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How effective is the megalodons pack buff?


KRONOSDOUBLE

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Just curious how effective it is. Considering getting a decent sized pack to kill unfriendly creatures in the deep, just want to know if its worth it.

Also, would a nice pack of, lets say 8 high level wild tamed, be enough to contend with a bred tuso? I imagine the tuso would still win, but the continuous bleed from thr sharks would likely cause a significant amount of damage overtime to the squid. And the pack bonus + mating bonus would keep them alive just long enough to do some serious damage right? 

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1 hour ago, KRONOSDOUBLE said:

Just curious how effective it is. Considering getting a decent sized pack to kill unfriendly creatures in the deep, just want to know if its worth it.

Also, would a nice pack of, lets say 8 high level wild tamed, be enough to contend with a bred tuso? I imagine the tuso would still win, but the continuous bleed from thr sharks would likely cause a significant amount of damage overtime to the squid. And the pack bonus + mating bonus would keep them alive just long enough to do some serious damage right? 

Hey Kronos.  Felt froggy so I did some testing for ya.  Singleplayer, set up exactly like Official Servers (150 max level, no weird stat scalings or dino mods that affect Megalodons).

I spawned in 8 level 135 perfect tame Megalodons: All 8 tamed out to level 202 of course!  I spawned in saddles until I had 8 close to 55 armor..

I did this to emulate taking some garden-variety wild tames, not all 150 perfect or bred ones, with less-than-official-capped saddles to see, as you put it, if it can handle unfriendly creatures in the deep.  It's harder to emulate a bred squid on singleplayer (POSSIBLE, I can do it, just annoying), so my own curiosity led me to see what would happen in the Ragnarok Squid Spawn area (Artifact of the Devourer) with some of the various denizens present.

All 8 sharks, again, thinking of your working parameters of "decently leveled," were leveled about 50-60 times.  I set their stats at pretty fair distribution in the following ranges:

HP - 6000 to 8000

Melee - 450% to 600%

Saddle Armor - 42-67

They.  Eat.  Everything.

Honestly, it was awful.  They are bleeding and biting everything so fast, most Squids never even got hits in.  And I'm talking 130+ squids, dead in seconds.  After getting their teeth through oh, I don't know, 6-7 Squids, the lowest was missing 150 HP.  Now a bred would most likely have a great saddle, and high HP.  But with 8 squids, even this ragtag pack I have, man...  If I had a bred Squid, I would be scared to see 8 Sharks coming at me.

It took that pack about 10 seconds to devour a 35 alpha Squid.  One single Shark is down 500 HP, so the alpha got some shots in at the pack.

It also took about 15-20 seconds to eat a 135 alpha Squid.  One was beat up a bit more, but it was awful.  Alpha Squids are no joke, they deal some serious damage!

Fought a 50 Alpha Mosa, it took the pack about 30 seconds to eat it.  No deaths, lowest was 5.5k out of 7.2k.

I don't think an average bred Squid could survive a pack of 8 Sharks with decent (55+) saddles and better melee (base 350+?).  Bred Sharks with near-cap (100 armor) saddles?  No contest, Sharks hands down.  I am honestly surprised.  Pack bonus at 7, with melees hitting from 600 to 900 per bite, WITH the bleed behind it.

So, there ya go.  :)

 

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All due respect to the work put in TheDonn, but I do believe he may be underestimating bred Tusos on official. No wild dino, alpha or otherwise is a great simulation of a bred and ridden tuso. Bite damage will be significantly reduced from both a capped saddle and imprint damage reduction. Add to that the incoming damage the sharks will take from an imprinted squid and I think this would play out quite differently, keep in mind that official Tusos can have well over 1k melee before the imprint buff.

In the scenario he tested, tamed Megalos w/ average saddles I doubt you could beat a well bred, imprinted Tuso. Unlike the PvE encounters he tried you would be taking significantly more damage and would likely lose several sharks in seconds. I do think you could deal some pretty significant damage, however the other rider is also likely to prioritize killing the shark you're riding in order to get to you. Once you die it would be a fairly easy task to pick off the remaining Megalos.

Another factor to consider is speed, a tuso can easily run from a fight against the megalos. Create some distance, and the tuso can use that to pick off individual sharks one by one. Because you'll be relying on the follow ai to keep your pack with you this would also make you an unfortunately easy target. As you'll be well ahead of the pack the tuso can whittle your lead megalo down before the pack catches up and once it takes you out the rest is fairly simple.

