Nova Drift – Amazing Combos Guide

This is a guide aimed at newer players or people struggling to make progress in this game. If you are more experienced you might already know about most of these, so don’t expect too much if you meet the latter’s criteria.

Amazing Combos That Change The Way You’ll Play

Note: Credit goes to SandpitSam

Disclaimer

These are things that helped me personally, so if these don’t help you, or if anything I said wasn’t accurate or “the best way of doing it,” don’t get too mad, as at the end of the day I’m just some person who took time out of their day to tell random strangers cool tips about a game made of tiny spots of light.

Barrage + Ataraxia

This combo helped me get most of the Ataraxia achievements.

It works by taking a powerful upgrade (Barrage – A super mod that can be taken once you take the Rapid Fire -> Burst fire mods, and the Volley -> Focus Fire mods) and slapping on the very powerful effects of Ataraxia on top of that (Ataraxia is used by not using the upgrades you get and instead stockpiling them. This lets you get marginal bonuses per unspent upgrade, but you get really nice bonuses when passing the 5, 10, and 20 mark.), you get an amazing combo. You should probably take Fusillade with it too (Can only be taken after Focus Fire or Firing Array, but to get Barrage you need one of the two anyway so it should be easy enough.), because Barrage fires all of your projectiles in a row in front of you, with the effect getting better with more projectiles.

I’d also use the ‘Flak’ with it because it starts with 12 projectiles and doubles the projectile gain of Fusillade and Volley, getting more gain per downside (as Volley and Fusillade have big downsides). You can use any shield and any ship, but I’d recommend Assault as the ship for more bullet upsides, and AMP if you can deal with the low defences, as you can gain a ridiculous amount of damage, being able to take down most bosses in around 10 – 15 seconds each.

This isn’t the kind of build you take to a 1mil score run, but it takes you decently far, around 250k score when I did only the upgrades listed above, but if you add maybe a few more defensive upgrades you could maybe make it further. Or just not have a skill issue like me ig.

Assault Drones + Shielded Constructs + Warp Shield

This, like the other build above, I found, and then realised later that you get an achievement for doing it, but for this one I figured out the strategy, then they made an achievement for it!

It was very funny when I saw, trust me.

I’m talking about the divide by 0 achievement, and it requires 40 warp explosions to go off at the same time, with a second or 2 wiggle room.

So you get it by taking the Drones mod and then the Assault Drones mod. You can go further, but that is the bare minimum. Then you want to get Elegant Construction and then Shielded Constructs, and probably Overseer, but, again, that is the bare minimum. Finally your shield has to be the Warp shield, although there is one exception which I’ll get into a bit later. (I’m realising now when editing I forgot to mention the Engineer as the ship, as it increases the amount of drones by a lot, and decreases shields, so it is also a requirement.)

How it works is that you press the tab button to make your drones go into pursuit mode. They then run right near enemies and take lots of damage, all done to the shield, and then the shield promptly explodes, making all enemies near the explosion very dead.

That was all just the bare minimum, so to improve it you want to take any mod that:

• Decreases shield health (Makes the shield blow up quicker)
• Increases shield recovery speed (Makes the shield blow up more often)
• Increases shield damage or area of effect (Makes the shield kill enemies more reliably)
• Increases the amount of drones (Just gives more of all the above)

Some favourites are:

• Flash Shielding (Does two of the above and lets you get Tempest Break)
• Drone Specialist (You’ll need lots of luck and wild mods enabled, but it’s worth it)
• Tempest Break (Super mod that needs Flash Shielding and Deadly Wake, does most of the things we want, even stopping the shield from recovering before it gets completely destroyed)
• And many more

One last thing, using Shockwave shield and Polar Inversion (a wild mod that makes knockback’s direction reversed), and Volatile Shields to make the shields still explode, you get drones that move to enemies and suck them in, for more shield damage. This reduces the power of the blast, as you don’t have a natural explosion, but the sheer potential of simply having the enemies sucked away from you with large force and then grouped up for a massive explosion of 15+ drones is just too good to pass up.