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I've seen people use the ink mine primarily as a way to cover escapes.

 

I have close to fifty hours on the game and am almost level 20, i generally manage to be the team's points MVP in almost every match i play, and virtually never with a negative KDR. I'm not going to pretend that i'm a top tier player, i've definitely been just absolutely worked over, but i feel like i have a solid grasp of the game, so i'm just going to start throwing out some thoughts and strategies for anybody who might feel they're useful.

General advice:

When just starting out, before you've played a lot of matches and are still at low levels, look around your hub area and find Inklings with 3 star gear, then order that stuff and get it from spyke. 3 star gear will start showing up in shops when you level up, but you can have gear that lets you close the progression gap almost out of the gate by going through spyke.

 

Now you're in matchmaking and playing:

 

Spread out, permanently stacking up with team mates is actually a really bad idea in this game. I mean from moment one, don't follow people down the same path in your base when moving out towards the map center, spread out that coverage. Also, by sticking together, not only do you reduce your paint coverage, but big centralized conflicts will invariably be game-ending for somebody, and if it's looking like you're not getting back any ground against a team that is deathballing towards your spawn, branch off and loop around them and take enough territory that they have to respond and break up their cohesion. If nobody on your team is doing this, you should do it. You will make comebacks happen.

 

Learn to use the motion control, the accuracy you gain is worth the adjustment period. Right stick for broad turns, motion control for fights. You can even mix mashing the x button to bunny hop while still aiming with the motion control to be a particularly annoying asshole, but i have better experience with abusing the squid form to setup kills.

 

Speaking of which, use the squid form constantly, juke around your opponents if you're fighting up close. You might not even want to aim at them directly for the opening shots of the fight, but paint the ground around them so you can swim up and get behind them to score a largely uncontested kill. (This is mainly for the short range splatterguns, the long range stuff is more about finding an advantageous standing and abusing the hell out of it, while the roller tends to benefit most from surprise attacks out of squid form, or tricky flanking maneuvers around the corners of level geometry. Be careful around corners and random patches of enemy ink when dealing with rollers, they want those uncontested up-close insta-kills.)

 

The inkzooka is amazing, i've carried out successful team-wipes with that thing. I feel it's probably the most powerful of the supers, and it's an especially powerful tool for clearing out people who think they're safely camping out on a higher ledge. I see people freak out about the kraken, but it's over-rated. As long as you have a path, you can swim faster than it, it's easy to juke around. The inkstrike's post-game "fuck you" might make it appealing, but it's largely harmless in-game, as is the killer wail. Other than the inkzooka, the only super i find particularly threatening is the bubble shield, which is extremely frustrating to deal with when it's in the hands of a good player. The grenade spam supers are also quite decent. As for the echo-locator, it's harder to pin down the value it has since it's informational rather than direct, so it's up to the individual as to whether they like it or not.

 

Spamming grenades out of squid form is an effective tool for locking down or clearing out choke points, and if somebody is doing it to you, don't try to fight it, flank them from another path.

 

Don't aim at the ground when painting with snipes or splatterguns/blasters or the tap attack on the rollers, projectiles all leave trails of paint behind them. Additionally, with the snipes, only charge half to two thirds of the way. You can get the same coverage while only sacrificing shot power. More shots faster = more coverage. Also, excluding the rollers, get used to the loop of painting the ground ahead of you, swimming up through it, and painting more ground ahead of you.

 

Be so careful when super jumping back into the fight, pick your partner carefully. If you get wasted just as you land, you've dramatically extended your downtime. Seems simple, but i see people make that mistake all the time. (Your landing destination is visible to the other team.)

 

If you feel like you're struggling to make the snipes useful, play ranked. They are incredibly dominant there. Also, regardless of what weapon you're using, don't be afraid to kind of hang back as a spawn beacon for your team, just hurling ink at the hill from a safe vantage point. You may not get the most kills, but you will probably win the game for your team. You're keeping the hill contested, you're letting allies get back in the fight quickly, and you're forcing the enemy to take up a risky posture where they have to deal with somebody in an advantageous position.


Clearing up common misconceptions:

 

- You can super jump at any time, from any location, to any allied player or spawn point. (Including the one-use spawn beacons that you should totally make a point of destroying if they're hostile.)

 

- The walls do not earn meter, score, or coverage for your team. Only floors, ramps, and half-pipes do.

 

- That little LCD lookin` thing on the matchmaking screen is your "vibe". When it hits higher levels, go talk to judd to cash it in for a small cash bonus. You can do this daily. (If you cash it it at a lower level and hit a higher level, you can cash it in again for a portion of the higher level.)

