If you've been playing for any length of time whatsoever, you've definitely heard claims relating to both how overwhelmingly difficult and overwhelmingly grind-y the Onslaught Villain system is. I'm here to tell you that the former is objectively wrong and the latter is only correct by virtue of being a time-sink that, while boring, you can effectively autopilot through as long as you possess some degree of sentience and one hand with which to play while your other grasps at a half-empty Big Gulp. And what better way to tell you than by showing you exactly how it's done? By the time you're done reading this guide, you'll have everything you need to get through the Onslaught Villain grind as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.





Skip directly to "The Onslaught basics: NPCs" if you're already sold on Onslaught and just want the low-down on what to do. Skip only to "The Onslaught Time Crunch: Dailies and rough time benchmarks" if you're sold but want to get an idea of how much time things should actually take you. Otherwise, continue on from here.





Now! First, I'll address a few concerns and complaints that frequently come up in regards to the OV system, because some of them deserve to be addressed for their validity and some of them for their stupidity. If you don't need any more convincing then just go ahead and skip all of this.



Isn't the Onslaught System a PvP thing though? I don't like PvP at all, so why should I even bother?
Technically, it is. In practice, though, almost nobody actually uses it for PvP outside of people dabbling in a tiny smidgeon of trolling, due to how woefully unbalanced Champions Online as a whole is. It is, in effect, just a "show up to kill X mobs every day" daily with an entire slipshod system built around it, that rewards you with one of the best secondary gearsets in the game (if not the best in most cases.) That, though, I'll speak more on shortly. In short, though? Don't think about it like a PvP system. As long as you're not falling asleep at the keyboard in a literal sense, it's not like a random player slapping you is going to do anything as an Onslaught Villain, and 99% of the time someone calling out "Passive OV" isn't lying, and actually is passive.

Onslaught is boring! I don't like standing there smacking a punching bag for five minutes, or waiting for Onslaught Targets to respawn and doing the same single repetitive action over and over again!
Absolutely valid. Sadly, there's no real way to spice up being an Onslaught Villain except playing in windowed mode or having a second monitor to watch something on, read something on, play something else on and the likes.

It's too difficult to complete Onslaught dailies, I always die before I can complete the daily in just one day!
I'm not going to say "you're just garbage, kiddo" but if you're doing it right then, really, you shouldn't be dying, or even falling below mostly full health. If it's a lag problem then there's nothing I can do. If it's a skill issue then all I can say is "keep practicing." If you're playing as Gravitar, then don't. Otherwise, I can't guess off the top of my head, but this guide should still hopefully help you.

It takes way too long to farm anything, it takes months just to finish a single Onslaught set!
Subjectively, I'd agree that the Onslaught grind is boring and takes too long. Objectively, however, it does not take months to farm a single set if you're doing it right, despite all the claims I've heard otherwise. I'll explain the basic math of OVT and OGT farming in a section dedicated to them.

Onslaught dailies take too long to finish, I spend half an hour just waiting for a POV to hit / I spend ages cycling across zones just waiting for a route to clear up!
Sadly, that's a limitation of the system. Playing early at morning or late at night when less people are on is better for this, and if worst comes to worst, it helps to use a secondary route. (Everybody uses the UNTIL/Harmon loop, but if those are all taken up, some have their own secondary loops they prefer, with my own being the two locations adjacent to Dynamic Technologies Research Group, the giant microscope on the map directly north of the Super Jet along the RenCen's left edge.)

I can't do Onslaught with all the trolls and griefers infesting it, it's just not worth it!
This is normally quite rare, if not almost nonexistent, but sadly a common occurrence during Onslaught Bonus Weeks. Of course, any time there's a bonus week of any kind, if it relates to open-world content at all (see: Onslaught and Cosmic weeks) people will invariably bust out their burner alt accounts and take advantage of our utter lack of moderation to ruin the experience for other people while pretending to not be able to speak English (seeing as that's the game's primary language.) My genuine advice is, if it gets to be too much for you, either don't bother playing during these weeks, or use secondary routes that aren't the typical UNTIL/Harmon loop as those go mostly untouched at all times. Cosmic grinders aren't that lucky with alternate methods, but Onslaught grinders at least have options.



With these concerns addressed, firstly, some terminology for those that might need it but haven't learned it yet.

There are some words and terms that don't mean much of anything if you don't pay attention to the Onslaught System. If you're already familiar with these, then skip this section entirely. But for those that aren't...

• OV: Onslaught Villain
  
• POV / Passive OV: Passive Onslaught Villain
  
• OVT / OVToken: Onslaught Villain Token
  
• OGT / OGToken: Onslaught Guardian Token
  
• Onslaught Target: used interchangeably both for UNTIL Defenders and for the entire target location that UNTIL Defenders are found at. More on UNTIL Defenders later.
  
• Dive / Diving: the act of forcibly ending an Onslaught Transformation early, namely by attacking one of the Hermes Heavy Turrets nearby. More on Hermes Heavy Turrets later.
  
• RC#: Renaissance Center #? (where ? is the number of the zone they're in. Switch zones via the button at the top of your minimap if you need to hop zones to get access to a POV, and be sure to enable "Always let me pick which instance I go to" when you do so.)
  
• Z#: Zone #? (with ? being the zone they're in. In regards to POVs, this means the same thing as RC# since Onslaught Villains always go Passive right in front of the Recognition building in the Rencen either way, though Z# is used for just about everything relating to places in the game that have enough players to have multiple Zones anyways.)

An example of these as you might see in-game: "POV RC2, 8mins left, worth 40 tokens, diving at 30secs" tells you that a Passive Onslaught Villain is waiting right in front of the Recognition building in Rencen Zone 2; they have 8 minutes left and are still worth 40 Guardian Tokens (I will explain this further shortly) and are going to commit honorable death by Heavy Turret at the 30 second mark for the benefit of anyone nearby if they aren't downed by nearby players already. Don't worry too much about keeping these in mind, once you've seen them used a few times you'll have them memorized passively anyways.

Another example of these you might see in-game: "OV Z1, 10mins left, need 2 kills before passive" tells you that an Onslaught Villain is at the Recognition Building in Rencen Zone 1, is not passive but will be after getting two kills (most players will kindly oblige) and of course has 10 minutes left on their timer before they forcibly de-transform. (You can assume they'll probably dive before then if they're still alive by that point, as this holds true most of the time.)

Mind you, you don't need to memorize all this right here and now or anything. If you haven't had these burned into your brain just by playing the game already and seeing them used, you'll get it quickly enough once you know to pay attention for them anyways. For the most part, you might not even need these either, depending on how you play! But for those that need it and don't already have it memorized, these are here for your convenience. Moving onto why you should care about the Onslaught system in the first place though...

This is a valid question, but one that deserves a little more care than just that Q&A above. To that end, I raise several points for why you should care. Once again, skip these if you don't need convincing, but read these if you do.

• 1: The Onslaught System has essentially no entry requirements.
  
