You and Vaati is just schooling me on how to use the exact upgrades i chose somewhat four hours of gaming ago man this is both awesome and fucking sucks xD
The Coral Generator is meant for you to constantly fully deplete it. If you fully deplete your energy, it'll start regenerating faster than if you had left a little bit like you normally do, and you'll immediately get like 75% of the bar back when it does.
Just curious, but is there a core that works really well with the Coral generators? I'm still tinkering with my setups, but I'm in a dilemma since I really like the Arquebus generator and it's super fast recharge. It's the heaviest one so far I think from their line, but I've been using it forever. I just cleared Jailbreak yesterday for the first time, just fyi.
@@darthripper_6573 one build I can think of on the get go, is a Tetrapod build. With this you can basically keep yourself in the air until you have no more energy left, then as soon as you hit the ground, you can instantly go back up again.
The difference in S-rank criteria is mostly explained by two things: 1 - Ranks are partially based on net payout. This means if the base pay for a mission is low, you'll be penalised a lot more for ammo and repair costs because they are deducting a greater percentage of your pay. It also means you should do everything you can to get bonus pay like destroying enemies in missions where that counts. 2 - Ranks for hard missions are much more lenient than easy missions. This is why boss missions are surprisingly easy to S-rank as long as you beat it first try.
No its not. Try skipping a bunch of enemies or not doing optional missions and you will see that it doesnt work for s Rank. You want a high payout while being fast, but if you dont break into certain money thresholds than no s rank for you
I just wanted to point out that OS upgrades really don’t need to be picked that carefully. Since the game requires you to do 3 playthroughs for the full experience you can upgrade everything around like chapter 4 in NG+. So don’t stress too much.
for target assist, you need to also take into account FCS and Firearm Specialization. the difference between soft and hard lock can be greater or lesser based on those stats
Ive always used the 160 firearm specialization and in my first play-through, I didn't realize you could lock on. Safe to say, I didn’t notice much of a difference. So in my experience I would say, yes.
@@RevPerdueJosh firearm specialization is a stat that arms use, it determines how fast your reticle realigns with the intended target after it engages with acrobatics and dodges.
Can confirm that after getting over the whole "but four weapons better than two!" patter myself, using the hangar bay slots to switch between melee weapons has been my absolute go-to strategy. I use one blast to stagger them then immediately following up with the pile bunker-bosses I previously thought were ludicrously difficult get absolutely ANNIHILATED
Yes, and combine it with the melee boost cancelling and you can achieve kind of a sliver of the ludicrous boosting capabilities of AC: For Answer melee builds.
Charged lance -> shotgun shot while moving forwards -> staggr -> weapon switch to pilebunker -> stun needle shot followup = 20000 damage combo for anything without a pulse shield (though enemy ACs have time to avoid the pile bunker if you stagger from the lance and try to skip the shotgun step)
When you're equipped with a melee weapon, you will not be using it a lot of the time untill an opportunity to use it presents itself. With that in mind, using one shoulder slot for a gun to swap to makes perfect sense.
15:18 in the garage, hit triangle or Y to open your license menu. One of the options is tips, some of which show up in game, but it explains the three status effects. There's also a Blind effect which makes it harder to lock on to enemies.
The status effects are also explained in the assembly screen, it's just hard to notice. There's four icons above the Part Specs at the bottom of the screen for weapons - damage type, weapon type, reload type, and status effects - and highlighting them with Contextual Help gives you a rundown of each.
@@66maybe66I was wondering what those little boxes each stood for since there's no explanation in game lol. I'm glad there's a way to highlight them to see what they are. Thanks!
Coral generators work best when you drain your energy bar completely. They have incredibly high post recovery stats so you get nearly your entire bar back from a full drain. This enables infinite flight with high upward thrust boosters or with assault boosts
@@kevintribe5672 Yep. It literally says that in the description, but it's not really easy to get what they mean until you play around with it a lot. Coral generators have a post-recovery supply of around 2k energy, meaning once you drain your entire bar you get like half to two thirds of your energy back. Note though, the post recovery isn't exactly so while iirc the overall energy recovery is 'faster', you spend a decent amount of that time on 0 energy, so you gotta plan around that.
Yeah the coral generators are honestly fascinating. I want to use one so bad but I'd need to completely build around it. I found that the wheelchair treads seem to be a good combo since you can zip around at mach speeds while waiting for the refill. But I can't puzzle any other good fits for them. Anyone else found a cool coral generator combo?
@@allenl5960 The sheer amount of energy given to my reverse joint semi-mid weight build by the NGI heavy coral generator is extremely useful, it lets me keep a decent range from my enemies while letting me boost around incoming missiles. Granted if I was good enough to boost around the missiles consistently. Btw depending on your AC core, your regen time will change
@@solomon9655 Im running a very "original" dual shotgun build with reverse joints that pretty lightweight. With the heavy coral generator I can dodge for days and clear insane distance with the AB. With stuff like the stun needle and dual grenade launcher as shoulder weapons. I can boost in bring massive burst and get out before they can blink. Be sure to empty the energy bar, and it will be 3/4 full in a few seconds for round 2. This is pve btw. Never needed another build after that. Melts bosses, and sometimes can kill ACs before they can get a heal off.
I recently learned that the Coral Generator (the one with the crimson boost flames) is great for an all-out-energy infinite fly build since it restores a big amount of your energy rather quickly when it gets completely depleted.
And the hover tank is an especially good set of legs for that kind of build too. I exclusively use that leg part for infinite flight, it is kinda painful when I'm on the ground with it cause it feels like its scraping the floor with the bottom of the hover tank
A quick note on OS upgrades, through NG+ you are able to fully upgrade everything so no need to stress too much about min/maxing or resetting repeatedly.
Yeah im still confused wtf is Ayre was she human that turned into sentient coral or is she just sentient coral thAT happens to be able to contact humans? . SPOILER WARNING . . . . . . . SPOILER WARNING . . . . . . . . coz Walter and Carla had "friends". Father Domayan was talking to Seria whoever that was. So are these coral beings just aliens or what
A few things you might have also forgot to include -Freefalling lets you recover EN slightly faster, nice for mustering up a quick boost in a pinch -Coral Generators also affect your expansion armor, changing it from green to red -S-Rank requirements also include completing a side objective, whether its mentioned in the briefing or in the mission itself such as killing the Tetrapod Walter tells you to ignore or defeating a hidden enemy (I'm looking at you Nosaac) -Compass will only detect active enemies, so scans are still needed for hidden or inactive ones -Weapons with charge attacks can be held indefinitely, you can hold down the charge while setting the enemy up for a stagger or a feint to help guarantee the hit.
Maybe I should have driven this point home further in the video, but you shouldn't ALWAYS be using soft-lock. Just because it improves your tracking strength doesn't mean that it offsets the benefits of target assist. There are some situations where it's better, and some where your FCS and Firearm Specialisation will be more than enough. When I say it's the "optimal" way to play, that's because if you're a perfect player, it is. Especially if you're using a mouse. But it's extremely difficult to play perfectly in Armored Core, so yeah. To my knowledge no one has done further testing on Target Assist than I have though, which is a shame. It would be good to know just how much it affects your tracking strength. Unless someone can let me know in the comments?
I just realised in ds1 the chosen undead is most likely thousands of years old you loose a bit of humanity everytime you die untill you become hollow with 99.9% of people being hollow in the world and chosen undead in a cell with the rest of the undead there being hollow and bashing their heads against the wall they where there so long unable to do anything they went crazy and killed themselves over and over again untill they hollowed. Chosen undead how ever somehow had the strength not to go absolutely insane in that small cell.a odd realisation out of nowhere 😂. Be safe friends,dont you dare go hollow!.
From my experience of using rapid fire kinetic weapons with high firearm specialization and high mid-short range FCS stats, softlocking definitely helps keep fire on faster, more strafe-happy enemies at mid-to-short range. Shooting with hardlock active seems to result in 2x to 3x more missed bullets than soft locking. Oddly enough, it also feels a little more natural to me as I grew up having to use the old claw grip when playing things like old-gen Monster Hunter. Main drawback for me seems to be that it is easier to lose an opponent if they manage to leave your view. Can't say which is better objectively, though. Only what works better for me. I mainly use hardlock to recenter my camera, then switch back to softlock.
