User blog:MasterKnight/Eyetrack Orbitars "imbalance" points

Something that has come to my attention is how Eyetrack Orbitars is deemed imbalance of its own volition. What happens with Eyetrack Orbitars is that the Dash Shots can do Shot Looping when they have homing increases, needing 30 meters per loop with Homing Boost if I recall correctly. It doesn't even help that the idol description freaking lies claiming that Eyetrack Orbitars has low attack power even though Eyetracks' projectile strength for Shots is 150% times that of the Standard Orbitars', though Eyetracks does have a 66% max range damage multiplier. Now my opinion? Eyetrack Orbitars has low velocity on the Shots to begin with, and those don't charge up fast nor do they have incredible stamina. They need significant setup before they can start causing too many problems, and that is why I am writing this, to call out what the blazes happens with with this infamous weapon.

The Nijuugo Combo
We're starting off with Eyetrack Orbitars' guaranteed Power Loadout, nicknamed the Nijuugo Combo after the 25 space minimum of the combination of Energy Charge, Slip Shot, and Homing Boost to promote Grid Reading. Eyetrack Orbitars would use this combination to get some quick and easy kills with Energy Charge boosting the attack power for the abrupt damage, Slip Shot to exploit terrain involvement far more easily, and Homing Boost to manage the looping. Sound simple, right? Why would a little "bookworm comment about economy" make such a difference?

Actually, you'd be surprised. I whipped up this quick video for anybody to reference. The summary is that the tag protection is unimpressive, and it shows when even having all 3 Powers of the Nijuugo Combo at Level 1 can't fit in Level 2 Celestial Fireworks. I should mention that Darkness does fit at Level 2, but not Level 3 or Level 4, and Level 2 won't fit with either Homing Boost or Energy Charge at a higher Level any more than Reflect Barrier or Warp will, and even Level 1 won't work if either Energy Charge is Level 2 or above, or Homing Boost is Level 3.

More likely than not, Energy Charge has to be Leveled up. If it isn't, Bumblebee would be needed to stop an abrupt hit from sniping off the singular charge of Energy Charge at Level 1 with something like Mega Laser, which crosses into the problem that Bumblebee requires a full line and therefore would force Slip Shot to be Level 1. Not only that, even if the 3 Buffs Rule wasn't a problem, Bumblebee on the combination would still block off anything that isn't a Tetris Line or objectively less costly, which doesn't exactly consist of an impressive lineup of Powers, and this would be with Bumblebee being, AGAIN, Level 1; Level 2 would outright deny anything further from fitting and Level 3, being the 2x6 Rectangle, is innately blocked off by Slip Shot itself even if Slip Shot is at Level 1. At least Level 2 Energy Charge instead could hope to fit in Jump Glide.

If you think the issues with tag protection aren't relevant, here is a past experience of mine with the Nijuugo Combo, on Eyetrack Orbitars no less, and it just so happened to be a hacked min-maxed weapon setup too, even if I would have uploaded the experience regardless of the hacking. And yes, the video STILL displays how much weapon modifiers, particularly Shot Range+, boost Eyetrack Orbitars to obscene levels, but if you think what I went through was bad enough (it was), believe me, Eyetrack Orbitars is generally capable of much, MUCH worse, bringing me to my next point.

Matchup bias: the V300 weapon
To elaborate on Eyetrack Orbitars' key stats, the Forward Shot has each of the eye orbs deal 28.5 base at point blank, a total of 57 with both eye orbs hitting, though at least that's just point blank even if the tipper range damage is slightly less than 38, still nothing to be trifled with. Still, the shot velocity is underwhelming and the size and stamina are nothing to write home about either. The looping could be a problem, but just being further away would at least attenuate that.

It's Shot Range+ that creates problems.

