I’ve mostly played the takedown with Amara and Zane with his new class mod and have been doing fairly well for the most part. I decided to pick FL4K up again since I’d gotten some new gear and wanted to try a glass cannon fade away type build. Damage output was no issue whatsoever until the wotan fight but I figured fade away and the pet revive might be enough to pull it off. But what does the pet do every single damn time? Walk straight into wotan’s shielded area and die over and over and over again (even though i picked the jabber that i thought would attack from a short distance). And fade away saving you? Nope forget about that, apparently wotan’s missiles or possibly the floating eyeballs have some sort of tracking missile that ignores the fact I should be hidden. Feeling very salty atm
Going from Amara or Zane with new class mod to Fl4k is going from super easy mode to normal mode. It’s going to take some build tweaking and/or practice, mostly practice, if you want to beat it with Fl4k. And if you think that’s hard try it on Moze without exploit or cheese. It’s supposed to be very hard it’s just Amara and Zane with the new com ignore that part.
Some tips for Fl4k include using a Rakk build and going for DPS and having a lifesteal weapon. For Fl4k really the main tactic is kill stuff so it can’t kill you. Fade away works too and plenty of people are successful with infinite fade-away builds, but as you mentioned it’s not going to help you avoid Striker rockets or Wotans grenades, that’s up to player skill.
A general tip I’ve picked up from running this place a lot. Ignore adds and focus on burning through his phases. The longer you spend in each phase the more of the type of add for that phase he spawns, mostly you can completely skip the spawns if you do it well. When you get to the phase where he’s up on pillars and spawning Strikers, this is a good time to clean up any adds you may want to get rid of, and make sure you take out Strikers as soon as you hear/see them they are very distinct. You want the small orb enemies, as many as possible don’t touch them. They are free second winds.
Also ignore your pet in this fight it’s literally useless.
Excellent reply and advice, kab. Spot on.
Great advice all around, might switch to a snowdrift since I miss the speed and get a corrosive ion cannon. Skill downtime isn’t really an issue but the healing weapon is a solid idea, just wish my pet wasn’t suicidal 
Kab has given good advice. Although personally I dislike rakks in the takedown, the action skill offers very little inherently and constant anointment uptime can be achieved with fade away anyway. theoretically the spec can do more damage, but it’s tougher imo because you never get a break. If you have lifesteal anoints that would simplify things. if you want to see an example of a rakk attack run LazyData recorded one of his.
For fade - idk how you have been running fade but three shot fade-away is best in the current state of the game. Going in and out of fade-away often will refresh your anointment and augments like Not My Circus or Until You are Dead. If you haven’t already seen the stuff Dakquan put out like his Gunboy FL4K video it’s a good watch. Some of his earlier videos were a little more messy which might be relatable as well.
For Wotan the tough part is that some of the most dangerous attacks will target you in fade. Strikers are the worst. Movement speed and situation awareness is very important for their fight. Until You are Dead should be a lock here for more movement speed. Snowdrift is a life-saver for me although I have used last stand. The hardest part of the fight is probably the split, personally I use a corrosive conference call to kill Wotan’s better half as fast as possible. Since the better half spawns spheres.
now, if you want a build where you don’t have to worry about anything targeting you at all, then gammavore / Red Fang would be the way to go. although it loses out on ASE anointment uptime, it’s a chill build that can still do the takedown in decent time. Red Fang simplifies many of the worst parts of takedown because almost everything will target your pet instead of you. the main exception is Wotan’s bottom half after the split, which still sends its little missile disks toward you. But strikers and all the rest of the mess he spawns will go for the pet. So will the Better Half.
The trickiest thing about gamma is probably getting the gear. Gamma burst brainstormer is tough to replace. I use it for most of the mobbing with Maggie as a sidearm. Corrosive dictator for valkyries, ion cannon while crossing the bridge to one-shot the deathspheres. And then brainstormer + cutsmen for Wotan. Optionally gamma can be run as deathless with transformer to take advantage of shared spirit and enable self-splash for healing. I am relatively new to red fang in the takedown and I don’t have a good video to link for this one unfortunately
Some more very good advice.
I’ve ran my rakk fl4k in the raid since day one, I just finished the night by soloing the takedown with the build I’ve used since it hit. Still using a non anointed lyuda on wotan, my build is a little glassy but very well suited for the takedown.