Here's some additional info on the Red Coral generator: It's actually better to fully deplete your Red Coral (Aorta) generator's energy meter so that it can make use of the Post-EN Supply refill which is what the Coral combustion is about in the item description.
ngl I love how relevant it is to be sponsored by a corporation for an AC video 😅 again you can check out LG's best ultrawide offering here: bit.ly/3Eic0Gz It's unironically just a lot of fun to use this thing. Even browsing the web becomes this dramatic activity. I've been playing a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 as well and that works well in ultrawide too :)
Fun fact: Not tested by me but from a video i saw, Plasma YO-YO and Chainsaw when charged can actually deflect bullets and missiles but also maybe gave you damage mitigation but still cause you to be stunned if your stagger meter went full. 16:08 also if you looked closely, when you get shocked, your expansion ability also flinched, does this also affect your ability to use?
The weapon bay was so essential for my success early on. Balteus was a huge problem for me, it was the first boss I couldn’t immediately beat by brute forcing the fight with skills from previous shooters, but the weapon bay fixed that for me. I ran dual pulse weapons and hot swapped to shotguns as soon as I got a stagger. I don’t use them nearly as mich now that I have more good shoulder weapon options, but the versatility they provide can’t be overstated
Game: "All you got to do is collect all these things without taking damage or spending much ammo." Player: _does that_ Game: "You didn't kill enough enemies. 😡 B rank!"
The load gap stuff actually has nothing to do with the gap, it's just the overall weight of your AC. ANYTHING that reduces that weight will increase boost speed, whether there's a gap or not. Also, fun tip about having the weapon bay unlocked: If you AREN'T using all 4 hardpoints for stuff (light AC, whatever), try equipping your hand-held weapon to the back instead and leaving a hand empty. If you do this, it will let you freely swap between using a weapon in that hand and being able to punch. If you equip the weapon to the hand and leave the back slot empty, however, it will ignore the bay and won't let you put your weapon away.
Yeah, for the weight it's definitely still best to keep the bar as close as possible to your limit I'm curious what the exact conversion rate is for leftover EN limit -> recharge time, since the recharge time is itself a stat on the generators. There've been a couple times when I wondered what the difference would be between two generators that have higher/lower outputs in the same build.
@@LEOTomegane It's not necessarily best to try and hit your weight cap if you're emphasizing speed in a specific mission or preference. There's a certain threshold, it's around 335-345 speed, where your AC is capable of passively dodging most tracking munitions by just moving side to side
@@RussOlson-nk3wc it does a TON of impact and is spammable. You can stunlock some enemies by alternating punches between both hands, as well as extend stagger combos by chaining the punch a couple times.
A few addendums/clarifications: Freefalling to avoid damage works not because you're simply falling faster, but because your speed doesn't remain constant as with boost-falling. The change in speed throws off projectile tracking, making it very hard for things to accurately hit you, especially slower objects. Changing your vector and velocity is key to avoiding fire when a foe is tracking your movement and leading his shot. On staggering weapon fire: remember that enemies have limits to their quick boosts just like you; they can only dodge so many times, so quickly in a span of time before pausing. Staggering fire works because you force them to use more boosts at once; if you catch them AFTER they've already done a boost or two you can deplete their EN bar and force them to take the hit. Stagger things with the right timing and you can actually catch them IN a quick boost with the second shot, weapon depending. You can cancel assault boost just by hitting ascend; no stick movement necessary. Going in overburdened can be a big benefit in long missions with lots of targets, especially if you plan to be a thorough exterminator. Being a little bit slower sounds more fun than running out of ammo most of the way through a mission, especially if a resupply isn't going to be available. Yes, there are missions which will test your ammo stores without resupply. *coughMICHIGANcough*
@@thecyanpanda241I had to do literally the same thing and that was with the miniguns and plasma missiles, which are NOT stingy on ammo; that's the reason I brought it up.
@therealbahamut miniguns are actually pretty ammo efficient if you properly use them in conjunction with assault kicks, weapons bay energy sword(for damage and staggers) and a rocket launcher to take care of the little drone. Very rarely do I run completely out of minigun ammo when dual wielding them
@@thecyanpanda241ill tell you right now, the michigan mission theyre talking about absolutely will kill your ammo if you use only double gatlings. borderline necessity to bring a melee weapon and 2 high capacity missile pods to deal with the sheer amount of mobs it throws at you
Not sure if anyone has said it, but for the S ranking killing the enemies that drop combat logs usually guarantees an increase from A to S, I've been doing a lot of grinding to get S in every mission and that's the biggest factor I've found
It should be noted that there seems to be a higher correlation with defeating enemies that cause a slowdown effect on kill and S-ranking. Even this isn't strictly necessary, but if you just can't get an S, consider looking for one of these mid bosses.
I think this plays a role for sure, even if there's no extra monetary gain for killing the combat log enemy (some missions will give bonus pay for it, even if credits on kill isn't a factor in the mission - typically happens more if the combat log enemy in question is a named character, though even then, not always.) Only frustration is on later replays when you have all the combat logs, there's no way to know which enemies are combat log enemies outside of memory and intuition.
I noticed that missions that give you bonus cash for additional actions(kills/retrieve logs or items) help or sometimes is required for S rank. S rank seams to boil down to time it took for you to finish the mission and your final net cash received by the end of the mission.
@@bloodasp6278 yeah I'd say this is more or less true for almost every mission - there do seem to be exceptions wherein killing extra enemies that don't even offer financial rewards is still necessary for S rank - e.g. in Investigate Baws Aresenal No.2 it seems like you have to kill the additional hidden enemy next to a dead mech in order to get S rank, even though there's no bonus pay for it.
A unique part about the Coral Generator (the one that gives you a red booster) is it wants you to overheat. I can't remember the name of the stat, but it has the highest EN regen out of any generator when it's depleted. You'll get about 3/4 of your EN bar once the cooldown ends.
There's at least two Coral Generators I've run into through my first game cycle but I think they both more or less share that quality Which is handy cuz I am very prone to QB spam on my Reverse Joint build and overheat without realizing it lmao
@skeletor8951 I'm the same way. Do you recall where you found the second one? The one I have is the AORTA which I found while surveying the city covered in fog.
For Point 22, another thing to note about heavy ACs are their armor. Heavier ACs tend to have better armor, so in your example the light has 20k and the heavy has 23k, but the Heavy's 23k will last a lot longer than the Light's
Also depending on what parts you equip, each has different resistance values that lean towards Kinetic, Energy, Explosive, or a balance of the two of the three.
Heavier mechs also tend to have higher ACS, so you might also get staggered less, resulting in less burst damage. However, dodging is usually harder in a heavy mech, so you'll often get hit more. 🙃
@@yyBoByy Yeah, in my experience the heavier mechs suffer from the fighting game heavies problem. Tougher on paper and in theory, but in practice, you're often sacrificing more speed than you're gaining in survivability.
And apparently coral damage, which is a damage type I haven't actually been able to use yet, ignores damage resistances, so the light and heavy in this scenario will take the same amount of damage
For really lightweight, close and personal, fast builds, the rate at which your energy comes back is super noticeable. Pretty much every decision you make in your mech design makes a noticeable difference in the overall mech if you have some role you want your mech to preform.
Yeah I prefer the lightest reverse joint build I can make and I've definitely had times where one new weapon or part will drastically change my boost speed and recharge. It took me awhile to figure out because the numbers were not changing all that much on the details screen
@@gerald216 Yeah it got to the point where my main AC (the one I've used to play most of the game with) I only have three weapons on (dual Gatling and a songbird). Adding any other weapon would drastically decrease my boost/quick boost speed. Sadly I had to stop using the bipedal/reverse joint legs (nachteichr or something like that) and had to start using normal bipedal legs so as to be able to use a better generator and chest
@joemency2242 Ah I have broken down and used the gattlining songbird on a couple missions, I actually had a set up that let me use my lightweight build with them too lol. But I try to use the second teir linear rifle, a plasma rifle, then switch out the back depending on the mission. It's actually crazy how much crap you can throw on the mid reverse joints
Heavy sided Medium Myself, Large HP Pool, Dual Lance Railing guns, 2x Rail Shotguns, Dafeng Legs (the ones with large armour plates over the thigh but not the calfs. Lot of HP and Armour, Guns, Yet I can still dodge effectively and do light air to air fighting / Long gap passes which is all thats needed for most bosses
The armored core subreddit has a whole section dedicated to emblem sharing. it's separated by platform too. There are some neat creations on there and might be worth a look.