• 2: The Onslaught secondary gearset is, in (most) cases, the best secondary gearset in the game.
  
• 3: The three powers purchased through OVT are (to varying degrees) quite useful.
  
• 4: The Onslaught Heirloom primary gearset is a viable and readily accessible alternative to six-piece set primaries for leveling characters.

Firstly, the Onslaught System has essentially no entry requirements. On a technical level, the bare minimum you need to run Onslaught content is to be level 10. That's right, you can start these at the same time you start doing Grab Alerts, except that since Onslaught revolves mostly around scaling levels, you won't be plastered all over the walls if you start Onslaughts at 10, unlike Grabs. While, out of habit, I wait for level 40, if you're slowly and casually leveling then you might get most of your Onslaught grind done by the time you're at 40, which also sets you up to more quickly get into the grind that actually has entry requirements, like Cosmics and Eidolon, Teleios Ascendant and Therakiel's Temple.



Secondly, the reason I say it "sets you up more quickly to get into the grind that actually has entry requirements" is because the Onslaught secondaries are some of the strongest secondaries in the game. There's a lot of sunk cost fallacy surrounding weaker secondary gearsets like the old Cosmic secondaries from Cosmics (and the GCR store) and the Determination secondaries from Teleios Ascendant (and also the GCR store,) but Onslaught secondaries are objectively superior to these. The secondaries that can compete are the Eidolon secondaries, which are varying degrees of expensive (usually 1kG-2kG and a R9 mod each, versus a single R5 mod each for Onslaught) and the new Cosmic secondaries, of which only the Offense pieces exist right now, taking a R5 mod and having unique effects that edge slightly ahead of or fall slightly behind Onslaught depending on which piece you're comparing. In (most) cases, Onslaught will serve you best, but do compare on a case by case basis if you can afford more expensive sets. (A special shout-out goes to Onslaught Medusa gear making dedicated combo DPSes viable and combo tanks more viable than they were before.)



Thirdly, while far less impactful on a case-by-case basis than Onslaught secondaries in and of themselves, there are three powers you can buy for the price of two Onslaught secondaries each, unlocking them account-wide once purchased a single time; these have varying uses that make them worth picking up if you ever plan on running a build with them. In order of my own personal preference from least to most useful...

Gravitic Ripple: a 25ft sphere Ranged PBAoE Maintain with a target cap of 5 that deals Crushing damage and Repels targets away with each tick, doing double damage to Knock-immune targets. It has Advs to turn it into a Pull and to make it drop a Shielding Rune on partial maintain. Its damage dealt is low to moderate at best, and it has a long cooldown. Useful for Force-themed characters, potentially, but Hurricane- at the cost of being much more expensive energy-wise- outpaces it in all aspects and lacks a cooldown. (And then Epidemic outpaces that, but you get the idea.) The least useful of the three.

Lance Rain: a 25ft sphere Ranged AoE Charge with 100ft of range with a target cap of 7 that deals Ego Damage to all targets hit, plus an extra 20% of that damage per stack of Ego Leech you have (acting as an Ego Leech rupture similar to Telekinetic Lance) in exchange for a semi-short cooldown time. It has an Adv that makes it Knock down all targets hit, and then Root them for good measure. Its damage dealt is identical to that of Telekinetic Lance, but with its large AoE size, long range and target cap of 7, it's actually reasonably useful as a nuke for crowds of trash mobs if already using a ranged TK build, and it has enough coverage that it won't rely too badly on using other powers to drag enemies into position to hit them all at once.

Nuclear Shockwave: a 10ft wide, 75ft long cylinder Ranged AoE un-targeted Tap with a target cap of 5 that deals an even split of Crushing and Particle to all foes hit, Knocking back targets within 15ft, Knocking down targets from 16ft to 50ft, and Repelling targets 51ft or more away, along with a very high Plasma Burn application chance. Has an Adv that makes it apply Disintegrate to all targets hit. Nuclear Shockwave is very useful for ranged Particle builds that aren't PA. (Recently, several Gadgeteer and Laser Sword powers were added that can apply Disintegrate at range, which makes this more generally useful instead of a must-take for ranged Particle, but before them, it was either this or the 25ft-range melee Plasma Burn rupture "Particle Smash" for Disintegrate.) Its 75ft range makes it a little wonky for sticking out to pure 100ft, but if you're running Pulse Beam Rifle, Pulp Fiction Ray Guns or the likes, you're likely sticking within 50ft to use Chest Beam to apply Burn Through as well so that doesn't matter too much. Being a non-targeted AoE, Nuclear Shockwave will aim in the direction you're aiming your character rather than in the direction of the enemy, so be mindful of where you're aiming (use your RMB to force your aiming) or change your settings in Controls to make sure your character is always facing your target while in combat. (This won't work as well for Grond and Medusa, but I'll get to that later.)



Fourthly and finally, the Onslaught Heirloom primary gearset is a thing that exists. See, I shouldn't need to go into crazy detail on what Heirloom gear is, but in short, they're gearsets that bind to your whole account and can be moved from character to character via the Account Bank (accessible both from your hideout and as of recently now also from the back of the Bank building in the RenCen.) In the olden days of a decade past, you'd grind Nemesis tokens for the Nemesis and Catalyst Heirlooms, but since then six-piece sets were introduced. The catch is, now adays, you have to get them exclusively from the Trade Paperback Vendor for a total of 6 purple paperbacks, which might take you 200kQ or 300kQ depending on your luck. Compared to those, Onslaught Heirlooms don't give as much stats, but actually give 10% more XP, and take only five days on one character to get all three pieces, making them accessible for anyone willing to brave the Onslaught system and cutting the amount of trade paperbacks you need in half. (Mixing Onslaught Heirloom primaries and Aurum heirloom secondaries is the general go-to here.) 30 to 40 minutes of Onslaught over just 5 days can and will save you tens of hours of time over the years if you're leveling characters in bulk. Seriously, don't sleep on the opportunity here.



Now, there are more minor reasons, like "oh, the Gravitar Cape costume unlock is a neat little thing that exists" or "the Medusa auras are super cheap and work great for various aesthetics, especially the weapon auras," but those are minor things more than selling points, and as such I won't bother touching on those any more. Instead, let's move onto...

Onslaught Guardian Tokens and Onslaught Villain Tokens, the latter primarily, are the lifeblood of the Onslaught System. There'd be no reason to ever do anything relating to it if these didn't exist. As you'd expect, you need these to buy everything Onslaught related, but there's a tiny little bit more to it than that. In short, Guardian Tokens are for smacking Onslaught Villains as a player/hero, while Villain Tokens are for smacking UNTIL Defenders/target zones and players/heroes as an Onslaught Villain. But to go into a little bit more detail...






