Headshot + Mid late game builds

[MayamSP]

I couldn't find a proper answer to this so I will try asking again.
Does headshot have any specific priority order like block and crit does? I know if an attack is blocked it will not crit but if an attack is a crit or a block can it still trigger headshot?

I have the mastery set on giselle that increases her headshot by 20%. it goes up to 55% total, yet I have not seen her do headshots when it matters, like at all. I know 55% is not that high and I could just be terribly unlucky but I can't help but wonder if there is any other reason to this.

With that said I would also like some build recommendations for the characters that I unlocked so far.

Giselle: I see people mention how she is supposed to be super good yet I just don't see it. She is slow and extremely frail. As a sniper she has advantage on high areas but she can never reach there in time. Heixing outclasses her in every way possible: he has a wide aoe, a skill to teleport to high places and a set that gives him overwatch just from attacking near a cover.
I am using the basic bish one shot one kill catharsis combo but she can neither kill enemies in one hit nor get near a lot of enemies from where I can abuse it without dying immediately. Please recommend me sets to boost her damage enough to kill tanky enemies with impulse field or high block, so that if she is gonna die she dies after doing some damage. Also I am not using any traps so far, are they worth it?

Ray: She is pretty good at taking out snipers when giselle is dead. What is the better class for her? I am currently using grenadier for the hit and run skill, is alchemist any better? I am not using the offensive mists since those require esp, are those any good?

Kylie: Again, no clue if engineer or hacker is the better class. Right now I just use her to cast decoys and try to steal control of bicrons. Speaking of which, what is the stat that affects the success rate of steal control? Is it hit rate? Also is it possible to get a better weapon for her, there's no point in using the attack abilities if she can't get more attack power.

Unrelated to builds but I wanna ask if others experience the game lagging and dropping a lot of frames in maps with a lot of terrain and uneven landscape. The map with the albino negoori especially was really laggy with 30 fps drop. Is there a fix to this?

Thanks for all the recommendations, it is really nice to see such an active community on steam forums for once.

[RexEviL]

Why bother dealing with rng? You can increase ignore block to 50%+ and 1 shot all elites. There are better ways to deal with bosses.

Gisele reaches around 55% ignore block against humans all time as sniper and up to 85% with 2 more masteries. You can add breakthrough as well.
Still not worth it, because there are characters that can one shot without restrictions. 100% hit all time.
Ray is trash.
Kylie Hacker can solo any map, just aoe whenever you reach max sp.

Game optimization is really bad at violent case maps, there is no cure for it yet.

[MayamSP]

Publicado originalmente por RexEviL:

Why bother dealing with rng? You can increase ignore block to 50%+ and 1 shot all elites. There are better ways to deal with bosses.

Gisele reaches around 55% ignore block against humans all time as sniper and up to 85% with 2 more masteries. You can add breakthrough as well.
Still not worth it, because there are characters that can one shot without restrictions. 100% hit all time.
Ray is trash.
Kylie Hacker can solo any map, just aoe whenever you reach max sp.

Game optimization is really bad at violent case maps, there is no cure for it yet.

Really? I find that hard to believe that kylie can solo any map with just the max sp attack considering how bad her offensive stats are and with no good class mastery to boost them. I doubt she can even survive long enough to max sp. Is there a video showcasing this?

[MagiKarp]

Kylie:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/470310/discussions/2/4149469212602836146/
Even without abusing the "I can't wait anymore" set she's still very strong.

For Ray I prefer Alchemist, she can easily one shot everything in the game from long range in an AoE, pretty much doesn't care about block and with Trance she always has full SP.

[MayamSP]

Publicado originalmente por MagiKarp:

Kylie:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/470310/discussions/2/4149469212602836146/
Even without abusing the "I can't wait anymore" set she's still very strong.

For Ray I prefer Alchemist, she can easily one shot everything in the game from long range in an AoE, pretty much doesn't care about block and with Trance she always has full SP.

oof I said I wanna see a video but I also don't wanna spoil late game mission. I assume it is a really powerful combination of mastery. I don't have all of the ones given there yet so I guess eventually it will be possible.

[RexEviL]

Hacker Kylie receives huge damage reduction from masteries and blocks a lot. She is the best tank after Irene, Sion and Leton.

[Starmachine24]

Headshot can activate on a crit, that i know for certain otherwise my Giselle would not come up in the range of 10 - 40k crit damage on enemies. For me she performs outstandingly, but as you said she is fragile, but as she is a sniper first and foremost she should stay far away from enemies so that doesn't happen (i say the even though i most of the time make that same mistake myself xD, not bashing you though). For me she is built around having long range and attacking from outside the enemies field of vision.

Here is how i built her right now:

Mastery Board:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2347747743

Gear:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2347747713

For me she can really clean up the maps by just straight up murdering her way through them, though for me she has a bit too low crit damage which i havn't thought up of a good way to patch up yet. So she can't one-shot certain enemies even though she crits them without headshot (must be because some enemies have insane damage reduction? or piercing resistance). But because she's so fragile i have been training my Glacier Tima and building it to be a tank and it still does really good damage as well as freezing anything it touches :D

Edit: Don't ask why i have masteries that add one defence slot and then in the defence category i add one Basic XD

[x_equals_speed]

I've not been watching for when headshot can trigger, I assumed it couldn't go off on a block but never checked. If you click the little speech bubble at the top right and select "Battle" in the window that appears when you do you'll get a battle log. This shows all of the masteries that triggered during a particular attack. If you play a couple of missions with it open you should be able to see what is and isn't triggering when. If you make 7 attacks there's less than a 1% chance that a 50% coin flip went against you every time, if you make 14 it's less than 0.01%

I'm presently using alchemist Ray with ESP abilities and she's working out pretty well. Her main gimmick is that she can build up stacks of unstable compound which each add 20% to the damage of her next attack (but cause her to explode if she gets too many). That can be a lot of extra damage if she's built for speed and AP reduction and is taking many turns rather than making several attacks in one turn. The sort of spray you give her decides which of her attacks will work out, the air cannisters boost her attack, while fire or ice sprays boost her ESP. I use the latter because I enjoy the larger blast areas of the ESP attacks and most of my team has mutant so we all benefit from the stuff it leaves on the field.

