Ascension Guide *UPDATED*

*Updated for every combination of players* 

Team Shop­ping List and Roles: Solo

The Kite Run­ner: Thun­der­gun, MP5K
*Essen­tial Perks (in order of impor­tance)* Jug, Revive, Sta­mina, Speed
*Equip­ment* clay­mores, ger­sch device



Team Shop­ping List and Roles: Two Player

The Kite Run­ner: Thun­der­gun, MP5K
*Essen­tial Perks (in order of impor­tance)* Jug, Revive, Sta­mina, Speed
*Equip­ment* clay­mores, ger­sch device

The Guardian: (flex­i­ble) Mus­tang & Sally (upgraded M1911), Ray Gun, Art­ful Law­ton (upgraded cross­bow), upgraded shotgun/python.
*Essen­tial Perks* Jug, Revive, Flop­per, Speed
*Equip­ment* clay­mores, ger­sch device



Team Shop­ping List and Roles: Three-Four Player

The Kite Run­ner: Thun­der­gun, MP5K
*Essen­tial Perks (in order of impor­tance)* Jug, Revive, Sta­mina, Speed
*Equip­ment* clay­mores, ger­sch device

The Guardian: Art­ful Law­ton, Mus­tang & Sally
*Essen­tial Perks* Jug, Revive, Flop­per
*Equip­ment* clay­mores, ger­sch device

Defen­sive #1: Ray Gun, Raid (upgraded stake­out)
*Essen­tial Perks* Jug, Flop­per, Revive, Speed
*Equip­ment* clay­mores, ger­sch device

Defen­sive #2: Ray Gun, Raid
*Essen­tial Perks* Jug, Flop­per, Revive, Speed
*Equip­ment* clay­mores, ger­sch device



The Kite Runner

Rounds 1–3:

Shoot and stab, we all know how it goes, right? Good.

Rounds 4–6:

Open the upstairs door between rounds 3 and 4 and buy the MP5k. Every­one. The team orga­ni­za­tion here is still pretty flex­i­ble. To be spe­cific, there are 2 entry points on the flop­per plat­form, a win­dow next to the MP5k, and the out­side area of the cen­trifuge room. Obvi­ously over­see all of these entries and rack up the points. Leave a crawler around round 6 or so and col­lec­tively buy your way into the power and jug­gernog room. Buy Jug, every­one. This is where orga­ni­za­tion starts to become really impor­tant. It would be wise to des­ig­nate your roles at this point. The goal of the run­ner is to accu­mu­late as many points as pos­si­ble. The MP5k is still fine for that pur­pose, it should still be your pri­mary but a stake­out would be safe to have just in case. The other play­ers should def­i­nitely buy a stake­out from the wall and keep the MP5k as well for points sake. Refrain from hit­ting the box right now, you don’t need it. Kill the crawler and pro­ceed back towards Flopper.

Rounds 7–10:

The run­ner should be focused on accu­mu­lat­ing as many points as he/she can. Over­see the main stair­case using the MP5k as much as pos­si­ble while also alter­nat­ing with the stake­out to reduce the size of the incom­ing horde. Buy MP5k ammo off the wall safely when you have a clear path. The part­ner watch­ing the stair­case should be con­cen­trated on sti­fling the mob with the stake­out. This is espe­cially impor­tant when the run­ner needs to re buy ammo for the MP5K. It’s a joint effort to make the run­ner as suc­cess­ful as pos­si­ble in the early going. The other 2 play­ers have it easy. One to each win­dow up on the plat­form with anMP5K and stake­out should be a breeze. Use your dis­cre­tion to assist the play­ers guard­ing the stair­case when they need it. You should encounter a mon­key round some­time dur­ing this step. First one’s cake, every­one guard Jug and you get a free mys­tery perk out of it. Even­tu­ally around round 10 or so, the run­ner should have enough money to spam the mys­tery box until they get the desired weapon (Thun­der­gun). Mean­while the other play­ers on the team should be buy­ing doors to perks and buy­ing perks them­selves. Once the thun­der­gun is inevitably dis­trib­uted, you could take turns at the box or save your money for a pack-a-punch. The pri­or­ity here is that the run­ner gets the thun­der­gun. It is still early in the game so there will be plenty of time to get prop­erly setup as the game progresses.

