Outriders guide: Understanding interrupts and crowd control resistance

Not long into Outriders — during the “carve a path to the Solar Tower” objective of the “Reunion” main story mission — you’ll face off against your first Altered enemy. These baddies use abilities like you do. Luckily, you’ve got a way to interrupt them while they’re casting and prevent them from using their abilities.

In this Outriders interrupts guide, we’ll explain how to pick skills that interrupt Altered casters, how interrupts work, and when interrupts won’t work.

What does interrupting do?

While an enemy is preparing to cast an ability — things like a Vanguard Captain’s Sanctuary or Gauss’s Shock Shift — a yellow Casting Bar appears above their health gauge (like you can see in the image below). This fills as the enemy concentrates, and they’ll launch the ability when the gauge is full.

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Using an appropriate skill — like the Devastator’s Earthquake or the Trickster’s Temporal Blade — to attack the enemy will interrupt their casting and prevent them from using that ability.

What skills interrupt?

In your skills menu, you’ll see information about each skill you have equipped. Below the skill’s name, there’s a tag for the type of damage or how the skill is used.

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Skills that can interrupt enemies have an Interrupt tag after the damage type.

How to interrupt enemies

Interrupting is as simple as hitting a casting enemy with an interrupt skill while their yellow concentration bar is filling. You can’t prevent them from trying to use an ability, but you can stop them in the act.

Resistance

You don’t get to just continually interrupt your enemies and prevent them from ever using their abilities, though. Every time you successfully interrupt a casting, that enemy builds up crowd control resistance — indicated by a blueish triskelion-like icon to the left of their health bar.

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When their resistance is full, that enemy will have a swirling blue aura around them. While they’re lit up like this, you can’t hit them with interrupt or immobilization skills, and if you try, you’ll get an “effect resisted” message. You can still deal damage with melee or weapon attacks, but your abilities won’t have the same effects.