Obtained by "being a hero" and all that, Onslaught Guardian Tokens can be obtained from the following sources:

• While tagged as "in combat with Onslaught Villains" (do any damage- direct or indirect- to an OV, or heal anyone who's already tagged as in combat with an Onslaught Villain) be within 200 to 250 feet or so of an Onslaught Villain when their health falls below certain threshholds (10 tokens at 66% health, 10 tokens at 33%, 30 tokens upon death. You will not get Guardian Tokens from an OV unless you're still tagged as in combat with them, which you can see on your debuff bar if you are. Also note that OVs cannot attack you if you aren't tagged, but if you are tagged then you're fair game, as rare as rabid OVs are.)
  
• 250 Guardian Tokens upon turning in the mission "Onslaught: Guardian Defense!" which I will elaborate on in the next section.
  
• 500 Guardian Tokens upon turning in the mission "Onslaught: Playing Both Sides" which I will also elaborate on shortly.

Onslaught Guardian Tokens are used for the following:

• Onslaught Villain Unlocks: 10k OGT each, each one can be purchased once per character. (purchasing one allows you to spend an additional 1k OGT or 10k Questionite to buy an extra OV transformation. Normally, you will never need to do so as every character is provided one free one a day, which I will elaborate on later.
  
• Onslaught Play Tokens: 1k OGT each, can be purchased repeatedly and bind on pickup, see the above. (These are the tokens you trade for those extra transformations once you have them unlocked.)
  
• Two costume unlocks: 2.5k OVT and 2.5k OGT each, automatically unlocks account-wide once purchased once (they can only be purchased once of course.)
  
• Twenty auras: 1k OGT each, binds on pickup and can be purchased repeatedly. (Medusa's Hair aura in colored, white, black and rainbow flavors, and then Medusa Melee Weapon Auras for Single, Left, Right and Dual, likewise in the aforementioned flavors.)

Obtaining Guardian Tokens is overall a near-effortless process, limited only by the fact that another player has to be willing to provide an OV for you to smack to get those tokens. however, plenty of players are willing to take a few minutes to be a punching bag in the RenCen if someone needs an OV, so you shouldn't be kept waiting too long as long as you're willing to ask. OVs returning from grinding Villain Tokens will also often announce their presence in the RenCen with ye olde "POV RC#" call in Zone chat to let people who need the Guardian Tokens know. Granted, Villain Tokens aren't much harder to get, but this is something you can get started on as low as level 6 (or level 1 if you teleport out of the tutorial zone) with essentially a single keystroke, though that is mostly only relevant if you're aiming for the auras, which is a common occurrence in the lead-up to dev costume contests and similar-such events.






Obtained by causing general mayhem while transformed into an OV, Onslaught Villain tokens can be obtained from the following sources:

• 5 tokens from killing an UNTIL Defender at the various target locations throughout the city.
  
• A chance of 1 token from killing an UNTIL Squad Leader, two of which always accompany each UNTIL Defender.
  
• A chance of 1 token from killing an UNTIL Soldier, three of which always accompany each UNTIL Defender.
  
• 5 tokens from killing a player. (You can only kill a player that is tagged as in combat with an Onslaught Villain, and killing them will give them a 1-minute-long debuff that makes them not give any more tokens if killed again until it expires.)
  
• 250 Villain Tokens upon turning in the mission "Onslaught: Supervillain Attack!" which, one last time, I will be elaborating on in a moment.
  
• 500 Villain Tokens upon turning in the mission "Onslaught: Playing Both Sides".

Onslaught Villain Tokens are used for the following:

• Onslaught secondary gear pieces: 4.5k OVT each, purchasable repeatedly and binding on pickup, their set bonuses (almost) guarantee you'll want to get a full set for 15k OVT for each character you plan on using for things tougher than casual Alerts. This is the majority of the OV grind.
  
• Onslaught Heirloom primary gear pieces: 500 OVT each, purchasable repeatedly and binding to account on pickup, you CAN buy multiple sets but now that everyone has access to an Account Bank for free there's no real reason you'll ever need to get more than one unless you accidentally delete these.
  
• Three powers: 10k OVT each, purchasable once and unlocking account-wide once obtained, these aren't necessary but I've already voiced my thoughts on them previously.
  
• Two costume unlocks: mentioned in the OGT section, 2.5k of each type of token, can only be purchased once and unlocks account-wide automatically.
  
• Three action figures: 1k OVT each. I'm... not really sure why you'd need these outside of completionism, but they exist I guess!

Onslaught Villain Tokens are slightly, slightly more intensive to unlock than their tights-and-spandex underwear-on-the-outside counterparts, but emphasis goes to slightly because once you know what to do you'll be auto-piloting throughout the entire process. Sadly, this is where the boring grind kicks in, but we're here to minimize that, which leads into the next section. Namely...

There are precisely four of these, and you will become intimately familiar with them, as well as Telei- ahem, Onslaught Agent's voice lines, as you get used to all things Onslaught. In order of appearance in the Onslaught Agent's menu:

• Onslaught: Playing the Villain (rewards an OV transformation device)
  
• Onslaught: Guardian Defense! (rewards 250 OGT)
  
• Onslaught: Supervillain Attack! (rewards 250 OVT)
  
• Onslaught: Playing Both Sides (rewards 500 OGT and 500 OVT)

The first thing to remember is that, while Playing Both Sides can only be completed once every 5 days (or technically, once every 20 hours,) all four of these missions have a 20-hour cooldown that starts on initial pickup, just like most non-event repeatable-dailies like Adventure Packs, Serials and more. Additionally, these missions become available starting at level ten. Saying that...

Onslaught: Playing the Villain immediately completes itself upon being picked up and can be turned in instantly. The only reward for this mission is a choice of one Become Onslaught transformation device, letting you pick Gravitar, Grond or Medusa. Don't pick Gravitar. This serves only and explicitly to give you the tool you need to finish Supervillain Attack! and let other players finish their Guardian Defense! dailies.

Onslaught: Guardian Defense! can be completed by obtaining 50 Onslaught Guardian Tokens. No further elaboration is required here.

Onslaught: Supervillain Attack! requires you to both kill three UNTIL Defenders and obtain 50 Onslaught Villain Tokens (three UNTIL Defenders will only get you 15; you'll see exactly how most players get their 50 tokens in a section or two from now.)

Onslaught: Playing Both Sides can be completed by turning in both Guardian Defense! and Supervillain Attack! five times each, serving as an extra kick for players doing both dailies. Doing both isn't necessary, but it will increase how quickly you reach specific Onslaught Villain Token benchmarks by roughly a third to a quarter depending on what pace you're going at.

Keep in mind once again that these missions are available starting at level 10 and are easily doable at those levels. Also keep in mind that their cooldowns all start when you initially pick them up. That means that, if you can't consistently play, you can potentially backlog them by one day, accepting them (and not turning them in, even Playing the Villain, which is important since Onslaught Transformations expire 30 minutes after pickup including while offline) to do two on the character in question the next day. Additionally, as their cooldown is every 20 hours, you aren't forced to log on exactly on the dot at the same time every day to finish them, thankfully. You have breathing room with Onslaught content, you can start as soon or as late as you like, don't feel rushed as so many seem to feel for whatever reason! Just don't turn in Playing the Villain until you're ready to use that daily OV device! Now, moving onto the time part of dailies and time...






