Epic Family Boss Fight Walk Through

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Before we get into the details of the Family Boss Fight, lets take a look at who we are fighting. Jeff The Knife can be found on your Home Page. The first thing I noticed is that Jeff doesn't even have a knife. All he has is  a big sword.  Jeff The Sword would be a more fitting name.  What kind of name is Jeff for a Boss anyways?

Let's take a closer look at this Jeff. To get a better view, Click on "Join the fight" from the Home Page or go to the new Boss Tab which was formerly called the Operations Tab and before that the Missions Tab.

New

Old

You can also join by accepting requests from your Family members.

Jeff The Knife looks like a cleaned up version of Jeff (aka Month) from Mafia Wars Live.

No matter how you get to the Boss Page, you will see that "Jeff" has a health level of 1 million and he will be around for 7 days.

As the fight progresses, you will see how many Family members have joined and get a breakdown of how many filled each position.

You will also find the main Leaderboard on this page where the top 10 contributors will be listed.

There are a few things you can do from this page before you begin. You can click on "Get More Ammo" and your mafia can send you a Boss Fight consumable item that you can use to fight Jeff. I'm sure you have seen these all over the news feeds by now. When you click on "Send Ammo", you will get one too. You can only collect 20 per day so don't get too excited and bust out your news feed scanners.

You can also check out the loot items that you and your Family will get for defeating Jeff.  You only get one item per fight and not all Family members will get the same item. It's random like Operations but if you help more than others you are suppose to have a better chance at getting a Superior item.

When you click on the yellow "Fight" button for the first time, you will have to choose a position. There are three positions and there is no need to stress out about it. Zynga makes this seem more complicated than it is. The only thing that is important is that your Family balances the number of players in each role according to the strategy you use.

Here is the in game description of each role.  There is no personal benefit to any of these positions, the only thing it does is designate who will share what boost with their Family members. This is why it's important to get a balance as you want a few players in each position active when you are fighting the Boss.

Once you select your position, you can move on. When you finally get to the Boss Fight Page, you will notice it's a little busy.  Leave it to Zynga to throw in a new feature with so many details that their players get confused not to mention overwhelmed.  This thing is a piece of work. Eike from Team Spockholm created the image below which gives a  good overview.  The one thing that is missing from this image is your own Health Meter. That is because you don't have one. These Bosses do not do any damage to you, they just take your stamina and Ammo items.  You can still fight them even you are iced.
(click image to enlarge)

If you want Zynag'a explanation of the mess shown above, click on the help mark located next to the title of the Boss (yes there will be more in the future).  They do a good job of explaining how the three different meters work but fail to mention most of the other stuff.

Once you know the rules and see the flow, it's not as confusing as it appears. You must be in a Family to have this feature on your account. Your Family works together by attacking the Boss and passing out designated boosts to each other. In this Boss Fight, you have a choice of how you want to fight. You can use your stamina or you can use Boss Fight Ammo. The Ammo can be collected while doing fights, jobs and robs. You can only hold 20 of each item at one time so use them up as you get them. With a Rage Meter of zero, each item will do the following amount of damage.  It's important to note that your personal skills don't matter when fighting the Boss with Ammo. Each Ammo item has a fixed range in the amount of damage that will be done regardless of your characters strength or what destination you are in.  You gain zero experience per attack when using Ammo.

Ammo Item	Image	Drops	Damage
Backstab		Jobs	80-110
Sucker Punch		Fighting	90-110
Crowbar Swing		Robbing	70
Rifle Round		Feed Requests	100-130

If you don't want to farm for these items, you can always purchase them at the cost of 10 items for 10 Reward Points (keep dreaming Zynga). Get them directly from the Fight Page by hovering your mouse over the item and clicking on "Buy" (note this can only be done when you are at zero).

Or find them in the Marketplace under the Special Loot tab.

When used in one of the following sequences, additional damage will be applied.

When using stamina to fight, your skills matter. The stronger you are, the more damage you will do. You need to play close attention to the Fatigue Meter. Things look great at first. Each attack gains you 15 experience points and when the Fatigue Meter is below 27 (results will vary slightly between accounts) only 5 stamina is needed per attack resulting in a experience/stamina ratio of 3.0. Once the meter passes the first threshold, it will cost 15 stamina per attack and it only gets worse from there.  The experience you gain per attack never changes. If your Fatigue Meter is at 100%, you experience/stamina ratio is now 0.1! I know we asked for a faster way to utilize our stamina but this wasn't what we had in mind.

The Rage Meter will decrease the damage you do per attack. When it goes up, your damage goes down.

Here are is the break down of the Fatigue and Rage Meters. The amount of damage will be different on all accounts as it is proportional to strength.

Fatigue Meter	Damage	Rage Meter	Stamina
<250	133	0-25%	5
<500	100	25-50%	15
<750	67	50-75%	45
<1000	34	75%-99%	90
>1000	34	100%	150

To makes things easier, you can use and send boosts to your Family members. There are three different types of boosts and they are designed to lower your meters and double the damage you do during an attack. Each boost is tied to the position each Family member chooses before joining the fight.