I already stated standard Clubs, with 5 Shot Cancel on even the Neutral Shot, never have to worry about losing Shot Cancel wars to Eyetrack Orbitars, which has 3 Shot Cancel on its Dash Shots, including the Back Shot and thus can't Shot Cancel through the Clubs' Shots even with Shot Cancel+. I further mention that the Neutral Shot's 100 Shot Stamina prevents Eyetrack Orbitars' Forward Shot from KOing it within one strike. 100 Shot Stamina is NOT even close to achieved by plenty of other weapon families' Forward Shots, and 5 Shot Cancel is certainly because I'm using a heavy weapon in the first place. Already you can see how my mileage is from power difference being useful MORE THAN NECESSARY.

Of course, the rabbit hole of matchup bias goes even deeper than I thought.



I will admit that I don't have EXPRESS permission from from Berlini to use this picture, but I have asked and by all indications, his only issue with usage of the image is picture quality, but as long as the important information is there, that's a non-issue. The important point is that Eyetrack Orbitars gets inflated as it does by Shot Range+. This setup is far from min-maxed and it's not like Berlini is a bad player, considering I have witnessed him actually use charged attacks and melee attacks to effectiveness with the Compact Arm, a weapon that is in its own right capable of being more powerful with flowchart than it should be. He's still calling out a single loop of the attack wiping out his entire health with unwelcome ease. He has reported Energy Charge and Slip Shot being on the setup, and since the looping is happening when Eyetrack Orbitars would need homing increases to manage as much, I can determine that Homing Boost, and thus the Nijuugo Combo is at work, and I still end up at a loss for an answer on what he could do. What gives?

What is worth pointing out is the damage that Eyetrack Orbitars deals when at 30 meters, already a decent distance for using Slip Shot and certainly big enough to avert any easy Black Hole usage that isn't beginner's luck or a surprise inspection. What happens there is that Eyetrack Orbitars' Forward Shot has its loop complete for every 30 meters thereabouts. The Forward Shot has a normal max range of 60 meters, meaning only 2 loops are able to happen. At 30m, this would result in 84% damage for the first hit and 66% for the second, a total of about 150% of the base damage. Shot Range+ changes this with the 50% range increase leading to the hits averaging 77%, ultimately managing to have 231% from all 3 hits, or about 131 damage before further modifiers to make things worse. This would already need just the 1.8x modifier from Energy Charge to take out a base fighter, never mind that effective 7 Stars would triple the damage entirely. You see how necessary it is to destroy the shots, but this is still easier said than done, and it shows how bad things get when in my video I was using a Skyscraper Club with practically superlative defensive power mods to avoid being vaporized in dead time and I still could barely hang on by a thread.

Really, it all comes back to a key problem: the Shot Range+ Eyetrack Orbitars using the Nijuugo Combo can hide behind terrain cover and shoot from their while the opponent can't hit them, having to instead maneuver around the terrain cover to even reach a location with a workable counterattack angle. Clubs have innate Slip Shot properties on the Neutral Shot, other than Atlas Club and Magnus Club, but no other weapon family gets such a property, so they are more likely to have to put up with 48 second onslaught worth of attacks instead of trying to pick off the Energy Charge use, something that brings up Quick Charge as a potential substitute for Energy Charge that at L3 for 3 charges none of which can be removed from play, conveniently uses Energy Charge L1's Female Box shape and makes clear why I would say 48 seconds instead of 32 over Energy Charge's inconveniences.

I had considered advising for usage of Dash Rapids to capitalize upon the Shot Cancel problems and slow chargeup that Eyetrack Orbitars is supposed to have, but Compact Arm has only 2 Shot Cancel on its Dash Rapids that shoot off 3 bullets per round dealing no more than about 8 base damage apiece, up against the 3 Shot Cancel and 15 Shot Stamina of each of the eye orbs. Other Arms have 3 Shot Cancel on their Dash Rapids, but this only brings up how Arms have improved Shot Cancel as a niche strength in projectile usage, and that the Dash Rapid standard for Shot Cancel is what else but 2. Dash Rapids that clear either 15 base damage per bullet with 2 or 3 bullets, or 7.5 per bullet with 4 or 5 bullets, are sadly uncommon. There is serious matchup dependence going on with this idea, really.

