I farmed Grendel solo. Some things I wish I had known beforehand

[BlindStalker]

I farmed up Grendel solo a while back. Almost like 2 weeks ago from this post date. I knew about the no mods/no operator/no gear thing ahead of time so that wasn't unexpected. Screenshots below for the Defense, Excavation and Survival. As expected, the Defense took the longest one to do out of all 3.

Spoiler

Defense (yes that's a bit of insanely long time to complete the mission. I ended up accidentally fighting tooth and nail to complete the defense, not exactly what I intended).

Excavation (was a much needed breather once I was off the adrenaline from the Defense mission, so much more lax).

Survival (cool, flat 20 minutes, once I figured out what to do).

Yeah, I took that long for the defense. Because I was purely relying on primary and secondary weapons to do the main killing and ended up waiting between rounds to let the defense cryopod heal up. Not an elegant or smart approach (rather bull-ish), but one that I accidentally committed to in the end. And yeah, the game gave me Bursas for s#its and giggles on the final round (I dealt with them anyways). Excavation was as expected, way less stressful and more lax (I didn't really bother to try and keep them fully protected. If they blew up, they blew up, but I tried to at least get 1 or 2 batteries in before they blew up). It was at the survival that I was struggling to figure out because, I couldn't actually make it all the way to the 20 minutes relying on my primary and secondary weapons, I switched out various weapons, but couldn't quite make it through (I got real close at one attempt where I think I had like 2 minutes left?).

Anyways, after that failed attempt I decided to go searching on youtube for easier approaches. Well, I found somebody's solo defense run and watched the video for a couple of minutes and was surprised to realize the technique that was used. Basically they just took a hammer and used the new 'heavy attack' on all the incoming enemies and kept them at bay/killed them like that. I looked through my hammers and looked at the heavy attack damage and the radial heavy attack and their attack speed. I ended up selecting the 'Wolf Sledge' because it was relatively fast compared to most hammers (not actually fastest though, but I can't remember off of the top my head which is the fastest hammer). 

Their video can be found here in spoiler:

Spoiler

Youtuber's name was Anakani

 

So I ended up taking the 'Wolf Sledge' and just started slamming 'heavy attacks' all around during my final survival attempt. It was significantly easier to juggle slamming 'heavy attacks' all around and activating life support towers whenever I needed them (I had gotten used to activating towers when I had like 5% or less life support. But having 3 extra towers as back up reserve was way more comforting). The damage from the heavy attacks scaled all the way to feel comfortable enough towards the very end of the survival run. I never had more than 3 or 4 towers available at once, but just using only the hammer's heavy attack was proving to be far more reliable, less stressful and more easier to use on enemies rather than relying on using my primary or secondary weapons. I did 'monkey see and monkey do', but I didn't care, it worked and I was fine with that (I wish I knew about this technique when I was still doing the defense one).

I ended up using Hildryn for all 3 missions. Hildryn seemed to be largely not too affected by the 'no mods' restriction. Also, Hildryn's abilities seem to work really well against the corpus (2 and 4 were really nice to use on Corpus). I never played Hildryn outside of getting her to level 30, so I was boob when it came to using her effectively (since I was being lazy and quickly read through her abilities again). But she carried my butt pretty well throughout. (I don't normally play tank frames, I'm just not into using them, and I'm crazy, kind of married to a different frame). 

Oh, also I just realized (as of writing this, Tavier Corsair also provided another guide/approach as well to trying these Grendel missions solo. This can be found in this spoiler below, he always makes a good guide).

Spoiler

 

So some basic bullet points:

• The new 'heavy attacks' from melee weapons can prove to be quite effective and can be used to 'mindlessly spam' through out the entire mission (I used 'Wolf Sledge' because of its speed, mainly).
• Apparently, the effects from Warframe augments will still work while equipped (as Tavier Corsair mentions in his video). This might still apply to sentinels/companions maybe(?). So like Carrier's 'ammo case' might still work.
• Apparently, using elemental mods to change the elements on your weapons still applies, along with mods that increase your status chance (again from Tavier's video). So for example, adding Malignant Force (60% tox/60% status) to Ignis will give you gas and it will allow you to load into the mission with a gas ignis instead.
• Removing all mods from your frame will also increase your initial starting energy capacity (copypasta formula from wiki: Starting Energy=Initial Energy+5(Free Mod Capacity)) i.e. - you start with more energy if you remove all your mods.
• Hildryn (felt like laziest easiest option for me personally). Mirage is also recommended. I vaguely recall somebody suggesting Wisp (for excavation). There are probably others (like broken OP Octavia) who can handle it as well, but I'm not going to go through every frame. I was lazy and used Hildryn only throughout all 3.

