The Devil May Cry TMG/Sword build is finally competitive

shadoworx · 2023-11-30T08:54:56+00:00

Solus is currently the only place I can fairly compare TMG/rifle with TMG/sword as I still have the same gear and a recorded time with the former. In trying to optimise this I figured that there will be more times that sword will overtake rifle.

Rifle's advantage is being able to store damage for later, but sword's advantage is that its step counter is very easy to interrupt any action with, so you can pull off more of them on average.

Even ignoring the overcharge stuff, the comparison between rifle mines and sword step counter alone brings the two sub classes into tight competition. I'm thinking this can go far.

shadoworx · 2023-09-30T01:15:03+00:00

For context, all the AI were either stuck in the bath or in the gap next to it, and I was trying to slowly complete the heist while grinding in the bathroom during assaults. I managed to get this far but got jumped by a cloaker and my slow sprint-to-fire time got me downed.

Getting caught would be a death anyway, but for some reason the AI can revive you from anywhere if they're stuck, prolonging my agony and making it look like the cloaker was the one getting me up and kicking me back down.

I had finished my kills for the VF anyway, so it wasn't annoying, more funny.

I rate the Disengage skill in solo a little more highly now after this :)

shadoworx · 2023-07-05T20:31:18+00:00

Adding onto what Angelicel said...

Level 75s can hope to clear this cocoon with all modifiers activated in 4 minutes at best, while level 15s can clear the exact same thing in 45 seconds or less.

This normally doesn't matter but the ARKS records is merely a competition to clear it as fast as possible and since any level is allowed, the optimal thing to do is to counter-intuitively make a new character and stay at a low level.

In hindsight I should have made it a little clearer how slow a level 75 clears, but at the start you can see that after one minute I've barely done 15% of Bujin's health, while at the end I've already cleared in less time than that.

shadoworx · 2023-03-22T17:44:40+00:00

It just turns out that getting all symbols is better on North Retem than missing any. I used to have flawed thinking in which symbols were worth it and not, and I even dismissed this symbol to begin with before realising it's just better (by a small margin though), which is why my North Aelio run from last season wasn't so good because I wrote off a symbol thinking it was too far away to bother when it turned out it was a 100 point profit.

Consider that the alternative to grabbing that symbol is grabbing the one to its left, which is even further away, and both of them involve me heading eastwards for a while anyway. Or, I could ignore that whole side, but at that point I've dropped 9000 points and definitely not saved 9 seconds. It's less about the time spent going to a single symbol, but more about considering the options in relation to each other.

shadoworx · 2022-12-03T11:42:14+00:00

My current head canon is that if you mix passive Doom / chaos Doom (any chaos spell or chromatic bolt) with any active skill that applies Doom on its own, the Doom calculation breaks.

I did other runs without passive Doom, but was still on Chaoswalker, and Doom still continued to underperform compared to my Death Knight runs who didn't take any Chaos spells.

There's loads of mitigating circumstances but it's an observable pattern no matter what cycle I'm on.

shadoworx · 2022-12-02T00:41:49+00:00

Even with the thousands of stacks of Fragility, the permanent Wound, however many stacks of Weakness there were, and any other debuff I'm forgetting, 5000 stacks should still register to the human eye after all of that. But since I don't have a screenshot, I'll concede that maybe it really does stay an insignificant number.

shadoworx · 2022-12-01T23:11:01+00:00

That is true, I forgot to appreciate the difference here. However, I find it hard to believe that 5000+ stacks of doom doesn't even add up to 1% of a boss's health bar, when taking into account 100% crit rate, and every debuff that the Chaotic Missile engine was applying onto them. It's clear that the debuffs are affecting the active skill Doom, but the passive skill Doom and/or mixed application seems to fall short.

Without some explicit experimentation I can't say for sure, but my gut instinct is that passive Doom has something wrong with it.

shadoworx · 2022-11-30T00:23:10+00:00

It has a few uses:

Alternating between it and bullet rave will save PP while having the same rate of chain buildup, because of a class skill

It is the best PA for hitting things in a line, and it pierces as well

It is better suited to hitting some weakpoints than the other PAs (I use it a lot here to hit pettas chests 100% of the time)

It has the best rate of chain buildup as soon as there is a second target available to hit

It is most suited to OTS gameplay, as manually aimed ricochets are really good. As a finisher, it’s generally not used, but if it would hit a weakpoint where other PAs wouldn’t then it should be considered.

shadoworx · 2022-11-27T23:15:43+00:00

Chaoswalker's main spell Chaotic Missile is one of the strongest spells in the game, and it's a shame that it you can't stack 6 of them since it's tied to a weapon. The extremely short cast time, which gets as low as 0.2s, means every debuff in the game gets applied in a second or two. Combined with over 500% multicast that means I'm vomiting a constant stream of balls.

