Popularity of non-blitz piercing guns against Vanaduke
Dom, 10/11/2015 - 08:35
Back when antiguas were split elemental/piercing, AP was one of the most popular guns to use against Vana, but when the split damage was removed and people had become better players, most people used Blitz to fight him instead. Now, since the gunner update, we have two new pure piercing guns with high mobility. Has anyone observed any trends of people using them instead of Blitz? By now, some people who started around or after the gunner update should have reached 5* and could very well have chosen Riftlocker or Gilded Griffin as one of their first 5* weapons with regards for both efficiency against Vana and general utility. Naturally, there's no way they beat Blitz in terms of DPS but they're by all means easier to use.
Dom, 10/11/2015 - 10:18
#2
lol shiv.
I tried Callahan on him after the gunner update, the charge doesn't hit that many times, maybe if it was able to push him back a little. The ending explosion does a fair amount though.
Dom, 10/11/2015 - 11:44
#3
I suppose maybe the previous state of affairs was that newbies used AP, good players used Blitz while nowadays it's newbies use Shiv+Blitz while pros use just Blitz. As you pointed out you can't use other guns with Shiver in pubs because it screws up the needlers. Mayhaps a combination of just blitz and mobile guns could work out but it's not something people will want to do.
Dom, 10/11/2015 - 11:47
#4
^
I went with my Iron Slug, had smiilar results as Flowchart, but with less dmg.
The Plague Needle became somewhat viable, at least less crappy, than it used to be, but of course, the blitz is still the best vs vanaduke. I did hear though that the Volcanic Pepperbox does slighty more dmg vs the mask phase then the blitz.
Dom, 10/11/2015 - 11:59
#5
response
I haven't responded until now, because I don't know the answer to the original question, because I haven't run FSC much since the gunner update. But here's my sense of the historical development of Vanaduke tactics.
In the early days, most players circled him, peppering him with mobile guns such as the old Argent Peacemaker, until he died. Blitz Needle was not very popular at all. For example, the classic "Ask a Master Gunslinger Anything" thread generally recommended old Callahan over Blitz Needle.
Then somebody came up with the idea of keeping him frozen using Shivermist Buster. This tactic is totally incompatible with peppering, but completely compatible with releasing huge, occasional charge attacks from otherwise risky weapons. Hence the Shivermist + Blitz tactic came into popularity.
Then players came to understand Vanaduke's Ai well enough, and equipment got buffed enough, that they could just replace Shivermist Buster with more Blitz Needles for higher speed.
Anyway, on many occasions my party has mixed Blitz Needle charges with lighter gun peppering. It is quite feasible. Indeed, can't all offense can be mixed when fighting Vanaduke, except freeze?
Lun, 10/12/2015 - 17:03
#6
Prior to the gunner update, I tried running polaris + supernova instead of blitz + shiver, and that worked about as safely as blitz + shiver did. If the party is competent, I could see riftlocker/gilded griffin being used in place of blitz by a couple people for fun, but not replacing blitz ever; it just does way too much DPS and so saves way too much time for that to happen.
Lun, 10/12/2015 - 21:10
#7
I've noticed Stagger Storm + Voltaic Tempest is an interesting replacement for Shivermist Buster. His dashes fail (and he tries to dash a lot), his attacks are slowed, and his turning is staggered. It requires more skill to keep up, but it means that your dumb teammates can't mess it up.
Vie, 10/23/2015 - 11:25
#8
hm
last I checked the GG did neutral damage to vana (bugged, did the same numbers as an AP)
since the last tortodrone event, I got a savage tortofist though (with lvl 10, ctr med, and a pmos it has ctr max, no damage bonus)
its not uncommon that ive been able to outdamage blitzers (and draw aggro from vana)
Mar, 10/13/2015 - 04:57
#9
@Hexzyle
That's an interesting strategy. However, in my experience it's better to control him and go all out blitz than relying on the randomness of shock. With stun+shock, he's bound to move, you don't know when he will actually strike, and so on. It could make for more mistakes depending on your playstyle and it will inevitably require a more cautious playstyle.
Mar, 10/13/2015 - 15:34
#10
@Hexzyle
Oh, the team mates will find a way. The team mates can always find a way to run into his fire orbs, waste time, fail to kill his summons and eventually parish while you sit there spamming bombs. Not perish, mind you, parish because this is a citadel we're talking about. They won't be able to break the ice though, which is probably what you meant.