A minor thing about the weapon's bay thing. Energy weapons cooldown at their normal rate but regular weapons seem to reload slower while on your back so keep the normal weapon out when both are reloading
Here's a minor trick: with bipedal legs, you get frozen in the air when using heavy/charged attacks. If you pair this with freefalling after your boosters run out, the extra time frozen in the air allows you to regenerate your boosters, meaning you can continue in the air without touching down. It's more effective than the quad leg hover at staying airborne, since hover mode prevents boost regeneration while immobile and eats some while moving. Pretty effective in duels against melee or close quarters mechs.
I kinda noticed this when I built a heavy biped with nothing but grenade launchers: The recoil juggled me in the air effortlessly, allowing me to keep bombarding from above way better than a tetrapod could. This was surprisingly good against AC's in the arena
An additional bit regarding the kick-spam strat, if you're quick enough, you can change your aim position to just about anywhere between the kick and activation. This also works if you use the AB cancel. Another thing about AB, too. If you're trying to AB and need to turn sharp. You can do a dodge to the left or right, and your camera won't be locked to the slow movement speed of AB for the duration of the dodge, allowing for easy redirection.
About OS upgrades : After your first playthrough you'll be able to max out everything so it's more a matter of what are you priorities ! About overburdening : if you overburden your arms, it also hurts your tracking.
NG+ you get. Allmind challenges. A B Y in NG+ 6 8 10 OCS per letter rank. The rank after that in NG++ gives 15 OCS points which will finish off the OCS upgrades.
As a person who uses pretty much nothing but agile, speedy mechs, I appreciate the tip about stopping Assault Boost in a better way. Definitely using that. ✌️
As someone else said, just tapping the ascend button will have the effect you want, and as another someone said quick turn can be used while assault boosting to rapidly turn 90 degrees
Just wanna clarify with the target assist thing: He's talking about soft lock (TA Off) vs hard lock (TA On). There's a core expansion that allows manual aiming, which is a completely separate thing.
I want to like manual aiming, but it honestly seems way too impractical except for sniping enemies, given how fast combat can be. I'm sure there'll be some people who get so absurdly good with it though that they can land 100% of their shots with the gatling gun or something.
Manual aiming is definitely much more valuable with weapons like the gatling or bazooka types because you can lead targets that even soft lock tends to trail on. Another thing about manual aim is you don't have to have it on all the time so you could use it for certain situations only.
Regarding the Coral generator that gives you red boost-- its recharge delay and speed are really slow. But, if you fully deplete your energy, it'll restore to almost completely full instantly once it recharges. The most efficient way to use the coral generators is to burn them out completely. I use this generator for perpetual flight builds
it also kicks the post-redline recharge on _faster_ than it starts the normal recharge. The standard recharge is like 5 seconds, but the post-redline one is around 2.5
The Smoke Grenade/explosion can be countered by using the active scan ability (which is based on the head part). So having a smoke screen between you and the enemy and having a long range scan and scan duration allows you to shoot the enemy precisely while they can't do much.
The manual purge instantly stuck to me as something that might be extremely situational but was also added to the game because it's undeniably so cool to have your mech enter a mission with skyscraper-sized guns, lay down hell and then discard them as if they're useless lumps of metal. Also, thanks for explaining melee cancelling and boost kick to extend flying distance (though, tbh for that mission I just went with a tetrapod leg build).
@@koontz1154 That's the hard way to deal with that section but I bet it was such an adrenaline rush. I might have to make a speed build and try that myself just for fun.
@@Dieci-9 honestly it really was, I had made a quick reverse joint build and learned the timing of the laser firing after the beeps. I love that if you boost from the ground it incorporates your larger jump distance into it as well.
@@koontz1154 Yeah, the devs really nailed it with making the game account for momentum, weight and other small but important details. The first time I tried the tank threads and started drifting while firing huge artillery weapons it was such a good feeling. They really nailed the power fantasy of driving these metal titans.
If you do this you don’t get access to the Assembly option to change your build. Another thing you can do if a boss is giving you trouble is change the voice volume to 0. “Not like this”
While repair kits might give you a similar AP amount as heavy builds, you also have to take into account damage resistance from different parts. The heavier parts almost always have more. Don't know how it works, but its one of the main stats mentioned on the AC Data screen, Defensive Performance.
Yeah I have no idea how defensive stats translate into damage resistance, as even the lowest Defensive Performance mech sits at around 1000, whereas the higherst is no more than 1400ish - yet a heavy mech can eat bullets for ages and still have plenty of AP left. Part of this is due to lighter mechs inherently taking far more damage due to being staggered more often, and stagger windows leading to taking critical damage if focused on. Yet even then a heavy mech feels like it takes around half the damage. Part of this might be that the player also gets the ricochet property when taking damage from weapons outside of their ideal range, if they player has high armour values (Like enemy tetrapods).
The heavy mechs will take a lot more punishments to die. They are designed to not be able to dodge a lot of attacks from the bosses. A mech with higher speed can easily dodge those attacks with a correct timing and directions. For example, some of the bosses in late game punish heavy mech much more since their attacks become undodgeable for the heavy mech with certain set up. But if you have jumping legs you can jump up and dodge easily with a boost.
@clarkp2125 I know why they did it, I just don't know how the actual Stat works. The difference between low and high numbers is usually only about 200 on a Stat that averages 1200. Is it flat damage reduction? Percentage based? No idea. I imagine 1000 is 100% damage take and 1200 is 20% reduction and so on, but I'm not sure.
@@0mnil0rd I think it works the same as when your bullets ricochet off of heavily armoured enemies - higher numbers multiply the chance of an enemy's attack ricocheting (taking into account the effective range falloff and damage of the weapon).
did a little testing and not only do the coral generator change your booster's color they also change your extension's color (assault armor etc...) AND it also increases its damage by ~50% (i only tested it with assault armor so far but i have to assume it also increases the shield on the defensive extensions)
caveat for #9. if you have a particular armor upgrade like pulse, assault, terminal, etc. make sure that you unequip it from your ac and save it before reseting os or the menu will lock you out of your ac because of "missing parts"
Some more tips: on some Generators it's better to completely spend all your energy than to carefully energy manage and let it restore on its own. These Generators have a very low natural energy regen but have a significantly increased initial energy restore if depleted completely. For example, one of the Coral Generators has a capacity of 4400, and if depleted completely you instantly restore 3300 once the energy begins to regenerate. So it takes a longer time to begin to regenerate compared to other generators, but once it begins to regen you gain 3/4 of the Generator's entire capacity instantaneously. This stat is called "Post-Recovery EN Supply" on the stat screen, something to keep an eye out for if you look at just the "EN Recharge" and overlook otherwise viable Generators because of what seems like extremely low recharge speeds shown on stat screens.
@EpsilonKnight2 I've found it isn't that bad if you get used to it. AB the last bit of EN and free fall, the combo is a good dodge when figured out and having basically full EN as soon as it is back is amazing. Also your core can make that time way shorter, with the aorta I have a 3.86 recharge delay which seems Hella long but really isn't. With reverse joint legs you can even jump without EN for a dodge substitute
that's why those bosses with the coral generators use the coral shield (and some shield users), they use it when they've almost depleted their energy from dodging.
As mkb player, i have used free aim more than lock on and aim assist off the most. But, there have been times where i locked on the enemy to make sure my melee lands. I think that's where it shines, a quick turn of your camera to find your target so you can then land a melee or turn it off to shoot.
Melee or close range semi-auto/single-shot is definitely where it shines the most to have the hard lock. Particularly against faster enemies where it's easy to lose track in close quarters.
One of the final bosses (depending on ending) moves so fast (or teleports) outside your FOV. Soft lock feels like a real pain in the ass during that fight. Hard lock however, most of the time followed that final boss' movement pretty easily. There are definitely times where hard lock's benefits are too good to overlook, even with M+KB. @@mmmao0630
A note on target assist: It's really strong if you're using single shot weapons and find an enemy too fast to track (certain late-game bosses... No spoilers!) Seriously, my AC will turn almost directly facing the camera and nail snipes before I even have a chance to track the enemy. It's worse against most enemies though, I mainly use it on ACs so I can worry less about aiming and more about maneuvering and firing at the right time.
Im currently stuck on chapter 4 final boss, and its so fast that pretty much all my shots miss. I was thinking about trying non lock for that reason. But even against slower enemies it seems like big one shot weapons like the bazooka are incredibly unreliable so idk how your AC doesnt miss.
I've been using paired bazookas+songbird on treads and at close range it is fun to see my AC torso pivot to aim at something entirely off screen and see the stagger bar jump. That said, it is definitely not free, you still have to run your enemy's dodges out, or back them to a wall or something for splash damage.
