Dalion may not be impressive anymore, as they jacked up the potency on the cannons by nearly 60% over previous, but I thought this would be the best showcase of the EX augments, particularly what may be among the best of them: the 1 HP self-immolation build. It's also an opportunity to show a better way to play the first phase, as my last upload was earlier on when we didn't really have any clue.
This combo of EX augments will set you on fire for most of the fight, give you extra potency for being on fire rather than losing potency, and give you extra potency when below half health, which can be achieved very quickly and is nearly lossless if superarmoring an attack. This combo of augments is the highest raw potency you can have. It is not the unequivocal best, as it can be messed up in several ways:
- You get hit and die
- Getting under half health is difficult without wasting time
- Someone else heals you
- The burn drops off when you're about to PB
The burn debuff is impossible to keep up 100% of the time. When initially applied, it has a 20 second duration before any modifiers (that means you must remove Bad Condition Reduction from your Ranger tree as it will ruin the uptime), but when you meet the conditions to apply it to yourself again, it adds 7 seconds to the current duration. This means that eventually it will fall off as you can't spend 100 PP every 7 seconds without griefing. Gunner doesn't spend a lot of PP as it is, so even by removing some PP preservation from the skill tree, it still doesn't let you keep the burn up for an entire fight; and some fights will be worse than others. Quick counters that let you input something between them, spending ~25 PP, are the best way to spend PP semi-naturally. Aimless Rain type 2 could be used to flash flood your PP away in a pinch, but if you're wasting time to burn yourself to do something else, it's probably not worth doing.
This build will be annoying when out and about such as in the Nameless City where you're just minding your own business and constantly burning to death, or when PSEing, or pretty much anything that is not a controlled environment. It also means you cannot use any other weapon that doesn't have EX Shortage PP Burn Up, because the burn debuff will make you lose potency again.
Other easier to live with builds include anything using Lively HP Starlings as that is simply a bonus for being good.
Other choices can shine in some situations but hurt in others, e.g. Dazzle Camouflage allows you to drop Ranger sub if you're only using it for aggro management but does nothing when you're alone; Stealth Wall double dips on non-aggro bonuses (again, does nothing in single player and is slightly bad there because it's 4% potency instead of 4.5%); Gradual Pressing aids our terrible down factor but sometimes our terrible down factor is beneficial for timings e.g. photon blasting on a down that exposes a weak point.
My positioning in phase 1 has changed such that I am at a range that the puppets will never use the invulnerability attack (minus the one time where I tried to swing around in preparation to move to another puppet and triggered it by accident), and in exchange for that will pretty much only spam a slow ranged move. This means less counters, but it also means almost no RNG with losing damage to sudden invulnerabilities or the puppets breaking line of sight. As a class that doesn't gain a lot from counters, this is more than a fair trade. The other two phases haven't changed much, other than phase 2 being way shorter now.
0:00 Phase 1
5:22 Phase 2
9:25 Phase 3