So I really just wanted to put out a bit of info on Raid mode for Revelations 2. I'm fairly new to speed running in general but I do enjoy watching allot. I really delved into Raid mode, and have been toiling over how to explain it as a whole to someone that would not know much about it or what may have changed since Revelations 1.
To start of lets talk about what is "Raid Mode". ¤ "Raid Mode" is NOT what some think of as "Mercenaries Mode" , Mercenaries is a Score attack game mode and does not share any similarity which what "Raid Mode" actually is. With that understood Raids in Revelations 2 are set up as a Gauntlet style level rush campaign that has ONE very clear goal. That "Goal" is to get the end of the mission as fast as possible before time expires. Gauntlets are comprised of 6 stages each. The missions most commonly start with 10 minutes on the clock and should normally average around 5 minutes with standard challenge. Missions can have set restrictions such as: "No Respawns" or "Kill all Enemies" etc. These are the primary governing focus of what that mission will entail during your trek to the Goal. During the mission you will sometimes be required to eliminate all threats for that area to advance and be given a key to unlock the next section. So in all that said, Raid mode is more or less a race to the finish line at the end of that level while fighting off threats.
¤ The Goals [ Medals and what they are ] "Medals" are earned by completing a set goal or challenge while trekking through the mission to get to the end to beat it. Each mission in each Gauntlet has 5 possible "Medals", to earn the medals that you may have acquired you must complete the mission and reach the "Goal". So... what are the 5 "Medals" that you can get in a Raid mission? I will outline them below;
So there is the only 5 medals you can get in a single stage. 100% clears also give a hefty bonus with each of the earned medals with "Raid Gold" and character "XP". Also to note, that collection Completion Medals can also unlock additional Raid mode characters as well and more.
¤ Albums [ Weapons and Parts ] So throughout a stage you will find gold chests that will contain either a weapon or a part for upgrading them, these items are random and varies in types and stats etc. When you get an Album you will have to evaluate the disc at the "JukeBox" machine and pay the small Gold fee to unlock what the item is, or choose to sell it on the spot before your know exactly what it is for a large sum of gold. Once you "Evaluate" the time you will then have it unlocked for use. Take note that there is a limited starting capacity for holding each type of items be it weapon, part or album discs. The only way to hold more is purchasing a storage capacity upgrade with real money. =( Each Album can have a rarity color to indicates what value the item might be. There is at least 6 known colors and the chances for drops are at the moment seeming very random. The colors known so far are: Gold , Green, Black, Red, Blue, Purple. ~ A very rare disc color that can be found is Rainbow which may possibly be the hardest to get, It's report to drop only on "Code Red" difficulty missions.
¤ There are Daily missions but I don't think we need to even go over those as they are just special scenarios that will change each day. One will be playable by any character, and the other a specific character and those would have greater rewards then standard mission raids.
¤ Threat TYPES [ Know thy Enemy ] During Raids when playing you can encounter threats that will have modifiers on them that can make them more challenging to deal with, and this happens pretty randomly and more common on higher difficulties with the rise in challenge. The modifiers that are given to the threats is purely random for the most part as far as I am able to make out thus far. The some types of threat "Modifiers" you can encounter are as follows;
( Killing this threat will remove the modifiers given to the nearby threats )
(You can spot these threats with the laser aimed on it or damaging it )
With that bit of lengthy info on the Modifiers you can run into when fighting off the threats during your trek for the goal. Lets talk briefly about weapon "Parts" .
¤ Parts [ Upgrade components for Weapons ] There is a large amount of different "parts" that you can obtain to upgrade your weapons and each part can range in levels starting at level 1. A few things you should note when using parts and it is outlined in the game, YOU CANNOT SAVE A GUN AND SAVE THE PARTS! You can only choose one or the other if you choose to change your mind and want to put new parts in or use those parts on a different weapon. so basically you will want to MAKE SURE YOU WANNA USE THEM FIRST!
So beyond all that the only real things to talk about know relate to the Characters you can play as and earn XP for and level up as you complete Raids. All the characters have a UNIQUE skill or ability that they start with, if they do not they most likely start with being able to use more weapons or even more bottles. Some characters even have both sides covered but they require higher levels to unlock additional skills or equipment slots. Experimenting with the skills and equipment loadouts for each character will be something each person will need to play with to find the best ways they wish to play those characters. Keep in mind some characters do have easier times with certain starting loadouts.
I cannot think of much else to add as part of the introduction, but down the road I may do a video for this instead to relive people of reading walls of text like this.
I will Cover my thoughts on how I picture Raid Mode being set up for speed running in the next separate post below.