@@habo249I used dual stun needle launchers, pile bunker, and JVLN Alpha. Reverse jointed legs too. The snipers REALLY benefit from the target lock, much more consistent than Songbirds or bazookas. Javelin purely for the raw impact so I could stagger and bolt in with the Doom Spike of Satisfaction.
@@giantflamingrabbitmonster8124it's hilarious with the snipers especially, yeah! Especially good for getting to know a fast boss before I'm more comfortable tracking it and keeping up myself tbh.
Don't forget about missiles too! They already have innate guiding, and tracking doesn't matter if the thing you fire is already homing, so if your build is heavy on (or entirely made up of) missiles then target lock should be on every single time you want to single out an enemy so you don't lose missile locks.
I really needed this. Ive been purposfully avoiding build guide videos so i can stick to my own style, so getting general tips to help improve my time in the game is great. Took me 20 hours to find the extra details button in the assembly screen lol was wonderind why certain stuff wasnt working the way i wanted lol
You're absolutely right, I use weapon bay builds a lot for my lightweight AC builds, it's great for the reasons you stated, letting weapons cool down and reload, but it also helped me deal with longer missions and encounters where I was running out of ammo too soon.
the air time you get from weapons that make you pause for a while to shoot kind of helps sometimes for specific scenarios eg. you stunned the sea spider p2 when you're flying and initially planned to stunlock it but you just got your en depleted. using songbirds for example gives you more time to keep that vantage point
This is the strategy I built my main mech around. Reverse legs, med weight, dual assault rifles, dual songbirds. I hover above ACs and bosses and fire both songbirds downward on top of the enemy. This pauses my decent, pushes me back a bit (upward since looking down), and it gives my EN time to recharge. The songbird damage is usually enough to stagger them, so I then fly around, emptying my assault rifles’ magazines into them. For harder bosses, I swap out assault rifles for gatling guns and use the same technique. I have yet to find a boss I can’t beat with this way. The songbirds raw damage even melts through plasma shields without needing bubble blasters.
One tip I'd recommend if assuming you're using a PS5 controller with Type A controls, swap the Assault Boost and Quick Boost controls with each other. I found having my dodge on the same stick as my movement not only allowed me to respond quicker since I don't need two buttons to dodge, but it also allows me to dodge and keep full control of the camera to track my targets while moving.
Surprised no one is bringing up that you can assault/pulse armor while ACS staggered. Pulse armor is really good for immediately reducing your ACS strain and effectively making you immune to being staggered for a few seconds, but if you have an opponent that likes to melee when you get staggered, assault armor basically works as a burst from a fighting game. Certain aggressive, lightweight enemy ACs get immediately staggered from assault armor at close range, opening them up to counter attack.
I feel like the ranges in your fcs play a huge role in target assist too, using double Zimmermanns with the best close range chip had my setup hitting people who jumped behind me off my screen while TA was on.
I can attest to this - I play almost exclusively with TA on other than when moving through a level and fighting MT chumps - with a close range FCS and high Firearm Spec arms I can be unloading zimmerman shots into enemies that have dashed off screen behind me. TA is absolutely the superior tool for close range builds that intend to disorient targets by rapidly moving all around them, and also essential for pinning down someone doing the same to you.
1. In Oceans' Crossing you can quick dodge the laser blasts, have to dodge after the second beep. Also, if you maintain a straight path, you will avoid most of the laser sights or at least it worked for me. 2. My light mech has the orange or coral color. 3. In NG+ you will get more os upgrades and be able to unlock everything though it is handy for resetting in NG.
One thing to note for Vaati is that, so early on he won't have unlocked all the OS Tunings, but you do eventually get them all. It might give a slight edge to be a bit more optimal early but you don't lose anything in the long run. That and the fact that you can reset them too.
Really nice video for us that are just getting started with the game. One thing I would add about tip #5 is that freefalling, while faster as an evasive maneuver, causes the AC to hard land. This makes you lose the charge of attacks you are currently holding, so it's something one might want to keep in mind.
I love that you're really enjoying ac and getting into all the details. It's quite surreal seeing a franchise I enjoyed as a kid getting so much positive attention. Thanks for all you do.
If you're playing the tetrapod legs and dont like that awkward stop that you do midair after quickboosting during a hover, VERY quickly tap your hover button again to go into freefall RIGHT before the quickboost happens. Just like how it keeps your momentum after assault boost, you keep your momentum and can go right back into your hover without any stops or delays.
For those who don't know, you will be able to max out everything on the OST stuff as you keep playing, so don't worry to much about being efficient with it, it's all gonna max out by the end of your second playthrough.
I can't state enough how much I appreciate having channels like yours for games like these. I can't mention how many times I heard something in AC6 that made me go "man I can't wait for Vaati to explain what the fuck that means". You bring a whole other level of enjoyment to these games for me, and I know many others can say the same.
1. On the Booster colors, the easy way to know which generators have which colors is simple: BAWS and Dafeng = Orange, Arqeubus = Blue, Rubicon Institute (aka "Coral" gear) = Red. 2. 15:02 The game actually explains the *3* status effects that it has: go on any weapon, bring up Contextual Help, then point to or click on the small icons the weapons have above their stats. The three status effects according to the game are named: Camera Disruption, Shock, and ACS Failure.
@@VaatiVidyaI dont get it, I assault boosted straight over it and you dont even get targeted until you cross. You may be have to dodge one laser before getting to cover.
Melee cancelling was a really popular tech in many of the 3D Gundam fighting games as well. In a PVP context it was a really effective way to force an opponent to not only backpedal but also bait out a potentially high commitment attack for an easy and highly damaging counter-punish. I can’t speak to how this translates to AC6 PVP but it could make for some really tense and fun interactions.
With staggering fire - I found it to be a very useful thing to do when I made a build with two Iridiums and two Songbirds. Fire one weapon at a time, then fire the next after the first one is done. Do it right and it means you can keep up a pretty much constant stream of explosives heading downrange, since it covers for the reload of each one. Plus, like you said, if the enemy dodges one shot, they might not be able to dodge the next, and it means I can take advantage of the Staggers the constant explosions put them into.
AC is not even close to any of the souls games 🤣 it’s not even a Soulsgame tbh. It’s like saying Forza got cars so it must be reference to Halo 🤣 shields , blades been in other AC games too. Moonlight blade /sword was in Armored core 1 for example 👌🏻
@@Adrian-L3x4 In terms of play style, difficulty level, and developer (literally FromSoft lmao) I'd say it's relatively similar. It's the least similar but still similar.
Got the first ending myself earlier. Easily the best NG+ modern From has ever done. Hooked me when it turned the easiest mission into one of the toughest, and not in a slapped-on way.
What a beautiful game, absolutely loved it, can't get enough of it, I really hope we get another Armored Core game instead of waiting 10 whole years. This was my first AC game ever and I just fell in love with it.
@@broccolidiego2053Be fun to have a white glint cameo. Wouldn’t be the same one, cause I’m pretty sure this is a different timeline, but them wings of light live rent free in my head
You can also AB cancel with a melee attack. I use this in tandem with melee cancelling to get in close with some of the slower melee options. You also maintain some of the AB momentum when you enter the melee animation which is really useful for the pile driver which has a really long wind up on its charge attack. You can take this a step further by AB cancel into Melee cancel. Happy hunting.
I am face-in-hands right now realizing that I was supposed to travel under the stage for the orbital laser section. I've played the mission 3 times now, but because I always use the heavy tank legs and had maxed the heal amount, I would have enough supplies to simply make it to the checkpoint. That and I managed to dodge the first laser so I just assumed that was what I was supposed to do.
There's a whole pathway to get under it right outside the door 😂 I use a lightweight mech so it was my only option, with a pitstop on a platform I found on the right side of the bridge.
That's the beauty about AC, you can take multiple builds in to play it different ways, my first attempt I took a mid weight and went underneath, but died at the boss, came back and tanked dmg like you with a heavy my second play on NG+ I used a light build and avoided the lasers or as it was about to strike dodged out of the way
I made it through even with a light-medium build, you just have to dodge the laser correctly. But i also didn’t know there was a way to completely avoid it, i assumed it was just like the Eye on the Strider and dodged 😅
14:10 If you get familiar with the shoulders and arm weapons you use, it can actually be beneficial to fire both at the same time if you pair it with another weapon fired just before impact as a sort of forced roll catch. An example is firing both rockets on your shoulders and firing a charged rifle shot as they land. It’s not consistent with every weapon, but when mixed up with spacing weapon shots it creates intense binds for your opponent, forcing them to choose between two sources of intense damage, or dump resources avoiding it all.