Why did I write all of this? When I finished the defense one, I noticed that my heart was kind of still racing off of the adrenaline from trying to complete that mission. Kind of concerned me when it felt like it was still in a tachycardia state, 2 hours after I completed the mission and had logged off for a break inbetween. I mean eventually my heart calmed down, but it just felt a bit worrisome to me. I've had my heart race before from adrenaline moments while playing, just wasn't expecting it to last that long. Also, could just be my imagination and maybe I'm just being a hypochondriac. I guess I wanted it to mean something?

If I got some things wrong, feel free to politely correct me/add info (its late where I live and I have a headache and I want to just collapse into bed. To answer that other inevitable question - I'm a bit of a loner and I wanted to farm Grendel solo, end of story).

Edited November 13, 2019 by BlindStalker

[AdunSaveMe]

Nice work doing them solo. 

[BDMblue]

I did the zaw from plague star. It seems the arcane you pick works can’t be 100% sure, but ya just jump heavy slam the ground could kill all but bursas in 1-2 hits.

i used Rev but I only did Defense solo. The survival I did get almost 700 kills tho. Witch was 500 more then all my allies put together. Also revs 1 is good in this mode. The aoe thing after you kill a guy just destroys and it seems to spread forever. Mana was not an issue with all the kills.

[Tyanya]

Hi there BlindStalker

I couldn't possible correct you or add anything to that because I did exactly the same. 😃

I went through so many frames trying out different techniques, I actually did the excavation with Wukong with tombfinger equipped, so while I was failing around with my melee my twin was spamming radiation which proc'd every now and then and helped with a bit of handy CC.

After failing miserably with many frames during survival, I too hit Youtube for some useful hints and tricks and I too found a guide that used Hildryn and Nami Skyla, I went with that and was so suprised at what a breeze it was to both do damage by spamming heavy attacks and the survivability from spamming Hildryns 2 ability. The survival mission itself wasn't that easy as I was really struggling for life support drops, I only just made it.

For the defence, same slam attack and Hildryn 2 ability spam, it was very hectic, the lack of Animal Instinct or enemy radar made it extra tricky, after 4-5 waves I started leaving ospreys floating around whilst the defence target got its health back to full, lots of standing around twiddling my thumbs. Same if the last enemy was stuck somewhere, I'd just leave them there until the defence object was back to full health, I think I would have ragequit if I had got to stage 14 then failed. 😃

I never want to do anything like this again, I was so glad when it was over.

Thanks for sharing this BlindStalker and I hope you feel better soon.

[RS219]

2 hours ago, BlindStalker said:

(not actually fastest though, but I can't remember off of the top my head which is the fastest hammer)

Volnus. It's the weakest hammer, but it makes up for that with being the fastest hammer (with slash to boot).

Otherwise GG OP, that had to be quite the masochistic slog you went through. Especially for the defense.

[ciTiger]

Good job.

I actually did all 3 missions in Duo with a friend (we only failed once, the defense mission because we went in with no plan as YOLO to check it out) and I thought that was an achievement, guess I was wrong 😉

Bursas spawned for us in the last round of defense (2 of them if not mistakes) we had to save them for end.

Cheers

[Anthraxicus]

I haven't even tried these missions yet, but Hildryn would be my first pick anyway. She already shines in energy reduction sortie cuz she laughs at energy anyway

[Anthraxicus]

I haven't even tried these missions yet, but Hildryn would be my first pick anyway. She already shines in energy reduction sortie cuz she laughs at energy anyway

 

If you can still mod for elemental, I suppose you can also mod her 1st with gas as well.

[KnossosTNC]

Timely. Just soloed the missions myself yesterday - thanks, Tavier Corsair! Cooking on the barbie right now.