 

Gear:

 

So there are main skills and sub skills. Main skills are locked in for each piece of gear and encompass a range of both the basic skills and a bunch of one-offs that can't appear as the randomly rolled sub skills. Also, yes, the sub skills are entirely random. What do you do if you get bad rolls? I mean, the shops won't sell you anything twice, hey? Well, some options open up at Level 20, i am led to believe, but before that if you order the same piece that you have through Spyke, he will replace the one you have with the one he finds. (Which may have a fresh batch of open sub skill slots, or may randomly retain one or two of the sub skills from the version of the item you initiated the order with.)

 

At level 20, you can apparently just have him reroll any piece of gear you have, and also upgrade 1 star and 2 star pieces into 3 star pieces. (All for either a large sum of in-game currency or apparently with unique items earned through the splatfests that Nintendo plans on doing, the first of which is on the 20th, i believe.)

 

Aside: I've been seeing a lot of intermittently janky netcode, and i'm having a hard time deciding if it's just Nintendo servers getting hammered, or if there's a prevalence of network manipulation hijinx going on. (Which is what it feels like to me.)

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No single game has made me want a console more than Splatoon makes me want a Wiiu.

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I got to B- in ranked last night. Does anyone know if you can go down ranks? I used mines really efficiently last night in the zones to kill people trying to take over.

 

General advice:


When just starting out, before you've played a lot of matches and are still at low levels, look around your hub area and find Inklings with 3 star gear, then order that stuff and get it from spyke. 3 star gear will start showing up in shops when you level up, but you can have gear that lets you close the progression gap almost out of the gate by going through spyke.

 

I don't think this is that good an advice. Ordering 3 star gear comes at a huge price, which you won't get at all quickly at that level, unless you have the amiibo's. on top of which, Spyke won't sell you 3 star gear until you're an appropriate level. I'd say to stick to low star gear, because they level up quicker, and at the price for one piece of 3 star gear that has 3 extra slots + 1 regular slot is more expensive than 3 1 star gear with 3 slots + the extra 3 for each gear. Also it takes a day to order, and you can only order 1 a day. You might as well just fight and level up naturally.

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That's a lot of good advice Sno! However, I think you can talk to Judd once per rotation map rotation, not once per day, since your hotness rating resets when the maps reset.

 

I am a big fan of the echolocator special. In this game, stealth is actually a surprisingly large aspect, so something that negates this is very powerful. Additionally, since time-to-kill is so short, any enemy caught in echolocator that is nearby is as good as dead. In general, I think that all specials are much more powerful in splatzones compared to turf war. The strength of specials (including echolocator and bubble shield) is temporarily controlling a small area, so in turf war the effect is relatively small. But in splatzones, the points of contention are much more centralised, effectively reducing the overall map size and increasing the proportion of the map that is affected by the special. Moreover, in splatzones, players tend to specialise in different roles and often you will see the same type of player in one place consistently (e.g. a sniper will often have a favourite perch). This makes it even easier to effectively use certain specials like Inkzooka, Killer Wail and Inkstrike.

 

Anyway, so most of my post was about the splatzones in ranked mode, since I feel there is more I have to say about that. I am currently B- like N1njaSquirrel (high five!) and to answer your question, yes, you can go down in ranks. Whenever you move up and down between ranks, it seems like they put you at +-30 points from the changeover point. So if you drop from B- to C+, you will drop to C+ with 70 points.

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I don't think this is that good an advice. Ordering 3 star gear comes at a huge price, which you won't get at all quickly at that level, unless you have the amiibo's. on top of which, Spyke won't sell you 3 star gear until you're an appropriate level. I'd say to stick to low star gear, because they level up quicker, and at the price for one piece of 3 star gear that has 3 extra slots + 1 regular slot is more expensive than 3 1 star gear with 3 slots + the extra 3 for each gear. Also it takes a day to order, and you can only order 1 a day. You might as well just fight and level up naturally.

 

I felt like i had way more money than i knew what to do with in my first few days of playing, it doesn't feel like the game's currency system has really been much of a limiting factor. I know Spyke's prices are inflated, but my first few 3 stars that i got through him were still only around 10-15k, which were easily afforded. However, I didn't know about there being a hard limit on when Spyke will first sell you 3 star gear, but i was definitely still pretty early on in the progression when i started getting my first 3 star pieces. What exactly is the limit? I have no idea exactly what level i was, i think it was still only the second day of the game that i placed my first 3 star order, but you blow through those 1-10 ranks so fast.

 

 

That's a lot of good advice Sno! However, I think you can talk to Judd once per rotation map rotation, not once per day, since your hotness rating resets when the maps reset.

 

That makes a ton of sense, i stand corrected.

 

Also, i am shamed, i'm only C+ in ranked. I just haven't played it as much as turf war, i swear!

