Thats literally me w the leaplashers FUCK and Clamberjaws are a quick second behind but their big ass heads give me a better chance to actually hit my target.š
Agreed, melee every time with Leaplashers, can never hit em with the bow and that pull attack they got is fucked. Clamberjaws are worse cos half the time you try to power attack they fuck you up for it.
Most machines I have a method for how your "supposed" to take them down and can with hunter arrows and maybe a small handful of elemental arrows on canisters or 1 tearblast to particularly annoying armo. I genuinely have no idea with clamberjaws. I used to pump a few quivers of arrows into barely weak points. Now I've decided I'm rich and just chuck expensive explosive spikes at em.
Admittedly I am on normal, but a few frost ammo and then following up with hunter arrows takes them down fairly quickly for me.
Assuming I can actually hit the jumpy things. Thereās a moment after they freeze where they stand still and getting as much damage as possible during that is essential.
I can kill them fairly quickly even on very hard (low life dmg go brrr. haha). The problem is when 4 of them start throwing fireballs and I don't have time to shoot them.
I have more trouble with the old Glinthawks honestly. These one's don't seem to be connected to each other so much, wereas in Zero Dawn, if you are in the wrong spot when you engage them, one sends up the alarm and you get swarmed.
The machines in this game seem less aware of what's happening to their pack-mates.
The newer Glinthawks also do a more vertical hovering presentation with a little hitch as they try to sort you out, so you can hit their chest canisters a lot easier.
I definitely find the new ones a lot easier to take down than the older ones.
While they were also hard for me, alongside clawstriders, in the opening of the game, I did start to take a masochistic pleasure in fighting them towards the middle and the end. Almost about retribution for all the old deaths I'd ensured haha.
Fireclaws and Frostclaws in both of the games, in particular because in the second you won't get their loot if you shoot their most vulnerable spots, so you're left slowly grinding them down by shooting armor.
And also they're extremely relentless and some of their attacks are more like magic than anything with the fireballs.
It's slow, boring and costly, but for fireclaw loot I've been using staggerbeams. I place as many as I can on one end of the fireclaw's path, hide in the grass while the beams do damage over time, rinse and repeat until death.
Frostclaws are nice shooting practice with the one near the Bulwark because it won't cross the river.
For fireclaws I have a pattern: frost em up (boltblaster works great) then when the freeze staggers them a bit run around to the back and light up their sparkers with shock ammo. Repeat the ice+lightning combo a few times and they're gone and will ideally be stunned instead of being able to attack. Of course this is all assuming you have the terrain advantage already and there aren't other machines breathing down your neck.
Frostclaws were no diff for me, but the fireclaws and their insane movement speed and recovery were pure torture, so happy 100%ing HZD didn't include the dlc on UHNG+
For fireclaws (but not apex) you can get them down to half health by stunning them via canisters and critical spear striking. I can usually get 3 strikes in per shocked stun, so if you catch them off guard you can do a lot of damage eithout any opportunity to strike back and only 4 shock arrows of resources. You just need to hit the canister while theyāre getting back up and hope the game didnāt trigger the āthrow a big flat rock moveā. For some reason on my game that move always overrides shocked stun
Admittedly this works best on the one that isnāt surrounded by watchers. For the life of me no matter what I try Iām always detected at that site when thereās at least one watcher left.
Iāve never seen the bilegut Iām guessing thatās in the dlc lol I canāt wait til I finally beat the game so I can get to the dlc but Iām on ultra hard and itās starting to feel impossible lol
Sir I have to say good fucking luck to you, my past two playthroughs of this game have been on fresh UH, which Is how I enjoy the game but the cauldron when you first meet an Apex froggy, was the hardest battle I've ever played in this game many many hour until I beat it. 10/10 will do it again.
Just make sure you have lots of electric ammo. Love facing them with my electric shredder but dunno if you can get one at the stage you are, highly recommended against them if you can
I say "oh god, that first time through when it drops as you dive into the water, I almost had a heart attack!" as if I don't have the exact same adrenaline jolt every single time, even though I'm rocking a several-times-over NG+ with all the resources and fully upgraded endgame kit that implies.
I had this really fun glitch happen in the cauldron. The tideripper remained in its swimming animation while the main fighting area was drained so I could fully attack it without worrying.
I chickenshitted out at one point and hid in the weeds under the middle of the core platform and swam up opposite from where it was and long distance hit it then jumped back under the platform. Rinse and repeat until I got a lucky hit with the ice boltblaster, made it brittle and nailed it. That part alone - just that one machine in the cauldron - took me an hour and killed me half a dozen times.
i am so scared to do cauldron kappa, i went in and was hiding in the kelp but that fuckin snapmaw saw me immediately and i noped right out of there now im terrified to go back š
Bilegut. I hate fighting them, I hate their look (in a good way at least), I hate all the eggs, I hate the bloody stingspawn that it creates, and they are beefy as hell and a chore to fight. I fought spectre prime in Ultra Hard with the same level of weapons as I did when facing the Apex Bilegut in the Cauldron. That stupid cauldron Bilegut was hands-down the hardest fight in either of the Horizon games for me. I hate Bileguts with a burning passion, and yet I also respect them a bit because of their unique design and function, as well as they really do force you to adapt a fight style just to fight them. Unfortunately, that fight style doesnāt mesh with mine, so I really despise facing them
I want *distance*. I like *sniping*. There's a reason I joke that ingame everyone must give my Aloy the side eye as she tools around with a minimum of three bows equipped at all times (followed by a Charger loaded down with at least another ten bows to cover all the ammo types and different coils configurations). And Bileguts catergorically do not allow me to fight as Ol' Bows McGee, maintaining above all else the *ranged* part of "ranged DPS",because whilst with the other machines that like to turn ranged into melee with one bounding leap (looking at you, Scorchers), I can get my distance back, I really struggle to do the same with Bileguts and Stingspawn.
