Plague Star Has Returned!
From April 5th to April 17th, Plague Star is back, bringing Infested and a massive, hideous lump of cancerous matter to the middle of the Plains of Eidolon. The event is a platform-wide operation, affecting the Plains no matter what if you’re on PC, and is probably coming back to Console versions in 2-3 weeks.
The way Plague Star works is pretty much the same as last time. You grab the Infested Catalyst blueprint from your Clan Dojo, you build some and equip them in your gear slot, you accept the bounty from Konzu in Cetus, you head out to the Plains, you rush to the waypoint and enter a cave to find the toxin, you take the toxin to a mixer inside an armoured vault, you put it in and add your Infested Catalyst (and Eidolon Phylaxis ones if you have them), you defend for three minutes, you take the mixture and take it to a drone, you defend the drone as you follow it to the massive infested meteor, you kill a bunch of infested to fill a meter and you kill the four Lephantis recolours that spawn at 25%, 50%, 75% and 99%, then you head back to Cetus and can spend ‘event standing’ at Nakak, the little mask girl.
Ideally that shouldn’t have been a run on sentence, but at least you can copy and paste that and stick it in chat, because there’s a lot of people who don’t know what to do.
If you add the two potions into the mixer, then you get more bounty standing. You need to put four in to get the extra standing, which means this event is best done with a full squad, so everyone puts in one of each potion each. You get 2000 for just the infested one and 3000 for both the infested and eidolon items. If you don’t put anything in, you only get 1000 standing. The standing you earn can be spent with Nakak, the little girl who sells masks for Space Kids.
When it comes to what to buy, I would recommend getting at least one of each of the Plague Zaw parts, and 10 minimum of each ‘exodia’ Arcane part. The rest you should spend on the rare gems, forma and Cetus wisps. The forma come pre-built and are a steal really, as you can buy one for every bounty you complete. The fish parts are somewhat easier to get, and the two mods are only worth it if you don’t already have them. But everything from Plague Star is obtainable quite easily.
The actual bounty rewards have changed too. The 100 Kuva and 300 endo are still there, but you won’t get an infinite supply of Naramon Lenses. They’ve thrown in other items. For example, I got a Gladiator Finesse mod, which was a pleasant surprise. But most of the rewards have been standard bounty items. The Hunter mods still drop regularly (and a Nekros helps hugely if you want a lot of them) but you can also get them easily from Ghoul bounties, which are currently active alongside Plague Star.
There are some differences though, mostly in how the Lephantis Recolour fight works. Sorry, Hemacytes. They’re called Hemacytes. Even though they’re just shiny Lephantises on the Plains. The old super-fast kill methods of using Ember, Gara or the Ogris rocket launcher no longer work, as Ember’s Fire Blast, Gara’s Splinter Shield and the Nightwatch Napalm augment for the Ogris now only do one tick of damage over time, rather than doing huge amounts of damage all in one go.
The best way to defeat the Hemacytes is the best way to defeat Lephantis normally. High damage corrosive and slash weapons aimed at their weak spots when they open. Rhino is a good choice, great for both damage and using Stomp to slow Hemacytes to keep their weak spots open for longer. Me and some clan mates stumbled across two Rhinos, an Octavia and an Oberon, which worked insanely well.
You WILL want some crowd control though. The infested spawn in HUGE numbers and there is a lot of toxic gas that spawns as well. Vauban could be good, but a Slow Nova is excellent for both her slowing and her mobility. I used my good old Zenistar though and that worked fine.
One last tip: Don’t stand on or near the massive infested tumor meteor. It will kill you.
So yeah, Plague Star is just a single bounty that you can repeat as much as you want. It’s a slow, grindy bounty that requires a LOT of long distances traveled, but the rewards are so worth it.