Heist Elite Challenges: how did you find them all?

[Jimbatron]

I’m a huge fan of Heists and have done all the Elite Challenges with the same group of friends. I’ve enjoyed them all but they’ve been very different experiences in terms of difficulty. Here’s my ranking of how hard we found them (for the avoidance of doubt this is rated after any initial patches e.g. removing the PAC STD helicopter, but before the next major update came out)

 

Easiest to hardest

 

12) The Bogdan Problem

Laughably easy to beat the time, and only a few easy bad guys to kill in the submarine. We did the Elite first time without even trying for it or knowing what the criteria was. Done this with randoms frequently.

 

11) The Cayo Perico Heist

The time limit is generous, the stealth is more forgiving than the casino, and the bad guys aren’t much of a threat. The only thing that requires a lot of thought with a large team is how you fill your loot bags and which team members will pick up which secondary targets. Solo this is a doddle though.

 

10) The Diamond Casino: Big Con Approach

Using the Gruppe 6 approach makes this simple, as does being able to take the helicopter to the destination. The only bit you can really go wrong with is botching the stealth on the way out

 

9) The Diamond Casino: Aggressive Approach

Asumming you’ve done the Duggan’s shipment prep the bad guys are easy to dispatch (if you don’t however, this is a totally different ball game). The only thing you have to be careful is that you don’t miss the headshot count

 

Series A Funding

The easiest of the original heists for me. You can use the heist heavy combat suit so you shouldn’t die, you just have to kill the bad guys quickly to trigger Trevor to signal it’s time to drive to the destination

 

7) The Data Breaches

Reasonably tight timeline and risk of dying, but it’s very short, so it enables you to quickly try again. The main thing is to make sure you do it from the Senora Desert facility or the time will be either difficult or impossible to beat

 

6) The Fleeca Job

Another short one, but the time is very tight. The hack requires the best dexterity of any puzzle and this must be done superbly, same with the drilling and driving. The Kuruma damage also means you can’t afford a knock other than the road block you have to smash through. Easy Heist, not so easy Elite.

 

5) Pacific Standard

Being able to use the Heist Heavy Combat suit means the risk of dying is low. But you must get good on the bikes to beat the time. Easy with practice, but if you don’t ride bikes or know the route you’ll need some

 

4) The Diamond Casino: Silent and Sneaky Approach

Should be easy, but with the games dodgy stealth system this can go wrong seemingly randomly, particularly if you have 4 players and there is any amount of lag

 

3) The Prison Break

Before people started figuring out tricks like how to get vehicles into the prison, this was hard. No heist heavy combat suit, so the two guys in the prison had to be careful not to die. You also needed to coordinate your team well for the plane pickup, so there’s no way to wing this one

 

2) The Doomsday Scenario

This one was most daunting to begin with, as it’s very easy to die. It’s by far the most combat heavy heist. However once you know where the bad guys are, and keep topping up your health and armour it becomes easier. The time isn’t difficult, even if you take the tank. However, it’s quite easy to miss the headshot target, and no easy way to verify if you’ve made it - unlike with the times where you can use a stop watch and back out if you’re going to miss it.

 

1) Humane Labs

This has since become easier. You can now purchase nearer still apartments and use a Vigilante. But back in the day when Eclipse towers was the nearest and you had to use bikes, the time was exceedingly tough. You had to drive flawlessly and if one of you fell of you might as well restart immediately. Heist Heavy Combat suits weren’t viable as they’d slow you down too much on the swim, but this meant it was easy to die in the labs. It’s much easier now, and people have discovered tricks to beat the time comfortably but back in the day if you did this as intended this had the least margin for error.

 

Curious to know how everyone else found the Elite Challenges, please reply and let me know!

 

Edited December 23, 2020 by Jimbatron

[Succnificent]

As someone who has also beaten them and enjoyed doing them heres my take from all heists. From easiest to hardest. 1 being easiest. 
 

