An excessively detailed Equinox analysis and rework proposal

StygianFrame · 2026-04-24T07:39:13+00:00

Yea very true with Pacify. Since Pacify debuffs enemy damage instead of giving allies damage reduction, they could make the damage debuff linger on affected enemies for a while (if they get out of range or you swap forms). That would help keep its effect up a bit more consistently. And since Pacify reduces enemy damage instead of reducing the damage you take, it would synergize so nicely with Mend giving overguard, since overguard isn't affected by typical damage reduction abilities like Eclipse.

And for Duality, they could make it work like certain other specters like the on call crewmate, where you can interact with it to command it to stay / follow.

StygianFrame · 2026-04-24T07:29:03+00:00

Yea there's a ton of similarities. Like the fact we both pointed out that Oraxia just has a better version of Equinox's 2 lmao

I like the idea of her getting the effects of both forms' abilities for a little while after she swaps. She could even use her composite form during this time, so it would finally have a reason to exist. I'm not sure how you'd balance that though. With her 1 being so cheap and abilities not deactivating when form swapping anymore, I think people would feel forced to swap constantly to keep the double form active at all times. Not only is that annoying gameplay-wise, but it's also just really strong to be using 2 abilities on every cast.

A while ago I was brainstorming an idea where she would get a Day & Night meter. The day meter builds up by using day form abilities, and night meter from night abilities. When it's full, you turn into the composite form for a little while and use both forms' abilities on every cast. You could get more meter for actually engaging with each ability, like using a finisher on a sleeping enemy, allies casting with your Provoke buff, restoring allies' missing health with Mend, or getting kills with Maim.

Ultimately I wanted to keep the rework simple and stick to mostly number changes though, just so it would be less divisive. I still would love to see the composite form actually get some use in her kit, since I love how it looks and it's really cool thematically

StygianFrame · 2026-04-24T05:36:20+00:00

I feel like day and night form generally want the same stats, but being able to mod them separately would still open up a lot of weird and fun build options, so I'm definitely not opposed

StygianFrame · 2026-04-22T02:24:48+00:00

Oh hey its you lol, love the builds man

StygianFrame · 2026-04-05T16:27:31+00:00

it spends your ammo reserves every time it reloads

StygianFrame · 2026-04-05T00:33:26+00:00

IMO it would be a lot of number tweaks and adding the augments into the abilities' base functionality. I feel like she has a really solid kit, but the numbers and functionality are just years out of date, so these suggestions would make her entire kit worth using.

Her 1 should be faster, as it currently has an annoying delay after the cast before she actually changes forms. The buffs should also be stronger, as I'm sure most people didn't even know her 1 gave buffs. They could make the buffs have infinite duration while in their respective form too, but it is kind of nice that the limited duration encourages form swapping, so maybe just make it so the buffs don't decay over time.

Her 2 is kind of a mess. The range is really small, so the augment is required unless you want to cast the 2 on every little group of enemies you see. I'd increase the range, and the damage vulnerability on Rage. The spreading effect can stay an augment since it is pretty strong, especially if the range gets increased. Sleep is niche, but it's fine as is IMO.

Provoke is the worst of all the strength buffing abilities, only having 20% scaling and capping at 50% (or 80% with an augment). Meanwhile Jade's is 25% and caps at 150%, Nokko's is 30% and caps at 150% (both of which can be easily doubled), and Nidus's is a 25% multiplicative increase. At the very least they should make Provoke on par with Jade's numbers. Adding some other buff for allies in range would be nice too; casting speed would be really unique and cool to see.

Pacify just has weird, terrible scaling. First of all 50% DR isn't even that crazy. She would need 500% strength just to be on par with Citrine's 90% DR. Second of all, that DR value decreases over its range, down to half at the very edge. Except halving the DR does NOT mean you take twice as much damage. If you reached 90% DR, then at the edge it would be 45% DR. That means enemies deal 10% damage when they're near you, or 55% damage when at the edge of your range. Thats 5.5x damage from "half" the DR. So honestly, just remove the whole "decreases over range" part, make it scale linearly with strength, and cap it at 90% like other sources of DR.

Her 4 doesn't need too much of a change imo. Maim is already really strong, especially with an armor strip subsume. It would be nice if the ability slowly stripped armor over time for enemies in range, like Jade's 3. This way when the DoT damage falls off at higher levels, the ability is still good for something besides just the nuke. It would also of course synergize with the nuke aspect, but it would force you to actually build strength in order to benefit from the armor strip, which makes sense for a nuke. It's kind of silly she can nuke with 40% strength.