Shots are an equally conditional idea. Neutral Shots tend to have 3 Shot Cancel and Compact Arm is, again, not an exception. The problem with 3 Shot Cancel? Well, the bullet will destroy only one of the orbs with the other orb still being around. I have Eyetrack Orbitars recorded on my sheet of attack data to have its Forward Shot capable of coming out every 2 1/2 seconds, but this is still more than enough to be overly disruptive when few Neutral Shots will get to be launched every 1 1/4 seconds or faster. Dash Shots could be worth considering at least because there will be good reliability on them having 4 Shot Cancel and clearing 30 Shot Stamina (to avoid being defeated by either of the Forward Shot orbs alone), but they have to hit both orbs reliably or they will be worse off. At the point where you care that Compact Arm doesn't have less Shot Cancel on the Dash Shots than other Arms do, I'm already thinking the damage is done, not helped by how the Compact Arm doesn't have a good size on the charged shots.

And remember: 2 1/2 seconds is not taking possible usage of Quick Charge into account.

Compact Arm is often restricted due to the aforementioned flowchart that I alluded to, actually rightfully so even if the flowchart does get inflated by weapon modifiers, so that should tell you how ridiculous Shot Range+ allows Eyetrack Orbitars to be by being overly demanding of offense through terrain cover while having stats too many weapon types become ill equipped to punch through.

Why blame Shot Range+?
Okay, so if Eyetrack Orbitars is singled out for excessively powerful shot looping, why call out Shot Range+? It doesn't benefit weapon types globally like Evasion+ or the Speed+ mods in general do. Higher range weapons that deal more damage over distance, such as standard Staffs and Clubs, practically just get hurt by it. Why would I deem Shot Range+ to have plenty of culpability when it's not enabling the same abuses everywhere?

Here's the thing: Shot Range+, for only about 35 Value, enables VARIOUS abuses, not just mid-range Shot Looping with a damage dropoff weapon.

For starters, range involves magic numbers as it is with the involvement of certain concepts, with a perfect example being Black Hole. If an attack has a 25 meter capacity, its usage to deal damage does not let the user be outside range of Black Hole to avoid being vacuumed, so when they want to use that attack to decent effect, they have to be mindful of Black Hole and that can cause them to twitch panic button usage. Shot Range+ changes this to have them able to use the same attack at over 35 meters away where they can't be nabbed by Black Hole and thus they can stack offense Powers with FAR less penalty for doing so. Compact Arm's Neutral Rapid has 30 meter range at base and Shot Range+ increases it to a whopping 45 meters. That's obscene even if we ignore the suddenly huge amounts of leeway provided.

Shot Looping is fine when it's happening at short range, if anything as a way to give weapons like Angel Bow some sense of risk assessment with distance closure. The problem is when it happens at mid range where engagement still is going to be only enough for an edge to have significant influence but no more than that, and so convolution becomes a blatant advantage. Mid-range looping is convolution for its own sake and Shot Range+ makes it easier to happen.

It even bolsters Predator Cannon as well by letting the Back Shot under Homing Boost or Shot Homing+ to last much longer while exploiting the relentless hounding that makes it literally undodgeable within the tip of its range of 50 meters. Forget that Predator Cannon under sufficient modifiers doesn't need Energy Charge to 1HKO with the Back Shot; I do NOT advocate forcing everybody to lug around Super Armor or Playing Dead just to deal with one particular setup, keeping in mind that I myself use the former as a staple, and the latter has bad stigma, undeserved or no, for stalling capability. Predator Cannon would be significantly more dodgeable without Shot Range+, just because of the Shot barely getting close to the ground under homing increase before expiring, which IS relevant when it needs to collide with something to explode, so just dodge it and it's practically no longer a threat. That's a MAJOR difference, and when Homing Boost is already a chunky Power, that's a show of how Shot Range+ deserves the lion's share blame.

