End of the game in Zenless Zone Zerofor most of its early life, it centers around the Shiyu Defense mode, a seven-stage timed gauntlet testing players' character and skill. That all changed in update 1.4 with the addition of Deadly Assault mode, a massive difficulty bump meant for only the most dedicated and invested players.

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Deadly Assault has none of the newer player-friendly mechanics, it feels like a true pinnacle activity that does more than just test players: it wants them to demonstrate mastery of all aspects of ZZZ gameplay. Here we go over everything you need to know about how to succeed in Deadly Assault.
How Deadly Assault works
First of all, know that you won't even unlock until you are reach Inter-Knot level 40 and have the Shiyu defense unlocked also. If all you do is play Zenless Zone Zero every day, it can take at least a few days to reach this point due to experience and the time limit during the story campaign.
Deadly Assault features three time trials against level 70 version of story campaign bossesand lower level characters have no scale.
You will also find that the bosses have new mechanics and moves, are much more aggressive and have massive health pools. Your goal in Deadly Assault is to score as many points as possible in three minutes of combat. The three score limits you need to reach are:
- One star/B-rank: 6000 points in three minutes.
- Two-star/A-rank: 14,000 points in three minutes.
- Three-star/S-rank: 20,000 points in three minutes.
Each tick of damage you land with any of your agents only racks up a few points, and a full damage roll (not including the stun window) just cleans you up. maybe 1000 or so if you have a top meta team like Miyabi, Yanagi and Caesar/Burnice.
There are two ways to score: dealing damage and completing specific tasks based on the boss you're fighting. For example, if you're facing Notorious – Marionette, you get an extra 200 points for destroying any of the duplicates it creates, up to a maximum of 5,000.
Every boss in Deadly Assault has 30 health, so even with metateams you're unlikely to actually kill them, but that's not the point. Points in the short term is all that matters.
How to succeed in a deadly attack
You can't quite get in without help. Each boss has modifiers attached to it. For example, a puppet takes 25 percent more damage, but each duplicate you destroy increases it by five percent to a minimum of zero, and increases ice and electricity damage by ten percent, up to 50 percent.
Three bosses means you'll need three teams because once you've chosen your team and their Bangboo, the characters you choose will be blocked against other bosses. In other words, you need three fully built teams to fight Deadly Assault with any success.
That three-team system is doubly necessary because you can choose between three enthusiasts for each team. You can choose the same buff for each team or use whatever better suits their DPS style.
Between your team's modifiers and the boss's modifiers, you'll always have a clear way to get the most points, but unless you have a game-breaking DPS (see Miyabi when it's released), you'll need to engage each one. special boss mechanic to get the performance points you need to clear the score requirements.
Using the puppet example again, while you can hit 20,000 points through raw damage if you have strong DPS, the additional 25 percent damage the boss deals will punish even the smallest mistakes, and the 50 percent damage bonus will ensure that score thresholds are met. significantly easier.
Don't worry if you don't get three stars in the first ten tries. Deadly Assault's bosses are a huge step up in difficulty compared to their story and Notorious Hunt versions.
Learning new mechanics, finding safe damage opportunities, and fine-tuning team setups for a particular fight will take at least a little bit.
How to build three teams for a deadly attack
Building three teams for Deadly Assault will take time lots and lots time. All three bosses are level 70 and the max character level is 60, so you'll always be facing ten levels of damage reduction.
Second, you'll want every agent on your teams to do this have at least two skill levels upgraded and a solid set of Drive Discs. And you have to do all this at least nine times, because more bosses and mechanics will make it to Zenless Zone Zero.
As for which teams will work best on Deadly Assault, it will really depend on the current meta for the game. When the mode launches in Update 1.4, there are three teams that can pass the mode with enough investment:
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Bearers: Miyabi, Yanagi, and Caesar.
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Pompey: Piper or Jane Doe with Burnice and Lucy. You rely heavily on anomaly and disruption damage here, but fire DPS characters are in short supply (sorry soldier 11).
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Puppets: Ellen with a lighter and Soukaku or Rina
Yes, we know these teams are primarily made up of limited S-ranks, but that's usually where a gacha ending like ZZZ ends up. Pull or suffer. When Deadly Assault was released in version 1.4, the character roster was particularly thin because the game was still well under a year old.
There are two main compositions you should consider for teams regardless of mode, but especially for Deadly Assault: hypercarry and double DPS. Hypercarry focuses on allowing a single unit like Jane Doe or Ellen to do most of the team's damage.
A dual DPS setup like Miyabi Yanagi relegates one of the two DPS characters to complement the other. Think of Yanagi acting as a Disorder/Fallen Frost battery for Miyabi, for example.
Why should you try Deadly Assault?
Deadly Assault's game mode isn't for the faint of heart, and unless you plan on spending hundreds of hours of Zenless Zone Zero equipping characters and mastering their movesets, it's probably not worth bothering too much.
The primary reason? You get a maximum of 300 polychromes from the activity plus a handful of investigation credits. If that doesn't sound like much, that's because it isn't. You'll only really want to play Deadly Assault if:
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You want to overcome the hardest challenge in the game.
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You want to test a new character or team to see how they are ready for the end game.
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You want to identify any glaring gaps in the lineups for your current teams.
Between the two, Shiyu Defense is a much better endgame mode for the wider ZZZ audience. It offers better rewards, difficulty progression and more variety of enemies and games.
In-game events, especially those coming in major patches, are also much better sources of polychromes and materials, as are the ever-evolving Hollow Zero modes.

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