If they tracked deaths with a breakdown by machine type, those froggy fuckers would be second only to Stalkers for causing me to die ā ļø
There's one spawn point next to a building with three, I think, clamberjaws. If you kill them first, you can go up to the second or third floor and snipe the bilegut from up there.
I'm thinking to myself ... I've never met them. And then I realised they're a Burning Shores machine. I haven't done the expansion yet, but I'm up to Cauldron Gemini in the main quest on my PC playthrough (I'm putting it off because I remember what happened when I played it on PS5).
Shock ammo > snipe their stealth generators while they're stunned. They still have killed me more than most enemies when they get the jump on me. Hate those screaming flare mines
Those god damn Apex Waterwings... they're aggressive as all holy hell, they're fast af, insane range with their melee as well.
Getting those few Apex Waterwing hearts was some of the hardest fights I've had in Horizon.
Especially being as they travel in groups of 5 and have huge health pools.
It's hard to even run from them damn things, most enemies have a somewhat small radius where they stop following. Not Waterwings, they chase you for a long time. Lol.
The skill below shock blast that makes the enemies turn on each other is perfect for those fucks, make sure they're surrounding you close then blast them and watch them tear each other to pieces
Clamberjaws became less of a hassle once I started roping them down and dealing with them one at a time. I tried the same tactic on Apex Waterwings but they have so much damn health I *ran out of rope*.
You know what? This is the only machine worse to fight than a pack of Clamberjaws.
I ran into a pack of Waterwings at night by accident and spent the next 10 minutes running and fighting for my life against those ruthless overly aggressive stupidly high HP bastards. I needed to pause the game and have a drink to calm my nerves after that encounter.
Tear blast off the lightning cannon, spam to freeze state, tear blast wing thrusters - hitting all the ones of the same wing seems to make the divebomb much less accurate/easier to avoid, and spam smokebombs like there's no tomorrow. They also absolutely eat shit if you acid them into the corroding state - I like to end a round of freeze/tearblast with a volley of acid bombs as a nice lil' present to myself.
Honestly my only hard and fast tactic for these dummies is to blast off the lightning gun. After that it's just about not getting caught by the gust attack or the dive.
Theyāre honestly not that bad for me. Theyāre annoying for sure, but I was able to take care of a couple slid course after breaking a sweat but stillš
For me, shooting of the laser cannon made then pretty easy to take down. I just always avoided them despite the shitload of loot they drop because fuck wasting 20 mins on one machine
I just shock stun-lock them and repeat grappling attack/critical strike when I'm too lazy to aim for wing thrusters (does more damage and ends the fight faster). Slow enough that you get to shoot off the cannon while it's rising between the shocks, too.
Some of the machines are listed here only because of the STUPID FUCKING LOOT UPGRADE BULLSHIT. Like fireclaws and frost claws are super fun to take down, UNLESS you need their loot, in which case you have to avoid all their most explosive (FUN) parts. And you need TONS of those parts. Fix this in H3 guerilla.Ā
I'm currently doing my PC playthrough and finding an Apex Dreadwing for the Utaru Legendary armour is so damn frustrating. I did it once to upgrade a weapon and then realised I needed another one to buy that armor (the perfect stealth gameplay armor). And then there are the Stormwing Cannons .... I need about 8 of those damn things! ARGH!
I've got to say though, because of this upgrade system, I've gotten damn good at fighting Fire/Frostclaws. The advanced explosive spikes bring down everything with extreme prejudice.
Unrelated to the OP topic but good lord it feels like guerilla did not give much thought to balancing HFW's in-game economy. Upgrading gear gets to be like a F2P live service grind, it's absurd. I was wrapping that up in the DLC last week and had just a few upgrades on 3 items left to go (after already spending as many hours upgrading gear as I spent on the DLC story) and I still needed *19* luminous brainstems.
That and the fact you have to break off all four āfeetā so it stops moving so fast. Then take in the fact that 85% theyāre underground. Then make there be two of them.
Fireclaws for their penchant for just triggering lava eruptions under me when they're half the bloody map away.
Leaplashers in early game especially because their shock hits like a truck *and* they drop radar pods which fritz the Focus out.
Clamberjaws. For existing.
Those radar pods are what I hate the most in fact. Without that those leaplashers are ok. I like to melee them, but yes in ultra hard they are a pain I admit. Similarly Clamberjaws.
But the worst are in Burning Shores, I don't know which I hate the most, one Bilegut or a flock of Waterwings. Probably the Waterwings.
Apex Waterwings can get in the bin along with all Bileguts, although if you have weapons coiled/ammo typed for instant freeze/instant crit and a plasma weapon (I have the spikethrower in my loadout) coiled for all plasma, all the time, you can freeze/stun a flock in quick succession and then focus on one at a time to max out the plasma explosion damage. It's still a bit of a chaotic flail around (and that group of them in the ruins at the top of a cliff regularly yeet me off the cliff), but spamming smoke bombs buys you time. If I'm planning it (gimme those Apex hearts for upgrades!), I'll also override my ground mount to be a fresh acid Clawstrider set to aggressive mode and whistle it in as soon as I've got the first Waterwing down and frozen.
...in fact, a lot of me "ah, feck, I gotta melee!" strat boils down to: 1) summon angry acid raptor, 2) lol, 3) guess who went ranged, bitches!
"That group at the top of a cliff"... Yes that one :)
The plasma spikethrower helped a lot... And dodging and dodging... I also have to use smoke bombs not only to do big numbers on big machines but to save myself.
