STS-25 Tarasa Survival Guide
Tarasa is a much tougher challenge than previous expansions, requiring special tactics and skills to succeed. With the help of numerous other players, I’ve put together a guide explaining how to survive everything Tarasa has to throw at you.
Weapons and Equipment:
On Tarasa, your loadout should be designed for damage second, toughness first. It doesn’t matter how high your DPS is if you aren’t alive to use it. Non-Pink Tarasa armor has two subtypes, one that boosts dodge, and one that boosts another stat. Pick the dodge boosting set. Your armor and health pool will help you withstand an attack, but that attack has to hit first. The more dodge you have, the longer you’ll live.
Weapon choice is mostly up to you. When given the chance, I suggest picking the weapon that gives you the biggest boost to dodge/armor/health over ones offering hit%, crit, or damage. I don’t recommend using Pistol+shield, since the armor boost from class weapons is much higher than what shields can provide (even when linked with an armor implant), and the stats on class weapons are usually much better than the ones for pistols. Regarding Napalm Carbines, only use them if you know what you’re doing. I’ve been in many skirmishes where the napalm users were the first to drop, but I’ve also seen skilled players do very awesome things with a carbine.
Implants and pets are purely up to you. I suggest using Yaniz Vorr over Zevon, since dodge is paramount in this expansion. For commandos, I recommend a damage implant (platinum version if possible). Commando weapons are still slightly underpowered when it comes to single target damage, and having nine extra points of damage is worth more than the 2 or 3 dodge in this case (equipping Yaniz will even out the loss). I don’t know enough about engineers and operatives to have good advice, so use your own judgement.
Party Composition and advice:
If you’re in the position to build your own party, I suggest two engineers, two commando, and an operative as the ideal build. The operative will help kill tanks faster, two commandos provides redundant tanking if one is killed, and two engineers will let the party heal faster, and if one engi dies, the backup engineer can prevent the battle from turning into a TPK (which tends to happen with only one engineer).
Protect the engineers at all costs. In Tarasa, they are the most important class by far, and if all the engineers happen to die at once, the rest of the party will likely follow. For commando players, having Graviton Slam, Neutron Stomp, Vigor, and Kinetic Reservoir ranked will be very helpful (again, I don’t know enough about the other classes to have useful advice). Finally, if you join a party and find that there isn’t an engineer, leave. Having no engineer makes the battle almost impossible.
Tactics:
On Tarasa, target prioritization is the name of the game. Taking out the right enemies in the right order can decide the fate of a party.
You’re first target should be the Vular Drones. Tanks don’t deal much more damage than drones, but there are a lot more Drones and they attack much faster. Blue drones should be taken out first, since they have a fast firing ranged attack that can cut a party down quickly. The yellow-gold drones should go next.
Once all the drones are down, you can shift fire onto the Vular Tanks. If possible, one of the commandos should hold agro while the Drones are being eliminated, keeping the tank out of everyone’s way. Tanks have an auto-healing skill, which makes them very hard to take down. They can’t auto-heal while knocked down or stunned, so use stun/knockdown skills as often as possible. As a general rule, tanks cannot be killed by less than four players, so the party must concentrate fire to bring them down. Be extremely careful when using knockback skills or kitting, as tanks will often be operating at the edge of their spawn radius, and an ill-positioned knockback will send them back to spawn and heal them to full health.
The Biomechs are extremely tough foes, but can easily be defeated if you use the right tactic. Said tactic is to exploit the fact that they have no path finding AI, like their ancestor Durrex. Forcing them to try and charge through a tree will usually work fine, though doing can be very difficult, and a single screw-up will often result in a TPK. I was able to get videos made of both a proper takedown and a botched attempt, and both are very enlightening. The takedown video also demonstrates the usefulness of a Napalm Carbine for Biomech fighting, and I suggest emulating it as closely as possible. Unfortunately, something went wrong the recordings. I’ll see what I can do about remaking them.
