem on SP too, there are two methods of dealing with this.
First, kill off all the low levels you come across. This way new one's will spawn in with a chance of being a higher level....You may spend days {yes I said day's} of killing off low levels, and hopeing something comes back later.

The other method, sadly, is to use admin commands to kill off all the wilds and then relooking around. This method may take a few hours, possibly a couple days.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

35 minutes ago, wizard03 said:

Iv run into this problem on SP too, there are two methods of dealing with this.
First, kill off all the low levels you come across. This way new one's will spawn in with a chance of being a higher level....You may spend days {yes I said day's} of killing off low levels, and hopeing something comes back later.

The other method, sadly, is to use admin commands to kill off all the wilds and then relooking around. This method may take a few hours, possibly a couple days.

I avoid using admin commands as much as possible, so I'll murder everything in the sea. I can use this to level up my existing basils too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, Jeebusu said:

I avoid using admin commands as much as possible, so I'll murder everything in the sea. I can use this to level up my existing basils too.

Have to admit, on the legacy server this is how I leveled my basil up. I was hoping to get a lvl 145 or as perfect, so I just swam around and killed everything in sight. I got enough fish meat to fill the pig three times over for boss fights.....even if you don't use it for the main run in the end, its always nice to have a backup basil, just in case

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/9/2020 at 12:12 PM, wizard03 said:

Have to admit, on the legacy server this is how I leveled my basil up. I was hoping to get a lvl 145 or as perfect, so I just swam around and killed everything in sight. I got enough fish meat to fill the pig three times over for boss fights.....even if you don't use it for the main run in the end, its always nice to have a backup basil, just in case

 

I was thinking: "yea the I'll try the water cave, why not" I know that the dunke will demolish you if you accidentally bite them, so I made my way in trying to avoid touching them. I moved past an alpha shark and as i try to kill it I bite a dunke that i couldn't see. they surrounded me so I'm stuck between them and quickly dying. 

I'm going to load an older save of the game to avoid losing my basil. I know this is cheating but I don't want to lose something else after losing those megatheriums, as well as all the black pearls I farmed off shrimps.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Jeebusu said:

I was thinking: "yea the I'll try the water cave, why not" I know that the dunke will demolish you if you accidentally bite them, so I made my way in trying to avoid touching them. I moved past an alpha shark and as i try to kill it I bite a dunke that i couldn't see. they surrounded me so I'm stuck between them and quickly dying. 

I'm going to load an older save of the game to avoid losing my basil. I know this is cheating but I don't want to lose something else after losing those megatheriums, as well as all the black pearls I farmed off shrimps.

yeah, its a rough road man....as for cave in general, I always go in with both barrels blazing. To hell with passive aggressive maneuvers, kill em all, then use the meat to recover health........you just gotta keep your wits about you, have a VERY high health tame or three, and just do things in waves. The first wave is always the worst, but once its done and over with, things "feel" less as overwhelming.......tell ya what, here in a few hours Im gonna hop on and Ill see if I got a basil and see if I can do a quick twitch and link the video here, so you can see what to expect, and maybe get a few pointers on how I handle it.....may not be for you, but maybe you can pick up on something that will work for you.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, wizard03 said:

 here in a few hours Im gonna hop on and Ill see if I got a basil and see if I can do a quick twitch and link the video here, so you can see what to expect, and maybe get a few pointers on how I handle it.....may not be for you, but maybe you can pick up on something that will work for you.

Wow thank you, Also something to note is that i listened to you about the loot quality. I maxed it at 500% on both drops and fishing. I tried it out today, going into the swamp cave, and I realized what you said about being not overpowered is true, it gave me ascendant stuff yes, but it was a cub, a fur, and a sabertooth saddle.... So i guess getting what you really want at a high quality and as a blueprint is still hard.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Jeebusu said:

Wow thank you, Also something to note is that i listened to you about the loot quality. I maxed it at 500% on both drops and fishing. I tried it out today, going into the swamp cave, and I realized what you said about being not overpowered is true, it gave me ascendant stuff yes, but it was a cub, a fur, and a sabertooth saddle.... So i guess getting what you really want at a high quality and as a blueprint is still hard.

Good news, bad news. Good news is I have the whole thing, bad news. My headphones reciver took a crapola....no me talking, just me playing. Sorry. =/ Ill see if I can get a set of turtle beachs soon if I do any more.
Also, I show you how to eat meat at the begining of the cave, however to conserve time, I just do "refillstats" later on to speed up the video, still took me an hour tho. x.x I also tried to get that stats set "just right" for what I would consider a good tamed basil......any questions on what I did or why, just ask. But I will say right now, I had to do 3 or 4 refill stats......you can look at it like this, I stopped and ate all the meat to refill health OR you can pretend I put the first basil into a cryo pod and then tossed a new one out, all healed up.