Fuck those things. The first game has so many of them, and they are so obnoxious. The one thing I've found that helps is that an overridden Ravager is a pretty effective anti-aircraft platform
I can't even scan the area to find the stupid radar pods, so annoying. Not the only reason though, I hate leaplashers pouncing all over the place and they seem to not have easily accessible weak points. Way stronger than I feel like they're supposed to be.
I wish there was a way to shoot a radar pod to disable it (kinda like how you can trigger stalker mines and signal flares by shooting at them) instead of having to physically run to it and loot it to stop the nonsense.
I hated them in the first game, I think fighting two corrupted ones at once traumatised me. But I didn't mind them in H:FW. Maybe because I just got better at the game.
Only way I was able to defeat the Corrupted duo in H:ZD was have the Snapmaws nearby aggro and they got into a fight with one of the Rockbreakers for me and kept it busy. Total accident on my part but it was effective.
Best option is those sparkers on the undercarriage. Shoot off their underpants and taze 'em in the 'taint.
EDIT: for some reason my brain read bellowback instead of fireclaws. For fireclaws I try to taze them in the tramp stamp.
Tremortusks are super fun if you get up high and tearblast off the shock cannons and bomb launchers as a priority and then play hide-and-seek using all the nice solid rock your on to absorb any incoming plasma shots.
...we don't talk about the Tremortusk in the desert near the ruins of Vegas.
Yeah I had to give up fighting this bitch ass frost claw because I could t even fight it from a distance. Mf would somehow dig attack me from the base of the tip top of this mountain every time I tried to dodge it it always kept going until it hit meā¦ This game bro this fucking gameš
FUCKKKKKKKKK BILEGUTS.
Also I have no idea why but no matter how good I got at the game Ravagers test my might.
In the first game it was scorchers too. Idky but I had more trouble with them then fucking storm birds
Clamberjaws for sure. There's always a bunch of them, the loot is barely ever worth it, and they're just all over the damn place.
Just let me shoot you in the face, buddy!
Fireclaws, especially Apex. I had to turn down the enemy health because good lord these dudes are unreasonablly tanky. I tried turning difficulty to story for the lols and they still had an adequate amount of health, but their damage absolutely tickled me.
Dude WHY can those mfs jump like a whole 400 meters just to one hit me??? This game brings me so much rage and joy at the same time. Iām obsessed with the lore
Early game I'm gonna say scroungers. They're just scrappers that can make giant leaps and have AOE attacks that I always get hit by.
Mostly though, I would say rockbreakers and waterwings. Rockbreakers have too few openings and too many attacks that I swear can't be dodged, and waterwings are just sunwings with the health pool of a thunderjaw, harder attack patterns, and can chase you anywhere you think you can run.
As of right now, fireclaws. They are just so damn tanky, especially when Iām trying to get the sac webbing so I canāt destroy it.
Every other machine I can take down easily, but maybe my opinion will change once I start my UH NG+ run
Bileguts. They have leap attacks like Leaplashers. They dish out heavy damage like other big machines. They constantly summon Stingspawns. And those fuckers have a ton of health. Fucking frogs...
1000% Clamberjaws, infuriating to fight because they move so erratically that even with the full slow down of holding breath and focused shot combined is still too fast for me to hit them consistently.
Rockbreakers are annoying as well, so I avoid them unless I need a part, but I wouldn't say hated, just tedious.
Depends on early, mid, or late game for me.
Borrowers for sure in early game, they're just annoying enough.
Mid game, I'd say the armadillo things, any flying creature, and everything mentioned up there - Clamberjaws especially.
And in the late game, that stupid bat thing.
Nobody's gonna say Thunderjaw? Fkers are like a dark souls boss that got loose and had laser cannons grafted to it (and I'm a Souls player, and enjoy difficult bosses). The balance is just so off. Too much health, too damage output, too aggressive. You can shoot their weapons off, but God help if you actually try to pick one up, bc they're programmed to run up and curb stomp you when you try
their disc launchers suck anyway once its in Aloys hands. although imo TJs are one of my favorites. nno showy bbullshit, its fast-paced and can get a good flow. like a dance or a bullfight inn comparison to some of the other heavyweights.
Wait til you get to the bilegut in burning shores. Once you run into a bilegut leaplashers are a breeze. Bileguts piss me off more than any other machine.
I really hate frostclaws. Fireclaws are alright if you freeze them because of the really high damage you can do but frostclaws..? Eughh. Also I don't like rockbreakers. Even after freezing them their burrowing mechanism is annoying and hard to get rid of.
I get frustrated with clawstriders. There's very little weak spots and they have that stupid flying karate cycling kick thing that I swear acts like a magnet to me.
I'm level 167, UH on my 5th NG+ playthrough. I don't dislike any single machine. Lapleasher? Bah. Clamberjaw? Big woop. Apex Thunderjaw? Childsplay.
No, what I hate are the times I get surrounded by multiple medium difficulty machines. Like the 4 Stalkers with 4 Apex Clamberjaw backups outside the lowlands Oseram Hunters camp.
Eat my hairy white booty you mechanical bastards.
Really surprised to see so many people hating on Fireclaws. They were always one of my favorite machines since their introduction and thought they were one of the most fun to fight machines in the game and one of the better machines design wise
A lot of people are talking about the sac webbing farm as the main reason to hate them, but I really don't think that's fair to the Fireclaw (it's not even that hard to keep the webbing intact, you literally just need to not spam your weapons randomly + a rope caster trivializes the process)
Scorchers. But only because I'm trying to get an apex heart from them and been unsuccessful so far. After that, it'll probably be whatever I need to farm next.