Firstly, a reminder one last time that Onslaught Villain Becomes expire 30 minutes after picking them up, so don't turn in Playing the Villain until you're ready to start! Having said that, it's also worth noting in regards to time that Onslaught Villain Becomes also expire after 15 minutes of use, whichever comes first. This means that if you turn on your Become with 12 minutes left until expiration, it'll expire before your fifteen minutes of OV time are up. This isn't a problem if you use it when it still has more than 15 minutes left.

Now having said that, let's get to the more pleasant side of time here: crunching out how slowly or quickly you'll be reaching specific OVT and OGT benchmarks.

Your OGT daily, if you do it, will always net you 50+250 Guardian Tokens, or 300 per day. This can be applied likewise to your OVT daily, where you have a theoretical minimum of 300 OVT per day but will likely obtain a few more. So you can safely assume that a bare minimum you'll get 300 a day. However, if you're doing both your OVT daily and OGT daily, you'll also get an additional 500 of each every 5th day. That leads us to the following, since really we mostly just care about Onslaught Villain Tokens:
OVT daily: 300 / day or 1500 / 5 days.
Daily with 5-day wrapper: 1500+500 / 5 days. (2000)
Every 5 days, you'll have an additional 1500 OVT minimum if just doing Villain dailies, or an additional 2000 OVT if doing both Villain and Guardian dailies. You can measure this against anything you're aiming to buy. Remember how I mentioned way back up at the top that some people think it takes months to complete an Onslaught secondary gearset? A full set is 13.5k OVT, so consider:
13500 / 300 = 45 days.
13500 / (2000/5) = 33.75 days, though in effect it's more either 34 or 35 days. (6 blocks of 2000 OVT per 5 days, gets you to 12000 OVT, plus an extra 5 days of 300, or an extra 4 days of 374 OVT, which gets into the following issue...)
Said issue is: you're almost guaranteed to get a few extra OVT over your minimum of 50, so consider shaving one, maybe two days off of those exact values. That is also assuming, of course, that you're aiming for a minimum of 50 tokens before turning in that Villain daily each time. (You're likely going to wind up with 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, etcetera if you're clearing the current set of targets completely and correctly before leaving to either go to the Rencen and let people farm their Guardian tokens, or just unslotting your Onslaught Become if you're in a rush and want to un-OV as quickly as possible without being hit by that awful hour-long debuff that keeps you from becoming an OV again until you wait it out if you get disconnected, try to change zones, or similar-such unpleasantries while being an OV.)

That, of course, assumes you're not running out the clock on your OV Become. If you're sticking it out the full 15 minutes, then without any outside help of players coming to your route specifically to let you kill them, you're likely goin1g to wind up getting 120+250 OVT instead of 50+250 OVT. That, of course, means you're spending a full 15 minutes instead of approximately 6 to 8 minutes per Villain daily, and so is inefficient if you're gearing multiple characters at once but may be preferable if only gearing one. Consider:
OVT daily: 370 / day or 1850 / 5 days.
Daily with 5-day wrapper: 1850+500 / 5 days. (2350)
Compared against 13500 for a full set of OV secondaries as an example...
13500 / 370 = ~36.486486486... days, or 37 days.
13500 / (2350/5) = ~28.7 days, or potentially 29 days, likely 30 days in actual practice.
This is of course assuming you don't have players sacrificing themselves to you, which can squeeze things down a little bit more but is highly unrealistic. (Who wants to leave the Renaissance Center after all? Just about none of us; it's just an obligation when doing Villain dailies!)

I won't do the math for literally every single thing in the store, of course; I'll trust you to be more than smart enough to do your own based on your own preferred pace, however fast or slow it may be, but that gives you a gist of the ease of getting these dailies done. If you have good luck with catching POVs, you can do the Guardian part in a minute or two, make it four or five if you have to ask for someone to drop on by or if it's late at night or early in the morning, while the Villain part is usually 6 to 8 minutes at a minimum pace. Just a few hours to get a full OV set when you actually look at it. That really ain't the months some folks say it takes! And as for how difficult (not difficult) it is? We're getting to that next.

Now we get into the actual meat of things, starting with an introduction to the five flavors of NPC you'll be dealing with for all things Onslaught-related. One of which will be causing you immense psychic damage by talking endlessly, three of which will be your designated victims for the day, and one of which you will avoid at all costs.



Now, firstly and in general, it's worth noting the following: the three regular hostile Onslaught NPCs have variable levels. I'm not actually sure what causes them to decide to be level 40 one time they spawn, level 11 the next, 6 the next, 29 the next, so on and so forth, but most of the time they'll be level 40. Thankfully, Onslaught Villains and Onslaught Targets all have this funky thing going on with damage scaling so that, you can be 6 and they can be 40 and they won't shred you any harder than normal, or you can be 40 and they can be 6 and the only real difference is that they'll take comparatively more damage and die quicker, similar to other enemies that level sync instead of just working at a fixed level.

Of note, this does not apply to the Hermes Heavy Turrets, which I'll be addressing last. Those sync to the level of the first person to enter roughly within render distance of them, and only unsync when everyone has left their render distance for an extended period of time. Of course, normally you want to avoid them so that doesn't really matter.




There are actually two of these; one is in the Recognition building directly in front of Defender, while the other is at the corner near the prison in Westside. For any and all purposes, the one in Westside does not matter and we only care about the one in the Renaissance Center, pictured above. Obviously, you aren't killing this handsome mug, but this is where you'll go to pick up and turn in all four Onslaught dailies as well as to buy anything and everything possible from the Onslaught store. There's nothing further to elaborate on than that.




You'll be dealing with these en masse doing your Villain dailies. Shy of other players, assuming you don't mess up and get in a fight with a turret, and assuming you don't try and drag an OV to an event open mission (most of which have fields around them that prevent OVs from attacking these days) the UNTIL Defender is the only thing capable of actually doing you any meaningful harm as an OV. Their toolkit consists of the following:

• 20,345 health at max level.
  
• "UNTIL Pummel" A melee double-fisted slam that does moderate Crushing damage can be used once every few seconds. An UNTIL Defender will use this up to five times maximum before backpedaling and using its ranged abilities instead. (It will still use said ranged abilities even if you keep moving towards it to stay in melee range.)
  
• "UNTIL Super Minigun" A moderate-ranged shoulder-mounted minigun, identical to every other power armor shoulder minigun in the game. Does significant Piercing damage over several seconds; can be avoided by backing away to take partial or no damage. Still does damage in melee range, however.
  
• "UNTIL Heat Cannon" A moderate-ranged charged blaster shot. Does significant Fire damage instantly, but takes three seconds or so to warm up; enough for an OV to jump back and away to get out of its range if reacting quickly enough. Still does damage in melee range, too.
  