One thing that many people forget: energy restores not only on the ground, but also during the free fall. So you can continue your flight, if you have decent EN regen
Unintuitively coral generators are usually the best if you want to get as much energy as possible without touching the ground. They take way longer to start but once it happens you'll have more energy without touching the ground than any other generator could give you in the same amount of time without touching the ground.
Built a PC january 2023. 13700K, 7900XT, 64gb of RAM, 980 and 990 pro M.2's and a 65" LG OLED TV. I saved up for a while and made it happen and i couldnt be happier. AC6 is especially fun on that TV. Great vids as always bro!
Quick note on the coral generator, it actually really good if you specifically deplete all your energy because it basically gives you back 75% of your energy bar when it recharges.
It's really good and funny when doing it in PvP. My friend forgot that and when he thought I was cornered after a dodge spam, he yelped when I suddenly AB'd right past him laughing
Loving this game, also there is a “status effect” where you get infinite EN during certain parts of the game but it might be a stretch to say it’s a status effect.
In case you make another one of these, you can charge weapons while going in for charged melee attacks. This makes things like the energy lance pair very well with shoulder laser weapons (same with R hand energy weapons). While doing the charged lance attack, hold down both shoulder buttons, and by the time they’re staggered you can unleash both at the same time for crazy damage. As a bipedal enjoyer, I was struggling to figure out how to use the laser scatter cannon, but this did wonders for me
Armordecor’ is so important I’ve spent like fifteen hours making custom emblems and decals for my knightly AC line. Coats of arms, scrolls with Latin passages, bundles of arrows and wreaths, creeping red thorns, my AC’s look like they’re FOR THE EMPEROR.
Love the idea of hangar bay plus manual purge The general strat in my mind is to build the mech so that you have 3 weapons on at perfect weight but then a forth one that puts you over and you remove any of the four that seem least relevant for that mission. Have the capacity to drop your weight even further if you want more speed. An adaptive mech with changing movement is really cool Also if you have seen the video of armored core without weapons, melee is really good against other ACs
Where in the world is this "hangar" coming from? Even when he says it he's clearly showing a screen saying "Weapon Bay" and then he refers to the upgrade as "hangar" for the duration of the segment. Does he even know what a hangar is? I respect and appreciate the video but it was just throwing me off so much and no one else is mentioning it.
In the hanger, if you enter photo mode, you can see your weapons resting on some mounts to the right. They actually change depending on what you equipped as your weapon choices. It’s a cool Easter egg
Another note about the Melee Cancelling: you can do this with Shoulder Weapons aswell. Example: if you have Stun Needles equipped and need to dodge, there's a window during startup where you can quickboost out. Especially useful if you know for sure that the needles aren't hitting.
Another interesting tip is some melee weapons that can be charged like the DOUBLE TROUBLE chainsaw and HMMR will act as makeshift shields while holding the charge allowing you to take slightly less damage and preventing you from flinching. You'll still get staggered if you sit there and try to block constantly but it's a nice way to armor through attacks before closing in for the chop. You have to be careful though as quick boosting undoes the block for a short time so that will still get you hit within the gap. Shields in general are pretty powerful and able to almost entirely negate attack damage and stagger if you time the parry right.
Reguarding the S ranks, I assume its based on end credits earned, along side speed. In a lot of missions you can run through them and only deal with the target, but some of those missions say on the right side objectives at the brief screen "bonus for other enemies" and you will see in the bottom right you earn credits for killing enemies. Personally i've only had that issue once, but I think as long as you have a good ratio of ammo consumed to bonus pay its good (Don't use a high cost weapon to kill things that only give you low amounts/just go past them and prioritse big targets) A prime example of this is the (as spoiler free as i can say) The scanning one for credits. If you pass all /some of the credit earning wrecks and only scan the OBJ ones, you're not gonna get S Rank even if you dont take any damage or use any ammo. You need to min max your credits earned-Credit cost to get S Rank. I found a dual shotgun build with Cheap multi lock missles works well for getting S Rank (can take out small enemies for low cost, bigger targets [MT's] only take a shotgun shell or two)
20:12 another broken thing about the compass : It does not care about invisibility. Cloaked ennemies still appear on the compass, and are very easy to spot that way
I clicked on this for the AC6 tips, not realizing you're the guy who creates the awesome Elden Ring lore shorts. That is, until your voice started sounding familiar to me hahaha. Thanks for this entertaining and informative channel!
Fair to say that this video dropped at the exact right moment for me -- I'm still working my way through Chapter 1 at a mission-a-day pace (partly because I want to savor the game, partly because I'm trying to see how long I can go without getting killed in a mission, and partly because I don't want to get too far ahead of my BF, who I talked into getting the game despite his not being a _Soulsborne_ fan and who almost immediately realized why FromSoft is known for unforgiving prologue bosses), and I felt like my performance could use a shot in the arm now that the rust has been knocked loose.
On melee cancelling, I'd like to note at least in 1v1 situations against faster targets, you'd benefit more from using Kikaku (the thruster with the maximum melee thrust and lowest consumption) as it's pretty much made for the technique. Not only does it make your meele go much further, it also has really good QB for the amount of distance you get for melee. I've been pretty much making a melee build work for the entire game and Kikaku is extremely good since some melee weapons tend to whiff on faster targets without the maxed out melee thrust.
I was actually beyond ecstatic when I got into the first mission and learned the game actually supports ultrawide (and no 60 capped fps). I've been using a 34' LG ultrawide for 3 years now, can never go back, and it's always so upsetting when a game doesn't support it, like Elden Ring, for example. I'm happy to see you're enjoying it as well!
It's interesting that you can't go negative in this game. Something I remember about Armored Core 2 I think it was that was kinda haunting experiencing it the first time was I ended up going so negative one time that my debt was cleared and while my AC was the same as normal, all my pilot information was reset to the default - I think the implication either being that a debter came for my pilot or something of the sort. Considering how it is a thing in the stories that debt could make pilot's take on experimental augmentations and stuff it's definitely something they were probably thinking about.
4:40 I think Target Assist is affected by the FCS equipped, since most of the explanations under contextual help for the FCS shows the "aiming assistance performance" at certain ranges, so if you've equipped an FCS made for long range with low close range assist like the VE 21-B your close range shots under 130M may miss more when you go hard lock (though the ideal and effective range your weapons equipped should also be considered else shots would just ricochet).
On the S-Rank: Sometimes you cannot get it without doing additional stuff. For example on the refueling base, you gotta get at least some of the enemies that give you combat logs. I did it over and over again with minimal dmg taken and it was A. When I got those enemies (while ignoring the fuel tanks even), I got an S Rank.
Are you sure? I only shot some in fly bys to the first mandatory enemy, then skipped every enemy until the last batch directly in front of the mission target. killed those in a drive by as well. Still got an S.
This video is so good! I beat the game already and didn't know about the radar lmao. I found weight control was really good on my ultralight build, because it allowed me to swap a couple of weapons depending on the mission that would otherwise just put me over the limit without having to redo my mech. The penalty for a little overburden is a lot less than switching out legs.
I'm really glad I already knew most of this stuff, but there were definitely a few helpful tips for me. Another important thing to note in the, "How to fire weapons" category is that staggering your damage helps make sure you don't use all of your damage to stagger an enemy, only to not have something ready to deal damage when you overload their ACS. I still get over-eager many times and fire all my weapons, only to facepalm when the enemy recovers only to have taken 1-2k damage.
Quick Turn is one of those things that I know conceptually is very useful, but in the moment I just completely forget about... Kinda same w/ core expansions... I tend to use Terminal Armor not cause i necessarily need the safety net, but just cause it goes off automatically. I know assault armor is OP from the couple of times I've remembered to use it, but those occasions were few and far between
Quick turn actually has an extra use. Using it during assault boost lets you turn 90 degrees left or right quickly while maintaining the boost.
This works amazingly in situations with terrain to quickly navigate through.
Bruh, for real? I gotta try that next time.
You and Vaati is just schooling me on how to use the exact upgrades i chose somewhat four hours of gaming ago man this is both awesome and fucking sucks xD
I thought that was the main use 😭
Had no idea about that, thanks.
The Coral Generator is meant for you to constantly fully deplete it. If you fully deplete your energy, it'll start regenerating faster than if you had left a little bit like you normally do, and you'll immediately get like 75% of the bar back when it does.
I've gotten it close to like 90% recovery with good EN optimization on my AC parts. It's pretty neat.
