Does Cobra Strike stack?

[MTaur]

I'm considering giving the full Agility build a shot, but Slave To The Wind is a pretty serious restriction on the late game.

I don't know if Cobra Strike stacks. If you can stack DPS and keep your endurance up by alternating Cobra Strike with evasions and Skip Turn, then I could see it accelerating you through matches in a way that justifies the hit to your other stats. If not, I would probably stick to a more hybrid build.

[dnrob7]

You won't need cobra strike and certainly not slave to the wind.
The killer abilities come before that.
Save the skill points for "good sneakers" or whatever the 15% endurance training boost is called..

[Knetog]

Cobra Strike is pretty damn awful, I went full agi (by the end I was 4str/21agi/9sta and that skill is not good at all. Even with that high of agility, I only had about 60% of landing it? On top of it the skill cost a lot of energy AND even if you apply the poison on the enemy, your character STILL use the ability which deals no damage and waste your energy pretty fast.

Do not get it, that's all I gotta say. They need to patch this and make sure once it's applied that it's not using the skill until the debuff is not there.

Also Slave To The Wind doesn't work as intended, I had it and could still go higher than 8.

[GreenTomato]

Originally posted by MTaur:

I'm considering giving the full Agility build a shot, but Slave To The Wind is a pretty serious restriction on the late game.

I don't know if Cobra Strike stacks. If you can stack DPS and keep your endurance up by alternating Cobra Strike with evasions and Skip Turn, then I could see it accelerating you through matches in a way that justifies the hit to your other stats. If not, I would probably stick to a more hybrid build.

cobra strike is not a good skill to go for, I tried it, it costs too much, the DoT is in 1s, it's very weak, and it is likely to get you knocked down if you put in your rotation, especially if your strength is for some reason above 2, and your stamina regen is low (which is often the case if you stack Agi) just ignore cobra strike altogether, and when you see an opponent use it, hurt their stamina and they'll self destruct
dmrob is right about your killer moves being way before that skill, your counters armor piercing and your kick power will carry you better than cobra strike.

[MTaur]

Good advice everyone, but slightly too late to help - I stayed up late and grinded for it anyway.

Cobra Strike seems like it does stack, but it's one damage per tick, and it seems to last for about one round. So it's sort of good damage overall, and it builds your combo meter. But you give up so much for it.

Cutthroat is great, and the various counterattacks are also solid. If you have Skip Turn, Cutthroat, and one or two dodge skills, you can chip away at the enemy while pulling ahead in the Energy race.

Absolutely nothing that comes after Slave To The Wind really justifies the skill, even if it is bugged (my Endurance made it all the way to 10, despite the tooltip, unless Endurance really is effectively capped at 8 and all the other tooltips are lying instead). In some fights against Endurance specialists, I found myself using Cobra Strike in Round 1 and seeing a small benefit. After Round 1, it isn't worth continuing to spam it.

So that's a dead-end skill. Thunderbolt looks pretty much like a dead end as well. Only the Endurance max-level skills look like they might be good.

I would love to see some patches for these kinds of issues or even replacement skills. A sequel or DLC-sequel add-on seems strongly implied by the wacky ending, so at least there's that. There's a lot of rebalancing that I would do on a lot of things, even if the game is in a good state already.

[GreenTomato]

Originally posted by MTaur:

Good advice everyone, but slightly too late to help - I stayed up late and grinded for it anyway.

Cobra Strike seems like it does stack, but it's one damage per tick, and it seems to last for about one round. So it's sort of good damage overall, and it builds your combo meter. But you give up so much for it.

Cutthroat is great, and the various counterattacks are also solid. If you have Skip Turn, Cutthroat, and one or two dodge skills, you can chip away at the enemy while pulling ahead in the Energy race.

Absolutely nothing that comes after Slave To The Wind really justifies the skill, even if it is bugged (my Endurance made it all the way to 10, despite the tooltip, unless Endurance really is effectively capped at 8 and all the other tooltips are lying instead). In some fights against Endurance specialists, I found myself using Cobra Strike in Round 1 and seeing a small benefit. After Round 1, it isn't worth continuing to spam it.

So that's a dead-end skill. Thunderbolt looks pretty much like a dead end as well. Only the Endurance max-level skills look like they might be good.

I would love to see some patches for these kinds of issues or even replacement skills. A sequel or DLC-sequel add-on seems strongly implied by the wacky ending, so at least there's that. There's a lot of rebalancing that I would do on a lot of things, even if the game is in a good state already.

I use the low kick instead of skip turn, I like it better, it slightly debuffs the enemies even if the dmg is negligible. Btw thunderbolt is ok, but what comes before it is bad, you stop dodging and defending, you just take all the dmg.

[MTaur]

Oh, neat idea about Low Kick as a Skip Turn replacement. It might scale with Strength too much though, which makes it harder to spam training.

[GreenTomato]

Originally posted by MTaur:

Oh, neat idea about Low Kick as a Skip Turn replacement. It might scale with Strength too much though, which makes it harder to spam training.

I experimented once, you'd be looking at a 200 day end of game at best, but you can actually use knee smash on an agility character, it's amusing. (it's something to consider late game as there isn't too much you need to learn in the tiger tree past the middle area)
Anyway the regular low kick does not scale well into late game dmgwise (there will be turtles who take zero dmg from it) but the agility debuff is great at any stage of the game.

[MTaur]

Have you tried to unlock a sixth skill slot? I'm guessing it wastes 25 points and doesn't work, but I didn't want to bother finding out the hard way...

I've done two runs, 234 and 196 days. The second probably could've been shorter if I hadn't rushed Cobra Strike, but I wanted to see firsthand ASAP. I'm starting with Endurance, so we'll see how that goes. The energy conservation buff is unique in that it helps you branch into other trees late-game if you want to, so I'm looking forward to that.