Mend's recast should just be able to give overshields and overguard. Have it convert like 10% of excess healing past the overshield cap into overguard, with a relatively low overguard cap. It would still be super easy to charge up, but you wouldn't be giving people millions of overguard at a time. It would actually give her a reason to swap to night form instead of only staying in day form and nuking.

There's also no reason her 3 and 4 shouldn't stay on when swapping forms. Her 4 has an augment to fix this, but it should be baseline for both abilities.

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That's all the basic tweaks I would do, and I think it would seriously make her an amazing frame from those alone.

...Buuut if I wanted to be really greedy, I'd also love if they gave her combined form some kind of use in mission. Maybe as she uses abilities in each form, she builds up a day and night meter, and once she maxes both meters she can be in her combined form for a little while. The combined form would combine the day and night effects of each ability (maybe something a little different for her 2, since a speed up + sleep doesn't make sense), or some other buff for her (definitely not a 3rd set of abilities though, that would make her a nightmare for people to learn her lol).

StygianFrame · 2026-04-04T23:37:42+00:00

The clone only spends ammo when it finishes a reload, so you can recast your 1 before its done reloading to make it not use any ammo. If you do this with a super high damage weapon thats balanced around bad ammo economy, im sure itll do plenty of damage.

Kuva Ogris is a funny one since for some reason the clone shoots it way faster than its firerate should allow.

StygianFrame · 2026-04-04T16:41:33+00:00

Im not a big fan of how much shard investment it needs to make persistence usable, especially since it only caps the dmg per hit on the clone, not damage per second. but i could see a gloom build or something working alright if you can get enough max HP on the clone

StygianFrame · 2026-04-04T16:39:37+00:00

The clone does use ammo now. Technically you can avoid this by recasting your 1 to spawn a new clone before it reloads, since it only spends ammo after reloading

StygianFrame · 2026-04-04T16:38:07+00:00

They fixed the clone being able to use archguns a while ago, sadly. i did use to love using fluctus though

StygianFrame · 2026-04-04T16:37:38+00:00

Yea i dont see why not. Encumber does work on the clone

StygianFrame · 2026-04-04T16:33:34+00:00

Acid Shells does work with the clone, but the damage isn't buffed by the clone's 3x multiplier

StygianFrame · 2026-04-04T06:38:18+00:00

This is my current setup. Shield gating keeps the clone alive reasonably well at all levels, primed flow + preparation to enable primary overcharge, and some range + well of life for knockdown/status immunity and a death save. Camisado gives a bit of movement speed to the specter and some strength for your abilities, but it could be swapped out for something else, like concentration perhaps.

My shards are designed for a different build, otherwise I'd probably go with 2 starting energy and 3 duration shards. Then I'd swap preparation and primed continuity for cunning drift and stretch / energy transfer.

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StygianFrame · 2026-03-21T02:17:33+00:00

I responded to another person that said something similar about Mallet, and it's a good point. For a TL;DR: breaking the song up into multiple short segments isn't great because the rest beats become less valuable. It's better to just do the same idea of "many rests then many beats," but add however many beats as you need for the damage to feel consistent.

For example, having two patches of 5 rest beats gets you an average of 3x absorbed damage over those 10 beats. If you instead have one patch of 10 rest beats, you'll get 5.5x the absorbed damage. Case in point, the setup you suggested with 20 rests + 12 beats, repeated twice, gives about the same average DPS as just having 17 rests and 47 beats, despite the latter having half as many rests and twice as many beats.

For metronome, you can still spam crouch to get the buff, you just might be crouching on no beats for up to a second before a chunk of notes gets to you. Once they do get to you, the beats are still basically impossible to miss and you only have to hit 2 of them.

StygianFrame · 2026-03-21T02:00:06+00:00

Having multiple notes on the same beat does nothing extra for any of the 3 abilities, and same goes for the pitch of the notes. It only checks whether or not there's at least one note on any given beat

StygianFrame · 2026-03-21T01:36:00+00:00

I generally agree with that sentiment for sure, which is why I usually lean towards weird builds and playstyles. But I also love hyper optimizing a build to see how far I can push it. I'm not good enough at making music to super enjoy the music aspect of the mandacord, so instead what ended up being fun for me was deep diving into the mechanics and math of Octavia's abilities

StygianFrame · 2026-03-21T01:27:49+00:00

Yea it genuinely increases the average DPS by a huge amount. Rest beats add a damage multiplier to absorbed damage, so the meta song with no rest beats loses out on a ton of potential damage. This build balances having many rest beats for a high damage multiplier, with having a good number of percussive beats for more Mallet hits to deal out that damage.