• An unnamed(??? not sure of the name) shield effect that gives the UNTIL Defender additional protection in the form of shield health; the Defender can use this periodically and generally prefers to do it immediately after a charged blaster shot, in the middle of its shoulder minigun maintain, or after the first double-fisted slam if it only saw you once already in melee range (usually via running up to it and THEN popping the Onslaught Become of your choice.)

The method you use for fighting these will differ depending on which Onslaught Villain you choose to play as (I'll talk about them in the next section) so I won't elaborate any further here. Just note that the UNTIL Defenders your only real threat; the Squad Leaders and Soldiers are negligible However, UNTIL Defenders cannot respawn unless the two Squad Leaders and three Soldiers they come with are killed, so always make sure to clean up and kill them as well before leaving.




UNTIL Squad Leaders are very negligible on their own, almost as much as the Soldiers themselves. The defining difference between these two is their ability to give a damage buff to nearby allies in the same manner a lot of "leader" type NPCs do, in this case with the bullhorn and everything. Ever seen these guys in the tutorial or the Qularr Invasion Simulation Alert? If so, you've seen it. It makes the UNTIL Defenders do noticeably more damage, though if you're doing your OV things right this will never be a problem. Their abilities consist of such:

• 8,283 health at max level.
  
• "Plasma Pistol" a short-range ranged attack that does extremely negligible Particle damage.
  
• "Plasma Pistol Maintained" a short-range ranged attack that does extremely negligible Particle damage.
  
• "Plasma Pistol Spray" a short-range ranged attack that does extremely negligible Particle damage.
  
• Bullhorn damage buff (unsure of the name,) does as described above. A 30-second buff to damage applied to nearby allies, which are in your case enemies. Inconsequential as long as you kill the only actual threat first.

These, along with their lesser counterparts, are really just fodder for your AoE of choice, and are at worst tripping hazards to get stuck on if weaving into or out of melee range.




UNTIL Soldiers are negligible period. Obviously, you still need to kill them and their Squad Leader counterparts to allow UNTIL Defenders to respawn, but unlike Squad Leaders, these don't even give their allies a buff, and they have far less health than Squad Leaders. Their toolkit consists of, exclusively:

• 2,232 health at max level.
  
• "Pulson Rifle" a short-range ranged attack that does extremely negligible Particle damage.
  
• "Pulson Rifle Maintained" a short-range ranged attack that does extremely negligible Particle damage.

The same that applies to the Squad Leaders also applies to Soldiers; there is nothing more to elaborate on.




These can be found in fixed locations independent of Onslaught Target locations, mostly centered around spawn points, certain open missions such as Destroids Rise Again, and scattered heavily throughout the Renaissance Center. They exist as a deterrent for Onslaught Villains otherwise rampaging through "safe" locations and/or spawncamping by attacking if you get too close or if any of your attacks hit them, serving as a veritable magnet for large AoEs. They give you nothing in the way of Onslaught Villain Tokens and as such should be avoided for the purposes of OV things. Their "move"set consists of sitting in place and only using one specific attack.

• 327,413 health at max level.
  
• "Heavy Laser" an extremely-damaging long-ranged maintained attack (200ft if I recall correctly) that does Particle damage and goes on cooldown for several seconds after completing.

With all that outlined, these should be avoided, and doing so is easy. That's all, really.

Moving onto where this is all taking place and what exactly to do, there's actually a variety of potential spots scattered across Millennium City where you can encounter Onslaught Targets. It's just that, due to the UNTIL Building in particular having two sets of targets instead of just one, jumping back and forth between it and Harmon Labs is the preferred route/loop for 99% of people running Onslaught, unless explicitly forced out of it, usually via all zones already being taken up and an active Become Onslaught timer ticking down 'till expiration. As such, I present the following:


Seen here, every single Onslaught Target on the map is circled in red (including the UNTIL Building, while both Onslaught Agent/Vendor locations are circled in yellow. Yes, I know, all the targets except for the UNTIL Building are marked with skulls in front of red starbursts, but for the sake of easily noticing your options and knowing what actually means what when the in-game map is generally cluttered with things, you usually don't care about or need to pay attention to, here you go anyways.


Seen here, meanwhile, is the exact preferred route of the bulk of Onslaught runners, including myself. It takes longer to run to a third location (usually ARGENT/the green triangle) than it does to run from the UNTIL Building (1) to the spot behind Harmon Labs (2) then just returning and waiting in front of UNTIL (1) again. This, especially if someone is willing to met you kill them at/on the route over and over again, is the fastest way of farming Onslaught Villain tokens.

In either situation, at the end of an Onslaught Villain run, if the villain player in question still has time, they'll generally go to stand right outside the Recognition building in the Renaissance center (directly above the yellow (!) slash (v) seen above, before calling out some variation of "Passive OV here" or "POV Z#" or similar as mentioned in the terminology section. There are exceptions to this of course, namely players ending their OV runs early by unslotting the OV Become or diving to a turret if they don't know they can just unslot, as well as players spending the full 15 minutes killing as many Onslaught Targets as possible. Letting other players farm their OGT off of you once you've farmed your OVT isn't mandatory, though it's helpful and preferable. That, of course, leads us onto...






The basic gist of being an OV is "please, for the love of god, make sure nobody's already on the route you're using." The "don't force another player out of their route to satisfy your sense of entitlement" is an unspoken but widely accepted addition to that, as is the "don't say you're a POV if you're not passive," and generally those that violate this basic decency are doing so intentionally, because it's easier to exhibit the aforementioned etiquette than it is not to! See the following:


When picking out a zone to run an Onslaught Villain in, since you're likely going to stick to the same UNTIL>Harmon route that everyone else does, firstly press O on your keyboard or click the Social button on your minimap to bring up the Search > Player menu. Look at the status of every single player in the zone; if you see "Playing the Villain" then it's possible that they're running the route already, and if you see "Supervillain Attack!" then it's almost guaranteed that they are. In either case, look at the location of the player in question; if they're listed in the Downtown portion of Millennium City specifically then it's all but bolded-and-italicized guaranteed that they're already running the UNTIL>Harmon loop.

However, that might not be enough, or you might also prefer checking via this method. See the following:


Of these two pictures, the former is the UNTIL Building and the latter is the spot behind/next to Harmon Labs. Together, they make up the UNTIL>Harmon route that almost everybody runs. If you're not sure whether or not a zone's being used, check the UNTIL Building; if both Defenders are missing then either someone just finished the route or, much more likely, somebody's already doing the route, and you should check the zone to see if anyone in Downtown has either of those quests in their status. Even if not, it's possible that they're there using /anon or /hide which means you should also check behind Harmon Labs to see if that one is empty too, and/or look around the museum between the two locations for any of the green (Grond) or pink (Medusa) or blue (Gravitar) skybeams that indicate there's an active Onslaught Villain right there.