[rokbase]

I don't know about you but Cobra Strike is the bomb against high agility builds. Sure, it's less effective that other skills/techniques against other builds but high agility it totally rocks.

[rokbase]

Originally posted by rokbase:

I don't know about you but Cobra Strike is the bomb against high agility builds. Sure, it's less effective that other skills/techniques against other builds but high agility it totally rocks.

What works for me is to have a decent kick like flip kick plus cobra strike and then all the dodge and counter attack stuff.

Grinds down high agility people who are hard to hit, counter attack themselves, and have generally low damage to counter back at them.

[metalfenix]

Originally posted by rokbase:

Originally posted by rokbase:

I don't know about you but Cobra Strike is the bomb against high agility builds. Sure, it's less effective that other skills/techniques against other builds but high agility it totally rocks.

What works for me is to have a decent kick like flip kick plus cobra strike and then all the dodge and counter attack stuff.

Grinds down high agility people who are hard to hit, counter attack themselves, and have generally low damage to counter back at them.

yeap, I agree. In my case, I use Roundhouse kick paired with cobra strike. I know, it's energy costly, I also use Skip attacks to offset this, and the dodge and counter stuff.

[madcapbeatitude]

Originally posted by MTaur:

I'm considering giving the full Agility build a shot, but Slave To The Wind is a pretty serious restriction on the late game.

I don't know if Cobra Strike stacks. If you can stack DPS and keep your endurance up by alternating Cobra Strike with evasions and Skip Turn, then I could see it accelerating you through matches in a way that justifies the hit to your other stats. If not, I would probably stick to a more hybrid build.

Cobra Strike is a source of damage, nothing more, nothing less. It is very expensive, so you will want to balance it with a cheaper attack. If you are throwing Cobra Strikes every attack round for an entire round, you are liable to exhaust your energy even at 1 strength and 9 stamina. If you're balancing Cobra Strikes with Karate Kicks, then at 1 strength you should be able to handle yourself pretty normally.

The thing about the Tiger build is that it relies on multiple sources of damage; its attacks might deal 6-7 damage with only 1 strength, and this is how you will want to handle the majority of the game, using modifiers like Penetrating Strike to reduce enemy armor so this hits like a bigger number. That is still only 25% of the damage you might expect from a powerful Bear build, and maybe 50% of what you might expect from a comparable Turtle.

However, with the Fast Reflexes/Technician passives, and with accuracy of at least 2, and with 2 dodge skills in your inventory, and with strength of only 1, you can dodge massive quantities of incoming damage extremely cheaply. With the Unstoppable defensive modifier, you can reflect a significant percentage of the damage you dodge, which combines with your offensive output and brings Tiger damage closer to a Turtle level. One of the advanced dodge skills also deals damage, so by making it one of your 2 dodges you can get a small 3rd source of damage.

With the Long Timer passive skill, you can make the poison debuff last even longer than it usually does, usually through the round in which it was inflicted and a ways into the next round. It results in constant HP loss for your opponent, which combines with everything else I've named so that your poisoning ninja can bring down high HP world champion level opponents in 2 rounds instead of 4. By keeping your enemies poisoned, you can beat the game with 1 strength.

This strategy is very difficult for beating the stamina challenges, since 6 opponents might take 12-20 rounds to defeat depending on their styles and stats. It's very hard not to lose even if each opponent only hits you once, and the RNG can damn you if one of your opponents lands a good combo on you.

It's not a good speedrunning strategy, but Tigers can be made ultra-powerful if you raise their strength to 4, unlock the Bear tree, integrate the Closeline (punch) and Sidestep (dodge) skills from this tree into a build with 1 attack, 2 dodges, the Penetrating Strike offensive modifier, and the Unstoppable defensive modifier.

Even though having 4 strength will increase the cost of your dodges, Sidestep is meant to be used by STR builds and is therefore super cheap, which gives us some savings to work with. Closeline is one of the cheapest and most powerful attacks in the game, so even with just 4 strength it is cheaper than most kicks and will deal 11 damage with high accuracy, which is not too shabby for a tiger. Penetrating Strike will let us apply that 11 damage to reduced enemy armor, which can be substantial against endgame-level stamina, while Unstoppable remains a core source of damage as a dodge artist.

If your opponent is a powerful blocker, you may want to switch out Closeline for Roundhouse Kick for its block debuffing benefits.

It's possible to use Cobra Strike with 4 strength, but it's absolutely required to have 9 stamina, start the round with a full energy bar, balance with a cheaper attack, and make use of Bear skills for energy savings.

A Tiger with 4/20/9, who has the Fast Reflexes/Technician/Long Timer perks, who is using Closeline/Sidestep/Crossroads/Unstoppable/Penetrating Strike, will comfortably annihilate any opponent in the game with any build. You may want to keep an eye on the RNG when attempting to take on 6 consecutive opponents, or switch from Closeline to Roundhouse Kick against problematic blocking opponents. You might switch out Penetrating Strike for Cobra Strike if you want to use Closeline/Cobra Strike together for a round in order to get your enemy poisoned, then remove Cobra Strike in the next round so your opponent can continue to bleed health while you conserve energy.

In order to make this build any more powerful, as long as the last fight isn't cleared you can do stamina challenges for skill points in order to gain passive skills from all 3 trees. Even if stamina is locked at 13 before you gain Slave to the Wind, it will drop to 9 when you accept that limitation. However, if you go Turtle and learn Infinite Energy BEFORE taking on Slave to the Wind, you can continue to utilize it with only 9 stamina. A dodge master with Cobra Strike, Infinite Energy, Shining Knight, Cool-Headed, Closeline, Sidestep, and Penetrating Strike can defy many of the game's core mechanics and overpower much stronger opponents with ease.