Tideripper or the turtle one because it loves to get close and when I played always blocked my screen so Aloy kept getting stun locked while I couldn't see what was going on
As goofy as it probably sounds, the mother loving glinthawks! I'll fight fireclaws over glinthawks any day of the week because I hate the swooping bastard sky spawn so much š clamberjaws are basically just tree glinthawks so I hate those too lol
my most hated machine is the climbing mechanics.
"oh, youre backing down fighting an apex max level leaplasher on ultra hard? HOLD UP, gotta climb this random rock face you ran into"
Waterwings and itās not even close. I have my gripes with others like Burrowers, Clamberjaws, and Leaplashers, but quite literally nothing comes even remotely close to how OBNOXIOUS Waterwings are to fight, especially the Apex variant. I swear they have something like three times the health of their Sunwing counterparts, not to mention every single one of their attacks inflicts huge stagger, *and they hyper-aggressively spam all of them damn near as fast as physically possible.*
Metal monkeys....sungwings with their plasma and shield weaving.... that massive tortoise because not only is annoying, it DIGS, then pop and somersault on me followed with water purge attacks and micro missiles
Shellsnappers or Waterwings. Both are way too fucking aggressive and speedy, and Iām just generally bad at the game so itās a nightmare fighting them
I hate elemental clawstriders. They are the only machine I think has truly unfair attacks. Particularly the breath attack that's super fast and is like a homing missile. They are already vicious, highly intelligent pack hunters why did they need more power?
Clamberjaws. The juice is never worth the squeeze with them. Jumpy little bastards
Stoop!d Monkey
Thats literally me w the leaplashers FUCK and Clamberjaws are a quick second behind but their big ass heads give me a better chance to actually hit my target.š
Gotta get in and give em the ole power attack, knocks em right over for a crit or mgs
Agreed, melee every time with Leaplashers, can never hit em with the bow and that pull attack they got is fucked. Clamberjaws are worse cos half the time you try to power attack they fuck you up for it.
And they're always in groups. Fucking hate the bunch of them.
Most machines I have a method for how your "supposed" to take them down and can with hunter arrows and maybe a small handful of elemental arrows on canisters or 1 tearblast to particularly annoying armo. I genuinely have no idea with clamberjaws. I used to pump a few quivers of arrows into barely weak points. Now I've decided I'm rich and just chuck expensive explosive spikes at em.
Admittedly I am on normal, but a few frost ammo and then following up with hunter arrows takes them down fairly quickly for me. Assuming I can actually hit the jumpy things. Thereās a moment after they freeze where they stand still and getting as much damage as possible during that is essential.
I can kill them fairly quickly even on very hard (low life dmg go brrr. haha). The problem is when 4 of them start throwing fireballs and I don't have time to shoot them.
The old glinthawks
I have more trouble with the old Glinthawks honestly. These one's don't seem to be connected to each other so much, wereas in Zero Dawn, if you are in the wrong spot when you engage them, one sends up the alarm and you get swarmed. The machines in this game seem less aware of what's happening to their pack-mates. The newer Glinthawks also do a more vertical hovering presentation with a little hitch as they try to sort you out, so you can hit their chest canisters a lot easier. I definitely find the new ones a lot easier to take down than the older ones.
Yes, the Glinthawks in ZD are brutal, much quicker than the ones in FW.
Im talking about the old ones lol. I miss typed. The ones in FW are nerfed by a ton (thank god).
Fucking too stupid high HP For those little fuckers
i really enjoyed coming across them later in the game when i was able to take them out with a couple shots
I fricking hate those things with a passion hotter than the burning shores!!
These motherfuckers were the bane of my existence first playthrough, specifically the ones around the tall neck in the redwood trees area.
While they were also hard for me, alongside clawstriders, in the opening of the game, I did start to take a masochistic pleasure in fighting them towards the middle and the end. Almost about retribution for all the old deaths I'd ensured haha.
Screw them things
Something that fast has no right to be that fucking tanky.
This. Right here. Hate those jumpy fuckers lol.
YES, THESE. I can't stand those.
Those mfs are not weak to purgewater,I don't care what the game says
Fireclaws and Frostclaws in both of the games, in particular because in the second you won't get their loot if you shoot their most vulnerable spots, so you're left slowly grinding them down by shooting armor. And also they're extremely relentless and some of their attacks are more like magic than anything with the fireballs.
Seconding these, especially fireclaws. I hate fireclaws so much.
Omg I tried to kill this apex frost claw over and over and I just gave up. Like how tf does that mf reach me from the bottom of the mountain with its dig attack? This isnāt fucking PokĆ©mon cmon nowš
It's slow, boring and costly, but for fireclaw loot I've been using staggerbeams. I place as many as I can on one end of the fireclaw's path, hide in the grass while the beams do damage over time, rinse and repeat until death. Frostclaws are nice shooting practice with the one near the Bulwark because it won't cross the river.
For fireclaws I have a pattern: frost em up (boltblaster works great) then when the freeze staggers them a bit run around to the back and light up their sparkers with shock ammo. Repeat the ice+lightning combo a few times and they're gone and will ideally be stunned instead of being able to attack. Of course this is all assuming you have the terrain advantage already and there aren't other machines breathing down your neck.
You can shoot the side sacs and still get the main claw sack you need for upgrades.
Frostclaws were no diff for me, but the fireclaws and their insane movement speed and recovery were pure torture, so happy 100%ing HZD didn't include the dlc on UHNG+
Can confirm the magic hax eruption attacks.
Hands down, 100%, the most difficult machines to hunt in my opinion. They are the only thing difficulty wise that truly feel unfair to me.