Kinda fun on a one-off basis. Twenty-five Vitus per key is still too high, and the missions are too long - I mentally checked out at about 10 minutes/wave 10/500 Cryotic. That said, best plus side is no RNG - you play the missions, you get the part.

Overall, has potential, but needs better execution.

Edited November 12, 2019 by KnossosTNC

[DoomFruit]

4 hours ago, BDMblue said:

It seems the arcane you pick works can’t be 100% sure

Not for me. I used a plague zaw rapier with the explode-on-proc arcane (the only one I have). While I got several procs, I never saw a single explosion.

Also, for those of you who intend to solo this mission and haven't done so yet, try Revenant. Contagious mind control is an extremely useful thing to have.

[BlindStalker]

19 hours ago, RS219 said:

Volnus. It's the weakest hammer, but it makes up for that with being the fastest hammer (with slash to boot).

Otherwise GG OP, that had to be quite the masochistic slog you went through. Especially for the defense.

Ah right, Gara's glass hammer. I forgot about that one. Thanks as well.

19 hours ago, Tyanya said:

Hi there BlindStalker

I couldn't possible correct you or add anything to that because I did exactly the same. 😃

I went through so many frames trying out different techniques, I actually did the excavation with Wukong with tombfinger equipped, so while I was failing around with my melee my twin was spamming radiation which proc'd every now and then and helped with a bit of handy CC.

After failing miserably with many frames during survival, I too hit Youtube for some useful hints and tricks and I too found a guide that used Hildryn and Nami Skyla, I went with that and was so suprised at what a breeze it was to both do damage by spamming heavy attacks and the survivability from spamming Hildryns 2 ability. The survival mission itself wasn't that easy as I was really struggling for life support drops, I only just made it.

For the defence, same slam attack and Hildryn 2 ability spam, it was very hectic, the lack of Animal Instinct or enemy radar made it extra tricky, after 4-5 waves I started leaving ospreys floating around whilst the defence target got its health back to full, lots of standing around twiddling my thumbs. Same if the last enemy was stuck somewhere, I'd just leave them there until the defence object was back to full health, I think I would have ragequit if I had got to stage 14 then failed. 😃

I never want to do anything like this again, I was so glad when it was over.

Thanks for sharing this BlindStalker and I hope you feel better soon.

Congrats on completing the Grendel missions solo as well! You made it through which is awesome, well done! Agreed, the defense one felt a bit spicy. Thank you as well for the kind words 🙂

18 hours ago, KnossosTNC said:

Timely. Just soloed the missions myself yesterday - thanks, Tavier Corsair! Cooking on the barbie right now.

Kinda fun on a one-off basis. Twenty-five Vitus per key is still too high, and the missions are too long - I mentally checked out at about 10 minutes/wave 10/500 Cryotic. That said, best plus side is no RNG - you play the missions, you get the part.

Overall, has potential, but needs better execution.

Yeah, I felt the 25 Vitus was maybe a bit high priced for the keys. I was fortunate to have enough Vitus essence lying around to buy it upfront. But, I vaguely recall that DE might have said they based the cost on the total average vitus collected overall. And I'm wondering if those results may have been a bit skewed. I can understand dedicated groups/clans going on for long endurance runs in arbitrations but others going for really short runs as well. I wonder if it was like extreme ends of the total cost, (you might have groups who gain tons, while others, only a small fraction in comparison. But DE would never show us those numbers anyways). I felt maybe the Grendel keys cost should've been a bit lower (maybe 20?). But I'm done, so I don't really want to look at it again. 

Edited November 13, 2019 by BlindStalker

[-CdG-Zilchy]

Revenant's thrall ability made the defense a cake walk, allowing you to choose whatever weapons you like.

[Talinthis]

actually nvm was thinking of something else.

Edited November 13, 2019 by Talinthis

[(PSN)cdzbrbr]

From 1-10 

How hard was it?

How boring was it?

We getting it in a few days here on the console side, so i wanna know whether to summon my market discount coupon from login reward or not (we have those on ps4) [the summoning part was a joke, i'm just THAT luck to get a coupon whenever a new warframe drops].

[ant99999]

Did them with Hildryn. The Defence was the hardest because you have to care about the coffin's health. I solved that with crowd control from my weapons.

