How to beat the Nightmare Prime Wars — Once Human

Oh boy, we have a brand new Phase in Once Human, and it brings with it some of the most challenging Prime Wars we’ve seen so far. There was plenty of speculation on our server this morning, with many saying that we’ll be facing three different bosses.

It turns out that it’s a lot more than that… so here’s how to beat the new Nightmare Prime War game mode in Once Human.

Update: The Shadowfall and Lost Oasis Prime Wars have some issues, however, Mewfassah Gaming reached out to Upcomer and shared his experience, proving that these can be done, but they’re not easy at all. The difficulty doesn’t lie in the game itself, but in a rather silly mechanic that definitely feels like a bug.

The solution to this is at the end of this article.

How the Nightmare Prime War works

Firstly, it’s important to note that there is no preparation period presently. The bosses start showing up as soon as you activate the event, so prepare beforehand. We did the Dry Valley prime war, and bosses were showing up from both the north-west and the south-west.

Yes, bosses. Every time you kill a boss, they will respawn in a while, rotating between the Shadow Hound, Servitor, and the Ravenous Hunter.

Next you’ll have to deal with constantly spawning mobs that make a beeline for the resonant filter. We had several flying mobs spawning on the filter the whole time.

Finally, there’s the Manibus, who also spawns in from the moment you start.

How to defeat the Prime War Manibus

The Manibus at the prime war is quite a bit tougher than his open-world counterparts. He has armor, but normal biomissles don’t do anything to him. Instead, you’ll have to bring along plenty of Red Plasma missiles.

This is the only way to crack the armor of the Manibus arms, and there are three of them. You’ll have to take them down one by one, and this is no small task. To give you an idea, our server managed to defeat the Manibus with just seven seconds left on the clock (and you get 30 minutes).

Once his armor is broken, you’ll need to hit the lilac or purple growths on his arm to do weakspot damage, since hitting the arm itself doesn’t do much damage.

And that’s how you beat him. Good luck!

Organisational Tips for beating Nightmare Prime War

All that I’ve mentioned above is the easy part. The hard part is actually getting your server to turn up and help out. Without at least a little preparation, this prime war is lost. I know, I’ve seen folks get wrecked in about 2 minutes from being unprepared.

You’ll need to figure out which direction the spawn puddle is. At Dry Valley, it’s south west, so we expected attacks from the opposite direction as well.

So you’ll want to set up turrets facing both directions. These turrets should also be able to attack the Manibus, but you may want a few turrets on higher emplacements for it, since it’s arms can be out of range of lower turrets.

Next, you’ll need to bring enough building materials so that you can keep rebuilding the protection around the filter. It’s going to get destroyed, most likely.

Finally, be sure to have enough Red Plasma rockets on hand, as well as enough biomissiles. I alone used 110 biomissiles in this one fight, and altogether we must’ve used over 1000.

If I had to guess how many plasma rockets we used, I’d say it was about 50-100 at least. It may have been way more.

So come prepared, and don’t waste the plasma rockets on normal bosses, we have missiles for that.

The smaller bosses also drop Plasma Missiles when defeated, so be sure to have someone run up and collect those as you’re fighting. Every little bit helps.

How to beat the Shadowfall and Lost Oasis Nightmare Prime Wars

The issue with the Shadowfall and Lost Oasis Prime Wars is that the Manibus spawns directly above the Restrainer. This means that any players or wildlife around the restrainer will cause the Manibus to use his AOE attack, which will melt the Restrainer in about two to four minutes.

When players teleport into these Prime Wars, they get a loading screen, and are stuck right next to the Restrainer while they load in. This gives the Manibus time to attack the person and the Restrainer, causing the insta-loss scenario.

This gives trolls the perfect scenario to ruin everyone’s day, since no matter how many times you ask in World chat, someone always seems to teleport in and ruin the fight. However, this becomes impossible if you fill up the available slots before the event starts.

This makes players unable to teleport in, so this is your solution. It’s silly, it’s a poorly thought-out mechanic, adding a layer of difficulty completely outside the control of the organizers of Prime Wars. Starry Studios has not recognized this as an issue, however, and as players we’re just forced to live with it.

What worked for us is taking time to organize these events, calling players to the area for over an hour in one case, until we had more than 40 players present.

It’s also important to note that once the Prime War starts, no player can go near the restrainer until one arm of the Manibus has been defeated. Once one of the arms are defeated, he can no longer use his AOE attack.

And that’s about it. It takes a lot of planning and organization and even saps some of the fun out of these otherwise enjoyable events.

Good luck, and have fun

Most important of all, remember to have fun and not blame anybody for a loss. This is an extremely challenging scenario, and whether you snatch that win in the last seven seconds or just miss it can come down to pure luck sometimes.

You’ll need a lot of people all working together to beat this one, so be patient and don’t rush your preparations.