~ I will be updating this with as much information I am able to write and also learn from the game as I play it myself and from other information that comes to my attention, I do hope this will be useful maybe as a FAQ for this particular game mode but the goal was to have something to at least share with people that maybe wanna delve a bit deeper into raid mode then they might not already know things about or to even give new players and idea of what this game mode really is about and how to go through it .
If you have anything to add or feedback let me know, I don't expect myself to know everything or I might have missed some stuff as well.
So I've gotten my first character almost to level 40's. And I noticed that better Weapon variations started showing up in chests as well as rare Album discs. This starts to occur around lvl 30-35 and onward. I also managed to so far obtain 50 completion medals. I am shooting to hit 100+ next. (Completion medals are the 100% stage clears)
As far as what I'm thinking of how the runs should be set up; They should be done by Gauntlet Level I,II,III,IV,V .... etc which will have each Gauntlet set containing 6 stages. Runs should most likely be timed from start(as soon as you gain control) of the first stage of a gauntlet and stop once the 6th stage is cleared.(as soon as you lose control and hit the goal) Alternatively you could time the start as soon as you gain control and then pause the time as soon as you hit the goal in each stage to count only the time lapsing as you are in-control. Thoughts on that, still not 100% sure but Method 1 seems to look like it would work best. As for the Difficulty variations to each Gauntlet set, those should also be separated from normal version of the gauntlets etc.
You can revive and still get the No Herb Medal, to clarify things up.
you can also get rainbow colour guns from chests (rarer than purple) and these weapons come with a weapon tag such as "speed shot" as far as i know these are only available on "code red" i had 2 of these while i was completing code red And as celestics said above yes you can revive and still get the completion medal but obviously using revive wouldn' t be allowed for speed runs.
Anyway all in all great info and ideas :)
~Ste
@Celestics The revive thing I never got around to testing because I never wanted to use one. I just quit and start from scratch again anyways, I think the runs should be done deathless anyways because people would abuse the instant ammo refill etc on the stages in that case. Sine most people have limit revives unless you buy them so I would still insist on deathless, But thanks for clarifying that.
@StevenMayte Rainbow guns.... I know they can be found as an assortment of colors which can have parts already in on the weapons at higher levels. I also did not cover all the colors only the ones That I have found so far. If you found some other colors if you can screen shot it or even find a reference of that, would be super awesome to see.
And thank you guys for the the additional info. =) Much appreciated, I will be doing allot of raid mode because I enjoy it, and now at the higher levels it really gets crazy with the threats and modifiers they can have and the number of them they can get.
the colours on the disc when you receive it are rainbow and they are only available on code red and always come with a weapon tag i've only had one so the chances of me getting another are very low :(
found a video so you can see what it looks like and it seems they are always lv100 weapons
that is interesting, those could be the the best rarity of album discs you can get then since they appear to have all 3 stars on them. Thanks tho for finding that video. I can't wait to have one drop for me now.
There is a new Threat modifier I have found, not sure what to call it tho. But the threat with this modifier appears to pulsate almost a solid blue and can pull you towards itself. The icon for this modifier is a bit strange almost looks like a net to me, it should be in a recent video of mine and I'll pull it as soon as I can so we can see.
since writing that post i obtained a lv93 rainbow weapon. so they are infact not always lv100 but are extremely good regardless.
yeah i've come across those enemies they are really annoying, also some enemies have a gun icon above their head which makes your weapon drop to the floor i actually couldn't find where mine was as i didn't realise straight away lol. But your weapon is not lost after completing a stage if you fail to pick it up so that's good :)
That is interesting so there are some very rare Modifiers that some threats can have that we are still finding then, so there is allot of variation in runs that can happen for sure.
Okay so Rainbow Album disc are not always a lvl 100 but always generally very good compared to any of the equivalent lvl weapons at other rarities then.
Yeah I will add those modifiers to the list, but I don't know what to call them... Maybe "Vortex" for the the modifier that pulls you toward the threat, and "Thief" for the one that makes you drop your guns...?
I can't wait to see what else will show up in Raid Mode for sure. =)
I accidentally opened a new topic that should have probably just been a comment in here.. anyways did y'all ever settle on how we should time the Gauntlet runs (stages 1-6)? If not I generally like the idea of using the actual "in-control" timer
We use IGT if you check the rules its states that we use the SUM of IGT for all the stages for your finial time for Gauntlet which is shown after each stage clear anyways.
I guess Im curious how this is a 17:59 (https://www.speedrun.com/run/pm330g4m)
in game timers add up to 18 minutes and 18 seconds so am I missing something here?
You are correct this should be 18:18 , may have been added wrong when things were moved around on the board a long while back. I'll request a fix for that, appreciate you pointing that out actually.
My other run was off by 10 seconds as well so I submitted a request to be fixed.
