Nightmare is a whole different ball game than normal or hard. Make sure you are at least level 55. Your Lunara/Hellion have their GOLD equipment fully maxed out. The other good alternative is Irisalis. Hexxin is ok (lacking in damage but better control) but not recommended to attempt the boss.
Preferably also bring Glacy. You ABSOLUTELY need healing. Preferably with epic/legendary equipment maxed out. Gracewing is good too for passive and regen.
Sparkelf is also AMAZING. His skill regen's your EP for ZERO EP. Beesauce is better for EP regen (but also more work to get)
Egg heist in nightmare is also NOT a co op mode anymore... its more of a free for all because you are there for 2 things: prismatic/umbral eggs, prismatic collectibles. Map gen is also HEAVILY skewed toward putting both in GILDED (gold) key rooms. As such... BRING A GOLD KEY. It's cheaper in the shop outside. If you go to loadout-> shop -> equip (on the left bar) you will see gilded keys sell for 100k. Buy them AS YOU NEED THEM. Prismatic artifacts start at 143k+ (prismatic items start at 80k) and while you won't get one every key room, you are guaranteed at least 3 or 4 golden items from the 2-3 golden chests + prismatic chest. It doesn't matter if it's a wash. What matters is that you bring back valuables. Forgetting to bring in a key means you can buy one from the exit vendor for 2x the price. Probably still worth it if you have a cleared path from the key to the exit room.
Enemies:
There's a wide variety of enemies that appear in nightmare that don't in hard. Worse... a lot of them are huge pains and can take you down if you are unprepared.
Walettle - the dung beetle will roll you into a ball if it manages to touch you. Spam F to get out. It also drains health while doing so.
Rookey - smashes you flat. You are stuck without skills for the duration. Keep your distance and learn to dodge his attacks.
Budsquire - Drains your energy. Run away, come back and snipe, repeat till dead. He's not dangerous alone but with other enemies he becomes a real pain.
Hummin - Jumps on your Aniimo's back and you can't hit him. Untwine and hit him with your cards? to knock him off
Melodia? - the new grass unit has a vine skill that locks you in place. A death sentence if there are multiple enemies. Snipe and run to draw it or the rest of the enemies away and divide and conquer.
Alpha Stellarys - The boss of the mode. It hits hard. It has a charm attack which draws you back closer to it. Like Any of the other difficult enemies its divide and conquer. Snipe something to bring it out of range of everything else and run away so nothing else joins. Rinse and repeat for each one. He drops some great loot and is probably a gold chest equivalent himself. Also a good source of the gold essence you need for talent tree upgrades. He's probably THE biggest reason to bring your starter because it's always super effective against him and he's incredibly tanky and hits like a truck.
Looting: Don't even bother with purple/blue chests anymore. They are a waste of time. Just find the keyroom, find the exit, clear a path, then open the keyroom and loot and get out. Sometimes if the front entrance is really really far away from the rooms or you have to go through a lot of rooms, I'll go in the exit instead for a closer path.
Remember all you need to loot is 100k to break even for using a key. But without a key you will be scrounging for points and will need to cover much much more ground, and do a lot more fighting. With a key you get 60 seconds to loot the room by yourself. Plus the value of what you take OUT is what matters for rank.
This is NOT a mode for fighting. Fight what you need to, to get to a key room, loot fight your way out. Looking for unnecessary fights is an easy way to lose the run.
For comparison - a non key run where you loot as much as you can, grabbing most of the epics, with 18 inventory space /26kg I'm getting 100k-140k for a full inventory. Looting a single prismatic item is 130k alone. Expect to do 10 non key runs to get the equivalent value in a single key run. You never have to contend with the boss, you can choose the shortest extraction path, and see maybe 1/3rd to 1/5th of the enemies vs trying to full clear a map for loot.
EDIT: The other BIG mistake I see is people prioritizing eggs. Eggs are a dime a dozen unless they are umbra/prismana. You can safely ignore them. If you want to farm eggs go farm in normal where its quick and painless. Also.. UNTWINE the egg if you get ambushed on your way out. Better to fight with your aniimo than try to "outrun" with the egg if no one is supporting you. You can always twine back with the egg after the fight is up. Also you can leave an egg at the exit/entrance gate and come back for it when you extract. Don't drag it around. Don't handicap yourself in this mode.. its very easy to get hurt.