Mar, 10/13/2015 - 16:41
#11
won't be able to break the ice
...Yes, they will be able to.
I've been that guy who ruined a Vana run before (my forum knight name says otherwise, though)...
Mié, 10/14/2015 - 00:16
#12
@Krakob
relying on the randomness of shock
What randomness are you relying on? VT infliction rays stop his dashes full-stop if he's not dashing off the edge, and always if he's also stunned.
you don't know when he will actually strike
When he's stunned, you sort of do. Even with my latent connection (I play from Australia) if he's stunned i have more than enough time to casually meander out of the way of mace swings.
However, in my experience it's better to control him and go all out blitz [...] It could make for more mistakes depending on your playstyle and it will inevitably require a more cautious playstyle.
Well duh, of course it is. However, the title of this thread is Popularity of non-blitz piercing guns against Vanaduke, and Shivermist's effects are dramatically reduced by the usage of non-charge attacks, something people with non-blitz piercing guns tend to do a lot.
@Vanaduke-Destroyer
I've noticed Stagger Storm + Voltaic Tempest is an interesting replacement for Shivermist Buster. [...] It requires more skill to keep up, but it means that your dumb teammates can't mess it up.
- Oh, the team mates will find a way. [...] They won't be able to break the ice though, which is probably what you meant.
-
- ...Yes, they will be able to.
They will be able to what? Break the shock+stun? Nope.
Jue, 10/15/2015 - 19:17
#13
They will be able to what? Break the shock+stun? Nope.
He said "ice", so I thought freeze.
Did you mean stun+shock making something with a similar effect to freeze, though not actually freeze?
Jue, 10/15/2015 - 22:26
#14
Did you mean stun+shock making something with a similar effect to freeze, though not actually freeze?
Yep. It's sort of different, he can still turn and attack, albeit far slower so all his attacks are super predictable. He can't dash though, and your teammates can't ruin it like they can with freeze.
Lun, 10/19/2015 - 05:04
#15
When he's stunned, you sort of do. Even with my latent connection (I play from Australia) if he's stunned i have more than enough time to casually meander out of the way of mace swings.
But he's also shocked. You don't know if he'll strike for sure because he might spasm and do something else. If he's in the animation it's a relatively safe bet to charge him but if he's not you might put yourself in danger by unleashing a charge.
Well duh, of course it is. However, the title of this thread is Popularity of non-blitz piercing guns against Vanaduke, and Shivermist's effects are dramatically reduced by the usage of non-charge attacks, something people with non-blitz piercing guns tend to do a lot.
Yes. Notice how I said all out blitz and not blitz+shiver.
Mié, 10/21/2015 - 00:31
#16
Yes. Notice how I said all out blitz and not blitz+shiver.
So then what does that have to do with piercing guns that aren't Blitz? My suggestion of Voltaic Tempest and Stagger Storm was at least a compliment to non-Blitz piercing guns. You've just gone ahead and stated that Blitz is better than a non-Blitz strategy, despite the fact that that is already widely known, but also in direct opposition of the subject of your own thread.
So now I'm confused at what you actually want us to talk about.
You don't know if he'll strike for sure because he might spasm and do something else
I was unaware you could stagger/interrupt Vanaduke's attacks. And so what if he does something else? If you're standing 4 tiles away from him, is that "something else" going to take off half your health, stun, and burn you?
Mié, 10/21/2015 - 10:48
#17
I'm suggesting that it would be better to ignore any form of bombing when playing with others who don't use Blitz as opposed to trying to replace the Shiver. Maybe we're arguing past each other, I assumed your strategy was presented as an alternative to Shiver to keep teammates able to Blitz while having others who use other guns. Did you mean that it should be employed if the party has no autoguns?
Jue, 10/22/2015 - 08:50
#18
I've found shiver to be a really nice fallback plan when fighting Vanaduke. Your party of goofy riftlockers all ends up dead and you're the last one left.. what do you do? Place shiver and get Vana to charge into it. This gives you time to either hit him hard from the back with blitz, hunt down the deadnaut guard things, put out fires, whatever. The non-blitz piercing guns are really only applicable when you already know you're going to win and aren't using shiver.. or if you have nothing better, I suppose.
Jue, 10/22/2015 - 20:38
#19
Maybe we're arguing past each other, I assumed your strategy was presented as an alternative to Shiver to keep teammates able to Blitz while having others who use other guns. Did you mean that it should be employed if the party has no autoguns?