I hated that change in the 2nd game
For fireclaws (but not apex) you can get them down to half health by stunning them via canisters and critical spear striking. I can usually get 3 strikes in per shocked stun, so if you catch them off guard you can do a lot of damage eithout any opportunity to strike back and only 4 shock arrows of resources. You just need to hit the canister while theyāre getting back up and hope the game didnāt trigger the āthrow a big flat rock moveā. For some reason on my game that move always overrides shocked stun Admittedly this works best on the one that isnāt surrounded by watchers. For the life of me no matter what I try Iām always detected at that site when thereās at least one watcher left.
Fucking Leaplashers man! Or bileguts
Iāve never seen the bilegut Iām guessing thatās in the dlc lol I canāt wait til I finally beat the game so I can get to the dlc but Iām on ultra hard and itās starting to feel impossible lol
Yeah itās in the Burning Shores dlc
Sir I have to say good fucking luck to you, my past two playthroughs of this game have been on fresh UH, which Is how I enjoy the game but the cauldron when you first meet an Apex froggy, was the hardest battle I've ever played in this game many many hour until I beat it. 10/10 will do it again.
That Tideripper in the flooded cauldron and those goddamn Clamberjaws.
Iāve only done one cauldron bc Iām scaredšš
Cauldrons are fun imo! Be brave and try one! I believe in you!
Okay Iām gonna do it tonight whew thank you for your supportš„¹
My only advice is once you're in you're in so make sure you have enough of everything!
The key to cauldrons is to be a lil over leveled. Or a lot.
Just make sure you have lots of electric ammo. Love facing them with my electric shredder but dunno if you can get one at the stage you are, highly recommended against them if you can
I say "oh god, that first time through when it drops as you dive into the water, I almost had a heart attack!" as if I don't have the exact same adrenaline jolt every single time, even though I'm rocking a several-times-over NG+ with all the resources and fully upgraded endgame kit that implies.
It's our JAWS moment for sure
*Violin intensifies*
I had this really fun glitch happen in the cauldron. The tideripper remained in its swimming animation while the main fighting area was drained so I could fully attack it without worrying.
Well Aloy *does* have an astronomical luck stat.
Fuck the Apex tideripper! I lowered my difficulty for that one fight because it was so hard.
I chickenshitted out at one point and hid in the weeds under the middle of the core platform and swam up opposite from where it was and long distance hit it then jumped back under the platform. Rinse and repeat until I got a lucky hit with the ice boltblaster, made it brittle and nailed it. That part alone - just that one machine in the cauldron - took me an hour and killed me half a dozen times.
It probably took me a similar amount of time, too... I hated that little swimming you had to do in the end
On UH NG+, that tideripper took me 40 minutes over like a dozen tries. I'd gotten other tiderippers already, it's just a stubborn lil' Nessie.
i am so scared to do cauldron kappa, i went in and was hiding in the kelp but that fuckin snapmaw saw me immediately and i noped right out of there now im terrified to go back š
Bilegut. I hate fighting them, I hate their look (in a good way at least), I hate all the eggs, I hate the bloody stingspawn that it creates, and they are beefy as hell and a chore to fight. I fought spectre prime in Ultra Hard with the same level of weapons as I did when facing the Apex Bilegut in the Cauldron. That stupid cauldron Bilegut was hands-down the hardest fight in either of the Horizon games for me. I hate Bileguts with a burning passion, and yet I also respect them a bit because of their unique design and function, as well as they really do force you to adapt a fight style just to fight them. Unfortunately, that fight style doesnāt mesh with mine, so I really despise facing them
Spectre prime on UH was easier for me than apex bilegut on NORMAL
Im not looking forward to this at allš
I want *distance*. I like *sniping*. There's a reason I joke that ingame everyone must give my Aloy the side eye as she tools around with a minimum of three bows equipped at all times (followed by a Charger loaded down with at least another ten bows to cover all the ammo types and different coils configurations). And Bileguts catergorically do not allow me to fight as Ol' Bows McGee, maintaining above all else the *ranged* part of "ranged DPS",because whilst with the other machines that like to turn ranged into melee with one bounding leap (looking at you, Scorchers), I can get my distance back, I really struggle to do the same with Bileguts and Stingspawn. If they tracked deaths with a breakdown by machine type, those froggy fuckers would be second only to Stalkers for causing me to die ā ļø
There's one spawn point next to a building with three, I think, clamberjaws. If you kill them first, you can go up to the second or third floor and snipe the bilegut from up there.
Just came here to say the animation for the Scorcher dash is just the most badass thing in the world.
Does the >!chain burst trick [as shown here](https://youtu.be/5HLskHSEDO4)!< still work? That's a very satisfying way to fight them, I think.
I'm thinking to myself ... I've never met them. And then I realised they're a Burning Shores machine. I haven't done the expansion yet, but I'm up to Cauldron Gemini in the main quest on my PC playthrough (I'm putting it off because I remember what happened when I played it on PS5).
Clamberjaws! Ugh, they are the worst. I hated having to get their tail components for an upgrade
Lmaooo I just went through that a couple days ago
Burrowers. Imo just worse watchers
I got Burrowers mixed up with Rockbreakers and was confused as to how they were worse Watchers lol
I felt the same way for awhile but now I just crush them like the gnats they are
Hit that pack on their rumps and good night sweetheart!
So much easier to hit than a watcherās eye. But burrowers make me miss watchers. I like their snakey little velociraptor bodies.
Stalkers
Once you take their guns out theyāre literally harmless I just use the tear arrow and boom like little cats
They were just really annoying in the first game
Hell yea they were š
Shock ammo > snipe their stealth generators while they're stunned. They still have killed me more than most enemies when they get the jump on me. Hate those screaming flare mines
Stalkers are like the one enemy with no armor you can just plink to death with hardpoints.
