Cure Ground

This is another very simple ground mission (in fact, all of em are).

The goal is to bring down a series of shields blocking your path to Armek, a big, annoying, mouthy, and very glitchy assimilated klingon whose day you are there to ruin.

When you first beam in, there is a practice session for precisely how you will be taking down the shields. Activating a series of transformers that bring a pretty green light from the starting transformers to one on the wall. When it gets to the wall, BOOM, and the shield goes down allowing you to progress.

Along the way, you have to gather samples from dead assimilated klingons and free captured klingon warriors. Also, you have to kill some borg.

The basic packs are simple, target them in priority Elite > Heavy > Tactical > whatever else. Remember to using flanking attacks, tachy harmonic, kiting borg into bombs, everything. Orions are pretty useful for seducing the harder targets (how they do that I neither know nor wish to).

When you get to the Turrets, however, it gets tricky. These are annoying, shielded little P'sITA there purely to waste your time. Getting them down requires some measure of teamwork, or a single very astute tactical officer with a fire team kit and an attitude.

At first they have a large, hemispherical shield around them. Damage them to roughly 40% health and the shield will drop, rotating cover shields will start spawning, and three light plasma turrets will show up to annoy you. This allows a player to run in between (or if a kitty, jump over) the cover shields and begin planting a bomb that, if they successfully get it off, will blow up the turret. The key to getting the bomb planted is to have the other players aggro and kill the light plasma turrets (they look exactly like the engineer phaser and disruptor turrets). Thus, you need a couple people to do this. If the turrets are not kept from attacking the player in the center, the damage they do will interrupt the bomb planting process, requiring them to start over and probably letting the turret heal enough that its big shield goes back up and you get to do the entire process again.

The other way, is to have a tactical officer chuck a plasma grenade at the turret late enough that it can last the entire time it takes to plant the bomb, but early enough that it doesnt get blocked by the spawning cover shields. This requires some careful timing, and, even if you have someone who can bring it off appropriately, you should still take out the light plasma turrets as soon as possible.

There are a total of 6 turrets in the map, 2 each in a pair of shield gauntlets, that must be destroyed in 15 minutes to satisfy the optional.

The shield gauntlets are where groups tend to fail. This requires some teamwork. They operate exactly like the first "puzzle" when you beam in. Activate the transformers in sequence to get the power to the shield and blow it up allowing you to progress.

There are two caveats however. First, activating the first and second transformer in each gauntlet activates a Borg defense turret that you need to allocate people to destroy. Second, every time a transformer finishes its activation process, worker drones spawn near all activated turrets and move in to shut them down. Thus, people need to be allocated to guard them.

Engineers and science officers work best for guarding transformers. If you run into one who says they need help, they probably need to uninstall the game, or go back to normal and practice a little more.

Each shield gauntlet run should look something like this:

1. One person starts Trans #1's activation process; the others get into position to take out the first turret.
2. Defense Turret #1 activates, all 5 people shoot it, bring it down to 40%. The bomb planter runs in to set up the bomb, the others aggro and kill the plasma turrets as fast as possible.
3. Defense turret #1 blows up. The yellow beam shoots from Trans #1 to Trans #2, opening it for activation and spawning worker drones that will attack Trans #1. The Trans #1 guard (plus perhaps one other) starts guarding the first transformer. The others activate Trans #2.
4. Trans #2 starts working and Defense Turret #2 turns on. Destroy it as before.
5. As soon as the beam reaches Trans #3, activate that and the Trans #2 guard starts working to defend their real estate.
6. One person runs to Trans #4 to wait for it to activate and one person stays at Trans #3 (and probably should be helping to kill any worker drones still alive at Trans #2).
7. As soon as the beam reaches Trans #4, the person there activates it and runs to help kill the drones spawning near Trans #3.
8. At this point you have a about 15-20 seconds before the beam gets to the final shield generator and blows it up, at which time you all move on.

After the second shield gauntlet, there is a pack of borg to kill, and a final turret to destroy after which, if you get it all done in 15 minutes, you get the optional. If youre getting down to the wire on time, its is virtually *never* a good idea to try and skip the drone pack and go straight for the turret as they will aggro and start flanking you with the turret.

From there, you kill a large group of drones guarding some shield generators that protect Armek. For this group, you need to hold back and snipe from range, there are simply too many to run on in. Engineers should swap to the Fabrication specialist kits for this fight as the quantum mortars are very useful here.

After they are all dead and the shield generators are destroyed, Armek can be fought, assuming you have gathered all the samples and freed all the klingons (4 of each).

Armek, aka 'Annoying, Glitchy, Assimilated Klingon'

This fight can take anywhere between 30 seconds or a couple minutes, depending on how much of a glitch fest it ends up being.

There are also a couple different ways of doing it.

The fastest, and dirtiest, is for everyone to get right on Armek's toes and pulsewave his face off. A couple people will likely die doing this, but thats not a big deal. This is probably the fastest way of doing it, and the easiest. And, by far the typical favourite.

The other way involves using some kind of tank who stays in melee range while the other players back up to the corners of the large rectangular shield that spawns around Armek and snipe a. This way requires a Science officer, either to be the tank themselves, or to stand closer, but nowhere near melee range, and heal whoever it is tanking (which anyone can do).

In either case, several things should happen. Any engineers should put on their fabrication specialist kits (which, they should have on already from dealing with the group at the shield generators) and place their mortars down outside the box shield. Secondly, ABSOLUTELY NO PETS of any kind inside the shield (this includes security escorts, drones, turrets, clones, anything at all). For the first method, they just get in the way, and in the second, they will likely get your tank killed as Armek has a melee range 'chain' attack similar to Rebecca's.

General Tips:

If they hang back a little before each shield gauntlet, engineers can swap out to their Fabrication Specialist kits, place down their quantum mortars and turrets, and then back to their Enemy Neutralisation kits. This makes guarding the first transformer entirely solo a cake-walk and frees up everyone else to work on other things and generally be nearer the shield which speeds the process up.

As mentioned, tactical officers can use plasma grenades to make dealing with the Light Plasma turrets that the Borg Defense Turrets spawn easier. As long as the plasma fire lasts on the Defense Turret, the Light Plasma turrets will not attack the bomb planter (or anyone else).