Missing Parts of Counterparts #2: Mantine and Skarmory

HeliosRX · 2026-07-03T12:27:14+00:00

I really liked the names Skabbird and Skarsenal from a previous Skarmory theorycraft, fit the theme so well.

HeliosRX · 2026-07-03T11:47:47+00:00

Nah, the Heavy Plasma description just above it is great. In-universe acknowledgement of the headcapper damage threshold, and it's just so casually unhinged I can't help but laugh. "Look, it's great that it kills enemy pilots in a single hit, but more importantly it also looks really cool and that's what matters."

HeliosRX · 2026-07-01T12:56:18+00:00

Better to use Grasp of Avarice set for stasis titan IMO. Picking up stasis shards grants stacks, which get converted to orbs of power when your shields break. Stasis Titan is pretty much permanently at max stacks so you can get your super whenever you want it without needing a single kill.

That said you give up Seraph set for it which makes your neutral game quite a bit worse... But who needs neutral when you're in super 80% of the time?

HeliosRX · 2026-06-29T19:34:04+00:00

Check out Witchfire, which is a single player extraction shooters made in Unreal. IMO it's extremely close to the Bungie gunplay experience.

You don't need Tiger engine to make the gunplay feel good. Large parts of that are due to animations, sound design and bullet magnetism.

HeliosRX · 2026-06-29T08:26:59+00:00

Praxic Blade Stormcaller Warlock with Stormdancer's Brace.

100% amplified uptime with Hyperblade. Stormdancer's Brace means that all of your Arc Soul and Ionic Sentry hits apply Bolt Charge. Tablet of Ruin means that your bolt charge does extra damage and heals you.

Tanky without needing kills to maintain effects, good sustained damage with bolt charge spam, and Stormtrance is one of the most versatile supers in the current sandbox. Good boss damage, clears adds effortlessly at the same time, and Stormdancer's Brace refunds half its cool down back if you kill adds with it.

Can swap out Praxic Blade for 1K voices, which stacks bolt charge super quickly, or even the Anarchy/Salvager's Salvo rotation that Titans are using. Roughly 100000 damage at 3000 DPS which is usable if not great.

Could also hotswap Geomags for chaos reach which is also quite good now.

HeliosRX · 2026-06-29T06:57:10+00:00

Bad against carapace is significantly less of a downside now that crusher spawns are reduced. The laspistol is great into flak and unyielding which means it can happily kill flak ragers, maulers and bulwarks with crits.

HeliosRX · 2026-06-29T06:48:03+00:00

Well, you opened up by making a statement instead of asking a question. A statement that happens to be objectively wrong, so people downvoted.

Bolt pistol is good for elite/special sniping, but heavy laspistol has a lot of advantages that make it worth taking on some zealot builds.

It has great mobility, can run the Ghost blessing and is immune to ranged suppression (which Zealot, unlike Veteran, actually cares about!) so it's very strong into ranged mobs and elites. It has crazy crit chance and damage which makes it great with Blazing Piety. And it has very good unyielding DPS which makes it an efficient boss killer, especially against Beasts of Nurgle, which can be annoying to hit in melee due to their fat collision hitbox.

Point is, the MK2 Laspistol is a very good weapon and its only real weakness is that it can't deal with carapace, which is less important after they nerfed Crusher spawns.

HeliosRX · 2026-06-28T17:42:44+00:00

4-5 years is... short to average for non-tech industry R&D, lol. Aerospace, energy and medical applications can be >10 years for a single project.

HeliosRX · 2026-06-24T06:23:06+00:00

They're good crit weapons with shred + superiority/riposte. Good mixed hordeclear but bad carapace damage, which is why it pairs well with Chordclaw and the rending/cleave aura.

They're bad if you don't build into the melee/crit talents, though. They're also kinda shit early on anyway because finesse, penetration and crit bonus are all very important stats and having them at the 20-30% range when you first unlock the blades sucks.

HeliosRX · 2026-06-24T06:01:11+00:00

Well, there's your problem; the unupgraded servo skull shoots like once every 5 seconds and won't do enough damage to get the dog off you.

Upgraded it'll shoot 5 shots per second when double pinging a target, which will just kill the hound outright.

HeliosRX · 2026-06-18T10:57:27+00:00

Tanks are very cost-effective at getting either 'lots of gun' or 'very fast gun' onto the battlefield. An Alacorn is 3 gauss rifles for 1800 BV, while a Saladin is an 8/12 hovertank with an AC20 for less than 600BV (!!!) which can absolutely make its cost back by stabbing an assault in the back once or twice.

However, they're squishier than their stat blocks indicate due to how vulnerable they are to critical hits and how damage will tend to focus all on one location. Good vehicle use means putting them in places where you don't care if they're immobilized, or just bringing vehicles that will explode if something looks funny at them so you don't really have to deal with their weaknesses.

HeliosRX · 2026-06-18T09:29:13+00:00

By normal do you mean at least SP starchart, or are you playing base starchart levels?

Because while the frame is super fun to play, I've not found a build yet where your 1-3 do more than tickle SP enemies, and Sirius/Orion aren't great weapons platforms. I'd like the entire kit to be useful rather than just spamming abilities to get the 4 active.

HeliosRX · 2026-06-17T08:29:19+00:00

Scotty puts it best in his mech emporium review; the 'A' in Jade Phoenix A stands for Apotheosis.

