A Quick Guide to 1 Hour Survival Fissures

Sometimes you need to open relics and fast. You’ve got a mountain of relics and Baro Ki’Teer’s coming tomorrow and you have no idea what to do. Alright, sure, you could do Capture and Exterminate missions, but you lose a lot of time between loading screens. Defense and Excavation missions offer endless rewards, but enemies are slow and often hide. Nope, if you want to open a relic every 5 minutes, you’ll want to do a marathon Survival Fissure. With the right set up, you can easily go for an hour or longer.

And this is a quick guide on how to do that.

A word of warning: This guide requires some rare and expensive mods if you are to do this yourself.

There are several things you need before you start. Firstly you need a fissure and a lot of relics. If you’re going for an hour, you need 12 relics minimum. You’ll also need the following items:

• One Nekros with a Desecrate build
• One Atterax with a Maiming Strike build and plenty of range. Other weapons with high range work as well (e.g. the Guandao) but most weapons require a riven (e.g. the Scoliac), while the Atterax only requires Maiming Strike, Primed Reach, Primed Pressure Point, Organ Shatter, True Steel and Blood Rush.
• A wall to hide behind
• A squad of 4 players, 3 players minimum

That’s the bare minimum setup to do an hour long survival mission. You can’t do this mission on Solo or with two players because you want as many enemies as possible, and the less players you have, the less enemies spawn. In fact, playing a survival normally can actually be difficult solo because you don’t have enough enemies to kill to get life support capsules off of.

The plan is incredibly simple. Find extraction, find a secluded doorway nearby, hide behind the doorway, activate Desecrate for extra life support capsules and do one billion slide attacks with your melee weapon of choice. You only come out from your cover to pick up your 10 reactant, which you need to do before the timer hits five seconds before the five/ten/fifteen/etc. minute mark. Most importantly, you all need to stick together, so that enemies always come to you. If you’re running low on life support (which shouldn’t really happen) then just send someone out using their space kid – when they die as space kid, they’ll teleport back to their Warframe.

If you plan on doing this, I’d recommend bringing a second buddy with a similar weapon, or some form of backup for when you get tired.

What else you bring depends on your mood. An Octavia is useful since she can buff your damage and make the whole squad invisible, while also attracting enemies to your location and still dealing high damage when your poor Atterax user needs a break. I’ve found that Loki can be useful in getting enemies to come to you, since his Radial Disarm forces all affected enemies into melee mode, and they’ll run to their deaths. Ivara could be useful with a high duration build, making allies invisible and using her Noise arrows to lure enemies over, but I haven’t tried her yet. Volt is exceptionally good (of course he is) since Electric Shield provides cover and Speed provides, er, speed. Valkyr is also great since she can 1. be immortal, 2. give a small attack speed boost and 3. drag enemies closer to you.

There are frames you want to avoid too. Frames with crowd control will slow you down. You definitely don’t want to use a Slow Nova (one with 100% or more power strength) but a Fast Nova (one with less than 100% power strength) can be handy as she’ll speed enemies up and get them to run into your Atterax blender of death.

Whatever you do, don’t take companions in there, because they will get themselves killed.

Now, you might think that doing so many spin attacks constantly is going to hurt one’s hands. And you’re right. But amazingly, Digital Extremes allows the use of button macros. The catch seems to be that you can use macros as long as you’re not exploiting bugs and as long as you’re still actually pressing buttons. So you can combine your slide and your melee attack into a single key but you can’t set up a bind so you can just AFK for hours. You still have to sit there meleeing things, but at the very least you can use AutoHotKey to make it one button press instead of two or three. DO NOT make anything that lets you just AFK. Combining buttons into one button is one thing, but anything automated is grounds for a ban.

There are some tilesets you want to avoid. Corpus Gas City can be somewhat awkward because many of the rooms are much, much bigger, meaning it takes longer for enemies to get to you. Infested missions are generally not a great choice either because of AoE enemies like Mutalist Ospreys and Moas, which will try and kill you through walls. Another reason to avoid Infested is because 99% of their damn Eximus units are Parasitic ones which will almost certainly drain energy more than you’d like, especially if your Nekros is not using Despoil.

The best place to do long survivals is at the end of Void maps. Where extraction is, there is almost always one room coming off that leads to a second doorway with a non-functional lift behind it. The room between the left and the extraction room is a good place to hide. Other good locations are the Grineer Meteoroid tileset, with the room with a walkway around a furnace before the extraction room; and the common Corpus Ship tileset with the set of stairs going up towards some lockers.

The only downside to all of this? Maiming Strike, the mod required to make the Atterax good, is incredibly rare, only available every six months when the Acolytes appear. Luckily, riven mods with the Slide Attack Critical Chance stat will work as well, but you need to make sure your weapons have enough range to do damage from behind cover.

But if you’ve got the time, the patience and a Maiming Strike, go for it!

If you don’t though, there are alternatives! The Zenistar/Azima are both pretty good at making a blender, and a Mesa behind some sort of shield (Volt/Frost/Gara) works excellently. Nidus is also a HUGE contender here because his abilities scale well over time.

Just make sure you don’t actually go AFK. Because then you lose out on loot. Even if you’re not spinning to win, you need to keep an eye on any enemies that slip by and make sure that life support doesn’t get too low.