Just when you thought he'd never be ballin'!
Okay, so, I think I need to explain what I'm talking about, and to do that I need to back up a bit. So Ep13 is rough for my niche. I don't have much block to work with, or reliable AOE, so I can't let the worms/blood amber pile up. Except I don't have a lot of great options for moving the payload either, given the way core/primal caster range cuts off and Eben's slow ASPD. So basically I can't let the worms respawn, but can't destroy the things that respawn them. In this stage specifically, that would be difficult enough if it weren't for the Sarkaz bloodnexuses who carry the amber into range of the spawners before I can do anything about them, and with the timing of the other elites leaving the area, Eben can't store up charges to one shot the first one before it picks them up. And after that, the entirety of Eben's range is in the respawn zone. The solution? Have him kill it outside of his range. By timing his skill activation just right, the bloodnexus doesn't die in his range, but triggers necrosis right before leaving, letting it die harmlessly a few tiles later, outside of the respawn zone (and juuuust before it would enter the next one). And this is part of why Eben's third mod is so much fun. It's not just that it's strong (though it absolutely is), but it opens up new ways to manage a stage that wouldn't really be possible with any other unit. Even the others that can trigger necrosis couldn't do this here, as they'd need to take out enough of the bloodnexus's HP for the necrosis to finish it where I want. And it's not just this. If you look through my other clears, you can see just how much he can do. Honestly, it feels like I'm still just scratching the surface of what this mod opens up, and I can't wait to dive even deeper.
But back to this clear: this tech makes this map possible for my niche, and it was a part of each iteration of this clear as I optimized it down to six. But the process of optimizing this was... well, let's get into that.
So it started as an eight with Czerny and Carnelian. Like I said, AOE and block really help with the worms. Czerny was the first to go, as I figured out that if I was really on top of my skill timings and deployments, I could prevent anything from actually reaching him and needing to be blocked. This raised the difficulty a fair bit, but was doable. Then I made the biggest mistake a niche player can make: I decided to chase an optimization that relied on RNG.
Optimizing out Carnelian meant I had to be a lot more aggressive with my initial placement of Vivi and Bassline, which meant I really had to rely on good shield RNG against the first boneguard torturer since she needs to block it for longer than the first duration of her S3, and there's a gap between the skill ending and Eyjaberry's S3 starting. I got really lucky here and even got an off skill shield or two, and believe me, that was not always the case. But the worst part was finding a whole new kind of Eyja RNG.
So I feel like we all know about Eyja's SP talent RNG, but that's actually not as relevant here. The problem was how her S3's targeting works. It's completely random. And 99.99% of the time that does not matter, because it hits six, and how often are you going to be dealing with more than six enemies who can actually survive for long enough in her range for that to matter? Well, it finally happened. The blood amber and worms just pile up so quickly that she ends up with like a million things in her range, much of which has 90 RES, AND there's the ASPD debuff from the boneguard captains. So on each of her first two deployments, I need her to hit the worms enough times to clear them out AND take out certain key enemies, and both times it's a toss up. It compounds, too, as each thing she misses on the first go only makes the second more difficult. For the first activation, I really want her to take out the left caster and bottom boneguard captain, as it'll make moving the second payload way easier AND remove a target from her range for her second deployment AND help keep Eben alive without using the payload as bait and risking it taking too much damage. Without this, it's possible, but requires even more RNG on the next deployment, on an already really difficult clear. And that second time there's already a lot. She takes out at least one boneguard captain there, depending on how the first deployment went, which then gets respawned as worms she needs to take out before they leave her range (and then they leave blood amber to soak up more of her hits), on top of moving the payload, on top of other enemies. It's brutal, and I used up all of my practice plans and a bunch of sanity (in game and irl) to make it happen. But it finally worked. And now I'm free lol
#arknights