Just curious, but is there a core that works really well with the Coral generators? I'm still tinkering with my setups, but I'm in a dilemma since I really like the Arquebus generator and it's super fast recharge. It's the heaviest one so far I think from their line, but I've been using it forever. I just cleared Jailbreak yesterday for the first time, just fyi.
i know with the "matching" RI core it gives you maximum EN output, but really just mix and match what works with your kit @@darthripper_6573
@@darthripper_6573 one build I can think of on the get go, is a Tetrapod build. With this you can basically keep yourself in the air until you have no more energy left, then as soon as you hit the ground, you can instantly go back up again.
Even still it has like a 1.5 second delay which is a long time to go without boosting.
The difference in S-rank criteria is mostly explained by two things:
1 - Ranks are partially based on net payout. This means if the base pay for a mission is low, you'll be penalised a lot more for ammo and repair costs because they are deducting a greater percentage of your pay. It also means you should do everything you can to get bonus pay like destroying enemies in missions where that counts.
2 - Ranks for hard missions are much more lenient than easy missions. This is why boss missions are surprisingly easy to S-rank as long as you beat it first try.
The only thing that matters for S Ranking a mission is speed, and not using continue.
No its not. Try skipping a bunch of enemies or not doing optional missions and you will see that it doesnt work for s Rank.
You want a high payout while being fast, but if you dont break into certain money thresholds than no s rank for you
@@Corey91666 It still works in most missions, just not all of them. You just have to be really, really fast.
This entire rank system is just confusing
Does going into new game+ make replaying old missions and S ranking them harder?
I just wanted to point out that OS upgrades really don’t need to be picked that carefully. Since the game requires you to do 3 playthroughs for the full experience you can upgrade everything around like chapter 4 in NG+. So don’t stress too much.
Plus, it’s free to reassign OS upgrades at any time, so you can always experiment arojnd
@@PonkingtonHeightsIts not free, the price scales up
But its so cheap one run of some of the easiest missions can get you enough to respec
@PonkingtonHeights literally untrue it costs money. Not a huge amount but its not free, idk where you got that
@@yungoldman2823 because I didn’t know it cost money 😭
im sorry wtf do you mean 3 full playthroughs
for target assist, you need to also take into account FCS and Firearm Specialization. the difference between soft and hard lock can be greater or lesser based on those stats
Wait, if I lock-on, is that with Firearm specialization?
Ive always used the 160 firearm specialization and in my first play-through, I didn't realize you could lock on. Safe to say, I didn’t notice much of a difference. So in my experience I would say, yes.
@@RevPerdueJosh firearm specialization is a stat that arms use, it determines how fast your reticle realigns with the intended target after it engages with acrobatics and dodges.
I like high firearm specialization for when I'm using dual Ludlows on a light AC build. The reticle sticks to the target like glue
1:08 wait! We can kick?!
Can confirm that after getting over the whole "but four weapons better than two!" patter myself, using the hangar bay slots to switch between melee weapons has been my absolute go-to strategy. I use one blast to stagger them then immediately following up with the pile bunker-bosses I previously thought were ludicrously difficult get absolutely ANNIHILATED
don't sleep on the laser dagger either, it recharges so fast!
Pulse blade and Pile Bunker on Balteus about to be my go to strategy now
Yes, and combine it with the melee boost cancelling and you can achieve kind of a sliver of the ludicrous boosting capabilities of AC: For Answer melee builds.
Charged lance -> shotgun shot while moving forwards -> staggr -> weapon switch to pilebunker -> stun needle shot followup = 20000 damage combo for anything without a pulse shield (though enemy ACs have time to avoid the pile bunker if you stagger from the lance and try to skip the shotgun step)
When you're equipped with a melee weapon, you will not be using it a lot of the time untill an opportunity to use it presents itself. With that in mind, using one shoulder slot for a gun to swap to makes perfect sense.
15:18 in the garage, hit triangle or Y to open your license menu. One of the options is tips, some of which show up in game, but it explains the three status effects. There's also a Blind effect which makes it harder to lock on to enemies.
My AC had an electrical discharge. We still aren't talking.
@@dont-touch-mepg1392I'm so sorry to hear that, AC's can be very vulnerable after an electrical discharge. Mine flat out bought dinner without me.
The status effects are also explained in the assembly screen, it's just hard to notice. There's four icons above the Part Specs at the bottom of the screen for weapons - damage type, weapon type, reload type, and status effects - and highlighting them with Contextual Help gives you a rundown of each.
@@66maybe66I was wondering what those little boxes each stood for since there's no explanation in game lol. I'm glad there's a way to highlight them to see what they are. Thanks!
@@66maybe66 Ah, I tried looking at those with contextual help but it wouldn't let me. Maybe I had to try using the stick rather than the d-pad?
Coral generators work best when you drain your energy bar completely. They have incredibly high post recovery stats so you get nearly your entire bar back from a full drain. This enables infinite flight with high upward thrust boosters or with assault boosts
WHAT
@@kevintribe5672 Yep. It literally says that in the description, but it's not really easy to get what they mean until you play around with it a lot.
Coral generators have a post-recovery supply of around 2k energy, meaning once you drain your entire bar you get like half to two thirds of your energy back.
Note though, the post recovery isn't exactly so while iirc the overall energy recovery is 'faster', you spend a decent amount of that time on 0 energy, so you gotta plan around that.
Yeah the coral generators are honestly fascinating. I want to use one so bad but I'd need to completely build around it. I found that the wheelchair treads seem to be a good combo since you can zip around at mach speeds while waiting for the refill. But I can't puzzle any other good fits for them. Anyone else found a cool coral generator combo?
@@allenl5960 The sheer amount of energy given to my reverse joint semi-mid weight build by the NGI heavy coral generator is extremely useful, it lets me keep a decent range from my enemies while letting me boost around incoming missiles. Granted if I was good enough to boost around the missiles consistently. Btw depending on your AC core, your regen time will change
@@solomon9655
Im running a very "original" dual shotgun build with reverse joints that pretty lightweight. With the heavy coral generator I can dodge for days and clear insane distance with the AB.
With stuff like the stun needle and dual grenade launcher as shoulder weapons.
I can boost in bring massive burst and get out before they can blink. Be sure to empty the energy bar, and it will be 3/4 full in a few seconds for round 2.
This is pve btw. Never needed another build after that. Melts bosses, and sometimes can kill ACs before they can get a heal off.
I recently learned that the Coral Generator (the one with the crimson boost flames) is great for an all-out-energy infinite fly build since it restores a big amount of your energy rather quickly when it gets completely depleted.
And the hover tank is an especially good set of legs for that kind of build too. I exclusively use that leg part for infinite flight, it is kinda painful when I'm on the ground with it cause it feels like its scraping the floor with the bottom of the hover tank
YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO GO UNDER THE BRIDGE????
Ahahahhahahahah
WAIT SHIT WHAT?!
Blew my mind just now. I just brute forced my way across after getting blown up a few times
The one of survived dosers that actually passed this challenge! XD
I seen the bridge way becase I had a feeling you couldn't brute force it
A quick note on OS upgrades, through NG+ you are able to fully upgrade everything so no need to stress too much about min/maxing or resetting repeatedly.
Wrong technically it’s ng++ after beating all three analysts unlocked you have maxed out so chips
@@nathankelly5976You don't need NG++ to max OS chips. You get weapons from the last 3.
@@nathankelly5976Wrong, it's only NG++ once you've gotten both endings. Beating the analysis sets isn't NG++, that's just NG+
@@spycrab421 what about the 3 bosses In ++ analysis or do they not give chips if so my bad
@@nathankelly5976 Can confirm the last three bosses in NG++ don't give chips, you get all available chips by end of NG+
The melee cancelling technique is straight up one the best distance closing approaches in the Gundam Versus games
Feels like if you put the instant transmission sfx whenever you cancel it would be perfect.
Yeah found early since ashmeade has such bad range to chain QB and ashmeade fire.
I didn't know that's how you're supposed to go through that area. I just boosted through and blew through all my repair kits and hoped for the best
I cannot wait for lore breakdowns. I loved this game and already got all 3 endings and would love to have someone explain the parts I missed.
Wtf
Armored Lore
Same, I loved everything but I need to ALL that there's, I know that i missed something
Same
Yeah im still confused wtf is Ayre was she human that turned into sentient coral or is she just sentient coral thAT happens to be able to contact humans?