1. Cayo Perico - This is the freest Elite Challenge and you dont need 1 or 3 other people with you do get. 
2. Bogdan - This is free especially with a cargobob to airlift the stromberg. 
3. Big con - Gruppe Sechs is free and you only gotta backsmack 3 guards and 2 cops. 
4. Silent and Sneaky -  Pretty free if you know what you're doing and you emp the 1st or 2nd half. 
5. Data Breaches -  This one is really easy with an assult shotgun and 1st person FPS config with your interaction menu so you can eat snacks and heal without animation. Only thing to watchout for is gettting "minigunned".
6. Series A Funding - The Vigilante made this one free since its missles rarely ever miss to get the 78 kills required while an insurgent pushes the trucks.
7. Prision Break - Again easy since you have a lot of time to set up as Demo and drive your karuma or even the new torendor into the compoud while your pilot triggers the bus so you can compete your job after you escape with officer, prisoner, and Rashkovsky. 
8. Pacific Standard - This was one of the freest Elites back in the day when you could glitch a helicopter to use in the escape and you could reset the timer by shooting random civis before entering the bank. As of now its a decent challenge as it relies on your teammates not to crash with the bikes.
9. The Doomsday Scenario - This one isn't so bad you're given plenty of time to do this and the headshots are easy to farm in the hacking encounter. The Unholy Hellbringer removes reloading so you can have your interaction menu up all times and the barrage is the better vehicle since you can have your gunner in the rear and just drive backwards. Only bad thing could be getting minigunned by an enemy by being too close to a teammate. 
10. Agressive - This one is a pain with the amount of time you have to achieve this. You pretty much have to forgo the loot and just leave with 25k. And every headshot matters in this one as well as buyer and cop spawn RNG.
11. Fleeca - Both roles have to be on point as well as being able to make the jump to the karuma with your bikes. Little time for error. 
12. Humane - This was byfar the hardest back in the day (ps3 360 era) back when you had either alta street or eclipse and 4 players had to be on point with thier driving on their akumas. Now we have the Concor stilt home, Explosive sniper MK2, Diving suits for ground team, The vigilante and mabye even the Torendor now since it seats 4, and before the diving suits we had the scarf trick. All of these shave minutes off the already tight 11 minutes, which half were spent getting to the damn valkerie. Doing this on 360 was still one of my proudest achievements I've ever done in GTA Online.

There was also a trick back in the day where you could request a buzzard if you had it in your MOC but thats been patched. I kinda wanna try Humane, Series A, and Prison Break with the new Torendor lots of potential in that car.

[Jimbatron]

1 hour ago, Succnificent said:

As someone who has also beaten them and enjoyed doing them heres my take from all heists. From easiest to hardest. 1 being easiest. 
 

1. Cayo Perico - This is the freest Elite Challenge and you dont need 1 or 3 other people with you do get. 
2. Bogdan - This is free especially with a cargobob to airlift the stromberg. 
3. Big con - Gruppe Sechs is free and you only gotta backsmack 3 guards and 2 cops. 
4. Silent and Sneaky -  Pretty free if you know what you're doing and you emp the 1st or 2nd half. 
5. Data Breaches -  This one is really easy with an assult shotgun and 1st person FPS config with your interaction menu so you can eat snacks and heal without animation. Only thing to watchout for is gettting "minigunned".
6. Series A Funding - The Vigilante made this one free since its missles rarely ever miss to get the 78 kills required while an insurgent pushes the trucks.
7. Prision Break - Again easy since you have a lot of time to set up as Demo and drive your karuma or even the new torendor into the compoud while your pilot triggers the bus so you can compete your job after you escape with officer, prisoner, and Rashkovsky. 
8. Pacific Standard - This was one of the freest Elites back in the day when you could glitch a helicopter to use in the escape and you could reset the timer by shooting random civis before entering the bank. As of now its a decent challenge as it relies on your teammates not to crash with the bikes.
9. The Doomsday Scenario - This one isn't so bad you're given plenty of time to do this and the headshots are easy to farm in the hacking encounter. The Unholy Hellbringer removes reloading so you can have your interaction menu up all times and the barrage is the better vehicle since you can have your gunner in the rear and just drive backwards. Only bad thing could be getting minigunned by an enemy by being too close to a teammate. 
10. Agressive - This one is a pain with the amount of time you have to achieve this. You pretty much have to forgo the loot and just leave with 25k. And every headshot matters in this one as well as buyer and cop spawn RNG.
11. Fleeca - Both roles have to be on point as well as being able to make the jump to the karuma with your bikes. Little time for error. 
12. Humane - This was byfar the hardest back in the day (ps3 360 era) back when you had either alta street or eclipse and 4 players had to be on point with thier driving on their akumas. Now we have the Concor stilt home, Explosive sniper MK2, Diving suits for ground team, The vigilante and mabye even the Torendor now since it seats 4, and before the diving suits we had the scarf trick. All of these shave minutes off the already tight 11 minutes, which half were spent getting to the damn valkerie. Doing this on 360 was still one of my proudest achievements I've ever done in GTA Online.