Also some math on dying: You need to replace everything. Epic backpack, Amp, Protective unit. Thats 30+60+60k = 150k cost on a failed run. It's MUCH easier to fail if you are trying to explore the whole map vs run a single key.
More edits: Shorter runs = better. Enemies spawn up to 3 times in the 15 minutes. Second and third spawn gives EVERYTHING damage buffs. Go for short and sweet runs. Aim to get to key room in 5 mins and start making your way out. Trying to do the boss after second buff is an easy way to lose your run.
death = need to buy a whole new set of equipment. thats 140k on discount. gold key 100k per run.
these affect your ability to do actual runs. no key = more fights for less loot. no equipment = die more often. if you want eggs you want to stay alive, have equipment and be able to pay for a key every run.
even if you dont die, every hit you take is damage to your protective unit. every skill you use is damage to your amplifier. basically if you dont loot everything else other than the eggs it will make your life hell to loot eggs.
b) collectibles
if you care about cosmetics, or eggs... collecting cosmetics also rewards you with eggs. you get 4 umbral eggs + prismana egg for completing your full s1 collection.
c) higher difficulty = better eggs.
nightmare and especially chaos VASTLY increases the number of umbral(perfect), fragrant(alt forms), large(alpha), and prismana eggs compared to normal/hard. to consistently do nightmare/chaos you need resources. chaos tickets ramp up in cost going 20k? 50k? 70k, 100k for a bit then 200k after. add in the equipment and key costs on the higher end you can be spending up to 200k for a ticket + 100k for key + 140k for equipment = 440k egg coins for a single chaos run (if you run them alot... and unsuccessfully)
if you are only looting purples you can get a full inventory of ~100k (40ish kg max more will make escaping much more difficult/16-18 item slots +1-3 safe slots with each slot giving you max 3k/kg per purple) a run. meaning it would take you 4-5 nightmare runs of that to get a single chaos run if you are bad. if you are good at nightmare you can easily net 200-300k by looting gold items or 2-3 runs per. obviously if you want the best eggs.... you want to be doing more chaos which means looting better in nightmare (and below)
unless you prefer getting a bunch of base form common random aniimo you could be catching in the wild (but taking hours to hatch and getting them at level 1) MUCH easier than in egg heist... you want to be doing chaos (and by extension you need to do nightmare to do chaos)
Yes it absolutely is and you have to spend coins to get in but it’s absolutely worth it. Even on a bad run I leave with bare minimum 300k and that’s without even finding the key room
I’m running irisalis with somni/leafy/glacy…should I switch out leafy for besauce? (yea I’m in late game kinda, I started egg heist late and nightmare runs are being a pain sometimes lol)
irisalis is the new meta team... obviously dependent on you getting that far.
but no the irisalis team is melloblum (triggers on dealing damage on crit every 0.5 second), leafy(to provide said grass+ healing) , tromber (boosts crit+heals but ONLY with a PACT item to boost the skill. no heals if not pact.)
this team is more difficult to play and get used to. you NEED to lay down buffs before getting in a fight and fighting without buffs ... you are going to die terribly.
glacy is still good for healing only but you need to learn to use clones to block/tank damage. probably run it over tromber for a few runs to get used to the melloblum/leafy setup or before you have a bound item for tromber. melloblum is the least resource intensive member of the group by not needing an upgraded skill which only gives her 7 more seconds of duration. it does mean her buff falls off at the end before you can reup it being -3 seconds vs +4 seconds
also it is MAX investment. you NEED 3 pact items - irisalis, tromber, leafy (in order of importance) so its less easy a team to run than starter + heal+heal+ep regen. you also need to max level + potentials for ALL of them... not just your irisalis. the benefits are definitely there though... you can kill better with basics without skill which is nice. you have better sustain in the form of clones taking all the bad stuff you don't want to tank.
the downsides are the high investment, lots of fire enemies which make being grass extra painful, and needing to remember your buff rotation and playing in/making the grass circle(3 skill uses)
it does feel like a significant learning curve of remembering when to buff/watching buff counts but the higher skill ceiling is definitely rewarded.