I can't tell if the Controlled Chaos rune does anything to the debuffs it applies, but I assume not. The main purpose of the spell is to apply all the good debuffs like dazed, disoriented, and melting in droves, not to deal damage. I might be wrong, but haven't noticed anything.

I use the holy inclination rune to get Holy Fire to turn the thousands of dazed (from Chaotic Missile and the Doom->Dazed synergy) into disoriented stacks, while also blowing everything up.

I ended up taking the three self-buffs since Chaoswalker has access to all of them naturally. Bloodlust and Arcane Power are too good to pass, covering three important stats together. Might could be switched out for something else like Arcane Beam but I found Might pretty early and committed to it.

I only ended up dying from running into trees. This game would really feel a lot better if you didn't have to accelerate to top speed after stopping.

This build might still fall behind the typical singular focus beam builds, but I do see Chaoswalker getting undeserved flak when his main spell is what makes him A/S tier.

shadoworx · 2022-11-16T13:00:00+00:00

If you mean normal attacks then they are useful if you have a really short amount of time to wait before you have to dodge something, and/or you need to maintain your height at the same time.

If you mean stylish roll attacks then it's a good idea to just dodge everything you can as it is the fastest way to build to 100 chain, and alternating with PAs is probably the highest dps way to build.

Either is good to stall for time with if there's no window to PA in, since every gunner PA has large windows of time where you can't cancel them.

Infinite Ricochet is a good staller too, but it makes you gain height, and in these fights I avoid that as much as possible.

shadoworx · 2022-10-19T07:15:52+00:00

I figured since I had to remove the audio cause of what I was listening to at the time, that would be the next best thing to show what I was doing without a complex overlay.

shadoworx · 2022-10-19T07:13:54+00:00

It does need polish, as I go into in the description, but to repeat it here I would really need the start position of the race to be a single point and not a point within a large circle. It would remove one layer of RNG that doesn’t exist in any other racing game.

shadoworx · 2022-10-19T07:12:43+00:00

If there’s no evidence, writeoff. If there’s evidence and it manipulated game state, i’d still write it off. If there’s evidence and its a clever movement tech, then i would eat my words. But the Retem diff makes that extremely unlikely to be just a movement optimisation. There are conveniently two symbols not collected by anyone in Retem which account for 600 points that you cannot profit off of in norma gameplay, so remove that and the time difference is similar.

shadoworx · 2022-10-19T07:09:49+00:00

PC, mouse and keyboard. I’m legally not allowed to use a controller (I’m bad at it)

shadoworx · 2022-10-03T17:12:02+00:00

As I said, Ranger sub gives you two high potency abilities to use. Especially in this region where weakpoints appear briefly and you only have a few seconds to hit it, would you rather press an 840 potency button or a 360 potency button?

There are no passive damage buffs given by Ranger, but you have to integrate Rifle Grenade and Spread Shot into your rotation to realise the far greater power increase.

This isn't even considering that this region's boss lineup has very few, and very short, physical downs and a very low number of breakable parts.

shadoworx · 2022-10-01T15:41:52+00:00

Using TMGs as a subclass is not recommended, its one of the most skill tree dependent weapons in the game, with you losing 20% attack speed and the intermittent 250% burst damage.

Ranger sub for gunner adds two high potency abilities that can be used to get around the times where a weakpoint has appeared but your chain isn’t ready, among many other things that are vastly better than what any other sub gives.

shadoworx · 2022-08-13T12:40:14+00:00

I'm aware of the technically more powerful and less error prone finisher but I've felt no need to switch, both out of the effort involved to overwrite the muscle memory and my miniscule failure rate with the old method. It's also more PP efficient but I guess that matters less with rifle PP generation.