There was also a trick back in the day where you could request a buzzard if you had it in your MOC but thats been patched. I kinda wanna try Humane, Series A, and Prison Break with the new Torendor lots of potential in that car.

Nice list, thanks for sharing your experience, very similar to ours I think the main difference is pretty much a switch around of Aggressive vs Silent and Sneaky.

 

Out of interest, did you do your casino runs with 2 players? We had 4 and found it simple enough to fan out, get the headshots and clear the vault. But with Silent and Sneaky a bigger team practically gets in each other’s way, also we seemed to have quite a bit of lag across 4 connections, often the alarm went off randomly with us using the exact same path.

[Succnificent]

8 hours ago, Jimbatron said:

Nice list, thanks for sharing your experience, very similar to ours I think the main difference is pretty much a switch around of Aggressive vs Silent and Sneaky.

 

Out of interest, did you do your casino runs with 2 players? We had 4 and found it simple enough to fan out, get the headshots and clear the vault. But with Silent and Sneaky a bigger team practically gets in each other’s way, also we seemed to have quite a bit of lag across 4 connections, often the alarm went off randomly with us using the exact same path.

Ya, my first Aggressive and Silent were both 2 manned. Reason being it was much easier to find a person through LFG to do the Elite Challenge at least for agressive. Silent and Big Con are extremely doable as a 4 man random quick job search if each player is experienced enough. 

[Lonely-Martin]

I was meaning to return to this thread when I initially saw it, but the festivities kept me busy and it slipped my mind, lol.

 

I love this side to the heists, both elites and the criminal mastermind challenges. Good fun and adds another dynamic to these missions.

 

I too have all complete, but I got so lucky with it in the end. Initially I had hoped to do the elites with my first crew back on PS3 days but after we did the CMM on the original heists, it just didn't happen and in time, the crew faded and I long thought my chance was gone.

 

But then I found these forums and my luck turned for the better to the point, I found some of the best heist players I've seen in action. At the time, I had no clue the guys I'd met were part of the world record heist players on these forums, lol. And once I saw that, I was over the moon I tell ya! I always thought I was good, not to toot my own horn, but these guys made me look like a rookie in places compared, lol. Good times, and I learned lots too.

 

As for rating them on difficulty, that's a hard one for me because when it did happen, the guys I'd met were so experienced that they went through largely trouble free, a few hiccups, mostly from me, lol. My achilles heel is motorbikes and long journeys. Using fast bikes to get to checkpoints was the trickiest part, Humane Labs and getting to the Valkyrie, or the Pacific Standard final chase, though the latter was much easier than the H Labs drive. With Fleeca I was the driller and always felt comfortable on that hack, with Prison I was the guard and these guys landed the plane right at the entrance of the prison while the demolition guy gave RPG back up to the prison team. That was quick to get around there indeed. For Series A Funding we had Vigilantes helping push trucks/get kills. It all just flew by. 

 

We did both the original heists and Doomsday elites in a short but busy spell while getting CMM III/IV at the same time. I loved it though, even though it was a real busy spell, it never felt rushed or too much. Just we all came together at the right time and it came quite natural.

 

With Doomsday though, the elites came within our CMM III/IV runs without too much extra thought/effort. I mean, I was running with guys that ciuld do an act 3 in about 15 minutes, lol. The 30 minutes given was never in doubt, although in the runs I did, we never rushed to hit such a quick time of course, but it was a great feeling to feel comfy on those jobs while hitting elites and CMM's all in one short spell.