Rounds 10+: The Main Strategy

This is the strat­egy you will employ for the rest of the game. If you are famil­iar with hord­ing strate­gies on Kino, this shouldn't be too for­eign of a con­cept to you. The run­ner with the thun­der­gun should gather up spawn­ing zom­bies by run­ning cir­cles around the plat­form. Fac­ing out­ward towards the map, I’ve seen cir­cles being run both clock­wise and counter-clockwise with suc­cess so it’s really up to the run­ner. In my expe­ri­ence, run­ning counter-clockwise seems to fare bet­ter for the rest of the team in gen­eral. Where is the rest of the team while this is going on? Good ques­tion. The rest of the team is in the small room with the flop­per machine and the lone window. The key here is for every­one to stay as close to the back wall as pos­si­ble. The closer you get to the door­way, the more likely cer­tain zom­bies being “kited” will sep­a­rate from the group and attack you and the rest of the group nes­tled safely in the room. This is where the roles becomes cru­cial. The “defen­sive roles” should be set on defend­ing that lone win­dow. Their weapons of choice should be some­thing with sheer stop­ping power in mind. Think ray­gun, upgraded shot­guns, upgraded pythons, etc. The ben­e­fit of upgrad­ing the stake­out is that it remains a highly pow­er­ful gun late in the game and ammo should never be a prob­lem as you can buy more between rounds. The Guardian has a very impor­tant job as well over­see­ing the run­ner and being the first one to react if the run­ner goes down. The guardian is also impor­tant in being the first to notice rogue zom­bies that might attack the group inside. It might seem like a some­what “bor­ing” job but it’s the sec­ond most impor­tant posi­tion. The Kite Run­ner is, by far, the most impor­tant player on your team. If he/she goes down, your instinct should be to throw a ger­sch device out there. In fact, if pos­si­ble, throw enough ger­sch devices for the player to re buy Jug and return to the pad. The runner’s job is sim­ple. Just as in Kino, the most effi­cient method of killing zom­bies in the high rounds is by using traps. Horde the zom­bies up until they have stopped spawn­ing while spray­ing the mob behind you every once in a while with MP5k rounds. Have your thun­der­gun out as a pri­mary when you sim­ply can­not dodge spawn­ers while run­ning a cir­cle. Per­son­ally, this is a bit more dif­fi­cult than on Kino because the win­dow of oppor­tu­nity to squeeze through zom­bies is a lot tighter. Even hav­ing the thun­der­gun equipped could give you a false sense of secu­rity and all it takes is a few well-timed shots on their end to put you down. In gen­eral though, using your thun­der­gun too lib­er­ally is bet­ter than using it too spar­ingly and going down. Any­way, once the entire horde is safely behind, lead them to the gate that accesses the launch­pad and acti­vate the trap through the gate. It is impor­tant for the rest of the team to stay against the wall in that room until the run­ner has led the horde a cer­tain dis­tance. The tail end of the horde could sep­a­rate and come after you if you decide to run out­side and fool­ishly buy grenades or something. After the run­ner has led the pack through the trap, he/she can then pro­ceed to run upstairs through the main build­ing, exit through the hole in the wall on the right and pro­ceed back to the plat­form to repeat the process. Buy ammo for the MP5k on your way back to the plat­form and you should have way more than enough to keep sustaining.

