Environmental Damage
There are two types of stacking environmental damage:
- 🌩️ - Building Static (lightning) by being outside the safe areas
- 🌱 - Volatile Residue (poison) by getting hit by the plants on the safe areas (oblivion damage - not shieldable nor mitigatable)
They gain stacks making each subsequent hit of the same type of damage deal more damage. After 5s of not receiving this damage, it expires - completely resetting the stacks.
Growth/Plant Safe Area Mechanics
As long as someone stays in the safe shelters (you recognize them visually by the wooden roofs above and the electricity or green outlines on the floor), more and more plants will be created until the central plant will start spitting at players. Use the spaces sparingly or rotate around the map to another safe area if one becomes overwhelmed with plants
- Every 4 seconds there is a plant explosion
- Every 7 plants, 1 extra plant is added (or roughly every 30seconds)
- When the area reaches 6 plants the center plant instead starts shooting out projectiles
- Every 6 seconds you're outside the safe area the plant loses a stack
Mechanics
Acid Reflux
Reef Guardians will cast a cone that follows the player with aggro (ideally the tank) for 10s and drops a poison pool on the circle every 2s - for a total of 5. If more players are in the cone, additional poison pools will be dropped, creating additional areas of denial.
Staying in the poison pool deals damage, and applies stacks of Acidic Vulnerability, with each consequent one making the player take more damage from poison.
Replication
There are three different sizes of Reef Guardians, each size with a different amount of health. When a Reef Guardian reaches a certain health percentage, it replicates into a smaller one.
- Large
- The initial boss you engage
- Health: 31 Million
- Quantity: 1
- Replication
- At 80% HP, it will create a medium copy
- At 50% HP, it will create a medium copy
- Hardmode: Creates medium copies at 100% and 80%
- Medium
- Health: 20 Million
- Quantity: 2
- Replication
- At 50% HP, it will create a small copy
- Hardmode: Creates a small copy at 80%
- Small
- Health: 15 Million
- Quantity: 2
- Replication
- Does not replicate
Their health values are doubled in hardmode.
Reef Heart
After a certain time or when reaching certain HP thresholds each Reef Guardian will charge towards an open hole and start casting Heartburn for 60s on a Reef Heart. A Coral Drift Bear and a Coral Drift Senche will spawn near that hole. If the Reef Heart is destroyed in the meantime, nothing happens. If the group fails to destroy the corresponding Reef Heart, the Reef Guardian will enrage and if it’s not killed within 10s “Rocks fall, everybody dies” - it will cause a group wipe.
In Hardmode, when the Heartburn is stopped (either after 60s or the Reef heart is killed), a Dreadsail Incendiary mage will spawn next to the corresponding hole upstairs.
See the section “Portals” for more details.
Map Views
Upstairs
Reef Guardian Upstairs MapDownstairs
Portals
- Jump in the water from one of the 3 entrances in the middle, and land in a whirlpool on the bottom. There are three entrances to the Reef Hearts that you can take. See which symbol is activated and take the corresponding entrance (either through communication, seeing the symbol upstairs or the symbol will light up in the center downstairs).
- Press the synergy (default: X) to take one of the three entrances and swim to the correct position.
- Kill the Reef Heart (800k HP in vet, 2.6M HP in Hardmode) and avoid the damage from the Coral Crab (you don’t have to kill the crab).
- After you’re done, press the synergy on the water spout to go up.
- When returning upstairs, a debuff (“you have been infested with a parasite”) of 40s will start that will kill you if you attempt to go do a Reef (or portal) in the meantime.
Hardmode
In hardmode, the lightning strikes falling on players are AOE, so if you stack your lightning, stacks from Building Static will go up much faster. Additionally, the Dreadsail Incendiary (mage) spawns after completing a Reef (portal) applying a healing debuff.
Video
Boss 2 Reef Guardian Hardmode HM clear (live):
