G12 for Dummies Part 4: Convoys (with addendum on zetas)

Grid12 for Dummies

Part 4: Convoys (with addendum on zeta bosses)

You may have seen red arrows pointing away from your tank, or bright red circles on the screen labeled "Enemy Convoy" moving across long red lines on the map. Now that you know how to fight fortresses, it's time to take one of these on.

A convoy is comprised of a group of two to three heavy bosses, each with 10K HP, that move across the map, surrounded by various minions. Convoys spawn at regular intervals on convoy routes - straight paths marked by the red lines criscrossing the map.

Why take on convoys? They're a plentiful source of coins, augments, storage space, and tank unlocks, and drop them much more frequently and at higher levels than the plain old fortresses you've been doing up to now.

A successful assault on a convoy requires a good deal of cleared space for the convoy to pass through; mounting a full assault on a convoy in the wilderness is extremely difficult and likely to end in failure. If you're new to convoys, it's probably a good idea to wait for a decently-sized team of three or more players to come on before attempting to do one. You'll also want some speed prisms - you simply won't be able to keep up with a convoy without at least a 20% speed boost. Pulches are recommended.

What tank do I use?

The four tanks you'll find most useful in a normal convoy group are the corsair, the avenger, the paladin, the cutlass.

Corsair, due to its impregnable front shield (when on overdrive), is the most forgiving of the three. Drive up to a convoy with it on, fire your shotgun and your gamma burst, and run before your ability expires, using your heal if necessary to survive.

Avenger's role is a crowd controller: you can paralyze a convoy, and hold it in a stun while you and your teammates pound at its hull. It's exceptionally useful in many situations, and will make you a valuable member of the team. Just make sure never to paralyze without stunning - people generally assume that a paralyzed enemy is stunned and will race it; a non-stunned paralyzed enemy will net you some very dead and very nettled teammates.

Paladin plays a similar role as a paralyzing and stunning tank, but sacrifices a lot of the avenger's DPS for greater range, a speed boost ability, and a healgun which can heal teammates (but not itself). It's an excellent tank to use in teams, but since the healgun can't heal the paladin, it's not particularly powerful alone.

The cutlass, due to its very high sustained DPS and cloak, is primarily a damage dealer and a wilderness pursuit vehicle. Just cloak, drive up, and park directly on top of the enemy to make sure all four of your guns hit; if one of your allies is stunning the enemy, you can stay there for a while and do massive damage. Don't overestimate the length of your cloak, though - it's a fatal mistake.

Other tanks you might want to try out after these three are spectre and kraken, which are both capable of dealing quite a bit of damage against convoys in teams despite lacking specialized enemies that can really help with convoys.

How do I attack it?

An assault on a convoy consists of several phases.

Initial Intercept

Convoys spawn in the wilderness and travel down their routes. Look at the convoy's route and note where it will enter cleared space, and head to an area close to that point. Don't try to stand directly on the route, though - convoys cover a lot of space and the last thing you want is to be caught in the middle of a convoy.

The intercept is also where you get to see what type of convoy you're dealing with. There are four types of convoys; I'm not going to describe them in depth here, but you can head over to the wiki article on convoys to see the full description. Here's the quick rundown:

Depending on the convoy, form up with your team in front of or behind the convoy and start cutting down the minions.

Minion Mowing

The minions shouldn't pose too much trouble. Just run up to them (or slow down if you're attacking from the front) until you're in range and pound away. Just make sure not to waste abilities on a mostly-dead minion - if one has only 500 HP left, your shear would be better used elsewhere.

Destroy minions until you have a path to the boss. If the convoy has lots of space in front of it, clear out all the minions between you and the boss; if there's very little room, commence an attack on the boss. If in doubt, just do what your team's doing.

Boss Bashing

Now for the fun part. You can't really dodge the guns on the bosses, so your only real option is hit-and-run, and sitting on bosses if they're paralyzed and stunned.

When paralyzing a boss, make sure not to do accidentally hit another boss or minion in at the same time. Since nobody will be able to stun it while attacking the boss, it'll make the attack a lot more dangerous.

Once you've collected the boss, collect your loot!

Cleaning up

Once all the bosses are dead, make sure to kill the remaining minions. You'll get a loot drop once all of them are dead.

Common Convoy Mistakes

Here are a few things you shouldn't do.

Addendum: Zeta bosses

Zeta bosses appear when regions are closed. They're stationary and drop even better loot than convoys, but are more dangerous to match - they throw bombs that make GCT and ion convoy ones look like toys.

There are a few known strategies that can possibly kill a zeta; one is to park a large number of hornets out of their range and activate rangeboost on all of them, and the other is to perform rapid hit-and-run attacks using corsair shears and hercules bombs. You'll need a large (~10 player) group to do this successfully, so make sure to announce a zeta to everyone you can (on the IRC as well as the game) when one pops up.

The only real tip I can give about them is to not drag bombs on your teammates by traveling towards them when heading out of range of the zeta, and to loot in waves to avoid being killed by bombs.

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