How to Kill Stormbirds | Horizon Zero Dawn 2022 | Master Machine Hunting Guide

guys welcome back to my horizon zero dawn master machine hunting series horizon forbidden west will be out in just a few weeks and i'm making these guides for everyone playing zerodon for the first time or maybe you're like me and you're replaying the first game to get hyped for the sequel either way stick around because in this video we're tackling storm birds one of my favorite machines and also one of the toughest to kill but get ready because i've got a strategy that will let you take them down even early in the game now i know a lot of people struggle with storm birds and for good reason at 5000 hp they have more health than any other machine in the game except for thunder jaws and fire claws plus storm birds are a flying machine of course which makes them way more dynamic and difficult to track compared to most machines of course they also have some very strong attacks for example the shock blast that they can shoot from their lightning gun on their chest and the diving thunder clash that deals both shock and melee damage they also don't have a particular body weakness that we can exploit so we have to find another way to chip away at that 5000 hp fortunately with a couple of key weapons we can actually handle storm birds pretty easily even in the early to mid game so first off the stormbird shock based attacks are very problematic but they're all driven by the lightning gun on his chest so this is the first thing we want to focus on destroying as we can see in the machine catalog the lightning gun is weak to tear so we can take care of this component fairly easily using a shadow sharp shot bow and some tear blast arrows as an additional bonus the storm bird will come down closer to us once its lightning gun is destroyed now i know that might not sound like a good thing but it actually is because now we can eliminate its flying ability as well to do that we just need a rope caster to tie it down and immobilize it which makes it much easier to deal damage now just like any machine freezing the storm bird will give our arrows a huge damage multiplier we definitely want to exploit this on the stormbird because of how much health it has so we're going to use a sling and freeze bombs to freeze it now that you have it tied down and frozen you can use your sharpshot bow and high damage precision arrows to deal a bunch of damage either directly to its body or to components like the wing engines now you should realize that as soon as you deal any significant amount of damage the ropes tying the storm bird down will break but don't worry what you need to do at this point is keep your cool and keep hitting the storm bird with precision arrows as long as it's still frozen it's best to line up shots on the center of its body because the stormbird makes a lot of random jerky movements that are hard to track remember to make use of the hunter reflexes skill liberally that gives you a slow-mo effect while you're jumping which makes it a whole lot easier to aim this is similar to the concentration skill but there's no cool down so you can use it as much as you want to line up your shots more easily you'll find if you can deal enough damage quickly the stormbird will get stunned and briefly crumpled to the ground again now the freeze effect will wear off after 30 seconds but when it does you want to immediately switch back to tying the storm bird down with your rope caster then just repeat the process of freezing it and dealing damage it will actually only take you two or three cycles of this to take the storm bird out okay i know that was a lot of steps and it's hard to put it all together so let's dive into the live combat example to see it done in real time all right guys so we're here just below the day tower at the first storm bird site i think pretty much everybody runs into this site before any others because it's on the main quest line from daytower to meridian so this is probably where most people are going to run to a storm bird for the first time so i think it's a good place to do our demo combat and i'll just show you real quick on very hard difficulty level and we can go over the loadout so my outfit is the nora protector medium which is a great early to mid game all-arounder because it has some great um bass melee resist and then i've thrown a basic shock resist on there just because the storm bird has a lot of shock-based attacks but we're actually going to disable all those really early on by getting rid of the lightning gun so we're going to use nora protector medium for the melee resist an alternative could be the nora survivor medium because it has kind of good across-the-board elemental resistance but you'd need to put a pretty good melee resist mod on there for it to be a good all-arounder so you could use that if you want but i'm going to go with the nora protector medium for weapons we've got the shadow sharp shot bow so this is even though it's a purple bow it's actually fairly inexpensive so i would definitely recommend you pick it up as soon as you get to the day tower because it's great for dealing damage early in mid game with the precision arrows and we're going to use those precision arrows to deal damage to the storm bird but we're also going to use the terra blast arrows to blast off the lightning gun right off the bat so let's take a look at the mods that i've put on here so i've got a mid-level handling mod a mid-level damage mod and a low level damage mod i think that's a fairly reasonable setup to say that somebody would have by the time they get to like day tower or meridian let's take a look at the karja's sling so this is what we're going to use to freeze the storm bird with the freeze bombs you could use the regular sling if you want the freeze bombs are just as effective but you only get one mod slot with that and the blue one is only like marginally more expensive and you get two mod slots so i i would grab that and then i put two basic just freeze boosts on here and then the last thing and this is the only thing here you can't get from the day tower unfortunately but i'm going to use the shadow rope caster the purple version and this one shoots heavy ropes which it makes it way easier to tie down big machines like a storm bird you can buy the karja blue rope caster at the day tower but this doesn't use heavy ropes so it's really hard to tie down a big machine like a storm bird with this so i would actually recommend that you kind of just run by the first stormberg and get to meridian where you can buy this shadow rope caster and then you can deal with storm birds a lot easier and on here i just have a couple of basic handling mods so we can shoot it a little bit faster okay let's take a look at skills so the only two you're really going to need are hunter reflexes which gives us the slow-mo effect when we jump so we can aim better which is going to be really handy for dealing damage with the precision arrows and then you're going to want concentration so