I've previously used grenadier Ray, but in a really dumb build. It's juuuust about possible to make her able to attack and double move and then reduce her AP by enough that it's a 0AP turn and she instantly goes again (Mostly thanks to the grenadier mastery that gives -30AP at the end of the turn if all you did was sprint and the responsive attack that takes place if you start your turn by an enemy). In theory she could solo any level this way since she makes infinite attacks on her first turn (and unlike Kylie doesn't run out of protocols doing it) but in practice it was boring so I stopped.

[Mochan]

Giselle is great. She can't do Heixing's AOE stuff but she doesn't need to. She's very good with a reactionary build where she takes pot shots at everything and kills them on their turn ignoring block, or on someone else's turn.

What makes her even better is she can do this while having pets like Gold Tongue out.

[x_equals_speed]

Gold Tongue IS AoE stuff :D

[MayamSP]

Publicado originalmente por x_equals_speed:

I've not been watching for when headshot can trigger, I assumed it couldn't go off on a block but never checked. If you click the little speech bubble at the top right and select "Battle" in the window that appears when you do you'll get a battle log. This shows all of the masteries that triggered during a particular attack. If you play a couple of missions with it open you should be able to see what is and isn't triggering when. If you make 7 attacks there's less than a 1% chance that a 50% coin flip went against you every time, if you make 14 it's less than 0.01%

Thanks. The problem was that many times headshot did activate but it did not show up on the battle log, my guess is that it will only shows up on battle log if it was a non crit headshot or maybe from . Headshot crit is possible and probably headshot block too. I will do more tests to confirm properly

Publicado originalmente por Starmachine24:

Gear:

Question: Do you use the traps often? I have decisive shot, reload and flare, thinking of removing flare for one of the traps even though I have no idea on how to use them effectively

Publicado originalmente por Mochan:

What makes her even better is she can do this while having pets like Gold Tongue out.

About taming, what is the best way to properly tame a boss beast? Any recommended beasts before I reach golden frog? It was really stressful when I last tried it, I almost rage quit the game. She will die if there are no people to cover her but the other characters kill the beast by reaction attacks when I do try to cover

[Starmachine24]

Publicado originalmente por MayamSP:

Publicado originalmente por Starmachine24:

Gear:

Question: Do you use the traps often? I have decisive shot, reload and flare, thinking of removing flare for one of the traps even though I have no idea on how to use them effectively

No i wouldn't say that i use traps that often, mostly that i don't need reload as i can get back my skills after just killing the enemies through catharsis. Also i find that flare is not worth it due it only having one use unless you use the personal mastery that makes it have 3 uses.

I mostly use the fire trap to make enemies less likely to wall through a certain area just because they sometimes tend to not go through the wall of fire. But sometimes they deem it the best to just go through it anyways XD

About taming:
One way to do it is to use Anne's Starlight Prison on the Beast which makes it unable to do anything for 3 turns. You can also use her constricting root skill on beasts if you know they have no ranged attack and you can tame them pretty easily. The hardest part is to keep anythnig from damaging the beast or knock out Giselle during the taming process. The easiest way would probably to clear out all the other enemies before you attempt to tame it.

[x_equals_speed]

I've tried various trap builds recently. They tend to do garbage damage even if you put everything into building for them, since they're basing their damage on Giselle's ESP stat and she has a very poor ESP stat and precious few ways to raise it, so there's essentially no way to get them to contribute meaningfully.

The two uses I found for them was:

"Fire tactics" and "Lightning tactics" will make the fire and lightning traps deliver confusion whenever they change the terrain type underneath someone. Fire is better for that since it sets fire to every valid tile, while the lightning trap is less reliable (but better in there's water, puddles, snow or other inflammable terrain types). It is pretty satisfying to spend half a turn to toss something under a group and watch them all attack each other as soon as anyone does anything in their vicinity.

The second is as the most reliable way to create floor effects. A character with mutant can get two buffs a turn for standing on a floor modified by Giselle's traps while in a cloud of Ray's gas since the two stack. Irene's joy of burning mastery gives her something like 125AP back at the end of each of her turns if she's standing in the middle of the fire trap after it goes off, which essentially allows her to kill everything in range without expending any time.

Neither of these things are worth gearing a build to do, but they only require a single mastery slot to do so it can be a nice addition when you've got one going spare at the end.

[MayamSP]

Okay.. I found out something really interesting which I don't understand. If any one of you can explain that would be really helpful.

So I was beating up john relentlessly with all of my characters and then suddenly irene when she used the skill "Red panda 5th form snatch" it removed his immortality buff and killed him right away. She has the standard battle mage build with revenge set, however none of them mention anything about removing buffs from enemies. Heck I attacked him with sion a lot too (Who also has battle mage sets) none of his skills could remove it. The snatch attack removed the immortality twice when I was redoing a mission yet the skill description does not mention anything about it removing buffs either. Is this a secret effect of sorts or maybe a bug?

I will upload my build in a bit.

[x_equals_speed]

There's a fire mastery that removes buffs from enemies without updating the skill descriptions when you equip it, could that be responsible?

[MayamSP]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2348318593
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2348318793

The thing is. Her other skills did not remove the buff, it was specifically the snatch attack. Very weird.