Keep these tips in mind:

–Mon­key rounds are a cake­walk with the right weapons. An ade­quately loaded won­der­gun takes care of them eas­ily. Don’t under­es­ti­mate them though. If there’s even a shadow of a doubt that you don’t have the ammo nec­es­sary to fight them off, your default perk machine that must be guarded is jug. Fight them off col­lec­tively if there are too many weak links. Put your best player(s) on jug­gernog. You can afford to lose other perks, but you don’t want to be jug­less in the mid­dle of a mon­key round. It’s a recipe for disaster.

–Clay­mores are impor­tant to place inside the room with the flop­per (and the rest of your team). Even­tu­ally, the clay­mores will inflict min­i­mal dam­age to the zom­bies, but it serves as an alarm for when the perime­ter is breached. if that some­how gets past the guardian, the remain­ing play­ers in that room should imme­di­ately think about throw­ing a ger­sch. if you are the guardian and notice incom­ing zom­bies, fire the upgraded cross­bow out the win­dow and the zom­bies should leave you alone. Every­one needs to be alert and work­ing as a term. Duh.

–The run­ner should be some­what calm and intel­li­gent about how to lead the zom­bies. “Run­ning in cir­cles” is a bit mis­lead­ing because the most effec­tive way to lead them around is to zigzag your run­ning pat­terns and keep them guess­ing. As pre­dictable as their run­ning habits are, it’s some­times impos­si­ble to gauge just how many there are and the tail end of a horde could end up being the death of you.

–The play­ers in the room, in addi­tion to hav­ing weapons with solid stop­ping power at the win­dow, should also have an emer­gency gun to clear the room of a stray horde. Ide­ally, the guardian should have that cov­ered with the art­ful law­ton but shit hap­pens. I’ve found Mus­tang & Sally’s work won­ders even in the higher lev­els. Ide­ally, there should also be a cou­ple ray guns in the pic­ture. This is where the flop­per makes itself useful. Contrary to pop­u­lar belief, the flopper’s main ben­e­fit is actu­ally the absence of splash dam­age. so feel free to not have to worry about hurt­ing your­self with the ray gun or any explo­sive projectiles. Needless to say, if the run­ner goes down with an entire horde behind, every­one in that room is jeop­ar­dized unless a ger­sch is thrown imme­di­ately. The last thing you want to see before you die is a hun­dred zom­bies storm­ing your trapped bodies. Hope for the best and expect the worst. But if worse comes to worst and every­one in the room dies, the run­ner shouldn’t veer from his/her strat­egy. Fin­ish the round.

–Keep the lan­der docked. Never use it in the mid­dle of a round to save any­one except the run­ner. While it may offer you tem­po­rary relief to revive other team­mates, you’re only shoot­ing your­self in the foot by hav­ing to rework your way back to the pad expend­ing cru­cial Zeus rounds and ger­sch devices. The docked lander’s con­trols also serves as an imped­i­ment to the zom­bies run­ning pat­tern and slows them down while you are lead­ing them around.

–Have a secu­rity fund. One or more of your team­mates is bound to go down and lose perks, or die and lose every­thing. Keep enough money to be able to re buy the essen­tials. Be fru­gal. If you’re at round 42 and you haven’t invested in a sickle yet, it’ll prob­a­bly never be a wise invest­ment at that point. Also, don’t be afraid to recy­cle your weapons. If you have excess money (as you should), you might run into sce­nar­ios where your gun isn’t empty, but isn’t exactly fill­ing you with con­fi­dence that you could last the end of the round either. this is most impor­tant with Zeus can­non rounds. If you know a mon­key round just passed and you’re already run­ning pretty low on ammu­ni­tion, don’t count on a max ammo powerup. Put the entire gun back into the box and spam it until it gives it back to you.

How far you can go will largely depend on how many play­ers are on your team, what kind of com­mu­ni­ca­tion you guys have, and con­trol­ling your mar­gin of error. Obvi­ously a solo run would be a lot eas­ier and faster (and with a pause func­tion!) while mul­ti­player with 4play­ers could prove to be a more daunt­ing task. Let me know how suc­cess­ful (or unsuc­cess­ful) you are. Thanks and good luck.