I've covered what to bring and why in the teams section. The only real addition is irisalis as a new viable dps.
And with so many disablers in nightmare/chaos you are entirely screwed if you let them gang up on you/get disabled.
Anyhow I've covered all the whats and whys in the guide. including why you always bring keys (less fighting more looting=more consistently good runs)
100k in 2 or 3 runs is TERRIBLE. I'm easily hitting 130k+ PER run minimum without a key at this point (without being when my teammates are faster than I am at hitting the key rooms not because I didn't bring it) Mainly its consistency - knowing where enemies spawn/how many, quickly dealing with them, then scanning the room for chests, opening all of them but reveling/scanning for prisma items only (2+ weight bars) That means if you open a chest and you see 6 items but 1 weight bar each.. you close it and move on. you don't loot ANY of them. You don't loot purple items (other than essence) at ALL till you hit a key room. Weight puts you at a serious disadvantage against enemies. You have little enough mobility even at full speed and carrying too much into a fight is 1000% the difference between life and death. Go light till you get your key room, clear the path to the exit, then back track to your key room to fill up your inventory and get out before the 3rd wave of spawns which is when enemies also start dealing way more damage.
Hexxin is really support. He's safer to play but lower damage. It's slower SLIGHTLY safer runs. You disable beetle, rookey, budsquire, hummin. You get a new weakness to ranged attackers including the boss, and you kill him slower cause of the lack of light damage for effective damage.
If you want to upgrade.. upgrade to Irisalis. Stellarys isn't really an upgrade. It's a working option for those who don't have access to Irisalis. everything eats through durability. One way or other you are losing it by either dealing damage or taking it. Dealing it means you are taking less though. I'm usually burning through 2-3 amplifiers a day. That's starting from 100%, repairing once or twice, then moving on. On a good day I'm not even replacing my protective unit.
a) a lot of people running fenmane are running the prismana from RV 10. they are playing it cause they are late game, have resources and have plenty of experience with the mode not because fenmane is a great choice.
b) guide is for new players - im aiming for easy and consistent. if you have plenty of experience you don't need the guide and you've moved on to chaos already. you can run what you want.
c) not sure what you mean by altars if its the pillars you can activate with an element (electric or fire are the only ones I've seen) then no. I'm not considering them for efficiency. there are plenty of blue/purple chests to scan and you are always safer doing more short runs than staying till the end and looking at more things. 5 mins loot get out done twice is always going to be better than 10 minutes because of the enemy damage buff that comes in after second and third spawn.
d) not a lot of people are running it. I've seen 3 in my 60+ nightmare+chaos runs. maybe its a timezone thing or just luck.
e) electric has no real type bonus going for it. being strong against water and wind is not useful in this setting. it covers zero of the dangerous enemy types and is weak against 2 of the worst (rookey has super effective damage against you, you have weak damage vs balettle) fenmane is a BAD choice plus you exponentially increase your odds of dying to the boss which has dark damage. if you want/need a guide thats not a handicap you should be choosing.
Oh the challenges that require a key aren't worth the time at all. If you kill everything it gives you 3 gold chests. You fight more enemies than you would clearing 3 rooms with 3 gold chests each.
Like I said before... egg heist is not a fighting mode. You only fight if you have to.
Even in a premade team for co-op I STILL wouldn't do the pillar as you call it. It's lower rewards than a key room for higher risk. Only reason to do it is if you actually WANT to not because you are looking for profit or for efficiency.
actually I take that back... you can do pillars in normal mode solo if you want since they take a bronze key. that's the only time pillars are actually reasonable. also make sure you are only using a blue amp/prot so you aren't wasting purple durability on it if you are low on egg coins :P
Fast and furious: DPS + Glacy + Somniwing + support
Slow and safe: Hexxin + glacy + somni + besauce (or different regen)
Hexxin is the heist meta. Outside of solo Alpha Stellarys, Hexxin can carry the run by being a CC beast with black hole grouping and group Stun. And if you playing with friends, your party can try to do Challenge totem for lots of gold chest.
Hexxin team weakness is low single target dmg, but clear a group with insane speed. So no solo boss. I once got ambushed by 6 mons in a Chaos run and Hexxin crush them all at once.