It's more of a general strategy when I don't know if my party members have Blitz or not. It works with Blitz, just not as "flawlessly" as shiver. And it works with non-autogun weapons, especially spammy ones, better than shiver.
Vie, 10/23/2015 - 03:42
#20
once again
the tortofists are ignored
Vie, 10/23/2015 - 08:54
#21
torto
Only because we don't all have the piercing tortofist yet. Perhaps you could relate your experience?
Vie, 10/23/2015 - 11:24
#22
I already did
its in the higher up post I made, no one even thinks of tortofists, they cant be learned in 5 minutes so people assume "bad weapon abort and never use again" even though they can be really powerful if you take the time to actually gain some skill with them/ learn the tricks
Dom, 10/25/2015 - 01:24
#23
The bottom line is that blitz was designed for hitting one enemy, and tortofists were designed to hit multiple. Against a crowd, tortofist's damage gets multiplied by the number of enemies it can hit at once and blitz needle's damage gets divided by the number of things that it has to try to take care of at once. It only makes sense that blitz needle work better in this situation, against the one enemy that is Vanaduke.
In much the same fashion, shivermist buster is better than the piercing tortofist in that it is designed solely to hinder enemies and not to hinder + damage. Combining these functions into one tortofist works, just worse than the traditional shiver + blitz strategy, or usually just blitz strategy that works faster but riskier.
Dom, 10/25/2015 - 19:28
#24
...
blitz was designed for hitting one enemy
It has spread that makes it great for hitting many enemies too.
Nu.
Lun, 10/26/2015 - 03:53
#25
ok ill make this more clear
ive used a savage tortofist on lord vanaduke, former king of almire and vana ALONE (no other enemies present) and i can deal more damage than a blitz needle
this means I have actually done this, held vanas aggro, and surprised the entire party by outdamaging their precious blitzes
and yes, the shard walls are actually very useful
Lun, 10/26/2015 - 10:41
#26
It has spread that makes it great for hitting many enemies too.
Good. Not great. Great would be splash/pierce effect not reduced by body blocking, like Brandish, Troika, DA, Magnus and Bombs.
Mié, 10/28/2015 - 08:32
#27
@Vohtarak
i can deal more damage than a blitz needle
While it might be the case that YOU outdamaged the blitz needle USER, your gun certainly wasn't helping you accomplish this feat.
Blitz needle charge: 272 * 15 = 4080
Tortofist (falling from sky): 272 * 6 = 1632
Tortofist (enemy bumping into it): 198 * 3? = 594
Total tortofist charge: 2226
Now, I couldn't find the number of times the shards from a tortofist can hit an enemy once they've landed officially and had to count from a youtube video so it might hit closer to 5 times, but I can tell you that it would take 13 for you to outdamage what you would have done with blitz needle. Obviously this assumes you hit with all 15 blitz needle shots or all 6 tortofist shards + Vanaduke charges into it. One of these things is vastly harder than the other, semi-random, and almost requires Vanaduke to do a charge to be effective.
You could argue that tortofist's ability to control Vanaduke is valuable, but the numbers disagree with that argument as well-
All tortofist: 2226 * 4 = 8904 per charges
3 blitz, 1 shiver: 4080 * 3 = 12240 per charges
Presuming that you are going to bring the shiver (which is presuming a lot since it isn't necessary), you can actually beat out the 3 blitz + 1 shiver combination with 2 of each-
2 tortofists and 2 blitz needles: 12612 per charges
But this is kind of a longshot for ~400 extra damage per charge session, since by the time you're good enough to build this setup you can probably just roll with all blitz needles anyway and the effort required to actually hit with all of those tortofist shards makes this almost impossible.
Video used to count shards hitting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gluHYYZxN3c
I think it might be able to get in 4 or even 5 but it's really hard to tell >.<
@Vanaduke-Destroyer (To add to what Hexzyle said in far fewer words...)
While its spread does allow it to hit at a medium range for moderate damage, its damage still decreases with the size of the crowd, whereas the tortofists damage increases with the size of the crowd. If I hit 5 enemies with a blitz charge, I still do 4080 total damage, yet if I hit 5 enemies with my tortofist I can potentially do the full 2226 to each of them for a total of over 11 thousand damage. This is what I would argue to be known as balance.