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Two very good comments. I appreciate the feedback. Regardless, it seems that having a good pack of around 8-10 sharks would definitely be a good deterrent. Slap some good saddles on them and pump their stats respectively in melee and primarily HP to further the fight and keep the bleeds going, and thr pack may be surprisingly OP

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On 1/13/2021 at 10:58 AM, carbonark said:

All due respect to the work put in TheDonn, but I do believe he may be underestimating bred Tusos on official. No wild dino, alpha or otherwise is a great simulation of a bred and ridden tuso. Bite damage will be significantly reduced from both a capped saddle and imprint damage reduction. Add to that the incoming damage the sharks will take from an imprinted squid and I think this would play out quite differently, keep in mind that official Tusos can have well over 1k melee before the imprint buff.

In the scenario he tested, tamed Megalos w/ average saddles I doubt you could beat a well bred, imprinted Tuso. Unlike the PvE encounters he tried you would be taking significantly more damage and would likely lose several sharks in seconds. I do think you could deal some pretty significant damage, however the other rider is also likely to prioritize killing the shark you're riding in order to get to you. Once you die it would be a fairly easy task to pick off the remaining Megalos.

Another factor to consider is speed, a tuso can easily run from a fight against the megalos. Create some distance, and the tuso can use that to pick off individual sharks one by one. Because you'll be relying on the follow ai to keep your pack with you this would also make you an unfortunately easy target. As you'll be well ahead of the pack the tuso can whittle your lead megalo down before the pack catches up and once it takes you out the rest is fairly simple.

@KRONOSDOUBLE I'll tag you too here.

So out of curiosity I loaded back up singleplayer with the shark pack.

I spawned a level 140 squid, imprinted it, and leveled it a bunch (over 50 levels, it spawned miraculously not half bad with 29 pts melee and 34 pts HP).  I leveled it to 40k HP, and ~600% melee and put a 75 armor saddle on it (first one I spawned).  I know, I know... those are big-time rookie numbers to the monsters people have bred.  The thing is, I said:

On 1/13/2021 at 2:44 AM, TheDonn said:

I don't think an average bred Squid could survive a pack of 8 Sharks with decent (55+) saddles and better melee (base 350+?).  

Turns out, even with the shark pack I spawned in, and the sharks functioning on AI and unridden, I didn't even stand a little bit of a chance.  Those sharks on average hit the squid for 150-250 damage depending on their individual melee percentage and the bleed constantly drained my HP away, whereas the biggest hit I ever saw with 8 sharks at +7 pack bonus and 45-60 armor saddles was 72 damage.  That's it.  72 damage from a 100% imprinted squid with 600 melee, and most of the hits were for 35-50 damage. 

My squid died, shockingly fast.  I even tried to kite the pack as you said, carbon, and by the time they were in melee range I had enough time for 1-2 hits before all 8 were on me, rocking the hell out of my squid with more bleed and more bites.  If I tried to go forward, the squid would whirl around and I could dive down, but I would still catch several melees and some bleed in the process.  When they would get in melee range, they would swarm around me and my melee wouldn't even be hitting 3-4 of them.  The movement of squids has always been a tiny bit wonky.  I know that they are powerful as hell, but they can also just whirl around randomly in the middle of combat and stop attacking.  They also have a big turning radius, and so it's movement is actually a detriment to the frozen rope way a pack of sharks travel and target.  Yeah you can hit space to spin around, but sometimes if you do that and attack, it will spin BACK AROUND the other way after 1-2 melee attacks, and that spin is a locked-in maneuver that last about a second that you can't get out of.  The whole time you are trying to kite and position just right and attack some and then spin and escape, the sharks are barreling down on you.  A squid rider would have little chance to prioritize a shark rider because the shark's maneuverability is just sooooooo much better, especially with 7 other sharks on the harass.

The lowest shark was at 5.6k out of 6.8k.  That's roughly 82%, so it didn't even lose 20%.  If you double the melee damage to ~1150, the biggest hit I'd get would still be in the ballpark of 150, with most hits being 70-100 damage.  The result would be close to the same, except the sharks might get close to 50% damaged.  If I pumped a bunch of stam so I could kite all day long, it might work, but there's only so much you can do against a pack like that.  Sure, you could put it against an 80K squid with 1500-2000% melee damage and the squid would win (probably :P ), so I guess my question is, @KRONOSDOUBLE, what kind of squid do you think you'll have to be defending against?