Boost	Image	Description	Family Postion Holder
Damage		Double the damage for one attack	Bruiser
Rage Debuff		Reduces the Rage Meter	Arsonist
Fatigue Buff		Reduces the Fatigue Meter	Racketeer

Giving and receiving these boosts is actually quite simple. We are very lucky they didn't tie it to the Free Gift system. To request boosts, simply click on the corresponding boost question mark located on top of the Boss Fight Page. There doesn't appear to be a time limit of when you can ask for more help. You just have to use all the boosts you were given.

When you click on the question mark, you will be told that you asked for the boost. Now you just have to wait until someone who is in the appropriate role sends you one.

Of course if you don't want to wait you can always buy them from the Marketplace by clicking on the Reward Point icon. I'm glad they had the decency to give you a verification popup to prevent accidental purchases.

To send boosts to your Family members, look for the "Help" icons on the score board located to the far left of the Boss Fight Page. You will only see the Help messages for the position you hold.

Clicking on "Help" will send a boost to the person who asked. You can only help if you have the boosts to send. In the example below, my position was a Racketeer and I had 5 boosts to give to my Family members.

There were plenty of people asking for them but I could only send 5.

The "Help" icon disappears as soon as you click on it and your Family member gets the boost.

Once you send off all your boosts, your balance goes to zero and a "Refill" link appears. In theory you must wait 30 minutes and they will auto-refill. Sometimes I see a timer and sometimes I don't. There are also a few issues with the timer not being accurate.

If you don't want to wait, you can always buy more from the Marketplace by clicking on the "Refill" link. Keep in mind these are what Zynga is calling "Charges" and you can't use them for your own fight. You can only send them to your Family members.

When the Rage Debuff and Fatigue Buff boosts are used, the attack will cause zero damage to the Boss. The only purpose the attack will have is to lower your Rage or Fatigue Meters. We aren't sure if this is intended or a bug but that's they way it works.

If you have boosts, they will automatically be used. It's best not to use your combos at this time because they won't apply either.

Once you figure everything out, your Family develops a system and you have the resources to fight, keep attacking the Jeff until his health gets to zero. Many noticed that once you get him below 20,000 health, the numbers do funny things and jump back up. We kept attacking through it and eventually he was taken down. If you are actively attacking when this happens, you will be told to wait while the rewards are being calculated.

If you weren't active when Jeff is killed off, you will find a collect button on the Boss Page. You will also notice that Jeff comes back contrary to what Customer Support told us.

Click on collect to get your item.

You get one loot item and it will be random.  The more you contributed, the greater your chances will be for getting a Superior item.  I don't know why it says 4 Grand Prizes on the Home Page. It's probably just the fact that there are 4 Superior (and therefore Grand) items. Is could be possible that the fight can only be done 4 times. I should have an answer to that later on today as my Family is currently working on their 4th Boss Fight.

Your loot item will be one of the following.

Name	Image	Stats	Quality
Blade’s Blade		135/96	Superior
Fencer’s Mask		94/136	Superior
Dagger Nose jet		95/132	Superior
Xiphias Gladius		133/95	Superior
Heartpiercer		84/115	Rare
Scorpio		112/82	Rare
Clocktower Jaket		114/81	Rare
Waterproof Gloves		80/111	Rare
Jawbone Helmet		112/80	Rare
Floatberry		83/112	Rare
Swiftsilver		113/82	Uncommon
Lodjur		83/110	Uncommon
Blue Racer		81/114	Uncommon
Peregrine Falcon		115/80	Uncommon
Mark 14-X		109/78	Uncommon
Grim Switchblade		80/106	Uncommon
Mini Vera		79/109	Uncommon
Simoom Breaker		80/107	Uncommon
Shutter View Goggles		106/81	Uncommon
Cheeder		80/107	Uncommon
Hummerpotamus		108/79	Uncommon
Rhinocycle		105/80	Uncommon
Gulper Eel		105/81	Uncommon
Skunk		80/110	Uncommon

I think this is a lot of work for one loot item. Eike wants to recommend to Zynga that Families also get some Family Experience for defeating the Bosses. I like that idea too. The strategy your Family chooses will depend on a lot of factors. My Family is stamina heavy so we have been using our stamina and not Ammo. The trick is to make sure we get plenty of Fatigue Buff boosts to keep our ratios high. Because of this, we will have more players choose the Racketeer position. Every Family will be different. The key is to work together.  We don't know how this fight will affect The Raven.  Many players have reported not seeing him for over a week. I know I haven't.   There are some bugs and issues with the Boss Fight and here is some commentary by Eike.


Bug #1 
The timer on the "sending" boosts is terribly wrong. It goes down from 30:00 to 0:00, then from 1:00 to 0:00 while you seem to get one each time its hits zero. In reality you only get one per 30mins.

Bug #2
If you have a Rage Debuff boost and the Rage-bar is at zero, you will attack once and then use one boost, setting the bar from  6 to 0, thus wasting a full boost. This works fine for the Fatigue Buff boosts, as they are only used when the bar is at more than 20.

Bug (may be intended) #3 
When you use a boost, you deal no damage, although it costs stamina.


Many thanks to Eike for helping me put this post together. The Spock family for sharing their insight. The {ASS} Family for helping me test things and knocking these fights out. TOKO and Mike Nestor for taking screen shots that I didn't end up needing.  And Karan for formulating a sound strategy.

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Article written by Jennifer Patterson, Creator of the MW Loot Lady Blog, The Mafia Wars Loot Lady Facebook Fan Page and Co-Host of The Informant Podcast. All material is protected by copyright law