It may seem like a lot, but once you're used to it, checking is a matter of an extra five to ten seconds at the most, and better to spend that extra five to ten every time you do an OV instead of accidentally waste that many minutes because you weren't paying attention (or making someone else waste minutes as well, which is also, as I have so been informed, "cringe." I'm inclined to agree.)



Of additional, separate note, is that it isn't actually too uncommon for people to offer themselves to you to get the OVT boost from them if you're in a route. It isn't a requirement on their part, nor are you forced to kill them if they do it, and if you're a wee little baby-boy (don't worry, I am too) you don't have to intentionally kill them, though it might make you clear the 50 OVT threshhold faster if you get good RNG or get multiple player kills in the same run. You'll see an example of this both in the second Grond strat video I'll list later on in the guide, as well as in the final "a normal run on Live" I'll show at the very end. Do remember this, though!



Now, having said that, it's time to move onto the last big part:

Now that you know about how the Onslaught Targets work, as well as where they are and what to just generally do as far as picking a zone to go baby Soldier clubbing in, it's time to move onto actually picking an Onslaught Villain to use. These, I'll bring up in order of their listing at the Onslaught Vendor, each with their own Section, mostly because there's a lot for me to describe. (For two of the three at least.) Starting with...




So, how do you use Gravitar exactly? The answer is, actually, surprisingly obvious!
Okay, technically you can use Gravitar. But Gravitar takes so long to actually ramp up and wastes so much time that, if you're using it to actually do Onslaught Villain dailies, you... well, honestly, you just shouldn't. Use it to goof off and have fun, maybe have a Gravitar mosh pit in the RenCen, players usually don't mind dying at all when the game's been reduced to endless blurry graphics effects and "lolwut"s, but Gravitar really, really isn't viable for actual playing with... which is a shame, but oh well. Fortunately, the other two are usable...

Inversely, Grond is the one almost everybody likes to use, and for good reason. Both Grond and Medusa can clear Onslaught Targets quicker than they respawn, but Grond does it faster than Medusa, and easier as well, leaving more time to look at something else, do something else, think about anything else, and just generally breathe. Less exciting than Medusa, certainly, but if you're doing six sets of Onslaught dailies a day, completing each daily ~30 seconds faster than Medusa with more time to pause and relax results in a lot less burnout and the extra time really adding up over, well, time. Of course, there's more to it than just that, so, to address how Grond works...

Grond both takes and deals more damage the higher his energy bar is. Said energy bar is increased by taking damage, and once it hits 100, it resets. The amount of damage it takes to hit 100 is fixed, which means the lower your level, the less damage you take, but at the minimum of 10, you'll die upon hitting 100 energy for the first time, while at the maximum of 40, you hit 100 energy much more quickly but can also hit it 2 or 3 times (depending on how much extra damage you're taking at once) before dying. As such, using Grond is about intentionally taking damage up to one of two specific threshholds before killing everything before it can so much as touch you. To elaborate on that:

• Energy builder / 1-key: "Radiating Strike" toggles on like an EB, and while it doesn't actually generate energy, this melee attack- doing split Crushing/Particle damage- will see use both while starting a Grond route and if you wind up using it on a player or unwanted NPC underfoot.
  
• 0 energy / 2-key: "Nuclear Debris" is a low-damage, incredibly long-range (250ft) click/tap with an extremely short cooldown, doing split Crushing/Particle damage. It doesn't hit as hard as Radiating Strike, but it sees plenty of use softening up weakened UNTIL Defenders that you're keeping at range, and in similar-such situations.
  
• 15 energy / 3-key: "Roaring Fury" is a massive 200ft sphere PBAoE that does split Crushing/Particle damage; this does low to moderate damage with no effective target cap, making it perfect for obliterating Soldiers and weakening Squad Leaders. Often used in tandem with Nuclear Shockwave and Nuclear Debris, which I'll both explain and demonstrate shortly.
  
• 30 energy / 4-key: "Nuclear Shockwave" is a high-damage un-targeted 75ft-long 20ft-wide cylinder AoE that does split Crushing/Particle damage with no effective target cap. Primarily used for obliterating close-knit groups of enemies or (almost) instantly nuking UNTIL Defenders,
  
• 50 energy / 5-key: "Atom-Splitting Fist" is a insane-damage un-targeted 100ft-long 30ft-wide cylinder AoE that does split Crushing/Particle damage. Of note, this has a target cap of one, making it a pseudo-single-target attack that you have to precisely aim to hit the target of your choice. (You want to hit an UNTIL Defender rather than the Squad Leader they just randomly walked behind because they felt like it.)
  
• 75 energy / 6-key: "Radiation Ground Pound" is a dirty liar. Let me explain: the tooltip claims it is- and I quote "75ft, 65ft sphere," but it's actually, at least as far as I've seen, a 100ft 90* cone. It does moderate-to-high split Crushing/Particle damage over a short maintain period that cannot be stopped once it's started, Stunning any foes left alive once it's finished. This sees a lot of usage if going for the 75-energy Grond strat specifically, though otherwise it might as well not exist.
  
• 90 energy / 7-key: "Unleashed Nuclear Fury" is a 60ft PBAoE sphere that does very high mixed Crushing/Particle damage to everything it hits. However, using it resets your energy to 0 prematurely, and it requires 90 energy in the first place, so you'll almost never use it when farming Villain Tokens.
  
• Travel Power: "Massive Leap" drastically increases your jump height, as well as your speed while jumping. (Just randomly being in the air/falling without jumping first does not count.) This emergency travel power can move you quickly, but it's slowed to a crawl while in combat, and if it expires while you're high in the air- namely on the way down- you can and will take a massive amount of fall damage, so tap-jumping is recommended to avoid that. Additionally, the tooltip says it lasts for 8 seconds, and the buff on the buff bar says 8 seconds, but it actually lasts for 12 seconds (with the jump buff sticking around at 0/unmarked for an extra 4 seconds after it says it expires.)

Having established all of this, there are two methods people use for Grond, the second a bit riskier than the first unless you have outside help. The two are as follows:



Pop your Become Grond while in melee range of the UNTIL Defender, preferable with your 1-key toggled on. Let the UNTIL Defender hit you three or four times, whichever gets you above 50 energy. While doing this, use your 1-key to bring it down to low health. Finish it off with your 1-key once above 50 energy, then use your 5-key to kill the other UNTIL Defender. Then finish off the Soldiers and Squad Leaders with your 3-key, 4-key. If necessary, use your 1-key and 2-key as well.

Having done this, now repeat the following process. Go to the Harmon target, 5-key the UNTIL Defender, 4-key the Soldiers and Squad Leaders then 1-key and stragglers. Go back to the UNTIL Building, wait at the top of the stairs for the two UNTIL Defenders to respawn, then 5-key one UNTIL Defender, 4-key the second, then jump away from it and 3-key in the air as you do so. 2-key when you land, and if necessary, run in and 1-key it after to finish it off. Go back to the Harmon target. Repeat until done with your Supervillain Attack! daily, then either continue until your time expires, or go back to the Renaissance Center and go passive, or unslot the device/move it to your inventory to end early.