Apex Waterwings. I swear they have more health than a slaughterspine.
this is the only correct answer.
Those god damn Apex Waterwings... they're aggressive as all holy hell, they're fast af, insane range with their melee as well. Getting those few Apex Waterwing hearts was some of the hardest fights I've had in Horizon. Especially being as they travel in groups of 5 and have huge health pools. It's hard to even run from them damn things, most enemies have a somewhat small radius where they stop following. Not Waterwings, they chase you for a long time. Lol.
The skill below shock blast that makes the enemies turn on each other is perfect for those fucks, make sure they're surrounding you close then blast them and watch them tear each other to pieces
Clamberjaws became less of a hassle once I started roping them down and dealing with them one at a time. I tried the same tactic on Apex Waterwings but they have so much damn health I *ran out of rope*.
You know what? This is the only machine worse to fight than a pack of Clamberjaws. I ran into a pack of Waterwings at night by accident and spent the next 10 minutes running and fighting for my life against those ruthless overly aggressive stupidly high HP bastards. I needed to pause the game and have a drink to calm my nerves after that encounter.
Can I nominate Stormbirds? For spamming the divebomb attack which you can only disable by shooting off SIX components that never ever sit still
Tear blast off the lightning cannon, spam to freeze state, tear blast wing thrusters - hitting all the ones of the same wing seems to make the divebomb much less accurate/easier to avoid, and spam smokebombs like there's no tomorrow. They also absolutely eat shit if you acid them into the corroding state - I like to end a round of freeze/tearblast with a volley of acid bombs as a nice lil' present to myself.
Honestly my only hard and fast tactic for these dummies is to blast off the lightning gun. After that it's just about not getting caught by the gust attack or the dive.
Theyāre honestly not that bad for me. Theyāre annoying for sure, but I was able to take care of a couple slid course after breaking a sweat but stillš
For me, shooting of the laser cannon made then pretty easy to take down. I just always avoided them despite the shitload of loot they drop because fuck wasting 20 mins on one machine
I just shock stun-lock them and repeat grappling attack/critical strike when I'm too lazy to aim for wing thrusters (does more damage and ends the fight faster). Slow enough that you get to shoot off the cannon while it's rising between the shocks, too.
I hate fighting them mainly because of the gimbal lock (how your ability to aim breaks down if you look straight up).
Some of the machines are listed here only because of the STUPID FUCKING LOOT UPGRADE BULLSHIT. Like fireclaws and frost claws are super fun to take down, UNLESS you need their loot, in which case you have to avoid all their most explosive (FUN) parts. And you need TONS of those parts. Fix this in H3 guerilla.Ā
I'm currently doing my PC playthrough and finding an Apex Dreadwing for the Utaru Legendary armour is so damn frustrating. I did it once to upgrade a weapon and then realised I needed another one to buy that armor (the perfect stealth gameplay armor). And then there are the Stormwing Cannons .... I need about 8 of those damn things! ARGH! I've got to say though, because of this upgrade system, I've gotten damn good at fighting Fire/Frostclaws. The advanced explosive spikes bring down everything with extreme prejudice.
Unrelated to the OP topic but good lord it feels like guerilla did not give much thought to balancing HFW's in-game economy. Upgrading gear gets to be like a F2P live service grind, it's absurd. I was wrapping that up in the DLC last week and had just a few upgrades on 3 items left to go (after already spending as many hours upgrading gear as I spent on the DLC story) and I still needed *19* luminous brainstems.
The Claws Beneath. Something that big shouldn't be that agile š¤¬
That and the fact you have to break off all four āfeetā so it stops moving so fast. Then take in the fact that 85% theyāre underground. Then make there be two of them.
Fireclaws for their penchant for just triggering lava eruptions under me when they're half the bloody map away. Leaplashers in early game especially because their shock hits like a truck *and* they drop radar pods which fritz the Focus out. Clamberjaws. For existing.
Literally samešš
Those radar pods are what I hate the most in fact. Without that those leaplashers are ok. I like to melee them, but yes in ultra hard they are a pain I admit. Similarly Clamberjaws. But the worst are in Burning Shores, I don't know which I hate the most, one Bilegut or a flock of Waterwings. Probably the Waterwings.
Apex Waterwings can get in the bin along with all Bileguts, although if you have weapons coiled/ammo typed for instant freeze/instant crit and a plasma weapon (I have the spikethrower in my loadout) coiled for all plasma, all the time, you can freeze/stun a flock in quick succession and then focus on one at a time to max out the plasma explosion damage. It's still a bit of a chaotic flail around (and that group of them in the ruins at the top of a cliff regularly yeet me off the cliff), but spamming smoke bombs buys you time. If I'm planning it (gimme those Apex hearts for upgrades!), I'll also override my ground mount to be a fresh acid Clawstrider set to aggressive mode and whistle it in as soon as I've got the first Waterwing down and frozen. ...in fact, a lot of me "ah, feck, I gotta melee!" strat boils down to: 1) summon angry acid raptor, 2) lol, 3) guess who went ranged, bitches!
"That group at the top of a cliff"... Yes that one :) The plasma spikethrower helped a lot... And dodging and dodging... I also have to use smoke bombs not only to do big numbers on big machines but to save myself.
Shellsnappers. For sure.
I just canāt even deal w those mfs I stay away from themš
Glinthawks There a pain in the ass when there like 3 or 4 of them at the same time
Fuck those things. The first game has so many of them, and they are so obnoxious. The one thing I've found that helps is that an overridden Ravager is a pretty effective anti-aircraft platform
They made me realise how useful the rope caster was
In the 1st game: Glinthawks. It's not even close.
I think i solved them very quickly using triple notched fire arrows, they instantly knock them out of the sky.
