User blog:MasterKnight/Combatting Orbitars basics

Orbitars provide signs of being more troublesome than welcome. Each time they fire a charged shot, there's two attacks to worry about. If only one of the attacks is cancelled, the other is still around to hit the opponent for damage. This is particularly troublesome with Eyetrack Orbitars, which abuses looping and has its idol description claim it lacks attack power (*HA!*); and Centurion Orbitars, which has stupid high attack power for its arrow shots.

In the table below, for Rapid Fire, the number of hits required to deal at least 15 Base Damage, the amount needed to destroy a standard charged Orbitars shot's portion with lesser Shot Cancel, is listed, and the divisor is the number of shots fired from the attack. The resulting quotient can't be higher than 0.5 or it can't destroy a standard Orbitars charged attack in one go. If an attack has 3 Shot Cancel, it is treated as 1 hit needed for 15+ BD because it isn't lesser SC. With 4 SC, the Orbitars attack portion is the one with lesser Shot Cancel and thus may fail to cancel your own, but don't rely too much on it, because your own attack still has a Stamina factor.

Charged shots are different: it is HIGHLY recommended to have at least 4 SC. A 3 SC attack is going to get destroyed cancelling only one of the Orbitar shot's portions, leaving the other one alone. Additionally, what is listed for attacks with 4 or more SC is the Stamina value of your own attack, which is how much Base Damage is needed for the Orbitar shot to overwhelm it.

Since plenty of weapons will want to use dash shots to clean up Orbitar shots, it becomes critical to know the base damage values of given types of Orbitars. Guardian and Boom are not listed because Guardian requires different tactics altogether, and Boom has 4 Shot Cancel on the charged shots, making it a fortune that it's tame anyway.

The good news is, all weapon types other than Orbitars have at least 25 Stamina on the forward and side shots, although Cursed Palm has only 3 SC at most on ALL attacks. Claws have 25, then Great Reaper Palm has 26, and then Cannons in general have 28, and then the standard is 30. So most Orbitars' side dash shots are guaranteed to get cancelled altogether. However, some Orbitars need to be noted for powerful forward shots that exceed 25 BD per portion. They are as follows:
 * Standard at higher range (can reach 28 BD but not 30)
 * Shock at higher range
 * Eyetracks at lower range (max BD of 28.5)
 * Paw Pad at moderate to high range
 * Jetstream at lower range
 * Aurum outside very close range
 * Centurion at any range
 * Arlon at higher range (does not reach 28 BD)

So half the Orbitars forward shots can potentially cancel the standard forward/side shot without resorting to the back shot.

Clubs also need to be wary. The standard dash shot for clubs has only 50 Stamina, which seems like a lot until you realize that they have obscene wait times for chargeup. However, the standard neutral shot has 100 Stamina, so even a single Centurion shot pair gets cancelled without destroying the shot, which will still have at minimum 25 Stamina going on, and who would want to hit the thing that close. The swings can also instantly destroy ANY shot in the entire game, including the Guardian Orbitars' back shot, without their equivalent of batting an eyelash.

Still, Orbitars may not have been checked properly. Though Eyetracks and Centurion could simply have had failure balance going on. Time will tell.