Lab Assault is now the place to farm for gear on DD. It is easy enough to run once you learn how. I have taken many through it and decided it was time to just make a video to show people.

• Lupine Bow - Used on Insane - A good Lupine with high damage can shoot through walls at a distance and destroy the crystals.
  
• BFDrill - Used on NM. Huntress reward from Volcanic Eruption Challenge. Get one from there, in a shop, add me or join the DD RnG group or the Free Runs Group to get one. Or you can add me to get one.
  
• High Health and Resists - Especially when running Nightmare. Your resists are lower on Assault challenges than normal NM maps. Your range of fire is greatly reduced as well.
  
• Crystal Staff/Classic Eagle/Rainmaker - Used to DPS when EVs wont jump off.
  
• Splitscreen - Having 4 characters in the game will get you 4x the reward. If you dont know how to enable splitscreen, check out the Splitscreen section in this guide.
  
• Pet with speed boost for NM: Skele (11%), Turtle (25%), Small Diamond (30%), Diamond (40%), Treadmill on Treadmill (45%)

• Insane Hardcore will get just as good armor as Nightmare but is far easier to beat.
  
• Nightmare Hardcore gives good armor, pets, and accs.
  
• Weapons received on this map are all useless except when sold to tavern keep for mana. Upgrading is expensive and all the items you cannot use from this map are a great source of mana.

It is now widely known to use a BFdrill or another type of gun with large AOE to destroy crystals and to make the EVs jump off the edge of the map. Also, the route you take to destroy all four crystals is a personal preference and is totally whatever you are comfortable with. The secret is where to stand.

I have found though the best place to stand when fighting EVs is in the hole near the spawn. If you watch the video I go AFK for about a minute and a half while some EVs jump off the ledge themselves. I start shooting at about 3:40 and usually complete around at around 3:00-3:20 left.

Others use the hole at the corner of the drop off but EVs can often get stuck on the ledge below where you cannot reach. I have had to go look for an EV on rare occasions but I can always get to them.

In the end, run it however you are comfortable though. There is not really a right way to run this map as long as you are beating it. :) Enjoy.

Sometimes EVs get stuck around the map and can be frustrting to find. Here are some pics of where you may find them hiding from you.

The first one is probably the most common one. Here the EVs are stuck beneath the spawn to the player's right. Usually they are easily pushed out of here by the projectiles of the BF drill but it can also happen that they venture further in under the spawn itself. In that case it might be too time consuming to stay and kill that one EV as they tend to stay in there for a long while. The player have to decide whether or not it is woth it.




This second spot is also very common. It is to the player's left when standing in the spot shown in the video. EVs somehow fall through the floor and lands on a small ledge out of the player's sight. To kill EVs that went here simply shoot the grey brick wall. It might be needed to move if the EVs were stuck further away from the player.




The last one is not very common. This is a spot that can catch EVs if they pass the player and falls down the small hole behind the player to the right. It is possible to stand on the outside of the ledge, as shown on the picture, however be careful as the jump height in assault modes is lower than the usual height. It can also happen that EVs here simply get stuck and cannot move no matter when the player does. Then all that is left to do is to restart.




Okay so you might have checked these three spots now and you still see no sign of the remaining EV? In this case it is hard to say where the EV could be located. Here is two things I (M3rc!_33#) like to do when hunting down an EV:

1) I look at the end of the little upwards conveyor belt behind the player to the right. There is a small gap between the wall and the two pillars where EVs tend to get stuck at.
2) EVs can be hard to spot from their figure as they do not have colours that differentiate very much from the environment. However their eyes are easily distinguishable also from relatively far distances. Simply go to a high altitude and take a look at the entire map. You might just catch that outstanding flare of the eyes of an EV stuck on a railing somewhere.

Move all the good loot you want to keep to another folder. Look for Ult++ pets as they can be great for DPS (dragons) or as tower pets. Of course you want to look for awesome myth, trans, sups and ult armor to improve your chars or to use for trade later. Accessories can have great stats on NMHC so make sure to look through those. If you dont have hardly any accs and cant run NMHC yet, then definitely look through the accs on insane to help boost your stats.

Sell all weapons unless you just want to collect one for some reason. They are useless otherwise except to sell for mana.

Selling the loot can be a painful process and deters many from farming lab too much (which may be a good thing). However CrispyBucket created an awesome script to make the process very simple. It basically goes through your folder dropping all to the map floor very quickly. So we you use it make sure you dont have anything in the folder you dont want to drop.

Here[app.box.com] is a link to the script.

The instructions on how to run the script are in the zip file. Basically you just need to load up a map and know how to push F7 to start and F8 to stop it. :) Once you are done dropping the items, hit G and the map will start the level and autosell the gear for the mana.

When the Update comes out you will be able to get all of the mana from your runs when you sell all. It should be about 2.3 billion mana per 10 runs.

UPDATE: Moonbase patch is out and you can now use the Unlock All and Sell All buttons instead of using the drop script. Currently though you may experience a hang when unlocking all. We are looking to fix that in an future update.

UPDATE 2: In patch 8.10 the hang when clicking unlock all should be fixed. It is still a good idea to check through the folder that you are unlocking. There are stories of very good items disappearing this way.

If you need further help, just let me know. Enjoy.