Ark Survival Ascended: Alpha Broodmother versus Megatherium

I've never fought against Alpha Broodmother without heavy losses. Will it be different now I've bred an army of Megatherium?

Alpha Broodmother versus my 19 Megatherium and one Yuty.

Health: 20,000
Melee: 700%
Saddle Armour: 164

This is my first line of megatherium, with good base health but poor base melee. I've since found one with better melee, so if I lose any here I'll start breeding a new batch.

[writhes]

Not sure if you noticed but there are a lot of moments in the video where some of your megatherium are running on a treadmill behind another megatherium because they can't actually reach the boss. Their hitboxes are really bad and they can't attack over each other. I think at one point of the video I counted up to 6 megatheriums that weren't attacking the broodmother.

Rexes on that other hand are blocked at their feet and their entire upper bodies lean forward with their damage oriented near their head which allows them to essentially overlay and reach over each other. This makes rexes a lot more noob friendly to micro manage on a boss fights. I'm not going to tell anyone to not use megatheriums but they need to be micro managed and fanned out if someone goes with the megatherium option otherwise they are objectively worse than rexes.

Assuming the melee damage of both are the exact same you need a minimum of 15 megatheriums with 100% insect killer uptime attacking the boss to be slightly above equivalent to 19 rexes roughly (last slot is reserved for the yuty). If you want the megatheriums to actually be better than rexes damage wise you would then need to position them well enough to get your 16, 17, etc... attacking the boss as well. This is all assuming they have a perfect 100% uptime on insect killer.

I think the best argument for megatherium at this point might be the 75% damage reduction from insect killer more so than damage output however megatheriums have lower base health on average so without insect killer their effective health is 70% of a rex however with insect killer their effective health is 84% higher or 184% of a rex.

Now you must consider that each individual megatherium needs to land killing blows on an araneo to activate insect killer every 2 mins for them to have 100% uptime. Think about that for a second. At least 15 megatheriums need to have 100% uptime on insect killer while attacking the broodmother just to break even with 19 rexes.

Megatheriums on broodmother represent what people might consider a "numbers trap". This is a situation where it looks good when you look at the numbers but the realistic application is a bit different than the expectation. However, there are many people that can get megatheriums to work on broodmother but the question on whether they are more optimal or less optimal than rexes heavily depends on how well they are micro managed by the player. Even people that use megatheriums less optimally than rexes still succeed at broodmother and in the end that is all that matters. As long as you win and you are personally happy with the results then that's great.


Obviously, this is all going to vary depending on the numbers your creatures actually land on when the level ups are applied especially effective health but I figured id just give some insights on some of the caveats of using Megatheriums that many people fail to acknowledge.

[barramundi]

Did u have them on aggressive or neutral?

[Butter]

Did alpha today with theris 20k hp 830% melee 150-190 armor saddles no deaths either but i tried dragon too and everything ded