The endgame in Zenless Zone Zero, for much of its early life, is centered around the Shiyu Defense mode, a seven-stage timed gauntlet testing players’ build and skills. That all changed in update 1.4 with the addition of the Deadly Assault mode, a massive difficulty spike designed for only the most dedicated and invested players.
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Deadly Assault has none of the newer-player-friendly mechanics, acting as a true pinnacle activity that does more than test players: it wants them to demonstrate mastery of every aspect of ZZZ’s gameplay. We’ll go over everything you need to know about how to succeed in Deadly Assault here.
How Deadly Assault Works
First and foremost, know that you won’t even unlock until you reach Inter-Knot level 40 and have Shiyu Defense unlocked as well. If all you do is play Zenless Zone Zero every day, reaching that point might take at least a few days, thanks to the experience and time-gating during the story campaign.
Deadly Assault comprises three time trials against level 70 versions of story campaign bosses, and there is no scaling for lower-level characters.
You’ll 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 rack up as many points as possible in three minutes of combat. The three score thresholds you need to hit are:
- One-star/B-rank: 6,000 points in three minutes.
- Two-star/A-rank: 14,000 points in three minutes.
- Three-star/S-rank: 20,000 points in three minutes.
Every damage tick you land with any of your Agents only accrues a few points, and a full damage rotation (not including the Stun window) will only net you maybe 1,000 or so if you have a top meta team like Miyabi, Yanagi, and Caesar/Burnice.
You earn score in two ways: dealing damage and completing specific tasks based on the boss you’re fighting. If you’re facing the Notorious – Marionette, for instance, you get an additional 200 points for destroying any of the duplicates it creates, to a maximum of 5,000.
Every boss in Deadly Assault has 30 health bars, so even with meta teams, you’re unlikely to actually kill them, but that isn’t the point. Points in a short time are all that matters.
How To Succeed In Deadly Assault
You won’t be going in entirely without assistance. Every boss has modifiers attached to them. The Marionette, for example, has 25 percent increased damage, but every duplicate you destroy cuts that increase by five percent to a minimum of zero and increases the Ice and Electric damage it takes by ten percent, up to 50 percent.
Three bosses means you’ll need three teams because once you choose your squad and their Bangboo, the characters you choose will be locked from use against other bosses. In other words, you need three fully built teams to challenge Deadly Assault with any success.
That three-team system is doubly necessary because you can choose between three buffs for each team. You can choose the same buff for each team or use whatever fits their DPS style better.
Between your team’s modifiers and the boss’s, you’ll always have a clear way to earn as many points as possible, but unless you have game-breaking DPS (see Miyabi at her release), you’re going to need to engage with each boss’s special mechanic to get the Performance Points you need to clear the score requirements.
Using the Marionette example again, while you can reach 20,000 points through raw damage if you have a beefy DPS, the extra 25 percent damage the boss deals will punish even the smallest mistakes, and the 50 percent damage bonus makes reaching the score thresholds significantly easier.
Don’t worry if you don’t get to three stars in even your first ten attempts. Deadly Assault bosses are a huge step up in difficulty from their story and Notorious Hunt versions.
It will take at least a bit to learn the new mechanics, find safe damage opportunities, and fine-tune your team setup for a particular fight.
How To Build Three Teams For Deadly Assault
Building three teams for Deadly Assault will take lots and lots of time. All three bosses are level 70, and the maximum character level is 60, so you’ll always be facing ten levels of damage reduction.
Second, you’ll want every Agent in your teams to have at least two tiers of Skills upgraded and a solid set of Drive Discs. And you need to do all that at least nine times as more bosses and mechanics make their way into Zenless Zone Zero.
As far as which teams work best to take on Deadly Assault, it will really depend on the current meta for the game. At the launch of the mode in update 1.4, here are three teams that can run through the mode with enough investment:
- Bringer: Miyabi, Yanagi, and Caesar.
- Pompey: Piper or Jane Doe with Burnice and Lucy. You’re relying on Anomaly and Disorder damage a lot here, but fire DPS characters are in short supply (sorry, Soldier 11).
- Marionettes: Ellen with Lighter and Soukaku or Rina
Yes, we know these teams are primarily made up of limited S-ranks, but that’s where the endgame of a gacha like ZZZ usually goes. Pull or suffer. On the release of Deadly Assault in 1.4, the character roster was particularly thin, as the game was still far less than 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 enabling a single unit, like Jane Doe or Ellen, to do most of the team’s damage.
A double DPS setup like Miyabi Yanagi relegates one of the two DPS characters to supplement the other. Think Yanagi acting as a Disorder/Fallen Frost battery for Miyabi, for instance.
Why Should You Try Deadly Assault?
The Deadly Assault game mode is not for the faint of heart, and unless you plan to dedicate hundreds of hours to Zenless Zone Zero gearing characters and mastering their movesets, it’s probably not worth fretting over too much.
The primary reason? You only get a maximum of 300 Polychromes from the activity, plus a handful of Investigation Merits. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, that’s because it’s not. You’ll only really want to play Deadly Assault if:
- You want to overcome the hardest challenge in the game.
- You want to test a new character or team to see how endgame-ready they are.
- You want to identify any glaring gaps in the builds 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 enemy and gameplay variety.
The 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.
