| Black Beetle | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Location | Neo Ark | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Black Beetle is a rare NMC. They can be very dangerous, do deal good damage and approach Aya, quickly. They also have insanely high health which allows them to shake off a lot of damage.
Strategy
Any weapon or spell fired will alert all the Beetles in the room to target the source and charge straight at it. Their attack bears similarity to the Chaser, meaning the player can side-step an incoming attack. A Beetle that is hit with an attack will also charge at a player and will even change course mid-way during a charge.
Knocking a Beetle over is critical to dealing with larger groups of them. This exposes their underbelly and allows the player to do 3x the usual damage.
- Buckshot, Hammer, Flare and wind-based attacks like Apobiosis and Plasma do an easy enough job. Pepper Spray works well if the player happens to face a group of Beetles heading toward Aya is near-single file.
- All Grenade-type ammunition and R. Slug shells work, but they are a more expensive alternative.
- Energyball, while it can knock a Beetle over, is not accurate when dealing with smaller targets and may be a difficult hit.
- Most melee attacks are not recommended since their windup time or low attack damage means you are likely to miss or not do enough damage to make it worth the trade-off in damage received (At least with the Gunblade, a melee attack can flip one over).
The targeting system may be an issue with Beetles while flipped over, so be careful. After a while, they will flip back over and need to be knocked back again.
With smaller numbers, weapons that deal a high amount of damage at once will be useful, such as the M950, MP5A5 and Pyke.
In extreme cases where flipping over a target is not possible, the P229 with the silencer will not alert other Beetles, allowing the player to pick them off one-at-a-time. It would be a slow, but doable process.
POISON attacks are a guaranteed death sentence, but can be dangerous to exploit since anytime the Beetle takes damage from poison, it will charge at the player, forcing them to be constantly on the move.
Combat Light will cause PARALYSIS
Notes
- The length at which they stay flipped over depends on how much health they have remaining. The lower their current HP is, the longer they stay flipped over.
- The formula appears to be: FLOOR(24 + ((280 - Current HP) x 5 / 14)) x 10. This gives us a duration length of 8-21 seconds, depending on how close one is to death while flipped over.
- The Beetle's attack is based on how much running time it has before making contact with Aya, with the minimum damage being 1/3 of what has been listed.