And yeah, the BP quality is still super tuff to find "exactly" what you want, even with that stat cranked.....same goes for fishing. Just cause you want that really big fishy over there, doesn't mean your not going to have to catch 12 other small fishies before hand. XD

Twitch vid: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/768191454

Link to comment
Share on other sites

52 minutes ago, wizard03 said:

Good news, bad news. Good news is I have the whole thing, bad news. My headphones reciver took a crapola....no me talking, just me playing. Sorry. =/ Ill see if I can get a set of turtle beachs soon if I do any more.
And yeah, the BP quality is still super tuff to find "exactly" what you want, even with that stat cranked.....same goes for fishing. Just cause you want that really big fishy over there, doesn't mean your not going to have to catch 12 other small fishies before hand. XD

Twitch vid: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/768191454

It's absolutely fine, I should thank you for even considering helping, putting that much effort for some random player on the internet is rare, I'm glad I got to talk with you. I can just understand the refill stats as either a cyro'd basil or a force fed one, health is the major concern. After that it's just a matter of if you can get the creatures to come at you little by little, cuz the damage piles up really quickly if you aggro too much at once.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 minutes ago, Jeebusu said:

It's absolutely fine, I should thank you for even considering helping, putting that much effort for some random player on the internet is rare, I'm glad I got to talk with you. I can just understand the refill stats as either a cyro'd basil or a force fed one, health is the major concern. After that it's just a matter of if you can get the creatures to come at you little by little, cuz the damage piles up really quickly if you aggro too much at once.

If you watch the vid, yeah. I got "dog piled" by a bunch of dunky's. {doesn't that sound familiar?} after getting out of there, I tossed out my mosa and went to work mowing them down. 
End of the story, keep on the basil hunt, don't overlook the ones that are at least over lvl 100, and keep your wits about you.....it is a test, for sure.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 hours ago, wizard03 said:

If you watch the vid, yeah. I got "dog piled" by a bunch of dunky's. {doesn't that sound familiar?} after getting out of there, I tossed out my mosa and went to work mowing them down. 

I have decided that all dunky's deserve to die, I shall go out of my way to eat all the dunky's I can find.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/14/2020 at 6:52 AM, wizard03 said:

Might wanna do it one at a time. :P

I did it, I got through the cave!!!

Yeah, it was just like you said, taking things one at a time is the way to go. I used my crossbow to lure things out and I was much more manageable. Thank you so much.

 

I want to ask how high you have your loot set up to? I have it set at 500% right now

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Jeebusu said:

I did it, I got through the cave!!!

Yeah, it was just like you said, taking things one at a time is the way to go. I used my crossbow to lure things out and I was much more manageable. Thank you so much. I want to ask how high you have your loot set up to? I have it set at 500% right now

Congratulations! Slow n steady works best in those caves. Worse case scenario, you can cut bait and get out of there. 
And yeah, mine is set to the same.....word of warning though, only specific loot crates generate specific loot.....for instance theri saddle can be found in all underwater drops, but can only be found in the red swamp drops, and they cannot be found in the ice caves as an example

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10/15/2020 at 8:00 PM, wizard03 said:

Congratulations! Slow n steady works best in those caves. Worse case scenario, you can cut bait and get out of there. 
And yeah, mine is set to the same.....word of warning though, only specific loot crates generate specific loot.....for instance theri saddle can be found in all underwater drops, but can only be found in the red swamp drops, and they cannot be found in the ice caves as an example

 

Speaking of the ice cave, I got through it yesterday. It's tough even with a rex(I took 4), it's like the east watercave but on land, they dogpile you. I decided to use it to level up my rexes so I took 4 in. (they started at 17k health, brought them up to 20k. 2 of them left the cave on half health). Normally going through each part or compartment of a cave takes 2 mins to clear, normally there's like some bats, spiders and scorpions, arthros are rare. But for this cave, even with a rex at 800% melee it takes 2 mins to take care of the polar bears, another 2 mins for the yetis, and 2 mins for the wolves+purlovias. Surprisingly the purlovias in the ground didn't affect me so much, i think the rexes are too tall for them to target me. Also the loot there is amazing

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 hours ago, Jeebusu said:

Speaking of the ice cave, I got through it yesterday. It's tough even with a rex(I took 4), it's like the east watercave but on land, they dogpile you. I decided to use it to level up my rexes so I took 4 in. (they started at 17k health, brought them up to 20k. 2 of them left the cave on half health). Normally going through each part or compartment of a cave takes 2 mins to clear, normally there's like some bats, spiders and scorpions, arthros are rare. But for this cave, even with a rex at 800% melee it takes 2 mins to take care of the polar bears, another 2 mins for the yetis, and 2 mins for the wolves+purlovias. Surprisingly the purlovias in the ground didn't affect me so much, i think the rexes are too tall for them to target me. Also the loot there is amazing

Believe Rex's are immune unless they get that PERFECT angle. 

 

I disagree with wizard on the loot % - I prefer it a tad boosted for my sp but not so much you get ascendant items every time. Half the fun is re doing the caves for higher % drops :)

 

Consider posting onto So What did you do in ark today? Thread, feels like you're in a community even on single player:)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...