SSF players, how's Atlas progression going for you in Abyss league?

Hey guys,

hows your tactic for Elders influence on atlas in SSF? Has anyone of you killed him already? Thanks for your tips.

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Sneckie wrote:

Hey guys,

hows your tactic for Elders influence on atlas in SSF? Has anyone of you killed him already? Thanks for your tips.

Killed the elder twice. Once on T1, once on T6.

My advice is this: even if you are confortable doing T10 or higher maps, try to channel the elder towards the low tier as much as possible.

It's not really a matter of difficulty on the fights. It's a matter of map pool.

I spent 3 days not being able to complete the event because one guardian spawned on a T7 map that simply didn't want to drop. It was quite infuriating, because to balance things out on the atlas I was forced to play the maps that threatened this spot...

So yeah. Try to channel the elder areas to maps you have a an abundance of, and cut & don't protect the areas where you only have one or two maps in reserve.

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polimeris wrote:

I spent 3 days not being able to complete the event because one guardian spawned on a T7 map that simply didn't want to drop.

Exactly the same here. Was stuck for several days, because I missed just one map.

Agree with your advice to first expand Elder influence toward a region that you have fully unlocked and have an abundance of maps. When the Elder does spawn, you can still expand into red maps the remaining region, if you want to play the "war" in red maps.

Need better access to maps... still haven't seen Leyline.

I've unlocked all maps up to T11 now and am only missing 6-7 from T12 up, not counting Guardians. The highest maps all have a vendor recipe, so I went ahead and started unlocking them as soon as I had about half of the next tier in my map tab. The amount of effort I put into unlocking maps to only have most of them after a /played of something stupid is ridiculous. It should not be this hard to unlock the Atlas.

The people I feel worst for are the ones who don't unlock the Atlas efficiently and instead skip through tiers, further reducing the chance for missing maps to drop. If it sucks for me, it's going to be horrible for them.

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Sneckie wrote:

hows your tactic for Elders influence on atlas in SSF? Has anyone of you killed him already? Thanks for your tips.

I've killed him three times. It works the same in SSF as anywhere else, with the exception that it's harder to have maps available to run in the first place. Once you unlock all the needed maps and build up a stock (I try to keep 3+ of every map from T8 down), just grow the Elder's influence until he shows up.

The Elder fight itself was surprisingly easy, apart from a couple of surprise one shot mechanics I didn't see coming. I had much more trouble with some of the guardians.

I spent the morning yesterday running everything I could adjacent to Leylines, even though I'm running T7 maps quite easily. Still no drop. Zana's no help either.

It's really annoying to have a spot like that.

This is one area where I think the developers have made "trading" an assumption. They reduced the chances to get lower tier maps because traders didn't like them. They need to bring back lower tier drops without adjusting the current rates for drops that we're seeing.

It's brutal, but you can work around it in large part if you progress slowly through the Atlas tier by tier. Going up a tier when you're still missing drop-only maps from the previous tier is a huge minus multiplier on that map's chance to drop.

I don't know if you're familiar with this or not, but I know a lot of people don't understand how huge this effect is, so I'll go over it here.

Say you need a T3 Leyline.

Scenario 1) You don't have any T3 maps unlocked and are running Flooded Mine. A map drops and RNG rolls it as a T3. That map has a 100% chance of being Leyline.

Scenario 2) You have all eight other T3 maps unlocked and are running Flooded Mine. A map drops and RNG rolls it as a T3. That map has an 11% chance of being Leyline. The rest of the time you're getting a T3 you already have.

This is why I almost never skip ahead in tiers before unlocking a drop-only map. It's way too punishing to your chances of getting that map later. I know it sucks to keep farming maps you don't want to farm, but the alternative is typically much worse. It's especially bad since missing a map often means missing an entire branch of the Atlas, further crippling your progression in the future.

I really hope GGG does something to fix this problem. Adding maps to Zana after people complained about this problem when the Atlas first came out wasn't enough. The problem has only gotten worse since then with the huge number of maps added to Atlas.

I know that... what I don't do is factor in "drop only". I didn't know which maps could be made by vendor recipe and which were drop only. I can see that's important now, and next time through I'll pay more attention to those.

Just started mapping, 2/157 :( I'm slow...

Unrelated note, but I like to share: did my 1st zana daily, lv70 Arid Lake, Sea Witches+Beyond, 3 abyss cracks in there, things became really crazy! I'm glad both my char and my PC survived the experience, I must admit there were a lot of wtf/fun moments! [@GGG do not nerf pls]