 

Lastly, i hit 20 and can confirm first-hand the details about the services Spyke offers at the cap. (Upgrading 1 and 2 star pieces with more slots, and rerolling 3 star pieces.)

 

Cool kids wear maxed one star gear.

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I really like the ranked mode, but as soon as I know my wins/losses count towards something I get really stressed out and can't play more than 1 or 2 at a time.

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I love ranked mode. I had the most amazing arc of starting out hating it, because it's so different to turf wars, so much so that I turned off Splatoon angrily after I lost like 5 times in a row. Then grumpily trying to play Final Fantasy 0, but not enjoying it because splatoon was on my mind. I then went back to splatoon, and then everything just clicked, and it was an amazing, beautiful moment. I love this game.

 

I felt like i had way more money than i knew what to do with in my first few days of playing, it doesn't feel like the game's currency system has really been much of a limiting factor. I know Spyke's prices are inflated, but my first few 3 stars that i got through him were still only around 10-15k, which were easily afforded. However, I didn't know about there being a hard limit on when Spyke will first sell you 3 star gear, but i was definitely still pretty early on in the progression when i started getting my first 3 star pieces. What exactly is the limit? I have no idea exactly what level i was, i think it was still only the second day of the game that i placed my first 3 star order, but you blow through those 1-10 ranks so fast.

 

For me, I think it was like level 8 or 10 before he sold it to me? I could have imagined it, it was quite a while ago. Even then, 10-15k is a huge amount, especially starting out, where you only get around 200-300 per match. The amount you get does increase as you level up though.

 

Also, do skills stack? I have seen some hints by Judd which indicates that they don't, and that it's best to have a wide range of skills instead of all the same.

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I've not actually lost a ranked mode yet (I'm rank C) so I feel once I lose one, I'll finally care a hell of a lot less about maintaining my winning streak. 

It's a really good mode though, you can pull off some really clutch things, and suddenly, killing the enemy becomes the most important skill, and rollers become useless.

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Skills definitely do stack!

There's a few things i've sorted out on my own, and a few things i've read online, but there's a lot of ambiguities and the finer specifics of it are still being sorted out by the community as far as i can tell.

In general, it seems like each successive addition in a skill stack has reduced effectiveness over the last, and they seem to cap at three, and a lot of them seem designed to only really do something useful at a full stack of three. (Ignoring the one-off mechanics-modifying skills that can only appear as main skills and which probably can't stack, like ninja squid and recon.)

So yeah, about those full stacks hey? The "special duration" skill, i ended up with two of those on one build, but it wasn't enough to get an extra shot out of my inkzooka despite a ever so slightly longer active period. I assume having that third instance of the buff might have been enough to push me from six shots to seven.

 

There's something similar going on with defense buffs, i understand. That a full stack makes it generally take one more hit to kill you. (While a full stack of attack buffs apparently can't quite achieve a similar effect in reduced shots to kill, but does apparently quite effectively counter defense buffs.)

 

If you want to see the effects of the defense buff, three of the target dummies in the weapon test level are marked with the varying levels of defense buff stacks.

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That's cool! I was disregarding things with 2 or more of the same buff thanks to the advice the cat gave me. 

 

What about run/swim speed and ink savers. They're the ones I really care about.

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Flippin' Judd misinforming me like that. dumb mog.

 

I'd be more interested in the ink savers too.

 

 

If you want to see the effects of the defense buff, three of the target dummies in the weapon test level are marked with the varying levels of defense buff stacks.

 

Oh man, I noticed them, but thought that it was just a cute thing they added to some! I didn't know it actually had a reason. Amazing.

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I lent out my Wii U to my friend yesterday since I am going to be overseas for 3 weeks, and I am already feeling the effects of not having any Splatoon to play. Pls send help. I've been getting my fix on streamers but there are very few quality streamers out there. Found an A- ranked player who is quite nice, but there are so many streamers who just trash-talk their own team and it really sucks to watch. Danielle's girlfriend Patricia is actually also pretty good, though she doesn't play a lot of ranked.

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As far as i'm aware, all of the skills that can show up as randomly rolled sub skills are stackable, and keep in mind that all of the sub skills are just stat buffs, it's just that some of the stat buffs happen to cross important thresholds.

 

People generally seem to feel that the movement buffs are the best ones, and i'm inclined to agree. I mean, but yeah, shoot for whatever you want.

 

Also, more stuff is apparently being unlocked tomorrow. (Today?)

 

This weird fuckin` crossover is also happening.

That sure made me laugh.

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Do your main skills give you more than your sub skills?

 

also, that crossover is amazing. Partially because I'm amazed Nintendo would even consider it. It's so common for Nintendo to let other companies include their mascots in their titles (like MH4U), but the other way round? I can't even think of one example!