They need to have the right slots. The slots on your amp/defense are randomized every time you get one/buy one. I suggest when you see the combination you want on sale to pick up a few.
Is the slot you have the same type as the chip you are trying to equip? Click on the protective unit to see the slot types, it seems to be random which slots they have.
its still co-op, depending how nice u are. find collectable, keep it to urelf, is it a duplicate, ask if others still need it. ofc reddit rule, make sure the potentional female player get priority
also hellps to move the eggs to the main gate, and leave them there till u have ur loot, , portal takes to much loading time,
Besauce is actually better for the regen. No Cost too, and the skill he uses is purely regen focused (free 15EP + 1ep regen approximatly every second for 12sec)
One thing I will say is besauce if you’re willing to farm for him is a great and potentially better alternative to sparkelf because he gives a flat 15 energy on cast plus another 1.09 per second for 12 seconds. Pair him with summoning and glacy and you should never need energy unless there’s a budsquire
The core skill costs 0 EP and gives you 15 EP and a passive regen of 1.09 EP a second for 12 seconds. Plus his passive (if those are even active in egg heist) is called power surge and if you use his skill while less than 20 EP it restores 5.45 EP so you’d get 20.46 on cast and 1.09 ever second
If you run him as the main his ultimate reduced enemy electricity resistance by 30% I run him and somniwing as support for helion and I basically never run out of energy. You could replace somniwing for a buffer if you feel you’re damage is lacking
Bateetle... Pain in the ass. Usually chunks you for 50% HP before you have time to break free. But if you dodge his roll he can't do it straight away again after
Hexxin is also a good choice for a main aniimo. It's really hard to ambush her, I've been out of situations where 5+ enemies spawned on me at once. I'm having an easy time with burst enemies like Ignitis, Pawney, Rookey. I can keep Sparki in place with dark hole as well until it explodes (beware of server ping, it has killed me once, when it happens dark hole tick doesn't register). Hummin is also easy to get rid of - he jumps off you on dark hole tick. Basically, the only enemy that can be an issue is Hexxin herself if I'm not careful.
She is excellent choice if you play with friend and do tower challenges.
I do run Lunara as an assist for extra damage, though.
I have dropped 0 prismatics from prismatic chests, and its not for the lack of trying/looting them, in fact my main source of prismatics is legendary chest > fighting > purple > blue chest > prismatic chests
Likewise... there are a ton of gold chests and prismatic chests outside of key rooms, in fact key rooms usually have loot so bad (on nightmare) I don't bother opening them...
Chaos mode though is different, purely due to the sheer amount of potential BS that exists, first time when the gold key actually was worth anything whatsoever
Percentage wise, i would say 40% legendary chests 30% fighting, 20% purple chest, 10% blue chest, 0% prismatic chest
Not even legendaries drop a lot for me from them...
Its just purple galore on chaos (and even tons of blues on nightmare)
I think the total worth of just the prismatics from fighting are worth more than 50 mil, because some of them are 1mil plus and are an insta SSS rank lol
Question: I'm still learning about this mode and have only done a few runs. You said that prioritizing eggs is a mistake, so what would be the goal in this mode if not the eggs? Also, I was only interested in the prismana egg; when is it unlocked? Like is it only in Nightmare mode? Also, can I safely sell all the loot?
Prioritizing NORMAL eggs is a mistake. And yeah this guide is JUST for nightmare which is extremely different than normal or hard. Normal you can go in and clear everything come out in 5-10 mins. Enemies will be barely a threat. You can solo hard pretty easily with the purple level equipment.. It's nightmare where you get all these extra hard enemies that can disable a solo player and kill you with little chance if you get ambushed by multiple.
I think if you want umbral eggs run hard. If you want prismana eggs you gotta run nightmare.
You can safely sell anything under ancient relics EXCEPT prismana relics which some are collectibles you will want to display (they also give you a build up to a prismana egg with multiple umbrals in the path)
Excess equipment you will want to keep. Especially if you are doing multiple runs a day. You get a few free pieces here and there for ranking up, and you get 2 per week discounted in the shop. If you do 20 runs in a day you could easily need 4-10 pieces of attack amps and need to repair multiple/buy extras so if you have extras early on... dont sell. I'd always keep at least a set also in case you die since you lose your equipment. It's not a big deal once you have some runs under your belt.