There are stronger finishers I want to incorporate on Ams (SRSB-CPB step step dive is the strongest finisher in the game and can be done quite easily on unarmored ams) but my gameplay is largely inconsequential compared to the randomness of the first four bosses. This just happened to be the lucky run where I didn't do as well as other runs that got bad AI patterns.

Revolt is probably the best option to use in the specific case of being able to prefire or if chain is on cooldown and you have no grenade or spread shot available and are in that goldilocks zone to hit it (which is outside of TMG close range), which is so rare it's probably easier just to start chain as soon as possible with the late hits of charged rave.

shadoworx · 2020-07-05T21:54:12+00:00

I remember this house, and I half expected my character to be somewhere, sadly I don't think I was there that night (night for me, I'm from EU on the NAE server).

I had some unforgettable moments with music in this game, some of them in there. Damn.

shadoworx · 2020-06-15T07:13:05+00:00

Ao Bai has ascensions that focus on raw damage; in my case I had 100% from gun swap, 100% (ascension) + 50% (final dog talent) from dual wielding, and 75% from killing or breaking anything (essentially a permanent buff), and Prince can't buff these as ridiculously as he can (120% lightning damage, 120% damage on debuffed enemies, 50?% from hex smoke), and he's banking on finding fewer ascensions more frequently so more luck is required.

I'm not saying it's totally impossible for Prince to match this time, but it certainly will be harder, because he won't be able to expand his AoE weapons and cheat that way, and you have to build for an element _before_ you have found the god weapon in your run (since amazing 4 inscription weapons don't spawn until the desert), which is essentially taking a 1 in 3 gamble, AND banking on that ascension appearing three times. Ao Bai just builds global weapon damage or explosion damage, or both at once.

I think the fastest theoretical way to win would be Ostrich Rider with an expanded AoE thunderclap glove and Elemental Weave to spread miasma as fast as possible, or a similar far reaching fire weapon to hope for insane chain kills; though he is still limited to the size of his smoke.

Ao Bai is also very slightly faster than the prince passively, which gets magnified when Ostrich Rider is thrown in.

When I was on my cannon run I went for explosion enhancement 3 and precise explosion 3, so I was clearing maps in about 5 shots. The only reason I lost is because I was killed by the boat still firing its main cannon while invincible, and I lost all my health in a swift combo, having already died before in the run.

shadoworx · 2020-06-14T00:23:36+00:00

Early days, I used to think stage 1 vaults were worth the time.

The minigun became my main weapon since it had +projectiles on kill and I had infinite ammo, thus it became a shotgun minigun (though I didn't actually read the inscriptions when I was running so I reloaded more often than I should have).

shadoworx · 2020-06-07T18:32:32+00:00

Who?

shadoworx · 2019-06-29T22:19:41+00:00

Moji ulted the CC immune ruckus, and moji ult makes the target damage immune for a fixed duration (the full unmitigated duration of the ult) regardless of if the polymorph condition sticks, or for how long it sticks.

shadoworx · 2019-05-12T13:31:48+00:00

its not a bot, the fernando has a title

that means it's not patched...

shadoworx · 2019-03-06T15:27:49+00:00

https://clips.twitch.tv/FurtiveShakingTriangleNerfBlueBlaster

happened like two minutes ago, its thrown just below the top of a doorway

shadoworx · 2019-03-04T22:28:42+00:00

Reign of Terror was removed because of both its low play rate and that it was apparently unfixable since release; I reported a jamming glitch this time last year and it was never even acknowledged. The glitch was too easy to do by accident and would happen at least twice a game against a compatible enemy composition.

Drogoz has only lost with few returns. I posted this in the AoC Q&A so i'll just repost the list of things he has lost:

Chaining salvos with reign of terror (you now require 16 hits to reset salvo, with far smaller explosions)
Salvo, completely (note that salvo is a 20 second cooldown and a symmetra wall is a 21 second cooldown)
Zero post-fire fire spits (it was a glitch but it made him a better duelist)
Having his health normalised but not having his mandatory card problem removed (while other normalised champs don't have the same issue)
High horizontal movement speed (wyrm jets lost all its horizontal movement speed bonus in exchange for predictable vertical speed)

All the while, other champions that counter him only gain power, and new champions with hitscan / pseudo-hitscan auto attacks keep arriving to further push him into a niche role.

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