Be careful not to use your Become Grond if the UNTIL Defenders are close together, as they might both aggro at the same time which can very quickly mess up your run. Grond is squishy despite having the most health of any OV specifically because he takes more damage the more energy he has, and he needs some energy to do anything at all.



This starts the same as the 50-energy Grond strat. However, depending on whether or not the Squad Leaders buff the UNTIL Defender, and whether or not the UNTIL Defender crits (and which of the hits it crits on) you might manage to reach 75 energy, at which point you can use Grond's 6-key power to devastating effect. Normally, it's entirely RNG whether or not you hit 75 energy, or if you'd get bumped straight past 100 and reset, or if you wouldn't even hit 75 at all before the UNTIL Defender backs up and starts using ranged attacks. As such, usually this is reserved for if you have, as I said, outside help from another player or other damage source that can bring you up to 75 energy reliably, unless you get lucky. It's all a gamble on crits and buffs after all.

Finish 1-keying the first UNTIL Defender, then 5-key the second, and back away a little while using your 6-key to wipe out all the Squad Leaders and Soldiers. 5-key the Defender behind the Harmon building, 6-key the mooks, then go back to UNTIL. Then repeat 5-keying one Defender then 4-keying + backing away from and 6-keying the other and all the mooks at the same time. Rinse and repeat.

The 50 energy strat warning applies here as well as the start is the exact same.

Medusa used to be more popular. You used to see more of her than even Grond. But these days, most have clued into Grond being easier, and arguably more beginner-friendly as well. However, there's still the occasional Medusa to be had, and there's nothing wrong with you if you want to be one of those! Unlike Grond, who wants to sit still and aim heavy hits like a big meaty turret that hits the gym, Medusa is all about moving around constantly like a jackrabbit dosed on several illegal substances, while stacking a debuff called "Mind Spikes" on the target. Reaching 10 stacks of Mind Spikes Stuns the target and gives Medusa a self-buff stack that goes up to 5, and at 2, 4 and 5 Stuns activates a new power.

• Energy Builder / 1-key: "TK Flurry" toggles on like an EB. It doesn't generate energy, but it does low to moderate Ego damage to a single target in melee range, and builds up Mind Spikes stacks on the target over time.
  
• 0 Stuns / 2-key: "TK Breaker" is a 20ft 120* un-targeted cone that does a moderate amount of Ego damage quickly and applies a stack of Mind Spikes to any target hit before going on a very short cooldown. Since it doesn't self-root on use, unlike Grond's un-targeted powers, TK Breaker is used to play Joust with enemy UNTIL Defenders, lunging in and tapping it just inside of range before jumping away to avoid most if not all damage.
  
• 0 stuns / 3-key: "TK Spear" is a 250ft 15ft-sphere that does a high amount of Ego damage to all targets hit, Rooting them and applying two stacks of Mind Breaks to all targets hit before going on a short cooldown. Best aimed at Squad Leaders in the middle of the barricade circles to kill all five mooks first before taking on the UNTIL Defender one-on-one. (Very, very occasionally, a Squad Leader might survive with a few health points left; these can be cleaned up after the fact.) Otherwise, just use on UNTIL Defenders at range before or after running in for a 2-key and jumping away.
  
• 0 stuns / 4-key: "TK Shatter" is a 200ft single-target ranged attack that does a moderate amount of Ego damage and doubles the stacks of Mind Spike on the target in question before going on a long-ish cooldown. Best used before or after running in for a 2-key and jumping back.
  
• 2 stuns / 5-key: "TK Wave" is a 120ft sphere PBAoE that does a high amount of Ego damage and obliterates the energy of all targets hit (only relevant against other players) as well as applying a stack of Mind Spikes before going on a very long cooldown. While this might see use if you have someone helping you build stacks before taking on an UNTIL Defender, using this is unrealistic for grinding Onslaught Villain Tokens since Medusa takes so long to build up, similarly to Gravitar (but can at least do good-enough damage with her 0-stun powers to be used anyways, and would actually go faster just using 0-stun powers.) This is, decidedly, a PvP thing.
  
• 4 stuns / 6-key: "TK Lunge" is a 60ft single-target lunge that does a moderate amount of Ego damage to the target in question while lunging at them, also applying a stack of Mind Spikes and instantly refreshing TK Breaker before going on a moderate cooldown. This would, and I emphasize would, be useful for OVT grinding if it didn't require four stuns to use, which makes it nonviable entirely without outside help from another player, and even in that case would still take far too long to stack up; you'd be going far faster just using your 0-stuns.
  
• 5 stuns / 7-key: "TK Eruption" is a 120ft sphere PBAoE that does a large amount of Ego damage that scales up to massive amounts depending on how many stacks of Mind Spikes are on each target hit, on an individual basis. Once fired off, TK Eruption has a massive cooldown, matching or exceeding an Ultimate power. This is worthless for Villain Token farming, serving mostly to just be PvP fodder.
  
• Travel Power: "Mind Warp" is a 5-second-long Teleport that moves obscenely slowly, and serves little practical use. There's nothing more to add to this, really.

Saying all of this, there's just one real method for OVT farming as Medusa. And it follows a few simple rules instead of an exact method, since Medusa is more about moving around and peppering targets rather than standing still and one-shotting or two-shotting them like Grond does.



Not taking any damage at all as Medusa is well within the realm of possibility, just not an effortless thing. Your method of engagement is to make liberal use of your 2-key, 3-key and 4-key, starting with using your 4-key on the middle Squad Leader inside a barricade circle to eliminate all five mooks immediately, and then playing Joust with the UNTIL Defender with your 2-key, jumping away or past as soon as you fire it off. (It takes a little practice to get used to landing your 2-key in this manner.) Additionally, use your 3-key and 4-key whenever available, either before or after you've gone in for your 2-key and backed back out. This applies both to the two UNTIL Defenders outside the UNTIL Building (take on one group at a time) and the individual group behind Harmon Labs. As Medusa doesn't need to take damage to start fighting, pop your Medusa Become away from the Onslaught Targets before engaging in the above manner. If you're feeling risky and an UNTIL Defender is on low health, you can run in with your 1-key toggled on to try and finish them off as seen above, you don't have to be perfect to get it done so long as you're not lagging out horribly or being slow and sloppy with your movement, though if you want to play it safe or need to conserve health then avoid doing this.

Do not bother with attempting to farm Mind Spike stacks off the UNTIL Defenders. It'll take too long and you'll lose a lot of health in the process, enough that you might genuinely die if you get sloppy and enough that if you go passive back in the RenCen other players might not get much Onslaught Guardian Tokens out of you. Just stick to your 0-stun powers, it'll go faster.

Before we wrap things up here, there's a few points worth raising to further streamline your OV experience. While not technically necessary, these are things worth addressing that I didn't initially think of when writing this guide.