you can zoom in and hit those tear blast arrows onto the lightning gun on the stormbridge chest so those are the only two you really need it would be very helpful eventually to grab double shot and triple shots you can deal double and triple the amount of damage and then you could also focus on picking up concentration plus and fast reload those would come in handy for any big machine as well but the only ones we're going to need here are concentration and hunter reflexes okay so the first thing i'm going to do here is actually just switch over to my healing potions so it's a good idea to do that before you get into a fight with a big machine like a storm bird just so you don't have to worry about it mid-fight and then i also realized that this is probably the first time a lot of you are gonna deal with terror blast arrows so the deal with terror blast arrows is they create an explosion that can knock off components from a machine so we're going to use them to knock off that glowing part that's on its chest that's the lightning gun which deals all the shock-based attacks so we're going to run out here and he's going to notice us right away and stop and so i'll use concentration and land one right on his chest and as he comes in closer we can land another one and every time he pauses we want to land one on there scan them again so we can see it and it's going to take four and you'll know you've done it when you get that shock animation there and a blue circle so it'll take four terablos arrows to do that and now that we've gotten rid of that he's going to stay down low because he doesn't really have any ranged attacks anymore so we can start roping him down it's going to take four or five of these heavy ropes to do it it'll take a whole lot more ropes if you're doing the blue karja rope caster but there you go we can see he's tied down so now we're going to switch to freeze bombs and he'll stay tied down for up to 90 seconds as long as you don't deal damage so you don't need to rush here so we'll do it'll take like five freeze bombs or so to get them frozen there you can see he's totally frozen now so i'll just scan him again so we can see him and then i want to focus on these engines on his wings and you can see i'm going to use the hunter reflexes to get the slow-mo effect okay now he's breaking free but don't we don't need to freak out because we can just keep hitting him don't need to fully draw our bow just kind of get a partial draw and make use of that hunter reflexes and you see now that we've steal enough damage quickly enough we've stunned him so we can get some nice easy shots on him and as long as he's still frozen you want to just keep hitting him like this so now he's unfrozen so we want to go back to roping him right away so he doesn't fly up and get away from us so there you go you can see his rope down again and we'll freeze him again you can see we've got about half of his health gone already one more freeze bomb now if you want to you can aim for his eyes which deal a little bit more damage but i think it's easier to aim for these engines or just straight into his body so you want to use that hunter reflexes ability to be able to line up your shots and uh if you just keep doing damage like that he'll just keep getting stunned and coming down and you can get free shots on him like this and as long as you keep up the tempo of dealing damage all of his attack animations just keep getting interrupted so he won't really be able to do anything to you there we go we stunned him again or i guess technically the term is knocked down and we actually killed him that time okay so it goes actually pretty quick as you guys can see the key to this strategy is making sure that we keep a storm bird on the ground and frozen it's also important that we don't let up on dealing damage to it if we do it will quickly try to attack us so keep the pressure on with those precision arrows you probably noticed i wasn't fully drawing my arrows which is also really important fully drawing your bow does increase the accuracy of your shot but it doesn't increase the damage so with a big machine like a stormbird it's not worth taking the time to fully draw it's better to only partially draw so you can get arrows out faster and deal damage more quickly dealing a lot of damage is what triggers that stunned effect you saw which is called knock down for the storm bird specifically you need to deal 480 damage to trigger the knockdown which will stun it for 12 seconds but those details aren't really worth remembering it's more important that you keep in mind that you just need to keep dealing damage while the storm bird's frozen and reapply ropes and freeze it again as soon as it's not now as you progress through the game and get better weapons and mods you may want to switch up your loadout a bit for example i prefer using a hunter bow and hardpoint arrows in place of the precision arrows hardpoint arrows are cheaper to craft and you can fire them faster than precision arrows but you need some good purple damage mods to boost the damage spec on the hunter bow you'll also eventually want to switch to using freeze arrows instead of freeze bombs freeze arrows cost far fewer resources to craft plus you can use them to trigger a freeze explosion by hitting the freeze canister on the storm bird's shoulders don't try using freeze arrows until you have at least a shadow warbo and some really good freeze mods though lower spec freeze arrows just won't cut it for the stormberg however you may be able to get some purple freeze mods faster than you think that's because like thunder jaws storm birds are guaranteed to drop three purple mods every time you kill one so use the tips you learned here to start taking down storm birds and get yourself some nice mods if you want to learn how to take down thunder jaws i'll leave a link to my video on them in the description alright guys that's my master machine hunting guide for storm birds storm birds are a really cool machine but they're also really tough to kill so i hope this video helped you out for all the horizon pros out there i'd be interested in hearing your favorite ways to deal with storm birds so go ahead and leave me a comment about that down below if you enjoyed this video or if you learned something hitting that like button is always appreciated we have just a few zero dom machines left to cover before forbidden west comes out in just a few weeks and i'm super excited to start making a bunch of content for that i'll definitely be continuing these machine hunting guides but i also want to branch out and do other types of tips and tricks content as well so make sure you're subscribed for that and maybe let me know what types of videos you'd like to see as well thank you guys for watching and i'll catch you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Arktix

Views: 46,252

Keywords: Stormbird, Storm bird, Stormbirds, Storm Birds, Horizon, Horizon Zero Dawn, HZD

Id: _bqi1tuVvZY

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022