The weapons I recommend:

Telos Boltace - bread and butter. Allows for quick and easy control and grouping, second slide attack also drops down ospreys.

Synoid Gammacor - easy means for dealing with nullifiers and shield ospreys.

Scourge or Ferrox for additional support

Alternatively Nagantaka if you have problems with Techs or Fusion Moas.

General tactic: use 2 ability on every arriving mob pack. It grants you overshields and a ton of energy for abilities and allows to constantly use 3 ability. If you're surrounded or objective is under attack, use 2 then 4 ability for more damage. Destroy nullifiers and shield ospreys with Gammacor, the rest are killed with Boltace.

1 час назад, (PS4)cdzbrbr сказал:

From 1-10 

How hard was it?

How boring was it?

I found it extremely enjoyable purely because of trial and error concept, though considering you've already read the OP, it won't be as enjoyable for you probably.

Hardness 7

Boringness 3

[Miser_able]

I did the defence with some friends, that wasn't too bad. But I soloed the survival earlier today with hildryn and the redeemer prime. It's heavy attacks worked surprisingly well. 

[Wolfdoggie]

I used Arca Titron, the huge heavy slam attack aoe kills everything and you can slide out of the animation but it's not really the most entertaining method. Easier to at least use Trinity + Frost. Main issue with the mode is how badly it sucks having 0 energy forever and Trinity fixes that easily. 

[ranks21]

khora

 

[BlindStalker]

9 hours ago, (PS4)cdzbrbr said:

From 1-10 

How hard was it?

How boring was it?

We getting it in a few days here on the console side, so i wanna know whether to summon my market discount coupon from login reward or not (we have those on ps4) [the summoning part was a joke, i'm just THAT luck to get a coupon whenever a new warframe drops].

For hard, 1 being easy, 10 being very hard.

This will vary wildly I guess for myself.

Survival 1/10

Excavation 2/10

Defense 7 to maybe 8 / 10?

I think the missions still just come down to a gear check. Certain gear will make the missions feel significantly easier to handle compared to other gear. I went with Hildryn because it felt like I was more comfortable using her. As others have suggested, Mirage with her augmented 1 can work well, or Revenant's thralls (I haven't really looked at Revenant's kit, but I have vaguely heard about him having some sort of 'never die' setup). And other frames and weapons, as others have suggested. If I had to redo the defense one, I'd probably abuse use the heavy slam attacks from a hammer all over the place tactic and I imagine it would've been far less stressful/easier to manage (so potentially could've bumped the difficulty down to maybe 6 or less). I think it will just depend on what you feel comfortable using most. For example, I only rate the survival 1/10 because, once I just started using heavy attacks with the wolf sledge all over the place, the mission became significantly easier for myself and less worrisome. 

For boredom-wise, I can't really put a number on them. Its a curveball set of missions, but I can't say I was entertained either, because to me, its just another frame farm (I've farmed for every single frame in this game and after a while, I've just gotten used to things being tedious at times). For the defense one, I had to be aware during the mission. For the excavation one I didn't need be aware as much, and survival was maybe a little less once I got a setup down that I was comfortable with. Take that as what you will.

Edited November 13, 2019 by BlindStalker

[GrandLompus]

As someone who tries to farm everything solo first, and only goes pub when the grind gets too boring, I was unpleasantly surprised when I tried the defense mission as Octavia; energy ran out just too fast.  Got disillusioned very quickly seeing it was literally going nowhere, and after reading about Revenant (which I never use) and Synoid weapons (which I never use) I gave that combi a shot.

Result: solo, revenant, carrier, tigris prime to get rid of the stubborn, synoid gammacor for the energy restore, arca triton for sheer damage (hesitated about volnius bc of the speed).  Completed it in one go in 29.5 minutes (with no revives left though 🙂 ).

Best practice indeed was to just slam-kill everything in sight (never used that before either since heavy attack came out; my mouse's button 3 is quite iffy).  And of course enthrall a few key actors each round to keep the rif raf busy.

Last round did indeed dish out 2 bursas, enthralled them as well but slam-dunking them proved quite tedious, until I found out there was a 3rd mob left somewhere behind a pillar.  Killing that one ended the mission right there, since the bursas were already mine by enthralling.  So that's a nice tips-and-tricks addition when using Revenant.

