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Had my best match ever on the new map today, just shy of 1800 points with the win bonus. All the areas are super wide so if you give yourself a good amount of coverage there is ample opportunity for sneaking swim attacks. The grate walkways are death though, I almost never go up there, but I think that's just my style of playing. I always have the left trigger held and regularly dive under for short breaks from shooting.

 

Also, it has taken me way too long to come to this conclusion but whenever I see a friendly player about to spawn on me, I completely stop advancing if I'm in a safe-ish area. Both to support them as they land and because I now know how helpful it is to have a buddy in close proximity for flanking attacks. Two players near each other are deadly.

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I like the new map quite a lot, there's so much surface area for tricky flanking, and the player interactions between the lower level and the upper walkways are really interesting. It's such an enormous map though, it's almost too big for 4v4.

 

Also, it has taken me way too long to come to this conclusion but whenever I see a friendly player about to spawn on me, I completely stop advancing if I'm in a safe-ish area. Both to support them as they land and because I now know how helpful it is to have a buddy in close proximity for flanking attacks. Two players near each other are deadly.

 

You're being a good teammate, but there's more you can do:

 

While you're on the respawn timer, you can pre-emptively tap somebody's name or location to give them early notice that you're going to spawn on them before actually being able to do so, so use this feature. If your super jump partner isn't terrible, he'll take the few seconds of advance notice to try and give you a safe landing spot. Likewise, be aware of this advance notice and what it means when it comes from team members trying to spawn on you.

Also, pay attention to the fight tracker at the top of the screen, if you're the only person in the game, pull back a bit. It absolutely drives me crazy when my team is trying to hold or take an area and the last guy alive just dives into the middle of the fight and gives nobody on the team a safe spot to super jump to.

 

You know, and in the rare circumstance somebody asks for help, super jump over and help them out, don't forget that you can super jump at any time and from any location. If 3 enemies are bulling towards your base, it may feel like you need to be there, but if it's already a fight you're losing, it would be way more damaging to the other team to go help your ally claim territory. Long and protracted fights against teams with momentum will lose games.

 

 

POLAR OPPOSITES

 

Arowana is probably my best map, and I think it comes down to "I love elevation" moreso than anything else. In Ranked, the dumb little grates they add that connect the platforms make it such that it is *super* easy to get over to the opponents side if you're willing to just charge through it. As soon as you get through to one of the aisles to their side, you're home free; just ink a path back to the middle, up around the other side, and just run figure eights to keep them off guard and having to continually re-ink their way back to the center.

 

In Turf War, it gets a little trickier, because those grates are gone, and it changes depending on your Weapon of Choice. When I play Charger, I head straight for one of the sniper points and just *sit there*. Don't leave, don't worry about your points, just sit up there and pick them off as they come in. If someone makes it through, ignore them in the immediate moment, keep an eye on the minimap (squid if you need to check) to see if they're still running amok, and deal with them *if necessary*. I've found as soon as I leave a sniper perch to go chase someone down/chase glory, everything unravels. Someone needs to be holding that middle point. As a Roller, you should, uh, roll? I dunno, I don't play Roller >_>. As a Shooter/Splatter, I find the best way is to participate in the usual "book it to the middle" race, followed by immediately hopping up the wall to the enemy base on the left and going in from there. If even one member of the other team has to chase after you, and you can catch and splat them off guard, that's Free Turf for you, and as the enemy needs to pull back into their own base to deal with you, your teammates get a firmer hold on the middle point. Inevitable Inkstrikes are what really shake Arowana up, and you have to be ready to recapture the middle (and have the numbers advantage doing so!) in the event that giant swathes of turf get inked, allowing people to slip past Chargers.

 

I'm usually up against snipers that will insta-kill me the second i show up anywhere near the hill, i can't even get out of my team's flanking passage most times. What i normally try to do, as a shooter, is what you suggest, and it kind of doesn't ever work out.

 

The thing is, i think i can probably get to their hill incline faster than i can get to and climb up to the enemy's flanking passage. I think i'm probably going to have to try to storm down that incline while dodging fire and position myself on the right side of that lower area to make myself hard to hit for the sniper, and... I don't know... Something, something. I can probably make that work though, i'm going to try that out.

 

Also, after a few games where my team got ruined by a good blaster (master?), i started playing around with blasters more, and those things are actually ridiculous. I had a string of easy 9/0 games, but my paint coverage was miserable and i kept getting stuck on teams where... There would be a roller and an aerospray and neither would paint the base. Anybody have any paint coverage tips for the blasters?

 

I also managed to get that 3 star "ink saver (main)" hat to roll three "ink recovery up" subskills. It just happened on the first try, i didn't even reroll it.

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So i ran some experiments with stat stacking in Splatoon since i have enough gear to try a ton of different permutations and look for differences.

 

As far as i can tell, there's no overall cap on anything, and a "main" skill counts for three sub skills, where applicable. You just see diminished returns as you stack things up on each other more and more.