Alot of people I know really like the gammaburst builds for survivability.
I will add after reading the advie above, a stopgap and last stand Otto idol are extremely useful if you do go rakk and I personally feel like a brainstormer is almost required. I used to use the ■■■■ out of my lifesteal Maggie but once you get the tempo down you’ll be able to use a more powerful one.
There was a brief mention of anointments, but making sure you have a good “on ASE” elemental anointed shield and some sort of grenade also with an “on ASE” anointment will really help you kill things remarkably faster with the Brainstormer, especially if you are specced into Megavore. I recommend the Transformer, but lots of people also like the Stop Gap and Re-Charger for the Takedown.
I recommend using radiation and corrosive as your on ASE elements for your shield and grenade. Those make the Brainstormer really wreck.
10/10 would recommend the Last Stand Otto Idol. Those are tough to get though, but really either of those artifacts on their own both work really well if they have good passives.
My typical loadout for my Rakk build for the Takedown is: Brainstormer, Maggie, shock Cutsman, corrosive Cutsman. I use Brainstormer for 90% of it, using the Maggie for single targets that are not near any others and using the Cutsmans for Wotan and the Valkyries if necessary (but it often is not).
It was a trial and error thing for me of figuring out the best strategies. Sometimes the ones that seem most logical are not. When you get the the bridge before Wotan, don’t get pinned down on the entrance side of the bridge. Run as fast as you can past all the enemies to the other side of the bridge where the door to the hall before Wotan is located and take cover behind those containers. Use the cover there, wait for the enemies to come to you, hop out and Braistormer a big group of them while taking cover between the containers and the dump truck to keep from getting overwhelmed.
Strange. I would think FL4K would be best suited for The Takedown. I’m using FL4K on my second run through the entire game (TVHM now), but I can’t even access the terminal. And there’s no exclamation point on my map. I’ve already made a post about it. I’m playing on Xbox One X. Have you tried with the Legendary Reflecting Messy Breakup Shield? You can farm it from GenIVIV. That might help!
I’ve run the takedown solo many times as Zane (many times pre-Seein Dead) and Amara, but had barely probed it as Fl4k. I decided to put some time in today to really tinker with it. After a little tinkering at Sanctuary, I decided to try a megavore build with up to 3/5 Who Saved Who in blue tree, and up to Turn Tail and Run in green. Friend-Bot with 3 in Barbaric Yawp, pistol damage, weapon critical. Stop Gap with ASE corrosive, cloning Hunter seeker with ASE cryo, and a purple rarity relic with last stand and reload speed as the big value points. Maggie with ASE radiation, non-anointed Brainstormer.
I made sure to log out and back in so I didn’t get weirdness with cooldowns, then jumped in.
Wow.
I basically strolled through everything, up until Wotan’s double shield phase. I hadn’t actually thought I would get that far, and stupidly forgot to plan for it.
Frankly, I’m stunned at how easy it was to get that far. The Valks were a breeze. Not My Circus is incredible.
That sounds exactly like my case.
On my 1st real attempt at MT, I made it all the way to Wutan and got him to the 2nd shield phase. I thought it was going to be easy after that.
It took me 8 more attempts from there to finally beat Wutan though. Made me realize I knew nothing about the fight. I had to learn the each phase the hard way.
I think you’ll beat it easier because you already know what to expect.
If you pulled that off with Fl4k as your first VH to Wotan, that is impressive! Having the luxury of having seen it made my run to him easier, for sure. When I learned it with Zane, I did it without CCC or Seein Dead, so I learned fall back points and where to fight to manage cover while barrier was cooling down. That translates almost perfectly to working around Fade Away. All of this to say, I tip my hat to you for getting there with a blind start.
From this point, it’s problem solving the double shield phase, which I think is fine if I get over my neurotic feeling that I fail if I go into FFYL in a run. That has haunted me since BL1. I tend to fixate on figuring out strategies to stay up, usually with a handicap of some sort early on, to force myself to learn how to do it consistently. It’s a lot of self imposed headache, and is usually slower going than accepting and planning for FFYL. It seems like it should be as straight forward as going inside the outer shield and spamming Brainstormer, which would also get my pet second winds off the Friend-Bot. We’ll see. I probably won’t get to look at it again unt next week.