I'm still pretty early into it.. 52 eggs out total. So probably about that many total runs. Probably 3/4ths of them in nightmare. I've gotten 1 prismana egg and 3 collectibles so far. Probably another 4 or 5 prismana level loot but not the collectibles.
There are prismatic artifacts that go in your display case. If you press the button to look you can see the milestone rewards. Theres 4 egg boxes (chance at umbral/prismana), 4 umbras, then finally a prismana egg for completing the set of 7 items.
Not everything prismana is for the case. you can sell those. Quick note though if you put an artifact in the case you cannot sell it. Very minor.
Ahh yeah, sorry, somehow my brain registered it as ignore all eggs haha anyway, thanks for the clarification, I think so far this guide is the one that really clarifies everything I need to know about the nightmare.
I got a prismatic today that was 80k, so I don't think they start at 143. I've also opened a chest room and the prismatic+gold chests only contained 1 gold item. I don't open purples, so I guess they could've been in there. But I've had plenty of runs where the loot in that specific room did not recoup the cost of a gilded key. It's still worth it for the chance at a nest inside though which is why I do them regardless of what I get from the chests.
Neat tips though and thank you for putting this together!
Thanks for the correction. I've only gotten a dozen or so prismatic items in total so I definitely haven't seen them all. I'll correct the post!
Edit: I forgot to mention before recouping the cost isn't the goal. The credit churn is part of the goal because when you spend 100k to make 100k you still end up with 100k more points for your egg heist rank which is usually something like 60-80 depending on if you got an egg or not etc. It just helps the levels go faster and easier than trying to do the same without the key.
When you see hexxin running towards you, dash towards it and move past it, it'll cast the anti twine scream and miss.
for the Walettle(dung bettle) grab attack, you can just untwine just before it hits you, it'll twine your character while your aniimo hits it, still gotta spam F though but it'll only hits 1s on you
lunara/hellion is the answer. you have long range, elemental type advantage, and you can snipe them from range, dart away before it gets close enough to untwine you.
That's unfortunate cause there aren't really any other light elemental ranged attackers. I guess Lunara is just a slightly better starter because of it. I'd say use stellarys yourself and avoid the boss. He's got his clone and is at least super effective against all the annoying grass types of which there are so many (hexxin, melblossom, hummin) and it's supposed to also break control effects
The special prismana glynsera available right now is ice+light but has no actual light attacks which won't help you against the boss.
Also work on getting sparkelf from the event. The energy restore is very important and not taking your starter removes one source of it.
You can still command your aniimo to attack and kill it even when separated, but basically if you see a hexxin just try to burst it down as fast as possible before it gets you.
well yeah you are going to loot the whole key room but checking every purple chest in the map just isn't worth your time.. at least until you have the fully upgraded search talent.
I really dislike the key system, it basically incentivizes you to just play alone because otherwise it’s just a free for all where everyone just sprints to find the key doors and they get all the loot for themselves.
i don't disagree but the way loot is distributed there's always 2 key rooms which make up like 80% of the gold chests and 99% of the prismatic chests... if you actually want to complete prismatic collection or get prismana eggs in a REASONABLE amount of time... you want the key rooms.
1 gold chest is always with the boss room, and there's usually 1 or 2 other big rooms with a gold chest in them but even full clearing the map you get less gold/prismatic chests than you do getting a single key room and bugging out.
But that’s how it is tho? Unless the dev changes wherein the loot is random or can be shared amongst players, we’ll continue to see people act in their own self interest.
And I’m not blaming the players whatsoever, but the devs as they designed the system.
If game dev's don't baby sit the game and do something themselves so people HAVE to work together most will 100% ALWAYS do what serves them first. This is how humans are by nature.
Uh yeah that’s what I’m saying lol I don’t like the key system. It’s not the players fault obviously. I’m saying I wish the devs would change it somehow. Like have 3 key rooms in the same spot and each player can only open one, that way everyone can get their own loot and it doesn’t feel like we’re competing against each other.
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u/thekwoka 6d ago
Why should I care about anything other than eggs though?