For example, it took three "special duration up" sub skills to get 7 shots out of the inkzooka, but only one "special duration up" main skill to achieve the same. (Three "special duration up" main skills got me eight shots.)

 

I was seeing similar effects on other skills, but even with three "ink saver(sub)" main skills, i wasn't able to get grenade costs down far enough to throw two timed grenades without at least a tiny recharge between the two.


The very noticeable exception is the attack buff, which seems to to cap very hard and seemingly after different amounts on different weapons. (Generally preventing you from turning 5 shot kills into 4 shot kills and such, though you can get so close that the damage from the ink they're standing in will probably push it over for you.) The general impression i have is that "damage up" probably does actually stack normally, but is meant to counter defense buffs to push things back to a median and never beyond. Since nobody uses defense buffs, there is virtually no reason to use "damage up".

 

Also, "run speed up" gives you a massive movement speed boost. It seems like with most other things you're looking at around 10-20 percent gains, but with run speed buffs it feels like you can easily achieve double your running speed or greater. That skill is ridic. (The swim speed buff is much more restrained.)

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I have still not messed with the clothes at all, only different weapons. What is a good place to start for changing up the clothing?

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Just pick out whatever looks good to you! As a rule, each clothing has a number of stars between 1 and 3. Every piece of clothing has an ability that it is tied to (always the same), and for each star, one more ability slot that is randomised.

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I have still not messed with the clothes at all, only different weapons. What is a good place to start for changing up the clothing?

 

Pick gear for main skills that look useful to you, main skills are worth much more than their subskill equivalents. Probably avoid the attack skill because of the harsh limitations the game puts on it, and avoid skills that won't be useful for weapons you want to use. (Don't use grenade distance if you're set up with the homing grenade, and don't use special duration up if you're using inkstrike.) Also, don't worry about matching pieces to stack randomly rolled subskills until you have three star clothing to work with. (Which is something you should pursue as soon as possible, but if you can only get two star pieces instead, those will be a serviceable intermediate step.)

 

There a lot of nuances in the specifics of how main skills and subskills all stack with eachother, being able to reroll subskills on clothing, how clothing brands weight subskill rolls to different abilities, and even actually being able to upgrade one and two star pieces with as many slots as three star gear to better exploit the aforementioned details in the pursuit of your perfect build. This stuff though, this second paragraph, don't worry about any of this until you hit level twenty. The stuff in that first paragraph is what you want to focus on.

 

In general though, don't worry about it too much. The ceiling on the gear progression is pretty low and you can end up with a "powerful" build quite early on, most of the late-game stuff is just optimization.

 

Frankly, if they insist on having these kinds of progression mechanics, this is the way it should be done. I've been trying to level up all my gear, so i've been playing a lot of matches with awful setups and i don't feel especially affected by it, i'm still doing quite well most of the time. I miss having ink resistance a whole lot, but it's not like i feel as though the deck has been unfairly stacked against me.

 

This even sort of extends to the weapons, the late-game loadouts tend to be way more specialized and technical than how versatile and powerful the early weapons are. Just make sure you play the solo game so you can unlock the weapons that come from the boss scrolls, they're some of the better weapon loadouts in the game.

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It occurs to me, 160 posts in, that Splatoon got something impressive going where it includes two control schemes, and advocates of both argue that using the other is a mistake.

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I think they're both a mistake!!!

 

Okay no I don't really but neither of them are optimal.

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I got Splatoon last weekend and I'm up to level 15 with stealth swim + stealth jump + tenacity and I love being a goddamned menace in ranked battles.  Inkstrike is mostly useless in a standard match but gosh it's great for ranked.  Also bomb rush: get up on top of the central tower and do your bomb rush and hello it's christmas, you get a bomb, you get a bomb, everyone gets bombs.

 

In ranked battles I notice teammates tend to not be terribly concerned with inking the ground outside of the zone, which I think is a mistake.  If you're inking all the way to the zone on your initial approach, you'll usually have covered enough ground to trigger your special by the time you get there, and if you're using inkstrike or bomb rush that's kind of a big deal.

 

I am terrible at shooters generally, I mostly got this game because I didn't want to be left out of the miiverse fun. I'm glad that Splatfest for NA is cats vs. dogs because I can be hella racist about dogs.

 

CHgP8CXUYAA-Z0j.jpg

 

 
Also my NNID is duskchapel, add me if you are down to splat.

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Tomorrow was supposed to be the NA splatfest, except now it's not. I guess it's being delayed so Nintendo can address a matchmaking issue. So that's lame. Two new maps were supposed to be unlocked for the splatfest, i don't know if those are going to be delayed too.


Seemingly to rub salt in the wound, my splatfest shirt rolled two damage ups and a defense up. I am unhappy about this.

 

Also, that triple shot burst weapon that just got recently unlocked is a nightmare to deal with, that thing is scary.

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It looks like at least one new map was introduced today?