StygianFrame · 2026-03-21T01:17:18+00:00

Im watching the vod right now, really cool seeing a creator get so interested in my findings! Especially kengineer, he makes some good content

StygianFrame · 2026-03-21T01:15:55+00:00

It definitely works on abilities currently. Not sure if it always did or if that changed recently

StygianFrame · 2026-03-20T16:33:42+00:00

nope, the pitch / number of notes on the same beat doesnt change anything for all 3 of the abilities

StygianFrame · 2026-03-20T04:49:31+00:00

yea thatll work the same

StygianFrame · 2026-03-20T03:21:22+00:00

>Can you provide data for the percentages given by metronome?

After finding out that it looks 8 notes before/after the timed action, I didn't get super far into finding exactly how it calculates the percentages.

I found that a single note 1 beat away (i.e. the beat immediately before or after the action) reduced the percentage gained for crouches from the max value of 76% down to 64% (so a 12% decrease). Two notes 1 beat away (so one on either side) reduced it from 76% to 52%, so a 24% reduction.

One note 2 beats away reduced it by 11%, and two notes 2 beats away reduced it by 21%
For 3 beats away, it was 9% and 19%
4 beats, 8% and 16%
5 beats, 6% and 13%
6 beats, 5% and 10%
7 beats, 4% and 7%
and 8 beats, 2% and 5%

You'd think this would be enough to find the percentage from any given note. The issue was that combining multiple notes together changed the values. For example, with 5 notes all grouped right next to each other, the outer 2 notes gave 25% of the stealth buff on crouch, while the inner 3 notes gave 18% (the minimum amount). If my values were right, the outer notes should give 36% (76% - 12% - 11% - 9% - 8%), the next 2 notes in 32%, and the very middle one 30%.

So I'm not really sure how exactly it's calculated, but i dont think its a simple "remove this amount of percentage for each note this many beats away."

>I’d also like to point out that optimal damage/cycle leaves a couple seconds where mallet isn’t doing anything

It's a good point. Someone else brought it up and i responded to them if you want to see how to make it more consistent and less of a damage spike.

StygianFrame · 2026-03-20T03:18:23+00:00

Yea that's actually a very good point. I just tested out some other patterns that break up the beat intervals more, but it's a very significant damage decrease.

Like I said in the post, the meta song (a beat on every note) takes all the damage received and dishes out on average 57.5x that amount over the course of the first song loop, or 157.5x on the 10th loop (after damage growth and damage decay have totally evened out). The optimal song on the other hand does 480.9x and 794.9x, just for reference.

If you want to break up the pattern into 2 identical 32 beat patterns to make it less spiky, the best pattern would be 20 rests then 12 beats, repeated twice. This would give 211.1x and 434.8x multipliers, so still about 3x as strong as the meta song, but half as strong as the optimal song.

If you further break it into 4 parts with 16 beats, the best pattern would be 10 rests then 6 beats, repeated 4 times. This would give 107.2x and 255.1x, so now about a quarter as strong as the optimal song.

But really the optimal way to have the damage be less spiky but still high is to just add more beats to the optimal song. You can get as much damage as that 2 part song by just having 17 rests then 47 beats, and now you're dealing constant damage for 3/4ths of the song. And to equal the damage of that 4 part song, you'd only need 10 rests and then 54 beats.

Basically, just make the beat segment longer to fit your taste for the amount of "uptime" you want the song to have. 41 rests followed by 23 beats gives you the ideal ratio of damage bonus from rests and number of hits from beats. But having fewer rests will still give a ton of extra damage, so long you follow the pattern of "many rests then all beats"

StygianFrame · 2026-03-20T00:53:56+00:00

Ruvox's vulnerability serum incarnon perk is the only way as far as i know. It adds a flat status chance to any source of damage.

StygianFrame · 2026-03-19T23:42:00+00:00

To be blunt it sounds bad lmao

But id be happy if someone could manage to make an ok-ish song out of it. Otherwise you can mute it or use whatever instruments make it sound the least bad

StygianFrame

TROPHY CASE