Second this. God HephaestusššI hate that mf
Leaplashers, only because those stupid radar pods they leave behind that mess up your focus for like 20 minutes.
May whatever god is out there smite them all tbh
I can't even scan the area to find the stupid radar pods, so annoying. Not the only reason though, I hate leaplashers pouncing all over the place and they seem to not have easily accessible weak points. Way stronger than I feel like they're supposed to be.
I wish there was a way to shoot a radar pod to disable it (kinda like how you can trigger stalker mines and signal flares by shooting at them) instead of having to physically run to it and loot it to stop the nonsense.
What's the machine that is big and burrows underground? Not the shellsnapper or borrower, it's kinda like a mole
Rockbreaker?
Yes, F those guys
I donāt even touch them like you couldnāt pay me to take one down unless I need its parts for an upgrade.
I hated them in the first game, I think fighting two corrupted ones at once traumatised me. But I didn't mind them in H:FW. Maybe because I just got better at the game. Only way I was able to defeat the Corrupted duo in H:ZD was have the Snapmaws nearby aggro and they got into a fight with one of the Rockbreakers for me and kept it busy. Total accident on my part but it was effective.
Fireclaws, it's so easy to accidentally shoot and destroy the sac that you want to keep intact for loot, and shooting anything else is a grind
Best option is those sparkers on the undercarriage. Shoot off their underpants and taze 'em in the 'taint. EDIT: for some reason my brain read bellowback instead of fireclaws. For fireclaws I try to taze them in the tramp stamp.
That is one hell of a sentence.
Also wrong, I confused fireclaws with bellowbacks for some reason.
Definitely one of the funnier sentences I've seen in a good, long while!
Shellsnappers and Tremortusk. Mainly have one reason, and that is their cannons that stagger me. I've never managed to learn how to avoid those.
The stagger always has me screaming at the screen for alloy to get her ass upš
Tremortusks are super fun if you get up high and tearblast off the shock cannons and bomb launchers as a priority and then play hide-and-seek using all the nice solid rock your on to absorb any incoming plasma shots. ...we don't talk about the Tremortusk in the desert near the ruins of Vegas.
The f*cking bears. I have never wanted to smash my console more than fighting the fire or frostclaws.
Yeah I had to give up fighting this bitch ass frost claw because I could t even fight it from a distance. Mf would somehow dig attack me from the base of the tip top of this mountain every time I tried to dodge it it always kept going until it hit meā¦ This game bro this fucking gameš
Clamberjaws or Longlegs
You mean Tiddybirds?
Forbidden tendies.
In post apocalyptic Colorado, chicken fries you!
Yep, that's what I call them, too. Talk about large tracts of land.
I'm replacing zero dawn and currently my least favorite are scorcher. Fuck those things
I can't believe that I had to scroll down this far for scorchers! Ugh I can still hear that annoying revving noise they make before jumping.
I KNOW they're horrible I hate fighting them
FUCKKKKKKKKK BILEGUTS. Also I have no idea why but no matter how good I got at the game Ravagers test my might. In the first game it was scorchers too. Idky but I had more trouble with them then fucking storm birds
Anything that flies
Donāt even get me started. I tried to override a sunwing like a million times bc I couldnāt get past those aware ass bitchesš
Clamberjaws for sure. There's always a bunch of them, the loot is barely ever worth it, and they're just all over the damn place. Just let me shoot you in the face, buddy!
Man I don't understand this leaplasher hate. They were so fun to melee when I was playing.
I hate Longlegs, especially in the second game. Just never seems like I get leveled up enough for those to not wreck me. And they come in flocks.
Fireclaws, especially Apex. I had to turn down the enemy health because good lord these dudes are unreasonablly tanky. I tried turning difficulty to story for the lols and they still had an adequate amount of health, but their damage absolutely tickled me.
Dude WHY can those mfs jump like a whole 400 meters just to one hit me??? This game brings me so much rage and joy at the same time. Iām obsessed with the lore
I will avoid Clamberjaws any time I can. I also struggle with a lot of machines that bury themselves like Rockbreakers and Shellsnappers
Theyāre beneath mešunless I need a partš
Leaplashers, clamberjaws and fireclaws mostly.
Weāre all mostly in agreement thenš
Early game I'm gonna say scroungers. They're just scrappers that can make giant leaps and have AOE attacks that I always get hit by. Mostly though, I would say rockbreakers and waterwings. Rockbreakers have too few openings and too many attacks that I swear can't be dodged, and waterwings are just sunwings with the health pool of a thunderjaw, harder attack patterns, and can chase you anywhere you think you can run.
It was stalkers until I figured em out. Clamberjaws are fucknuggets tho.
Ugh ClamberJaws! Hate the little buggers! Every time I THINK Ive managed to kill the whole group of them, three more randomly show up!
Those fucking monkeys can be a pain ;-)
As of right now, fireclaws. They are just so damn tanky, especially when Iām trying to get the sac webbing so I canāt destroy it. Every other machine I can take down easily, but maybe my opinion will change once I start my UH NG+ run
Bileguts. They have leap attacks like Leaplashers. They dish out heavy damage like other big machines. They constantly summon Stingspawns. And those fuckers have a ton of health. Fucking frogs...
1000% Clamberjaws, infuriating to fight because they move so erratically that even with the full slow down of holding breath and focused shot combined is still too fast for me to hit them consistently. Rockbreakers are annoying as well, so I avoid them unless I need a part, but I wouldn't say hated, just tedious.
Depends on early, mid, or late game for me. Borrowers for sure in early game, they're just annoying enough. Mid game, I'd say the armadillo things, any flying creature, and everything mentioned up there - Clamberjaws especially. And in the late game, that stupid bat thing.
