Archon hunt excavation solo is a nightmare

[Rifz57000]

The mission is easy but the battery carriers spawn needs to be tweaked, they seem even rarer than tauforged shards. Also you keep getting bombarded by sentients taking up 75% of the spawn pool further reducing the chance of getting a battery man.

The only way is doing 20 every excavator till the end, or doing squad but for people with trash burgundi internet thats even worse.

[(PSN)Zoltan6201]

I wholeheartedly agree! The abhorrent lack of power cells is alarming! The occurrence of power carriers needs to be dramatically increased!!!

[Unimira]

Noticed lack of carriers too, felt like sentients are overriding many of the spawns (no sentients spawned for the first extractor and carriers spawned normally too, second onward I barely saw any carriers).

I let a bunch of extractors explode and only defended them when I actually found some power cells, less than 10 carriers throughout the whole mission though. Thanks to bonus drops from Khora strangledome I finished two full extractors but let all the others explode at 20-60%.

[vureus]

^^^^this

1-extractor shield/hp scaling

2-carrier spawn ok on first, then impossible

3-sentients pour in after 1-2 reactors and just insta-wipe the reactor 

had to resort to public, was fun but absolutely ridiculous number of sentients and eximus

[Lord_Drod]

This is the worst mission in Warframe.  It's unbearable.  The guys never spawn.  It takes me a half hour every time.  I don't know how you're supposed to do it solo, but it should at least be viable.  I go 5 feet away, waiting 5+ mins for spawns and then 200 sentients just spawn right on top of it.  I had one sentient nuke the excavator right as it spawned before I could even put a power cell into it.  The disco sentient attack just goes right through the globe.  If you were to take gloom or slowva, the spawns would be nonexistent.  Power cell carriers have been a huge issue on Europa and Earth tilesets for a long while now.  It's time to fix that.  Waiting around for enemies to spawn in shouldn't be a thing.  It's just an endless mobile defense mission.  Archon Survival is also bad on spawns, with 90% of the enemies being the disco sentients.

I want to very clearly state my opinion on these archon missions and kahl missions.  If you remove the archon shards from the tables - I will never do them ever.  I never ever sortie.  I want DE to know that I'm doing these purely for an exclusive reward that may or may not be useful in the future, but NOT because I enjoy them or approve of them. 

[Botsari]

Although it would be crazy to say these are ever not extremely annoying solo, I've tried a bunch of my usual-suspect solo excavate builds for "archon excavation" (like Zepher, Octavia, Frost, Vauban, and so on) and the one I found works best for me solo is Khora.  I think the two things that make it unbearable are the first the large percentage of sentients - it feels like the code for the archon hunts mission just subs in sentients for many of the other spawns in normal missions, so that is likely the source of the lack of power cells - fewer of every other type of mob, including the power cell carriers.  And the second issue is of course the nuking eximus units everywhere, as already pointed out above. Missions where one unfortunate nuke can end a mission instantly have always been my solo Achilles heel.  Fortunately the sentients get trapped in the strangledome, and even the eximus units will also get trapped if you somehow manage to  knock them down first. This slows things down a lot, but makes everything work solo.

I doubt this is most people's problem, but PSA, just in case - if you are using a strategy that just neutralizes the enemies, like strangledome, etc - you have to keep killing to get new spawns to occur. So if you are waiting *literally* forever that might be part of the problem. Probably need a good method of efficiently killing the sentients while you are waiting  in order for the mission to work well.  It doesn't come into play that often, and when it does the maxed out enemy numbers usually plays to our favor  - such as in interception missions. But something to keep in mind.

I'm using a resonator-pilfering-max range Khora build.  Pilfering will very often cause double energy cell drops, so that helps.  It is hard to say directly how much the resonator helps, but when it is out I do seem to have a lot fewer times when one of the eximus units nukes my drill 10 seconds after it spawns.  But again, use something to break their overguard to add them to the dome where they will stop nuking the drill, the resonator and you, and where you can deal with them at your leisure.

Hope this helps a little.  But those missions are STILL a bloody pain! Personally I wish the guys carrying the energy cells, and not just the cells themselves, would show up on the map!  The one I did today went about as perfectly as it gets solo - praise the great RNG in the sky - and it still took almost 17 minutes.  Most of that is waiting for energy cells while slowly killing off stuff in the dome.

Anyway, my 2 cents.  I've actually enjoyed the pre-archon archon missions as interesting nuts to crack solo. A few of them (so far defense and excavation) are probably some of the more technically difficult missions in the game to do solo. But I can't say there wasn't a bunch of cursing going on along the road there.

Edited December 26, 2022 by Botsari

[-AncientWarrior-]

Man I must have had a dream run when I did mine, first 5 excavators completed in a row no problems done and out.. yes the carriers were fewer than normal but I must have been lucky as I had no problems at all with this mission. 

[Botsari]

4 minutes ago, -AncientWarrior- said:

Man I must have had a dream run when I did mine, first 5 excavators completed in a row no problems done and out.. yes the carriers were fewer than normal but I must have been lucky as I had no problems at all with this mission. 

To me it always seem like something is a total pain until you have it figured out, then suddenly it become just going through the motions. Usually not much in between.

[-AncientWarrior-]

36 minutes ago, Botsari said:

To me it always seem like something is a total pain until you have it figured out, then suddenly it become just going through the motions. Usually not much in between.

Thats the truth, Voruna with large range gloom worked a treat for it for me :) 

[leachPrime]

I went insane and did a 30 excavators in 30 minute mission. The excavator sometimes got one shot. I'm thinking if Limbo would work.

[(XBOX)Cotton Tail]

Just did this mission solo again and made sure to retrieve every cannister that spawned. 25 minutes, 11 cannisters. My usual setup for this is Trinity P with Resonator subsumed over her 1 so the enemies just chase the ball around and you can spot the cannister carriers quite easily (if they spawn!) I was killing all the time too.

Edited January 1, 2023 by (XBOX)Cotton Tail

[Marvelous_A]

Power cell carrier spawn is problematic for ALL kinds of excavation missions. Including the plains.

Once you move to another excavator the carriers you didn't kill still take the spawn slot (as there is a limit of maximum carriers allowed on the map) but they are too far to reach you.

So you can only wait until they despawn and the game decides to spawn some other carriers somewhat close to your current excavator.

[OneBuckShort]

"Excavator destroyed. Protect the remaining dig sites." 😌

Never really hate so much towards those sentient units before until I played the solo archon excavation. Especially the one with the disco lights.

[cantide101]

DE please fix the power carrier drop rate. It is awful solo. What could have been a 5 minute mission ballooned into a 25 minute mission.

[Zakkhar]

It is super easy to cheese solo if you:

• Bring a loot frame (I prefer Khora) and get 2 batteries per kill (most of the time).
• Do not mindlessly kill everything away from the extractor.