Eidolons and Spidolons

After the Fortuna 2.0 update, there are now two massive bosses you can fight. They both have the same basic idea, being composed of adapting Sentient parts, requiring a little team work at first and being immune to various sorts of damage. In fact, the Orbs are actually made from bits of sentient stuff, hence why they’ve got the nickname Spidolons. But the two fights are very, very different. And not always in a good way.

Let’s have a quick recap of how an Eidolon fight and how a Profit-Taker Orb fight works.

Eidolon fights require you to take down an Eidolon’s shield then shoot out one of four weak points, repeating until all weak points are destroyed, killing a bunch of Vomvalysts that try to heal the Eidolon and then shooting the Eidolon down in a final all-out fight. The shield-shooting stage requires you to use Operators with Amps, the second stage requires high-powered rifles with Radiation on them. If you don’t want the Eidolon to teleport away after each weakpoint is broken, then you need to grab some Eidolon Lures, fill them up with Vomvalyst souls and keep them alive so they can attach to the Eidolon and ground it.

Profit-Taker fights require you to take down the Orb’s shield by using the correct element (it changes on a regular basis). When the shield is down, you then shoot at the Profit-Taker’s legs using your Archwing gun. Then after that, you shoot the Profit-Taker’s body with your Archwing gun. You repeat that three times, pausing only to destroy the occasional shield generator that pops up.

To efficiently do an Eidolon fight, you need a lot of high tier equipment. You need some well-forma’d sniper rifles, you need to get yourself an Amp for your Operator and you generally need a good squad – someone who deals high damage to the weak points, someone to look after the lures and stop them from dying, someone to protect the team from the waves of magnetic energy and someone to buff the damage of Operators. The most optimal setup is a Chroma, a Trinity, a Harrow and a Volt, but if you’re not trying to kill 3 Hydralysts in a night, then you can swap them all about, perhaps using a Rhino instead of a Chroma, an Oberon instead of a Harrow and maybe a Mesa instead of a Volt. But you still need everyone to do their jobs.

Now, the Profit-Taker fight is a lot simpler. You just shoot the right gun at the right thing. If the current elemental weakness isn’t the one you like, you can change it using your Operator. But apart from coordinating elemental damage types, the fight is pretty simple. The only real hazards are dodging the Profit-Taker’s attacks and the normal mobs that spawn around it. It turns out, all you need is raw damage for the Orb fight.

At first glance, that sounds fine. It makes the fight seem more accessible to new players. They just have to get through the first three stages, which involve defending a base from Hyenas and Jackals, grabbing data and fighting two Ambulas and a lot of coordination when it comes to hacking consoles. All featuring level 60 enemies of course. Oh and they need a good Archwing gun. The Imperator is not a good Archwing gun.

But really, the Profit-Taker fight is only about damage. Healing is helpful and crowd control is optional. You just stand around shooting at the massive orb while tanking the homing rockets and that’s pretty much it. A meta has already appeared – three Chromas and a Trinity. You can’t even reliably use other tank frames or heavy damage dealers like Rhino or Octavia because the trash enemies knock you about and things like using the EMP Aura (reduced enemy shields) and Shattering Impact (reduces armour on hit) have already been patched out, further reducing the fight to nothing but as much damage as you can muster.

Heck, I already have a clan mate who worked out how to do the whole fight, solo and without optimized gear, in fifteen minutes!

I don’t really understand this though. We have three missions before the Profit-Taker fight that you only need to do once and people are only repeating because it’s faster to farm the parts for Vox Solaris standing. Those three missions all have a little bit of intrigue about them. You do some things other than just shooting. But none of that appears in the fight itself.

Unfortunately though, even the three smaller missions have already made a lot of players bored. You need to hit the third rank of Vox Solaris to access Baruk parts, and the only way to do so is to do the four Profit-Taker missions, to get parts only available in those missions.

Sure, Eidolon hunts have a strict meta and are pretty dull, but they have some sort of… variation about them.

It also didn’t take people about 5 minutes to figure out what you have to do.