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coz Walter and Carla had "friends". Father Domayan was talking to Seria whoever that was. So are these coral beings just aliens or what
A few things you might have also forgot to include
-Freefalling lets you recover EN slightly faster, nice for mustering up a quick boost in a pinch
-Coral Generators also affect your expansion armor, changing it from green to red
-S-Rank requirements also include completing a side objective, whether its mentioned in the briefing or in the mission itself such as killing the Tetrapod Walter tells you to ignore or defeating a hidden enemy (I'm looking at you Nosaac)
-Compass will only detect active enemies, so scans are still needed for hidden or inactive ones
-Weapons with charge attacks can be held indefinitely, you can hold down the charge while setting the enemy up for a stagger or a feint to help guarantee the hit.
Maybe I should have driven this point home further in the video, but you shouldn't ALWAYS be using soft-lock. Just because it improves your tracking strength doesn't mean that it offsets the benefits of target assist. There are some situations where it's better, and some where your FCS and Firearm Specialisation will be more than enough.
When I say it's the "optimal" way to play, that's because if you're a perfect player, it is. Especially if you're using a mouse. But it's extremely difficult to play perfectly in Armored Core, so yeah.
To my knowledge no one has done further testing on Target Assist than I have though, which is a shame. It would be good to know just how much it affects your tracking strength. Unless someone can let me know in the comments?
Meep’s Armored Core Garage did a decent video
Some enemies are just Impossible to follow with the standard camera movement sadly.
I mean... It wouldnt be a fromsoft game otherwise.
I just realised in ds1 the chosen undead is most likely thousands of years old you loose a bit of humanity everytime you die untill you become hollow with 99.9% of people being hollow in the world and chosen undead in a cell with the rest of the undead there being hollow and bashing their heads against the wall they where there so long unable to do anything they went crazy and killed themselves over and over again untill they hollowed. Chosen undead how ever somehow had the strength not to go absolutely insane in that small cell.a odd realisation out of nowhere 😂. Be safe friends,dont you dare go hollow!.
@@xrpmoonwolf Do you know what a period is? Have you ever paused for breath when you talk?
From my experience of using rapid fire kinetic weapons with high firearm specialization and high mid-short range FCS stats, softlocking definitely helps keep fire on faster, more strafe-happy enemies at mid-to-short range. Shooting with hardlock active seems to result in 2x to 3x more missed bullets than soft locking.
Oddly enough, it also feels a little more natural to me as I grew up having to use the old claw grip when playing things like old-gen Monster Hunter.
Main drawback for me seems to be that it is easier to lose an opponent if they manage to leave your view.
Can't say which is better objectively, though. Only what works better for me. I mainly use hardlock to recenter my camera, then switch back to softlock.
Here's some additional info on the Red Coral generator:
It's actually better to fully deplete your Red Coral (Aorta) generator's energy meter so that it can make use of the Post-EN Supply refill which is what the Coral combustion is about in the item description.
ngl I love how relevant it is to be sponsored by a corporation for an AC video 😅 again you can check out LG's best ultrawide offering here: bit.ly/3Eic0Gz
It's unironically just a lot of fun to use this thing. Even browsing the web becomes this dramatic activity. I've been playing a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 as well and that works well in ultrawide too :)
Fun fact: Not tested by me but from a video i saw, Plasma YO-YO and Chainsaw when charged can actually deflect bullets and missiles but also maybe gave you damage mitigation but still cause you to be stunned if your stagger meter went full.
16:08 also if you looked closely, when you get shocked, your expansion ability also flinched, does this also affect your ability to use?
That thumbnail is so good. I'm gonna print it , frame it and mount it on my wall. Or better yet who made it ? I must know.
When a Corp sponsors a video:
Cyberpunk fans: *Confused Screaming*
Armored Core fans: _Nice, Raven! Get that COOM!_
Oh hey I just realized you put my Mr Krabs in here!
Alan Blackwell! Link in the description@@StressHaze
The weapon bay was so essential for my success early on. Balteus was a huge problem for me, it was the first boss I couldn’t immediately beat by brute forcing the fight with skills from previous shooters, but the weapon bay fixed that for me. I ran dual pulse weapons and hot swapped to shotguns as soon as I got a stagger. I don’t use them nearly as mich now that I have more good shoulder weapon options, but the versatility they provide can’t be overstated
Just got the third ending and all the combat logs achievements. What a great game, this is worth all 3 playthroughs absolutely.
Welcome to the nightmare of trying to S rank some of the most deceptively simple and easy missions.
Game: "All you got to do is collect all these things without taking damage or spending much ammo."
Player: _does that_
Game: "You didn't kill enough enemies. 😡 B rank!"
Never played any AC games before this and I'm just floored with everything about this game. Haven't enjoyed a game this much in a LONG time
The load gap stuff actually has nothing to do with the gap, it's just the overall weight of your AC. ANYTHING that reduces that weight will increase boost speed, whether there's a gap or not.
Also, fun tip about having the weapon bay unlocked: If you AREN'T using all 4 hardpoints for stuff (light AC, whatever), try equipping your hand-held weapon to the back instead and leaving a hand empty. If you do this, it will let you freely swap between using a weapon in that hand and being able to punch. If you equip the weapon to the hand and leave the back slot empty, however, it will ignore the bay and won't let you put your weapon away.
Yeah, for the weight it's definitely still best to keep the bar as close as possible to your limit
I'm curious what the exact conversion rate is for leftover EN limit -> recharge time, since the recharge time is itself a stat on the generators. There've been a couple times when I wondered what the difference would be between two generators that have higher/lower outputs in the same build.
@@LEOTomegane It's not necessarily best to try and hit your weight cap if you're emphasizing speed in a specific mission or preference.
There's a certain threshold, it's around 335-345 speed, where your AC is capable of passively dodging most tracking munitions by just moving side to side
@AdamOwenBrowning i have since learned, yes.
Also that overall weight avoiding that deadzone at 74k-80k is important
@@RussOlson-nk3wc Attack without spending ammo, or lead-up/follow-up to a dash kick without needing to equip a melee weapon.
@@RussOlson-nk3wc it does a TON of impact and is spammable. You can stunlock some enemies by alternating punches between both hands, as well as extend stagger combos by chaining the punch a couple times.
A few addendums/clarifications:
Freefalling to avoid damage works not because you're simply falling faster, but because your speed doesn't remain constant as with boost-falling. The change in speed throws off projectile tracking, making it very hard for things to accurately hit you, especially slower objects. Changing your vector and velocity is key to avoiding fire when a foe is tracking your movement and leading his shot.
On staggering weapon fire: remember that enemies have limits to their quick boosts just like you; they can only dodge so many times, so quickly in a span of time before pausing. Staggering fire works because you force them to use more boosts at once; if you catch them AFTER they've already done a boost or two you can deplete their EN bar and force them to take the hit. Stagger things with the right timing and you can actually catch them IN a quick boost with the second shot, weapon depending.
You can cancel assault boost just by hitting ascend; no stick movement necessary.
Going in overburdened can be a big benefit in long missions with lots of targets, especially if you plan to be a thorough exterminator. Being a little bit slower sounds more fun than running out of ammo most of the way through a mission, especially if a resupply isn't going to be available. Yes, there are missions which will test your ammo stores without resupply. *coughMICHIGANcough*
God, Michigan was awful ended up killing the final tetrapod MT with kicks and punching it to death lmao.
@@thecyanpanda241I had to do literally the same thing and that was with the miniguns and plasma missiles, which are NOT stingy on ammo; that's the reason I brought it up.
@therealbahamut miniguns are actually pretty ammo efficient if you properly use them in conjunction with assault kicks, weapons bay energy sword(for damage and staggers) and a rocket launcher to take care of the little drone. Very rarely do I run completely out of minigun ammo when dual wielding them
@@thecyanpanda241ill tell you right now, the michigan mission theyre talking about absolutely will kill your ammo if you use only double gatlings. borderline necessity to bring a melee weapon and 2 high capacity missile pods to deal with the sheer amount of mobs it throws at you
@saixion3966 bruh I completed it using exactly what I said I used, it is not easy but they are more ammo efficient than people give them credit for
Not sure if anyone has said it, but for the S ranking killing the enemies that drop combat logs usually guarantees an increase from A to S, I've been doing a lot of grinding to get S in every mission and that's the biggest factor I've found
Yeah I can confirm, if you see something like an optional quad, take it out efficiently and fast and your score will go up by a lot.
It should be noted that there seems to be a higher correlation with defeating enemies that cause a slowdown effect on kill and S-ranking. Even this isn't strictly necessary, but if you just can't get an S, consider looking for one of these mid bosses.
I think this plays a role for sure, even if there's no extra monetary gain for killing the combat log enemy (some missions will give bonus pay for it, even if credits on kill isn't a factor in the mission - typically happens more if the combat log enemy in question is a named character, though even then, not always.)