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I've had to put Splatoon down for long stretches recently because it makes me incredibly angry. I'm normally pretty chilled out with games, but something about this one that sends me into an absolute rage.

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Haven't touched the game since before last week. Often happens when E3 comes around, suddenly everything I was playing looks really old. Kind of curious to see if anything new brings me back in. It'd probably have to be a big update rather than the current trickle of content.

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I guess the NA splatfest still hasn't happened? Unless it happened/is happening and nobody told me.

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Apparently the Japanese Splatfest has had some issues with loading times and connectivity, so the NA Splatfest has been postponed. I hope it doesn't affect the EU Splatfest too!

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Both the NA and EU splatfests are apparently now happening on July 4th.

So... Yeah.

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Whatever, that's a full 3 days after July's important day.

 

Oh miffy, you remembered my birthday!

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JULY BIRTHDAYS UNIIIIIITE

 

Are July birthdays the most important birthdays?

 

Yes.

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Including, but not limited to,

1. Canada

2. USA

3. jennegatron

4. Merus

5. natellite

6. did I mention America????

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A patch is apparently also coming on July 1st.

It contains a lot of behind-the-scenes matchmaking adjustments to prepare for the splatfests, but will also contain a number of balance updates!

Stealth jump, ninja squid, and ink resistance are all being nerfed. (Stealth Jump and Ninja Squid are both slower, and Ink Resistance will be less effective.)

 

Ninja Squid probably needed it, though i don't actually see how slowing down Stealth Jump will be much of a nerf, and even though i love and use Ink Resistance, right now it's so good that it's the only footwear skill worth using. All of those potentially, but that last one especially, will make aggressive styles of play a little less viable. (I would agree that Ink Resistance is too good as it is, but in addition to nerfing it specifically, i also think the negative effect of enemy ink should be slightly reduced across the board. Enemy ink creating traversal barriers is an important part of the game, but the current implementation is an extremely punishing mechanic that disproportionately affects certain short-range weapons.)

 

Ink Strike has a bug that, as i understand it, causes it to paint more ground than intended when dropped on certain taller environment features. That's being fixed. Not really a nerf, so Ink Strikes will probably continue to be used way too much. (It is not uncommon to see 3 or 4 Ink Strikes happen virtually at the same time at the outset of a match just as people get the first instance of their super up.)

 

Kraken is being nerfed! It will now have a significant knockback when shot at, similar to how the Bubbler works. This desperately needed to happen, the kraken as a lazy panic button has become a massive nuisance online. It reminds me of the problems Halo Reach had with the Armor Lock ability before they patched in limits to its effectiveness.

 

Also, more weapons and maps coming in the next few days.

 

I've also finished up a lot of the fussing around with gear upgrades that i was focused on and have set forth to get deeper into ranked, but... Ranked is not a happy place for me. Losing a string of 4 games when you have, yourself, consistently gone anywhere from 12/4 to 18/6 while the rest of your team is just completely imploding? You can't help but feel salty.

 

My solution has been to, against all instincts, stay with the matchmaking party. The people who suck will be the first ones to drop, and if both teams are made up of good players, you yourself have more of an opportunity to decide the outcome of the match. I need one more win and i'm into B, but just as i was about to play that match, the maps rotated out and... Nope, not going to risk that on Port or Rig.

 

I've been using the .96 gal for ranked and it's been incredibly dependable. Keep sprinklers in obnoxious spots with good coverage, enemies will understand they can't take the hill without destroying it, they'll focus their fire on it instead of you, easy and repeated kills. (The .96 gal is an accurate two hit kill with good, safe range.) All while the echolocator super keeps you aware of any sneaky flank attacks.

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I haven't had access to Splatoon for the last month basically, making me super sad. But how is everyone enjoying the new ranked mode? I will hopefully get my Splatoon back from my friend (she borrowed my whole Wii U while I was overseas and left Splatoon at home when she returned the console) in time for the Splatfest, so I've got that going for me.

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It's different. You die. A lot. Well...I do. To get the tower moving, you must be on top of it, so you're the prime target for everyone as soon as it starts moving. 

 

It's a change of pace, because you get used to having a K:D of 2 or more, then suddenly you're dying 10+ times in a game. 

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I'm super annoyed that splatfest is tomorrow, I wish they could have picked a non-holiday date when I'm not having company from can til can't.  As it is now, I'll have to get my sea snails by purchasing them, like some kind of animal.

 

The new ranked mode is fun, I've been fortunate enough to either be playing with teams that are pretty good at it or playing against teams that are still (like me) figuring out what the optimal strategy is.  I do wish there was an opportunity to choose between tower and control zone modes in your ranked battle preferences, rather than having them randomly assigned, though.

 

My strategy for tower mode is to allow my teammates to sit on the tower itself while I run advance and splat the opposite team before they can knock my teammates off.  Inkzooka is very, very satisfying when the other team has control of the tower.

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