A list of general tactics to use for the legendary difficulty, as well as level specific tips that will help minimize or skip the most difficult parts of the game.
General Tactics
- On missions where you have Noble team allies, always let them push up in front of you and grab most of the attention. They can’t die, so don’t feel too bad.
- Abuse the noob combo. Always carry a Plasma Pistol unless I specify otherwise. There’s no reason not to, and you’ll just be making things harder for yourself by not doing it. And always carry a weapon capable of an instant headshot kill in your other slot. That means a DMR, Needle rifle, Magnum, or hell, a Sniper Rifle. Whenever you encounter an Elite, dip behind the nearest cover, charge your Plasma Pistol, pop out and shoot them, then quickly switch to your headshot weapon and tap them once on the head. If you don’t use this combo, you’ll be wasting ammo and time on Elites, both of which are valuable on legendary.
- Use headshot weapons for all the normal infantry. Tap grunts on the head once or twice and they die. Always aim for the exposed hand on the left of a Jackal shield, then tap them on the head while they’re reeling. Optimally, this means that you’ll be using 1-2 rounds on Grunts and 2 rounds on Jackals.
- Find a piece of cover and stay back. More times than not, there’s no reason to push in. You can almost always take out most of the enemies from a safe distance with your precision weapons.
- Brutes are hilariously weak, and you should consider replacing the Plasma Pistol with the Needler and the DMR with the Needle Rifle on areas where they’re the dominant enemy. That means all of Exodus, the hospital in New Alexandria, and the final wave defense segment in Pillar of Autumn. Since they’re mostly unshielded, you can kill one with 6 Needler rounds or three body shots with the Needle Rifle. Note that the DMR tends to take 1-2 headshots to pop their helmet off, and 1 more headshot to kill. The Needle Rifle is just as efficient except you need to aim a whole lot less.
- Grab the drop shield when you can, and use sprint otherwise. Other than some very niche situations, there’s very little reason to use the other abilties.
Mission 2: Oni Sword Base
- Sprint up the left ramp as soon as you have control to murder two jackals and grab their Plasma Pistol. The firefight shouldn’t be too tough after that.
- Once you have the target locator and leave the base, you’ll come across two Wraiths. Target one of them and let the artillery kill them, then kill the infantry and the gunner on the remaining Wraith. Your goal is to hijack it. You can use an overcharged Plasma Pistol shot to disable it if you want to be safer on your approach, but it isn’t too necessary. Watch out for the ram it’ll try to do when you’re too close for its gun to hit you. Once you’ve started hijacking it, only punch until the cover over the driver comes off. Then, dismount from your hijack animation, jump on the Wraith, and melee the exposed driver to death. If you hijack meleed until the driver dies, then the Wraith will be a smoking wreck on the verge of blowing up when you take control of it.
- The Wraith should make the entire outdoors section easy. Once the game hands you a Gauss Hog after the second objective, use that instead. Kat is a great shot and you might as well savor its power.
- You’ll encounter two hunters later on in the level. These are one of two Hunter encounters you’ll have to fight in the entire game if you follow this guide. There are two ways to handle them. One is to take the Gauss Hog with you into the base by either driving at the barrier quickly, or nading it over. The Gauss Hog will be able to snipe the hunters from outside. You can also just grab the shotgun and utilize the traditional “bullfighter” method, where you bait their melee animations to shoot them in the back.
- After you reach Jorge and are told to go help Emile, you can skip basically the entire map. Run to the right up the stairs and kill any enemies inside. Then, as you’re crossing over to the third floor, you’ll notice a ledge on the outside of the entire floor. Instead of entering the room, hop onto that ledge and you can just run over to the ramp that goes to the fourth floor. Do this until you reach the top. You may take some random hits, but you shouldn’t die.
- Your main worry at the top are the cloaked Elites. Don’t worry about helping Emile until these two are dead.