Another was that my synoid gammacor never procced, prob. because I had the arca triton equipped 100% of the time.  But I didn't need it either; mobs dropped just enough orbs, and I only really ran out of energy once in the beginning when I enthralled more than was needed.

A third one was that I also just could have left my tigris prime at home, since when I tried it on an ox osprey it just didn't get nowhere fast either; I just enthralled it instead.  The others I dealt with by letting them go kamikaze, at least the ones that survived the enthralling frenzy.

After my first Octavia ran I predicted a 1/10 for engagement and 10/10 for difficulty, but going with Rev made that a 7/10 for engagement and 6/10 for difficulty (had no revives left, but then this was my 1st try and had to get used to Rev and enthralling again as well - 2nd try would be easier I guess).

So my hopes are back up -- on to the other 2 parts!

Edited November 16, 2019 by GrandLompus

[KosmicKerman]

Octavia for defense is probably the easiest. Cast your 1 and 2 and jump around while the mallet and resonator kill the enemies. You can use the broken scepter to get energy orbs at the end of each wave. Equip an ignis to deal with the bursas and Nullifiers. Mirage worked well for excavation and survival. The clones from the augment appear to receive some benefit from the mods on your weapon (gas ignis is probably best - gas staticor might be good too). 

[Andikki]

I failed miserably on my first few attempts with various frames, and then also saw a video utilizing slam attacks. Did that (used Orthos Prime just because I didn't want to repeat the video that did it with Nami Skyla Prime and Orthos was the first thing I laid my eyes on, it's probably far from the best choice). It wasn't easy, but I got to the end and got my Grendel parts. It's a bit sad that only one (overpowered?) technique works. I wish it was hard but not impossible with various approaches. On the other hand, there are more options if you have friends, I wish I had some so that we could try different frame combinations.

I used Wisp in my successful attempts, because she has healing and buffs that potentially last forever from a single cast (unless you need to relocate or a nullifier walks into your flower field). Also, her passive that makes her invisible to enemies if she jumps around and doesn't shoot proved to be an absolute lifesaver in survival and even more so in excavation. In defense it worked against me, since enemies were all too happy to switch to the pod - I had to make sure I "roll" instead of jump when the dropship came to draw fire to my frame and away from the pod.

I also saw that video with Mirage trick, but it feels like cheating and will most likely be fixed in the future.

I believe these missions were the biggest challenge I had in Warframe so far. I've read critique that it's invalidating everything we've been working for in the game for the sake of providing challenge, but I must say I enjoyed cracking this. As a friend once said, if you don't want to smash your controller against a wall at some point, it's not a good game.

[(PSN)Pumba_Beneator]

Thanks a lot to all who contributed here, I read carefully and finally succeeded with the three missions solo, after several pathetic failures 🙂

Excavation and Survival, I did with Hildryn and a Sancti Magistar - as said above, Hildryn runs without energy, and spamming the 'heavy slam' attack of hammers deals serious AoE damage.

Defense I could not do with Hildryn, as the cryopod was taking too much damage. I did it with Wisp - the electricity Mote provides some crowd control that comes handy. I let the last attack drone alive at the end of most waves, in order to give time to replenish the life counter of the cryopod.

A couple of things :

- mods are taken into account in the melee weapon set up (Wiki seems to say otherwise) ; I used a heavy attack build (sacrifical steel, amalgam organ shatter, killing blow, corrupt charge, gladiator might, etc.) and it works. Same with sentinel builds (I used a Djinn with the renaissance mod)

- the Sancti Magistar seems to heal on heavy attacks, but NOT on heavy slams. There is a thread about that, not sure if this is intended or a bug. I finally used Life Strike in the defense mission (can be used on anything else than the Sancti Magistar of course), but with the vitality mote my Wisp stayed at 600 HP pretty much all the time, so not sure if this is really needed or not.

Bottom line is 20 minutes for the survival, roughly 40 minutes for the excavation (not defending the excavators as written above, doing +20 or +40 cryotic at the time), and a good 45 minutes for the defense.

The "no mod" mode has potential I think (for nightmare missions for example), assuming that some other strategies are possible, which does not seem to be the case for the Grendel missions.

Anyway, the thing is in the foundry now, I hope it's worth it...