• Stick to two different targets/locations for your routes, don't bounce back and forth between three. (The UNTIL building counts as one location for this, not two.)
Already an issue in and of itself, but one made much worse if you're using /anon or /hide to keep yourself hidden off player search; all Onslaught target locations are spaced far enough apart that if you attempt to do three, one or two of them will already be up before you arrive back to them. You might think this is a good thing, but it means that you have so much travel time that you aren't killing targets as quickly as they spawn, which makes it iffy at best and usually a loss compared to sticking to just two locations at a time. However, this means that- especially using the "meta route" of UNTIL > Harmon- anyone checking both locations will usually find them both up and assume that you aren't using the route even when you are, which can result in two different OVs vying for the same route, or one having to wander off to use a less efficient route but reaching it more slowly in the first place since OVs don't move as fast as travel powers, which in turn don't move as fast as vehicles.

• Don't neglect your Onslaught Guardian Defense daily and Playing Both Sides 5-day mission.
As I wrote in the time crunch section, assuming you get exactly 300 tokens a day by doing only Supervillain Attack, you'll take 45 days to get a full Onslaught Set. If you do Guardian Defense (for the sake of Playing Both Sides giving an extra 500 every 5 days) you'll get it done in around 34 days or so. The difference adds up if you're gearing multiple characters at a time, and if you have a to-do list fifteen characters long... well, you get the idea. And with that in mind, there are ways to go about making your Onslaught Guardian Defense dailies much, much easier to complete. Namely:

• Use and abuse the power of Friendship™!
You may think I'm joking, but consider this. If you have one person helping you out (and no, I'm not here to talk about any crazy hypothetical alt account farming strats "ooooh just get 50 accounts in one instance somehow, 3.6k tokens per day oooOOOooo" type garbage) you can shave down enough time off the UNTIL>Harmon route to do it in just one and a half to two loops instead of the usual two and a half to three. One person feeding you a kill every minute and (as Grond) helping you get to 75 energy will get your Grond cycle down to around 4 and a half to 5 minutes, with Medusa not too far behind. So get a friend! Know anyone else doing OVs? Make an agreement with them: "I feed you 4 kills on the UNTIL >Harmon loop, then you come (carefully so the OG tokens don't bug out when OVs die too fast, which is mostly a Grond problem since he's the squishiest despite having the most health) dive on one of the turrets in front of the museum, then you feed me 4 kills and I turret-dive for you." Just like that, it takes around nine to twelve minutes to do two sets of OV dailies and two sets of OG dailies. And let's be honest, this is about the closest you'll get to the Onslaught system working "as intended" anyways.

• Make sure you're buying what you want or need when you spend your tokens.
A single misclick can waste quite a few days, and the OV system is really a pain only because you can only get so many tokens per character per day. Additionally, any poor purchases now might come back to bite you later. (There are quite a few characters of mine I need to grind for more OV gear on to replace bad choices for example.) So make sure you're getting the right thing you want. For a few examples...
• For DPS, I need to re-check this at some point in case Kaiserin nerfed it, but different DoTs are tagged as melee or ranged, so Onslaught Gloves of the Slicer and Sniper are minutely better than Grond and Gravitar gloves in situations where you can reliably keep them procced and also use the relevant types of DoTs. Clinging Flames and Poison are ranged, for example, while Bleed and Plasma Burn are melee. Grond and Gravitar gloves are just more flexible and can be used for melee and ranged at the same time, which has its uses. Dedicated combo builds should only ever use Medusa gloves, period.
• Defender Gloves are BiS for a tank in most cases, but if you can afford full R9 mods, Eidolon secondaries will be better in some situations, and if playing a combo tank, Medusa's Gloves will be better than Defender Gloves if you're using two threat mods with more than 30% bonus threat each, since Medusa Gloves are a 1.5x multiplier to combos and Defender Gloves are +30% threat.
• For raw healing, Onslaught Gloves of the Savior aren't actually as good as Cosmic Presence with Onslaught in the other two slots, and a full Eidolon set in R9s is better for survivability. Rather, Onslaught Gloves of the Savior are slightly better for giving nearby allies more energy gen, and for not costing a lot to build and use. (Mind you, you can still heal anything in the game with Savior Gloves, this is mostly just a consideration for minmaxing purposes.)
• Unless you're a dodge tank or something more weird and experimental, Onslaught Tights of Fitness are always BiS. Freedom/CC resist is worthless through and through. ("Max health > defense > everything else" tends to apply to most builds when it comes to what gear and mods to use, even.)
• Similarly, Onslaught Mask of Speed is usually BiS since cooldown reduction is always in higher demand than cost discount. Exceptions tend to mostly revolve around tanks, where energy management is much more exacting than it is with DPSes and even most healers. And with the upcoming CAMS system (which hasn't been added yet at the time of my writing this,) energy management will be even easier in the future. Cooldown reduction means things like on-next-hits, ults, active offenses and defenses and more being usable faster, and you don't need me to tell you how good that is.
• You only need one set of Onslaught Heirloom gear. If you don't have an account bank (which gets unlocked once you own any Hideout) prioritize getting a Hideout (base 625 Zen off the Z-store, but some can also be obtained during the Anniversary event for event currency.) This goes for all Heirloom gear, really, but I've seen people making this mistake before: get an account bank so you can use your account-bound things properly.
• Don't bother grinding for and buying the Onslaught powers unless you have a Freeform character to use them on. Similarly to Ultimate power unlocks (not to be confused with Ultimate Power Variant Devices) you'll only be able to make use of them on Freeform characters, and if you don't have any, or if you don't plan on making any that would benefit from these powers, they're not going to serve any use to you at all. That 30k OVT could be two characters worth of full Onslaught secondaries with 3k OVT to spare instead!

This might all seem like a lot, but it's just like any MMO: once you learn to ignore all the extraneous junk that doesn't actually matter, it winds up being incredibly simple. Seen above is a casual Grond run on live, from start to POV end with a quick turret dive at the end just to show it off: everything I've talked about made simple. Emphasis goes to casual, because I even let myself play a bit sloppy there, like not popping the Grond Become directly in melee range and letting myself be clipped by an UNTIL Super Minigun a little as well, while still staying below 75 energy. In turn, someone came up offering themselves to me for a free kill, but I didn't actually take the offer (out of habit I usually don't just because it always feels rude.) They got me above 75, so I switched from 50-energy Grond strat to 75-energy Grond strat at the end, before finally retiring to the RenCen to go POV. I still had enough health to give a full 50 Guardian Tokens to early arrivals.

All in all, simple and easy. Not the impossible nightmare too many players frame it as; just boring. And after 7-ish to 7 and a half-ish minutes, which would have been a tiny bit shorter if I had better RNG or if I'd actually gotten over myself and took the free 5 OVTs from the other player, 300 OV Tokens. Do that 44-45 times if only doing OV dailies for a full Onslaught secondary gearset, or 34 or 35 times if doing OG dailies as well.



In conclusion, don't be afraid of one of the easiest and dumbest systems we have to interact with. It ✨just works.✨