 

The Casino was a breeze too, again with these guys on the aggressive and silent runs, the big con is a given though, lol. So easy compared to any elite, much like this new Cayo Perico heist is now too.

 

But that spell on original and Doomsday elites/CMM's was one of my favourite spells in the game. The only other time it was so good was when me and my lad did the 2 player CMM on Doomsday. I don't push for elites on every run whenever I heist though, but with this new one and big con casino, it just happens naturally all too often. But I have helped/joined 6 teams now to complete the original CMM challenge and always enjoy those too. Just all feels quite rewarding to meet folks and hit up a challenge like these can offer on heists. Sharing that common goal and smashing it, good times!

[Nutduster]

Won't do a complete ranking, but it's definitely the case that the elites have gotten easier over time. On all the OG heists they were hard, and on Humane Labs, nearly impossible originally. I only completed it with a very practiced crew after literally dozens of attempts and restarts. Never did do the Doomsday ones so I won't comment there.

 

Cayo Perico is so easy it's a joke. So easy I'm almost not interested in it now, except as a way to add a little extra cash to my payout.

 

DCH varies a lot depending on all the different variables, and my group have had a lot of fun beating it various ways. We never use the heli, always drive, always to the high level buyer. Just doesn't feel legit any other way. We used to only do it with artwork, and for us, we found Big Con easiest (obviously), then Silent & Sneaky (got really efficient at it), and Aggressive last (we had a little trouble getting the headshots and being under time on the same run, but got there eventually). Our latest achievement was doing an elite run with gold, in the snow. Gold just adds a layer of difficulty that is hard to overcome, though some nice RNG with the getaway vehicle and buyer locations helped a lot. Next we'll try S&S with gold--should be tight.

Edited January 2, 2021 by Nutduster

[Jimbatron]

4 hours ago, Lonely-Martin said:

As for rating them on difficulty, that's a hard one for me because when it did happen, the guys I'd met were so experienced that they went through largely trouble free, a few hiccups, mostly from me, lol. My achilles heel is motorbikes and long journeys. Using fast bikes to get to checkpoints was the trickiest part, Humane Labs and getting to the Valkyrie, or the Pacific Standard final chase, though the latter was much easier than the H Labs drive.

 

We had to practice loads for the bike runs on Humane Labs and Pac Std. I even created a custom race in the editor to mirror the route we'd take so we could practice.

 

2 hours ago, Nutduster said:

Won't do a complete ranking, but it's definitely the case that the elites have gotten easier over time. On all the OG heists they were hard, and on Humane Labs, nearly impossible originally. I only completed it with a very practiced crew after literally dozens of attempts and restarts. Never did do the Doomsday ones so I won't comment there.

 

Yeah the times haven't been difficult to beat since the originals. Doomsday Act I was easy if you bought the closest facility, Act III was just tricky not to die and get the headshots, all the rest I'd argue are pretty easy (except if you had lag issues on Silent and Sneaky). Part of me thinks they'd have been better to put the Cayo Perico time to 10 minutes, although it does mean you can get the Elite with really 5h1tty RNG (for example, no painting in the office, not enough loot in the main docks to fill your bags), then again, maybe a lower par time would have been an incentive to take a mate along to access loot behind the dual key card doors.

[Nutduster]

12 hours ago, Jimbatron said:

 

We had to practice loads for the bike runs on Humane Labs and Pac Std. I even created a custom race in the editor to mirror the route we'd take so we could practice.

 

 

That Humane Labs route is ingrained in my brain forever, we did it so much. Both practice runs and restarts.

[Nutduster]

12 hours ago, Jimbatron said:

 

Part of me thinks they'd have been better to put the Cayo Perico time to 10 minutes

 

I think I would like a target of 12 minutes. Still not that hard, but not as ridiculously generous as the current 15. Today I did a solo run where I took a winding bike trip from the compound to the airstrip, filled my entire loot bag there from two different locations, then drove off the end of the airstrip and SWAM away. Slowly. Still beat it with 40 seconds to spare. To my mind, that should not be an elite-worthy run.

 

The RNG aspect of it is a bit unfortunate, but that's true of the DCH as well--car and buyer locations can really make or break, especially with non-Big Con runs.

Edited January 2, 2021 by Nutduster