As Fl4k, I found the Wotan fight infuriating for the first couple weeks the Takedown was released. I am on Xbone, so I was only playing it solo, because matchmaking is hell on Xbone. I refuse to watch YT tutorials on this kind of thing because I want to figure it out myself. I am talking specifically about M4.
I would literally almost speedrun through the dungeon to the Wotan fight, clear the first 2 or 3 phases of Wotan with no problem at all, and then once I would get the 2-shield phase down to half of the second shield bar, he spawns the 4 Krakens and splits in 2. If you take his shield down quickly enough, this essentially all happens at once. That is where I would get wrecked. It is just a very brief - but huuuuge - volley of damage in what I perceived to be an otherwise very easy fight.
If you want some strats, here is what I would say. If you are like I am and don’t want any, look away! LOL It is easy to make that phase more difficult than it needs to be. There are two pretty easy options in my opinion. I am sure this depends on your build ( I run Rakks and Hunter/Stalker with Megavore only) but you can either:
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Quickly run in between the outside shield and the inside shield and “kill the Maliwan guys” with the Brainstormer, as it will generally chain to Wotan and take down at least the outside shield - and it will do it quickly. Then get farther away from him, go to the top of the jump platform, and hit him with the Cutsman or some other strong weapon that you can get in over the top of the shield. This is the more risky option. Sometimes the add spawns and enemy positioning dictate it though.
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You can stand outside the shields (this is why this is the less risky option, LOL) and use a shock Projectile Recursion to shoot through the shield to Wotan and bounce projectiles off all the adds. This will generally take down at least the outside shield and sometimes both. It doesn’t require a shock Recursion, by the way, any Recursion will work as long as you have some way, like an anointment, to deal shock damage. If the Recursion kills all the adds but doesn’t fully take down both shields, you still may have to do some of #1.
Either way, I have found the key is that, once both shield bars come down and Wotan splits, you need to have left the 4 Krakens left alive to either chain a Brainstormer off of to Wotan’s halves (must be done REALLY quickly and is risky, but is possible) or get a little further away and ricochet Recursion shots off of the halves and the Krakens (also must be done quickly). Make sure you have your Recursion reloaded and ready to go, and either switch to corrosion if you have a shock/corrosive, or have your corrosive anoint on so you can use your anoint.
If that doesn’t kill at least the Better Half, things can get dicey after that. When the Better Half spawns the orbs, use your anointments and chain Brainstormers to them. This will generally hit the Better Half pretty hard and allow you to corrosive Cutsman or Maggie him to death.
Then you are left with the Bottom Half. Use the corrosive Cutsman and hide behind the jump platform to the right side of the entrance. I find that provides the most protection.
Sorry for the long post, but it was infuriating me to figure out how to finish just that very last part of the fight and I thought you might appreciate some help. Hope it does help you and good luck!
I just went back in and worked it out on the fourth go at Wotan. What you described is almost exactly what I did (Brainstormer, not Recursion). I switched to Until You Are Dead and Unblinking Eye augments and a Bounty Hunter for the last look, and they paid off beautifully. I was surprised to not go into FFYL between the shields in that phase. I did go down once while the Better Half was up. Striker volleys are ridiculous.
I think a lot of people are scared at first to go inside the first shield because up to that point in the fight going inside the shield is instadeath. But it actually makes the fight quite a bit faster, at least as Fl4k, to do it that way because the Brainstormer is just that good on him.
And yeah, that volley of damage is tough on Fl4k because he lacks shield skills. I use the Re-Charger and a Last Stand Otto Idol for the Wotan portion of the Takedown for that reason. It essentially doubles your shield capacity when you need it most, and then you get the immunity under half health too. Only problem is that I don’t think a Last Stand will protect you if you get DOTed. Will protect against incoming damage though. Lots of people use Stop Gap in that fight for these same reasons.
Glad you were able to get through!
Like Kab mentioned in the earlier post, I make sure to kill all the Strikers before Wotan gets into the double shield phase. It makes rest of the fight much easier to manage.
Like Tyson, I utilize the Recursion during this fight to delete adds in just 1 FA. It’s like the entire arena getting lit up. Quite spectacular.