Mié, 10/28/2015 - 11:51
#28
I cant say I agree with you
there is obviously the unaccounted for blitz misses, since at a distance some shots will miss, whereas ive found an average of all but one shard making contact and a good chance of vana taking the post-contact tick damage from all of them, and you severely underestimate the formations of the shards, ill have to guess that either you (if youve tried it) or other sources are very unlucky because theyre much more reliable than people claim (because just about everyones used to guaranteed aim so of course the "not my style this is bad" assumption ranks them pretty low, as I saw in the community weapon rankings but thats off topic)
and I really dont consider myself to be a player who has enough skill to outdamage ~85-90% of people using one of the most OP weapons in game with whats considered a useless weapon by most, it might be a self esteem issue but by the looks of it there is a difference between theory and practice that works out in favor of tortofists (i think its a 90% chance its the theory to practice thing)
yes, I admit that in theory those numbers are real and recorded, but recorded numbers almost never work out the same in practice
edit: proofreading is difficult with autocorrect
Mié, 10/28/2015 - 12:17
#29
Tortofist damage (one missed crystal landing) = 1954
Blitz needle misses needed for tortofists to outdamage blitz against one target: 1954 / 272 = 7.1something = 8 misses to knock it below that..
And you're sure they're aiming at the boss? Regardless, here is footage of someone shooting Vanaduke from the correct distance away with a blitz needle. In the video the knights in question stand quite close to Vanaduke and manage to land hits with their weapons.
https://youtu.be/ovQZlZRfDoo?t=134
Missing with 8+ shots because you stood too far away is known as "bad play", and can be avoided by actually hitting the boss. If you're somehow doing better with tortofists, feel free to share footage because like you say "recorded numbers almost never work out the same in practice", and like I say "what you're claiming is mathematically impossible."
Mié, 10/28/2015 - 12:42
#30
well theres 2 problems with that
I never said the shard missed completely, I said there was a good chance of the post impact ticks from all the shards getting vana (when he tries to move/dash), and yes im sure theyre aiming at the boss because I take time to kill the slags/deadnaughts before I go after vana himself
and I cant record, its the same blank image issue as when I try to take screenshots, I really need to find a way to fix that
Mié, 10/28/2015 - 12:57
#31
ive found an average of all but one shard making contact and a good chance of vana taking the post-contact tick damage from all of them
All but one shard making contact. You do realize that the shards all share one invincitink counter, right? If vanaduke hits shard A 4 times and then comes into contact with shard B, shard B won't do anything.
Similarly, shard bombs all share one shard bomb counter. So if shard bomb A hits some enemy and then shard bomb B detonates and hits, shard bomb B won't do any damage. This is why the shard bombs are never used. I've submitted a fix/detailed bug report of this issue (which Zeddy found, by the way) to the GMs who have since submitted it to the developers.
The only alternative to this is that you did in fact mean that one of the shards falling misses Vanaduke, in which case it requires exactly one less blitz needle hit to miss and my argument remains.
Mié, 10/28/2015 - 14:10
#32
...
I know they share invincitinks, I guess I just said that awkwardly
how about "good chance for him to take every lodged hit possible", does that sound better?
and yes, I did mean all shards but one hit vana on impact, and he almost always takes the maximum ticks from lodged shards, and its still somehow possible for me to outdamage almost every blitzer ive seen, i still dont know why but that doesnt just make it not happen, could you think of any possibilities that arent just raw numbers for this to occur because just numbers dont seem to fit with actual experiences in this case, i have ctr max and asi low if that means anything
Jue, 10/29/2015 - 05:33
#33
and I cant record, its the same blank image issue as when I try to take screenshots, I really need to find a way to fix that
Are you using Evolve? I never did manage to get that to record Spiral Knights.
I personally use ShadowPlay for recording.
Jue, 10/29/2015 - 11:22
#34
I use neither
but im sure its something with the computer and not the program
Sáb, 10/31/2015 - 06:52
#35
Can you record other games? I had a problem with Spiral Knights (black screen) but I could record other games fine.
I've seen a few people bring GG but that's it, most people just stick to Blitz. I've never seen a Riftlocker and I doubt it will ever be used in place of Blitz/GG/Callahan.
For that matter, I'd like for someone to test whether Callahan out-DPS's Blitz now that its charge pierces.
Additionally, I'd like to ask why do people use Gilded Griffon if there's someone with Shiv in the party? It makes sense if all players are using Gilded Griffon, but in conjunction with Shiv all GG does is unfreeze Vanaduke repeatedly and make the Shiv user or anyone with Blitz fresh meat for Vana's slam/charge.
PSA: if someone has Shiv just take Blitz. Please stop breaking Vana's ice.