Character Nuance

[SnowMutt]

So, Indivisible has a pretty big character roster, and it's pretty good about handing you a lot of those characters pretty early on, so you have a lot of options to play with and a lot of party load-outs you can experiment with. They all have REALLY sick designs and I love them all to be honest, but even with all the characters looking as great as they do...

... there ARE a handful of characters I was a LITTLE underwhelmed by, in terms of gameplay, and I'm wondering if other folks have had good experiences with them or found cool team combinations with them they enjoyed. My RPG brain basically said "okay time to min-max" and decided pretty quickly on what feels like a pretty optimal team; Nuna/Thorani, Ginseng & Honey, and Leilani, if you're curious.

In a game like this that has so many characters, especially one made in the spirit of a fighting game, I would have loved to see EVERY character have some kind of niche gimmick or use that made them legitimately useful, but some of them just fall a little flat imo.

Basically just gonna ramble for a bit about six characters I had some hang-ups with and what I think could have made them more interesting or more valuable.

-- Hunoch & Xiboch
I kinda wish they would change up their moveset a bit when they tag out, or the ball behaved differently. While Hunoch is the ball, they do more damage per hit. While Xiboch is the ball, he generates a little more Iddhi per hit, but it honestly doesn't make a big difference because he's still only hitting one enemy at a time and can't juggle because the ball doesn't track well, so it can whiff pretty easily. I really wish that, given their gimmick is dependent on the player's ability to time their button presses well, there was a bigger risk-reward ratio. It'd be cool, for instance, if Xiboch dealt more damage because he spikes the ball harder, and if he goes for it and misses the timing, he actually gets HIT by the ball as it bounces back, and loses a chunk of health instead, but in exchange for the risk, the damage could be buffed significantly, or scale much higher when the running hit count is high, basically tacking it on as a really powerful combo ender against single-target enemies. While Hunoch is active and Xiboch is the ball, it'd be neat if the supernatural aspect of Xiboch's existence let him do stuff like, say, deal less damage per hit, but would bounce between more enemies with each success, or would do an AoE burst on contact that got progressively bigger on each success to hit more enemies surrounding the targeted one, which would make the extra Iddhi generation really MEAN something. In the meantime, the extra Iddhi generation feels so minimal that there's no reason to use Hunoch in comparison to Xiboch's damage, especially since there are enemies that absorb magic damage, but I've never come across an enemy that absorbs physical damage. I just want a better excuse to bother burning the meter to switch between the two.

-- Naga Rider
For a Kamen Rider kinda character, Naga Rider feels really... I dunno, flat. I love his idle animations, but his actual attack animations aren't as flashy as I'd expect. He's a lot slower than I expected him to be, and pmuch only has single-hit, single-target attacks, with similar supers. I guess he's good at juggling, but otherwise he basically just feels like slower Yan that hits a little harder. I'm honestly shocked his "legless steed" never seems to come into play, especially for his supers, or that he doesn't have any Blanka-Ball/Screw Attack type attacks given that the animation for it basically already exists. I just feel like he could have been a little flashier; like maybe each button press did several weaker hits that added up to a relatively strong hit, but because he does multiple hits he generates a lot of Iddhi easily or something, like a more offensively-oriented Ginseng.

-- Yan
Similar to Naga Rider, I don't really see a particular benefit to Yan. Single target, single hit moves. If anything, she might at least be better than Naga Rider because she's so much faster, but that's about it I think. It looks like her down attack ground bounces, which is pretty good, but otherwise they seem to more or less fulfill the same role. It'd be nice if, because her legs were so long, she could more easily hit multiple enemies at once and juggle multiple enemies really well the way Dhar's sword or Leilani's down attack do; being able to kinda hook enemies in and group them up for the rest of the party would be really sick.

-- Phoebe
Phoebe is my biggest hang-up I think. She does pretty big damage, but I feel like, especially since some enemies can't be launched anyway, her throw could have a bigger payoff or a little more flash, like unique animations for different enemy types. In the spirit of fighting games, I think it would be cool if, say, similar to Altun's up attack, using the throw expended all of her remaining actions and had a really long cool-down, but in exchange it would do significantly more damage, and STUN the target. It would stun for more time if she expended more actions, and would be exclusively single-target. During the stun state, the combo meter wouldn't decrease, just like in a fighting game, so it would give the rest of your party a chance to regain their turns, and get a full second cycle of moves starting with the same hit count for a huge payoff with optimal damage, assuming you burned enough action points to accommodate for your team's average speed. Like, if she's going to be specialized for single-targets, REALLY optimize her ability to deal with single targets and beef up that throw. Something like that would have been great, and would absolutely be worth having no supers (at the moment; I'm vaguely aware that they're apparently broken and have been removed for the time being). I can't say with confidence that this would be "broken" either, because Zahra can completely disable the entire enemy party for a pretty extended period of time at the cost of 3 meters.