 

I wonder if we'll even get it over here? I have no idea how popular that anime is. (I didn't really enjoy it when I watched it)

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Main skills do provide more of a base bonus than sub skills, but in most cases the difference is negligible.

 

The general consensus is that damage up/defense up are completely useless, movement is great, and Ink Saver/Special Charge Up are good but interchangeable depending on your playstyle.

 

Non stackable skills that are Coveted right now are Tenacity, Ninja Squid, Stealth Jump, Haunt, and Cold-Blooded.

 

Cold-Blooded is *especially* useful right now, since everyone is running around with N-Zaps and Echolocators.

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I have had a string of random disconnects in ranked and have lost a ton of ranking points because of it. I am mad at you, Splatoon.

The netcode in this game kind of sucks, especially obvious with how prevalent disconnects are. Either you start a match explicitly a man down, or you find that two people on your team have zero points on the final score card, indicating they dropped mid-match. It happens constantly. (Since their KDR's are preserved on the score card, it's not as easy to discern in ranked when somebody drops.)

 

I've even been killed by people on the complete opposite end of the map with no visible attack happening. No inkstrike, no killer wail, tons of walls inbetween. If i give people the benefit of the doubt, i'd assume the game failed to sync the visible portion of a killer wail attack, but still hit me with the result.

 

Harder to reconcile is stuff like the ranked game i had where the game froze at around 20-30 points for my team. I die from an invisible and out-of-sync roller that i had killed seconds earlier and subsequently witness from the death cam every ally that was around me explode in rapid succession. The game syncs back up with only 5 points left to win for my team, but now with both hills controlled by the enemy. What the fuck? (Happy conclusion: We retook the hills, worked through seventy penalty points, and still won.)

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The worst I've had is ink lagging? Although, if someone got 0 points in a normal match, did they get kicked out or something, because that was the same match.

 

I really don't like the brush, you're fast, but you don't cover as much area, when you're slow you cover a ton of area, but I'm just not good with it, I did terribly until switched back to the N-Zap.

 

I also did great at Arowana when I took the sniping spots from the other team, they don't expect you to just come from below them apparently. XP

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I got more used to the motion controls and didn't get motion sickness. I even did some of the online multiplayer! I won one match and lost one match. Game is pretty fun!

 

im rly bad at it tho

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also, that crossover is amazing. Partially because I'm amazed Nintendo would even consider it. It's so common for Nintendo to let other companies include their mascots in their titles (like MH4U), but the other way round? I can't even think of one example!

 

 

 

 

I was on fire this morning. Won and got MVP several times in a row, including a match where I had a 9:1 KDR. Ninja Squid and the movement upgrades are my favourites.

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Apparently different clothing brands are weighted massively towards specific associated sub skill rolls.

 

So say you want tenacity. The obvious choice is that 3 star gas mask, unless that brand isn't going to give you the sub skill rolls you want. The option you have is to look at the lower rated tenacity pieces and see if their brand matches up with the sub skills you want on that tenacity hat, then you can upgrade those pieces to have just as many slots as the 3 star piece.

 

List of the brands and their effects.

 

 

The worst I've had is ink lagging? Although, if someone got 0 points in a normal match, did they get kicked out or something, because that was the same match.

 

I answered this in the thing you responded to. If somebody has 0 points, they dropped mid-match. KDR's appear to be preserved though, so it's less obvious when somebody drops in ranked.

 

I'll add that the problems seem most common during peak hours for north america. Late at night, the game seems fine.

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Still have to try the other stuff said here, but Sno's advice about motion controls is so true. Aiming with the gyroscope is way more effective than using the gamepad, doing much better now when facing other squids.

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Wow the amiibo stuff in this game is junk. I thought it was whole new content plus a free costume or something, but no, it's the same levels I just completed, except now with a different weapon/power. Also I have to beat them to get the items. At least the inkling one is fun to rush through in squid form all the time, but the charger does not make for a good experience in those levels.

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Yeah, its a shame to hear how poor the Amiibo stuff is. I really enjoyed the single-player. It repeated the same level concepts a few too many times but I thought the boss levels more than made up for that, and were vastly better than the bosses in 3D world, especially the last one. I would gladly play more of it, but the Amiibo changes don't seem to be what I want.

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I also enjoyed the single-player.

 

On another note, I wish the motion controls in this game used the wiimote pointer. That'd be much better. I agree that the motion controls are better than the stick, but, then, what isn't? Stick for aiming is hot trash. I can't play this game for extended periods of time because of the control method. For whatever reason, I haven't felt physically ill since the first time, but it's still less than stellar. \:

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