And who could forget weapons that deal less damage over distance? This is a balancing measure to prevent players from just sniping all day long with weapon types more likely to try to be exploitive with as much. Capricorn Club becomes a particular standout because it has THE lowest max range damage multiplier of any weapon type at only 22%, provided to make sure Capricorn Club can't exploit the Neutral Shot having Slip Shot capability on top of actual DPS. Shot Range+, naturally, messes with THIS too, increasing its base damage at the reliable ranges by about 50%, and outright doubling them at the edge of its original range. This is with the Club meant for DPS and range at the cost of efficiency.

Oh, and did you notice how I said BASE damage? Because this is significant with all of the above. Not only does it help a bit with Shot Cancel by wearing down winning bullets better, in case the addition of longer range bullets wasn't enough, but it also makes status involvement easier to abuse because base damage has actual influence on ailment infliction, whether by chance, requirement, or duration.

Just for good measure, defensive attacks end up with longer lifespans as well. Even when their damage is higher later into their lifespan, such as with Ancient Staff, their mere existence still generates a hitbox and a blockade to confine your movement just for dealing with an opponent with a passive effect the developers deemed to be equivalent in effect to 2 Range Stars when deciding Value costs. Oh, and guess what? Eyetrack Orbitars has this as its Back Shot.

Countering this with Speed+ mods or Lightweight is also a slippery slope expecting everybody to have them to deal with FOUR mediocre mobility weapon types (Leo Cannon, Eyetrack Orbitars, Predator Cannon, and Capricorn Club), one of which, Capricorn Club, is almost as slow as Skyscraper Club itself and doesn't even have the Neutral Swing movement boost for walking, and nothing stops those 4 weapon types from having Speed+ mods themselves aside from MAYBE weapon modifier slots, which when min-maxing happens to where it allows for easy gatekeeping by people grinding for random provision weapons is not exactly going to check anything. I do not buy that having to abuse something cheap in return is any better than Eyetrack Orbitars giving Compact Arm the fits that it does for basically no reason, especially when Compact Arm exploits Walking Speed+ to be more problematic than it should be anyway.

Without Shot Range+, Eyetrack Orbitars is nowhere near as capable of abuse. Even if its abysmal shot velocity doesn't start putting this under control, mid range shot looping wouldn't happen even on a hide-and-seek map like Starlight Observatory because multiple hits per orb would start failing to happen. Damage falloff would actually reach noticeable levels and exploitation of something like Weaken+ would lose a lot of chance to get inflicted OR made use of in the first place. Even the Back Shot wouldn't be able to stall out an attempt to more directly pick off an Energy Charge use without having to resort to Mega Laser sniping that not everybody will have available.

Summary is that Eyetrack Orbitars is just a convenient scapegoat. It benefits in several ways from Shot Range+, but Shot Range+ itself is excessively powerful in general to begin with.

Closing
At the end of the day, Eyetrack Orbitars is still capable of rampaging in randoms and all it needs is a single given modifier, and that's why it is infamous. However, analyzing what happens in the first place, what is allowing me to beat a hacked min-maxed setup while somebody with his own share of skill and a weapon type with its own bad stigma just ends up being flattened by a setup that is nowhere near as min-maxed, and what a remake could do to fix this balance issue. My primary suggestion, of course, is to weaken Shot Range+ big time so that it can't create as much unhealthy matchup bias. I imagine there would still be concerns that wouldn't have everything covered by this notion in one fell swoop, but the biggest offender would be taken out and this would go a significant distance in balancing out a few other weapon types with their own capabilities of abuses as well. A remake would also get to work with patches for anything that crops up post-release, so there's that too.

When all is said and done, it's important to look at the factors before declaring something to be a problem for sure. Eyetrack Orbitars is proof of as much.