Or, "How to use your battle sprite". I saw a thread like this but it was on Maskeraith only.
Too often do I see statements to the effect of sprites being useless. It's clear the abilities were introduced to make us get creative and clever in our playstyle, and I think my play has become quite varied after their introduction. I'll tell you of tricks I've discovered, and you guys can share how you're using your sprites. This can be general combos or how to use an ability in a specific area of the game.
No whining about how weak your sprites are in this thread!
Caustic Quills as more dakka (Autoguns)
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When maxed, Maskeraith fires 11 quills for about the same damage as medium damage plague needle. There are several ways to utilize this by synergizing it with your own autogun or your friend's:
- Synchronize it with your friend's autogun charge.
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The most effective, and fittingly the most difficult technique to pull off right. The most single target damage achievable might very well belong to a team of four maskeraith users with autoguns and caustic quills who know what they're doing. Each user needs to synch their quill so that they don't fire the quills at the same time as other players (since the quill limit of 4 is global, rather than per-player), and also time it to go while it their friend's autoguns are running. If performed correctly, I predict we'll see new Vanaduke time record videos using this sometime in the future.
- Instant charge attack, just add water.
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You can also synch the quills with your own autogun, but you need to use the regular attack if you want to get all the quills in on a single target. This provides close to the damage of a charged autogun attack, but without the low movement speed and slow windup of the charged attack.
- Change your autogun's damage type.
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If your quills are of a different damage type than your autogun, they can be used for situations they couldn't before. Perforate giant lichen colonies with your Blitz Needle! Make your Pepperbox piercing damage! Make your Blitz normal damage for Vanaduke's mask!
- Instant dakka, just add dakka.
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Take some distance from a group of enemies to spread the quills amongst several enemies. This let's you use the charge attack of your gun to break the quills provided you have the CTR for it.
Caustic Quills as more dakka (other weapons)
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While Quills can be used to make OP weapons even more OP, I think it's a lot more fun to use it for making previously underpowered weapons competitive:
- Shard bombs, Ash of Agni, Voltic Tempest:
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Take distance from your enemy group and spread the quills. Spam one or all of these bombs and watch the damage numbers fly. Add Vengeful Quills to double your damage. (Someone with Virulent Quills chime in on how well that works on groups, I'd love to know!) Fire ticks, shock ticks and shard bombs are all great for multihitting multiple enemies, and as such for breaking many quills fast.
- Making cutters OP:
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I usually use cutters as quick bursts of damage against single targets, such as lumbers, lichen colonies and trojans. Since cutter combos do 10 hits and you have 11 quills in a cast, you can use the cutter to continously break off quills as they hit the target, thus allowing all of them to deal their damage towards a single target. This is fun and very effective, basically like having your sprite fire a plague needle charge while you go to town with your cutter.
- Silkwings and Menders:
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Healing breaks quills, and the poison also turns the healing into damage. This works great with silkwings simply because of their enormous rate of fire. Try using Quills on a lumber with three silkwings backing it up.
- Seraphinx:
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Concentrate a Seraphinx Laz0r and Maskeraith Quills in the same area for fun and profit.
- Vengeful Quills for racking up damage on a hard to reach target:
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Imagine a situation where there is one target who is easy to hit and a another target who is hard to hit. Let's say a lumber and a gremlin demo. Fire your Quills at the lumber and lay out something like an Ash of Agni. The rebound Quills will apply to the demo and you've effectively transfered heavy damage from a slow tank to a speedy dodger.
Getting creative with Shadow Cloak
I've been asked what the point of this ability is before, and it baffles me every time. You turn invisible, for crying out loud! Just apply a bit of imagination and it can do anything:
- Priority target assassinations:
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Utilize the cloak to get close to a mender and shove a Gran Faust up their shineyholes. Also useful for deadnaughts, rocket puppies, mecha knights and other targets that are annoying to get to but important to kill fast. Mortafires will never annoy you again.
- That one room in that one Scarlet Fortress level:
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Know the one I mean? It's the one where the exit elevator is right next to the entrance elevator, but you have to take the long way around. At the end, four gun puppies guard the elevator. Have your non-maskeraith using friends stay behind while you cloak, casually stroll up to them and unleash swordey rage.
- The rocket puppy room in FSC:
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I know, I know, we already have a thousand ways to deal with this without turning invisible and just walking past the puppy, but this is still pretty fun.
- Surprise shard bombs:
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This is why I got Vengeful Cloak instead of Deadly Cloak. Walk into the middle of a group of enemies and start bombspamming. The Vengeful Cloak will stun them and make it easy to get a chain going.
- Speedrunning:
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With minerals suddenly becoming important, you may want to start running through stages, ignoring enemies. Sometimes, enemies are so thickly gathered that they're hard to avoid on your own. In such cases, Shadow Cloak will speed things up. I personally use it nearly always at the end of compounds where you need to run for keys.
Mobile damage haze bomb
This ability is so beautiful. (I still want the time extension to matter more, Nick.)
- Murder ALL the gremlins:
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Ever gotten annoyed by thwacker shields? Mortafires? Ghostmane recons? Evasive menders? No more! If their weak spot is facing your way for even a moment, Hexing Haze will bag them. The hex explosion also seem to make the shell come off pretty quick from mortafires, but I was on Normal mode when this happened so I can't confirm it for higher difficulties.
- SLAUGHTER all the gremlins:
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Ever been in a decon zone and been annoyed by gremlins running away from you? That's your loot they're not dropping! Using a +3 MSI setup, activate Hexing Haze and hunt them down with ease.
- Tank compound minis to death:
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The haze is often strong enough to kill them on their own, but you can speed it along with an Ash of Agni or something such. Shield until your enemies have fallen. Works well from the inside of an Angelic Aura.
- Surprise shard bombs:
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This is why I got Vengeful Cloak instead of Deadly Cloak. Walk into the middle of a group of enemies and start bombspamming. The Vengeful Cloak will stun them and make it easy to get a chain going.
- Slaughter dodgetastic enemies
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Equip a piercing harness and laugh at teleporting wolvers as much as dodgey devilites, swerving gorgos and shielding trojans.
What a fantastic sprite; it's all I could ask for except my much needed standalone firepower against Roarmulus for the sake of shardbombing them.
I use the shadow cloak to chat in the middle of a run.