And please do keep in mind...  These are level 135 wild-tame-spawned ones that aren't max leveled and have middling-grade saddles on them.  And there are only 8.  If they were actually consistent and decent stats (bred and leveled to 13-15k HP and 650+ melee which is achievable), with 90-120 armor saddles, it would be even more of a wash.

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8 minutes ago, TheDonn said:

Sure, you could put it against an 80K squid with 1500-2000% melee damage and the squid would win (probably :P )

If you're going to be doing tests like this, it would make sense to compare apples with apples.

That is to say, on your test, you compared wild megalodons against wild tuso, which is correct.

If you wanted to test against such a high stats bred tuso, then your megalodons should also be high stats bred, with tons more health/damage.

I'm not entirely sure how bleed works with megalodon, but if it's anything like Deinos bleed, then those sharks will chew up the tuso's health pretty quickly even if with 80k I would assume.

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1 hour ago, Vit0Corleone said:

If you're going to be doing tests like this, it would make sense to compare apples with apples.

That is to say, on your test, you compared wild megalodons against wild tuso, which is correct.

If you wanted to test against such a high stats bred tuso, then your megalodons should also be high stats bred, with tons more health/damage.

I'm not entirely sure how bleed works with megalodon, but if it's anything like Deinos bleed, then those sharks will chew up the tuso's health pretty quickly even if with 80k I would assume.

Well in all fairness the OP did pose the question of wild tames vs bred squid. Probably entertaining the idea of a equalizer for power disparity between alphas and small tribes

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3 hours ago, johnm81 said:

Well in all fairness the OP did pose the question of wild tames vs bred squid. Probably entertaining the idea of a equalizer for power disparity between alphas and small tribes

 

15 minutes ago, Vit0Corleone said:

Ops, that's right. I missed that somehow.

Never mind then ;) 

Yea, that's definitely what I was going for lol. But keep up the discussion! I hadn't even thought of how OP bred sharks would be to have. Might should invest in some. wouldnt need to worry about meks as much or squids if I have 30 sharks on aggressive patrolling the waters around my base on official

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Thankfully WC removed  buff on wild megalodons. Also buff didn't work correctly  it gave bleeding and eat all stamina of your tame, so they removed it.

Also with that buff was almost impossible to do caves to get artifacts as incave megalodons are up to lvl 300 including alpha megalodons and they are nont alone in cave all will attack you once alpha agro.

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43 minutes ago, KRONOSDOUBLE said:

 

Yea, that's definitely what I was going for lol. But keep up the discussion! I hadn't even thought of how OP bred sharks would be to have. Might should invest in some. wouldnt need to worry about meks as much or squids if I have 30 sharks on aggressive patrolling the waters around my base on official

You have an underwater base?

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5 hours ago, Vit0Corleone said:

That is to say, on your test, you compared wild megalodons against wild tuso, which is correct.

If you wanted to test against such a high stats bred tuso, then your megalodons should also be high stats bred, with tons more health/damage.

Naaah Don Corleone, it was wild tamed sharks VS a decent bred squid, because that's what Kronos was asking about, and I was honestly curious.  I love testing stuff like that!  Maybe I am misunderstanding though, because I did fight wild squids against the shark pack, and it was terrible for the squids.  Even multiples, fighting 3 wild squids against the shark pack was a total wash.  The pack maybe took 200 damage between all 8?  But the new test I posted the huge wall of text for was wild-tamed VS imprinted and ridden.  I tried to set the squid HP to what might be considered a "decent" level as to not hamstring melee damage completely.  I figured 40k was ok, and it turned out that I put a few more levels into the squid's HP than I did most of the sharks.  Only reason I say that is because with less HP and more melee, the results would've tilted more in favor of the shark pack.

4 hours ago, johnm81 said:

Well in all fairness the OP did pose the question of wild tames vs bred squid. Probably entertaining the idea of a equalizer for power disparity between alphas and small tribes

Yepyep John.  That's what I figured as well, so that's what I did.

34 minutes ago, KRONOSDOUBLE said:

Yea, that's definitely what I was going for lol. But keep up the discussion! I hadn't even thought of how OP bred sharks would be to have. Might should invest in some. wouldnt need to worry about meks as much or squids if I have 30 sharks on aggressive patrolling the waters around my base on official

If you had 30 bred sharks, yeah.  Hmmm.  I don't know.  I don't really even want to imagine it.

@Noa OK, I didn't know they turned the pack bonus off of wild sharks.  That is honestly good to hear because yeah, that cave would be nearly impossible.

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