I’m curious about this new “hard” mission, but not enough to do the 120 missions I skipped (it’s roughly 10% investigations I didn’t feel needed repeating since I solved them properly in TSW, 50% side missions I never found, 20% action/sabotage that I just didn’t need to do to progress the main story, 20% kaidan storyline that I cleared once but not twice)
Although apparently with the droprate I’d need to do about that much to even get the box to be able to attempt it…
Also I suppose somewhere in there is History of Violins, which as far as I can tell is meant to be done with a cheat sheet
Looked like this before and after a full set of New Dawn missions. Actually, it looked like this since Christmas except for the occasional mission item or two.
Nice one. Also, if you look at the AO section of this forum, Funcom is doing its utmost to make sure people don’t give them money.
So, I have completed this mission myself and gotten a Tank Commander Blade. I can confirm a few things regarding the quest.
The trigger item is a “Peculiar Box” that drops randomly as a reward from any green quest reward bag. It will go straight into your mission item inventory when you obtain it.
The drop rate is very low. I have done over 200 missions and only seen two drops.
The item requires certain achievements to use. These achievements are all under the “Regional” section. The ones with a gold border that award 10 AP/SP and a Guise costume upon completion. They require you to complete all quests, kill all champions, and fully explore the zone. You need to have the achievement for every zone completed. (Meaning in essence you need to do basically every quest in the game at least once.)
Upon activation you get a quest to go to the South Tunnel Entrance to Orochi Tower. You Zone in at the same place where you start Assault on Orochi Tower. The inside of the tunnel is basically the same as in Assault on Orochi Tower. Except you fight through a gauntlet of enemies and turrets until you reach the end. At the end there is the Tank Commander boss fight.
The mission is scaled in difficulty to your IP. It’s kind of like faction missions and Dark Agartha except you can’t choose to pick a lower difficulty, it’s just automatically set to the highest one. So in theory everyone should be able to beat the boss inside. Except…
The boss is very mechanically challenging. He has a variety of annoying abilities such as a purge, a pull, a teleport, a stun, and an AoE that hits like a truck. He also starts with the Rising Power buff (+% dmg increase that grows over time) which is effectively a soft enrage. He also spawns adds which will heal him for a ton if not dealt with quickly. Overall, the fight is fairly difficult and will test the skills and builds of each player.
After killing the boss you complete the mission which rewards a “Spoils of the Southern Tunnel” item bag. It is this bag that can reward the Tank Commander Blade and the Depleted Energy Cell. You also get a couple 4k distillates and 10k anima shards from completing the quest.
The quest itself has an 8 hr cooldown for patron and 18 hr cooldown non-patron. However, the Peculiar Box is consumed after you finish the quest so you will need to farm up a new box every time you want to do the quest.
Both the Tank Commander Blade and Depleted Energy Cell are tradable so if you don’t want to bother with all this quest stuff you can just buy them off other people.
Thanks for the detailed info, and grats for completing the quest.
Only one further question, is the Peculiar Box a unique item or can you stack more of them before using one ?
I just want to know it in case I will drop one while I go back doing all the missions I skipped as I would hate to loose the possibility to drop more. It would be bad design to put such a pressure on people who still did not complete all missions, both new and old players.
OK. My second attempt at tank commander failed. I understand how to do it but fight is too long to not make any mistakes (1,8M HP at my IP=1200). And surprise surprise: fight needs insane amount of aoe dps thanks to all incoming healing and debuffing droids (60K HP per drone) - again AR wins. From what I saw fight is almost unwinnable for most not hardcore players.
Leogrim has completed with Shotgun main and Jimmy with pistols main. leogrim without cruel delight I might add. It is actually less dependant on meta weapons then one might expect. In fact things like hammer defensive CDs are highly detrimental in the fight for example. Ranged weapons are still superior in that you take less direct damage from boss but certainly not required.
@Shalrys Thank you for the thorough confirmation and the very complete information about the mission! I wanted to know if the box dropped in the mission inventory or the main inventory too, so thanks for clearing that up.
Looking forward to doing these ultra-hard fights at my e7-ish level!
Due to medical issues I’m not really good at mechanical things, neither in rl nor ingame. So the fact that the mission scales with the players IP kinda sucks for me, personally. I’m at 734 IP and due to my conditions I probably won’t be able to do this. That’s why I usually play only story mode or max e2, since that is doable for me.
I understand that these are my personal issues, but still, I’d be really happy if we could pick difficulty with this mission too. Lower difficulty doesn’t even have to reward the museum items with 100% droprate. I just want to finish this mission for the sake of my completionist heart
So there actually is a mission and it may drop these long missing museum items. It’s going to be a bloody hard mission and apparently you will have to run it multiple times to get both items. Or any. So why does it have to be so difficult to obtain? It has quite high prerequisites already so why not just have it available at a terminal? Why are the SWL devs so in love with everything being RNG with super low chance I wonder…
Most players won’t even know this mission exists since it was not mentioned in a proper patch note and is also not in the in game news popup which people might see when they grab the daily login rewards.
Rant done. I guess I’ll have to reluctantly see if I can complete all the remaining missions and drop this mission item while doing it.
Not related to the blade as such but more to the “this patch has been underdocumented” but I just sat and stared at the Tabula Rasa sign for a couple minutes and got an SMS from Mr. Redbum. I don’t think I’ve hung around the Tabula Rasa before since there aren’t that many reasons to unless you want to ERP. So maybe it only goes out to people who’ve been to that bit of London.
I visited Tabula Rosa, twice. Tried almost every emote infront of Mr. Rosenbaum. Didn’t stare at the sign. I got the sms inside Shambala when waiting for the doors to open. I think someone just targeted you sitting there. And someone invited me inside Shambala, or maybe something got triggered while PvPing since Shambala also was in the patch notes.
Another theory, a little bit spoilish:
Rosenbaum says he won’t say no to his daughter Isabel, made me think if she can invite you somehow. I don’t know where she is though.
Well… friend invited me - via targeting - at Monday, however until now I have not got any invitation. If someone else try to do, he get info I have already got imvited and cannot be again. So no Rosenbaum mission for me.
No, without knowing he targeted me and invited me and then checked my status by other people who wanted to invited me I would think nobody invited me yet.
I think both Leogrim and Jimmy are in their own category above common ‘hardcore’. My feeling is that I could do it and it would be more or less fun if boss had half of that HP. With 1,8M it is too stressful and long. Same for Smiler bot before commander. And hammer being my only developed lv70 weapon doesn’t help either (SG as main I just hate).