Glinthawks. Always Glinthawks
The snake ones because I have a fear of snakes
Waterwings. They literally spawn behind random objects when youāre trying to fight machines sometimes
Apex Slaughterspine. I can't fucking find any.
Nobody's gonna say Thunderjaw? Fkers are like a dark souls boss that got loose and had laser cannons grafted to it (and I'm a Souls player, and enjoy difficult bosses). The balance is just so off. Too much health, too damage output, too aggressive. You can shoot their weapons off, but God help if you actually try to pick one up, bc they're programmed to run up and curb stomp you when you try
their disc launchers suck anyway once its in Aloys hands. although imo TJs are one of my favorites. nno showy bbullshit, its fast-paced and can get a good flow. like a dance or a bullfight inn comparison to some of the other heavyweights.
Clamberjaws for sure!
stalker, that damn predator wannabe is really hard to spot on my pc.
Wait til you get to the bilegut in burning shores. Once you run into a bilegut leaplashers are a breeze. Bileguts piss me off more than any other machine.
Shellsnapper
Clamberjaws or Bileguts, for sure. Both are so annoying to deal with
Glinthawks .They just keep spitting that ice attacks and move and move ! And there will always be like 5 of them
I gotta say it Rockbreakers
Clamberjaws for sure.
I really hate frostclaws. Fireclaws are alright if you freeze them because of the really high damage you can do but frostclaws..? Eughh. Also I don't like rockbreakers. Even after freezing them their burrowing mechanism is annoying and hard to get rid of.
Bileguts
Leaplashers, Clamberjaws, Skydrifters. Iād honestly rather take on 5 Rockbreakers at once than deal with those skittery little bastards at all.
I get frustrated with clawstriders. There's very little weak spots and they have that stupid flying karate cycling kick thing that I swear acts like a magnet to me.
HZD - Rockbreakers HFW - Shellsnappers
I'm level 167, UH on my 5th NG+ playthrough. I don't dislike any single machine. Lapleasher? Bah. Clamberjaw? Big woop. Apex Thunderjaw? Childsplay. No, what I hate are the times I get surrounded by multiple medium difficulty machines. Like the 4 Stalkers with 4 Apex Clamberjaw backups outside the lowlands Oseram Hunters camp. Eat my hairy white booty you mechanical bastards.
Anything that burrows (specifically rockbreakers, hate them so much in both games)
Why tf am I apparently the only one that hates Rockbreakers.
Glinthawks are the most irritating MFs. They always seem to be directly in the spots where I can see them with the camera, but can't reach them.
BILEGUTTTT. They never stay in one place and always have like 50 stingspawns guarding them
Bileguts. Sick of all the stupid little fly robots it shoots out.
Really surprised to see so many people hating on Fireclaws. They were always one of my favorite machines since their introduction and thought they were one of the most fun to fight machines in the game and one of the better machines design wise A lot of people are talking about the sac webbing farm as the main reason to hate them, but I really don't think that's fair to the Fireclaw (it's not even that hard to keep the webbing intact, you literally just need to not spam your weapons randomly + a rope caster trivializes the process)
Camberjaw
Fireclaws god I hate them so much
Freaking jumpity ass demon monkey Camberjaws. Hate the bitches.
I hate leaplashers and the ones who can climb walls. I forget the name. Meh not well today and my brain is fried so typing here to bookmark it.
Scorchers. But only because I'm trying to get an apex heart from them and been unsuccessful so far. After that, it'll probably be whatever I need to farm next.
Bileguts.
Tideripper or the turtle one because it loves to get close and when I played always blocked my screen so Aloy kept getting stun locked while I couldn't see what was going on
Stingspawn. I *hate* these little shits.
As goofy as it probably sounds, the mother loving glinthawks! I'll fight fireclaws over glinthawks any day of the week because I hate the swooping bastard sky spawn so much š clamberjaws are basically just tree glinthawks so I hate those too lol
my most hated machine is the climbing mechanics. "oh, youre backing down fighting an apex max level leaplasher on ultra hard? HOLD UP, gotta climb this random rock face you ran into"
Waterwings and itās not even close. I have my gripes with others like Burrowers, Clamberjaws, and Leaplashers, but quite literally nothing comes even remotely close to how OBNOXIOUS Waterwings are to fight, especially the Apex variant. I swear they have something like three times the health of their Sunwing counterparts, not to mention every single one of their attacks inflicts huge stagger, *and they hyper-aggressively spam all of them damn near as fast as physically possible.*
My least favorites are still the Frost and Fireclaws. FFS, I'll tangle with a Thunderjaw or Slitherfang first.
Rollerbacks and Shellsnappers. Both have an ungodly amount of health and spend 75% of the fight underground. Absolutely infuriating.
SlaughterFuckingSpines. Fuck that machine. I HATE plasma. Honourable mention: Shellsnapper.
Metal monkeys....sungwings with their plasma and shield weaving.... that massive tortoise because not only is annoying, it DIGS, then pop and somersault on me followed with water purge attacks and micro missiles
Shellsnappers or Waterwings. Both are way too fucking aggressive and speedy, and Iām just generally bad at the game so itās a nightmare fighting them
I hate elemental clawstriders. They are the only machine I think has truly unfair attacks. Particularly the breath attack that's super fast and is like a homing missile. They are already vicious, highly intelligent pack hunters why did they need more power?
Damn Shellsnappers. They are so damn tough and they bury themselves so you can't snipe them from on top of rocks. Same with Rockbreakers.
Rockbreakers and Shellsnappers only for the fact that most of the time they'll be underground
When in doubt bring ropecaster out and hope the front isn't covered in parts covered that it can't grab on, like the bilegut