ARC Raiders Bastion Guide
How to beat the Bastion, its attack tell, its weak points, and the loadout that turns a heavily-armored ARC unit from a raid-ender into a predictable fight.
Draft: this page has not cleared review and is not indexed.
- Unit class
- Heavy ARC, slow-moving, heavily armored
- Primary threat
- Sustained minigun fire
- Frontal armor
- Effectively immune, flank instead
- Recommended weapon class
- Heavy ammo (e.g. Anvil-class)
The Bastion is the ARC unit most likely to end a promising raid through sheer attrition rather than a single mistake. It's slow, but its sustained gatling fire punishes anyone who tries to just stand and trade. The fight is winnable consistently once you know its tell and stop shooting the front of it.
Read the tell
The Bastion telegraphs its burst attack with a loud screech before it fires: that screech gives you roughly one second to break line of sight before roughly three seconds of sustained gatling fire follows. The entire fight is built around that window: you have cover ready before the screech ends, or you're eating the burst.
Don't shoot the front
Frontal plating on the Bastion is thick enough that a straight-on engagement is close to a waste of ammunition. Wait for it to turn (chasing you, repositioning, tracking a teammate) and put your damage into its rear plate and exposed joints instead, which is where its actual weak points sit.
Two specific weak-point details show up consistently in community reporting:
- A yellow cylinder on the rear stuns the Bastion when hit and exposes the true weak spot underneath it.
- The legs and joints are a soft target for heavy-ammo weapons specifically: breaking a leg strips its ability to reposition, which turns a mobile threat into a stationary one you can finish from cover.
Loadout
Bring a heavy-ammo weapon (an Anvil-class weapon is the commonly cited pick) with enough reserve ammo to sustain a multi-cover-cycle fight, not a quick trade. If you're carrying a Deadline-class deployable, placing it next to the Bastion's canister is reported to drop it outright, the fastest single answer to the fight if you happen to have one on hand.
Common misconception
Bastions look like a DPS check because of how much damage they can put out, but the fight is actually a positioning check. Abusing hard cover and only exposing yourself in the gap right after the screech-and-burst cycle ends beats trying to out-damage it from the open every time.
Related reading
For the encounter that punishes a poor loadout even harder, see How to Kill the Queen in ARC Raiders. For the augment that determines what loadout you can even bring into a Bastion fight, see Augments Explained.
Sources
The Forge’s one room today is EU5/Paradox. There is no ARC room yet.
The Embriters there are glad to talk ARC Raiders too. Drop in.