-- Qadira
Initially, Qadira was great and really fun because she gets those follow-up attacks and she hits like a truck, but her supers are really boring and her gimmick doesn't seem to really scale that well throughout the game, unless I'm missing something. I don't honestly know how this could be improved. I still love the character, I just feel like she becomes pretty underwhelming pretty fast, and I can't really justify using her anymore outside of fun.

-- Zebei
Last one. Zebei's moveset just feels kinda dull. His down attack supposedly launches multiple enemies, but I've never seen it launch more than one enemy at a time, and his supers, much like Qadira's, are just underwhelming. It kinda seems like all he's really good for is popping off a neutral attack to juggle a single enemy for Iddhi generation; bright side, since it hits three times, it's useful for floating enemies, kinda like how Nuna's neutral can stun enemies midair to keep them airborne longer. It'd be nice if his down attack could properly launch multiple enemies at once, and if he had a little more variety to his supers.

Compared to characters like Ginseng, Razmi, Kampan, Leilani, and Nuna, these six just feel really strictly outclassed. They all feel like they're meant to do one thing really well, but the developers got just a little too scared about making them too strong, and instead made them really kinda meh.

Does anyone have any cool tech with these characters, or insights I don't have that makes these characters really fun or rewarding to play? Do YOU think any characters I didn't list here also kinda fell flat?

[Loot Hunter]

Ginseng & Honey (heal), Leilani (AoE damage) and Tungar (AoE damage that also affects flying enemies). Baoszei's cannons are cool, becaus they interrupt enemies' attacks, but later in the game it didn't matter much comparing with pure DPS. I didn't consider much anyone else.

[SnowMutt]

Originally posted by Loot Hunter:

Ginseng & Honey (heal), Leilani (AoE damage) and Tungar (AoE damage that also affects flying enemies). Baoszei's cannons are cool, becaus they interrupt enemies' attacks, but later in the game it didn't matter much comparing with pure DPS. I didn't consider much anyone else.

Nuna is like, perfect. She launches, she sets traps, and her neutral even extends juggles well. Lately I've been enjoying Thorani though; Leilani's down attack groups all the enemies up, and then I chain Nuna's up attack or Thorani's down attack with Ginseng's neutral to build a ridiculous amount of meter. Nuna's way more versatile, but I think Thorani's damage is better.

Late game at the moment gets a big dip in difficulty for some reason, but Lab Zero says they released the game knowing that, and that they're working on fixing it, so eventually they'll patch to re-tune the difficulty curve, and things like specific character nuance and each character's ability to build meter will matter a little more.

[Fringehunter7719]

The strongest single target DPS characters (and if you're using Leilani most of them will often be hitting multiple targets, making them the best for DPS and for Iddhi generation) are Kampan, Latigo and Yan. Latigo is better than Yan (at the cost of some Iddhi) after his personal quest and worse before.

The strongest AOE DPS characters are Ren, Lanshi and Leilani, although Leilani is effectively better than Lanshi and sometimes better than Ren simply through allowing Ajna's combos to hit multiple targets.

The characters with the strongest Iddhi usage are Baozhai, Razmi, Kampan and Ajna.

The strongest buffing character (who will multiply the DPS of all other characters by up to 300% if she gets to the point of using 6 actions without being hit in a long enough fight) is Zahra.

The best healer is Ginseng, although healing is essentially never required due to the blocking and resurrection mechanics.

Thus min-max probably ends up giving you Ajna-Kampan-Zahra-Leilani, although for bosses Leilani is way behind Latigo or Yan. The exact contribution of Iddhi to damage varies as the game progresses (the amount of Iddhi generated goes down as the length of the bar goes up) and is difficult to quantify, so at points it might be worth bringing Baozhai or Razmi as a pure Iddhi spender, but I've been unable to confirm that.

There are three characters which are just *way* off the pace of everyone else: Kushi, Naga Rider and to a lesser extent Hunoch.

ETA: All this ignores Dhar, since I haven't yet been able to test him on a level playing field vs. Yan and Latigo. He is a strong performer as far as I can tell and might squeeze one or both of them out for parts of a run.