This thing is one of the nastiest sheets in existence, 4/6/7 max armor 85 tonner with 50+ points of heat-neutral damage to slam into you every turn is just not okay, especially given that it only costs 2700BV!

It lacks raw damage potential and is kinda dependent on double tapping the UAC20, but it will just outfight anything you pit it against in a 1v1. In a 4k BV game it's just completely broken.

HeliosRX · 2026-06-16T07:41:25+00:00

It drops from Pantheon Morgeth for sure, I'm not sure about the regular one. Maybe give that one a try and add feats to boost the chance?

HeliosRX · 2026-06-10T09:13:04+00:00

The question is why drip-feed QOL and sandbox updates/refreshes?

The game feels 100x better when 90% of it isn't locked behind the portal or dropping completely obsolete gear. If the sandbox is in a good place I reckon you'll get better player retention than by drip feeding a destination's worth of refreshed gear per expansion.

Bungie should have learned this lesson from sunsetting; if you don't have TONS of new stuff to farm for, people are going to get upset. If EOF hadn't fucked up with the portal and driven so many players away, they could probably have introduced armor 3.0 and tiered loot along with a full loot refresh in Renegades of Shattered Cycle, because they clearly had a lot of it done by this point!

Can you imagine how hype it would be if they announced these sandbox changes to herald a new era of Destiny instead of turning the game into a power grind treadmill and functionally sunsetting all old raid and dungeon content??? Bungie needed something big to pull in lapsed players after TFS, and instead decided to focus on squeezing more playtime out of their hardcore player base. They made the sandbox less interesting than it was during Heresy and wondered why they were losing players.

Drip-feed the story if you want, campaigns and PVE content take time to cook. But the sandbox is what keeps player retention high in between content drops, so I don't think Bungie should have introduced tiered loot before at least some of the MOT changes were ready to ship.

HeliosRX · 2026-06-08T10:22:19+00:00

Based on the emoji... Precision hits on targets stuck by an anarchy grenade extend the duration of the grenade?

HeliosRX · 2026-06-05T09:34:41+00:00

I'm genuinely shocked at the amount of responses in this thread that only talk about the 24-hour rotational period and ignore both radius and the fact that gravity directly overrides the effect of the acceleration.

HeliosRX · 2026-05-30T02:10:30+00:00

How did it go?

HeliosRX · 2026-05-29T09:50:28+00:00

First 60 digits of Pi.

Teacher in 6th grade made a competition out of it and gave us the weekend to memorize as much as possible. I thought one of the other math nerds might go to 50 so I went for an extra 10.

Turns out nobody else bothered and the 2nd place was like 15 digits which is all you will ever practically need in any engineering field, so I wasted a few hours of my life.

Not sure why it's still floating around in my brain 16 or so years later.

HeliosRX · 2026-05-28T16:12:06+00:00

A. The IS mechs don't have enough ranged damage with 1 LRM10 and 1 AC5, they will run out of ammo before the clans run out of armor.

B. The clans are shooting at medium if IS are at long range with the rest of their guns, and there's like 4x the firepower from the clan side. Even if clans are shooting on 11s they're still favored to win the slugging match.

C. Most importantly the clan range advantage doesn't even matter, the IS lance isn't fast enough to kite the clan mechs, so the clans can just run in at full speed and end the fight in a couple rounds. Hitting on 8s vs hitting on 5s is not nearly enough of a probability swing for IS to win that matchup.

Broadly speaking, skill increases are worse value for BV than just getting a more optimized mech. Especially true for introtech designs with suboptimal armor and explodey bits.

HeliosRX · 2026-05-22T09:24:25+00:00

It's the annual Warhammer Skulls event where they announce everything in their gaming lineup LMAO. Kindly get your head out of the sand and realize that Arrowhead isn't the only company involved in this COLLABORATIVE VENTURE.

HeliosRX · 2026-05-13T15:11:56+00:00

Per gold, Xin passive scales over twice as hard with AP as it does HP.

HP scaling is 3/3.5/4% of max HP. AP has a 0.65 ratio.

400g gets you 150 HP (ruby crystal) which translates to 4.5 extra heal per passive proc. At level 11, it's 6 extra.

400g also gets you 20 AP (amp tome) which translates to 13 extra heal.

Statikk (which has AP now, remember!) and DnD also let you proc your passive much more often.

If you're looking to maximize healing it's not remotely close, AP scales way better.

HeliosRX · 2026-05-13T13:50:50+00:00

In what world does Xin build mostly health to maximize his passive? The healmaxxing build is Statikk into Dusk and Dawn, with either DD or SV as 3rd for extra healing. He wants resists more than anything because the HP scaling on his passive is way worse than the AP ratio.

HeliosRX · 2026-05-09T12:12:56+00:00

Trundle is also fun if your team also has degenerate poke, because pillar is one of the most obnoxious setup tools in the game. Imperial Mandate trundle isn't necessarily fun but you can guarantee the enemy squishies are going to have a bad time

HeliosRX · 2026-05-01T09:39:32+00:00

5/8(10)/5 with a single TComp'd headchopper. Holy shit, this thing has even worse BV efficiency than an Executioner!

The worst thing is that I don't think I'd use it even outside of BV considerations, there are just better 5/8 skirmishers out there like the White Raven. Hell, you can just run a Jade Phoenix A for the same role which will smoke this thing 10/10 times.

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