Only frustration is on later replays when you have all the combat logs, there's no way to know which enemies are combat log enemies outside of memory and intuition.
I noticed that missions that give you bonus cash for additional actions(kills/retrieve logs or items) help or sometimes is required for S rank. S rank seams to boil down to time it took for you to finish the mission and your final net cash received by the end of the mission.
@@bloodasp6278 yeah I'd say this is more or less true for almost every mission - there do seem to be exceptions wherein killing extra enemies that don't even offer financial rewards is still necessary for S rank - e.g. in Investigate Baws Aresenal No.2 it seems like you have to kill the additional hidden enemy next to a dead mech in order to get S rank, even though there's no bonus pay for it.
A unique part about the Coral Generator (the one that gives you a red booster) is it wants you to overheat. I can't remember the name of the stat, but it has the highest EN regen out of any generator when it's depleted. You'll get about 3/4 of your EN bar once the cooldown ends.
There's at least two Coral Generators I've run into through my first game cycle but I think they both more or less share that quality
Which is handy cuz I am very prone to QB spam on my Reverse Joint build and overheat without realizing it lmao
@skeletor8951 I'm the same way. Do you recall where you found the second one? The one I have is the AORTA which I found while surveying the city covered in fog.
@@DragonKnight-lr9bg perfect, I'm rank 8. Thanks.
It was the perfect generator for assault boosting my way through missions to speedrun through NG+ runs because of this. Perpetual flight!
For Point 22, another thing to note about heavy ACs are their armor. Heavier ACs tend to have better armor, so in your example the light has 20k and the heavy has 23k, but the Heavy's 23k will last a lot longer than the Light's
Also depending on what parts you equip, each has different resistance values that lean towards Kinetic, Energy, Explosive, or a balance of the two of the three.
Heavier mechs also tend to have higher ACS, so you might also get staggered less, resulting in less burst damage. However, dodging is usually harder in a heavy mech, so you'll often get hit more. 🙃
@@yyBoByy Yeah, in my experience the heavier mechs suffer from the fighting game heavies problem. Tougher on paper and in theory, but in practice, you're often sacrificing more speed than you're gaining in survivability.
And apparently coral damage, which is a damage type I haven't actually been able to use yet, ignores damage resistances, so the light and heavy in this scenario will take the same amount of damage
For really lightweight, close and personal, fast builds, the rate at which your energy comes back is super noticeable. Pretty much every decision you make in your mech design makes a noticeable difference in the overall mech if you have some role you want your mech to preform.
Yeah I prefer the lightest reverse joint build I can make and I've definitely had times where one new weapon or part will drastically change my boost speed and recharge. It took me awhile to figure out because the numbers were not changing all that much on the details screen
@@gerald216 Yeah it got to the point where my main AC (the one I've used to play most of the game with) I only have three weapons on (dual Gatling and a songbird). Adding any other weapon would drastically decrease my boost/quick boost speed. Sadly I had to stop using the bipedal/reverse joint legs (nachteichr or something like that) and had to start using normal bipedal legs so as to be able to use a better generator and chest
@joemency2242 Ah I have broken down and used the gattlining songbird on a couple missions, I actually had a set up that let me use my lightweight build with them too lol.
But I try to use the second teir linear rifle, a plasma rifle, then switch out the back depending on the mission.
It's actually crazy how much crap you can throw on the mid reverse joints
@@joemency2242Same here, I always run only 3 weapons.
Heavy sided Medium Myself, Large HP Pool, Dual Lance Railing guns, 2x Rail Shotguns, Dafeng Legs (the ones with large armour plates over the thigh but not the calfs.
Lot of HP and Armour, Guns, Yet I can still dodge effectively and do light air to air fighting / Long gap passes which is all thats needed for most bosses
The armored core subreddit has a whole section dedicated to emblem sharing. it's separated by platform too. There are some neat creations on there and might be worth a look.
This could be a fun video segment!!
Any swastika in there?
A minor thing about the weapon's bay thing. Energy weapons cooldown at their normal rate but regular weapons seem to reload slower while on your back so keep the normal weapon out when both are reloading
I noticed this with the cooldown of the mini gun. It cools slower on your shoulder than in hand.
Here's a minor trick: with bipedal legs, you get frozen in the air when using heavy/charged attacks. If you pair this with freefalling after your boosters run out, the extra time frozen in the air allows you to regenerate your boosters, meaning you can continue in the air without touching down. It's more effective than the quad leg hover at staying airborne, since hover mode prevents boost regeneration while immobile and eats some while moving. Pretty effective in duels against melee or close quarters mechs.
I kinda noticed this when I built a heavy biped with nothing but grenade launchers:
The recoil juggled me in the air effortlessly, allowing me to keep bombarding from above way better than a tetrapod could.
This was surprisingly good against AC's in the arena
Does this also work for Reverse Joints, or is it just Bipeds?
@@skeletor8951 As Reverse Joints do not let you ignore the animation freeze it should work.
@@skeletor8951 I think so. Charged shots from linear rifle have the same effect on rj AC's.
That animation with the melee cancel is too clean!! Love how fast and vicious the AC looks when its doing it.
An additional bit regarding the kick-spam strat, if you're quick enough, you can change your aim position to just about anywhere between the kick and activation. This also works if you use the AB cancel.
Another thing about AB, too. If you're trying to AB and need to turn sharp. You can do a dodge to the left or right, and your camera won't be locked to the slow movement speed of AB for the duration of the dodge, allowing for easy redirection.
About OS upgrades : After your first playthrough you'll be able to max out everything so it's more a matter of what are you priorities !
About overburdening : if you overburden your arms, it also hurts your tracking.
NG+ you get. Allmind challenges. A B Y in NG+ 6 8 10 OCS per letter rank. The rank after that in NG++ gives 15 OCS points which will finish off the OCS upgrades.
@@NoblessObligee You can buy every OS upgrade before the end of NG+
As a person who uses pretty much nothing but agile, speedy mechs, I appreciate the tip about stopping Assault Boost in a better way. Definitely using that. ✌️
As someone else said, just tapping the ascend button will have the effect you want, and as another someone said quick turn can be used while assault boosting to rapidly turn 90 degrees
Just wanna clarify with the target assist thing: He's talking about soft lock (TA Off) vs hard lock (TA On). There's a core expansion that allows manual aiming, which is a completely separate thing.
I want to like manual aiming, but it honestly seems way too impractical except for sniping enemies, given how fast combat can be. I'm sure there'll be some people who get so absurdly good with it though that they can land 100% of their shots with the gatling gun or something.
Manual aiming I found is better for sniping stationary targets outside of your auto lock-on distance, less so in pitched combat.
Manual aiming is definitely much more valuable with weapons like the gatling or bazooka types because you can lead targets that even soft lock tends to trail on. Another thing about manual aim is you don't have to have it on all the time so you could use it for certain situations only.
So where do we change this? Soft lock and hard lock?
@@gudadryckfulon controller its right stick click I think, it'll change the lock-on cricle somewhat
Regarding the Coral generator that gives you red boost-- its recharge delay and speed are really slow. But, if you fully deplete your energy, it'll restore to almost completely full instantly once it recharges. The most efficient way to use the coral generators is to burn them out completely. I use this generator for perpetual flight builds
it also kicks the post-redline recharge on _faster_ than it starts the normal recharge. The standard recharge is like 5 seconds, but the post-redline one is around 2.5
Yeah, I feel like a lot of people aren't looking at the detailed stats on parts. There's so much extra information hidden in there.
@@LEOTomeganekinda wild he made the wholeass vid and either forgot to metion this, or just really wanted to dog on that 5 sec recharge
It's FIVE seconds though...
@@latebakr He just didnt know because the description is in Armored Core lingo instead of exact player terms. Im glad i know this now though
The Smoke Grenade/explosion can be countered by using the active scan ability (which is based on the head part). So having a smoke screen between you and the enemy and having a long range scan and scan duration allows you to shoot the enemy precisely while they can't do much.
The manual purge instantly stuck to me as something that might be extremely situational but was also added to the game because it's undeniably so cool to have your mech enter a mission with skyscraper-sized guns, lay down hell and then discard them as if they're useless lumps of metal.
Also, thanks for explaining melee cancelling and boost kick to extend flying distance (though, tbh for that mission I just went with a tetrapod leg build).
I use it on certain builds to go from a slow dreadnaught to a fast machine gun guy
I feel so hard headed I just dodged the lasers on top of the bridge the whole way 😅
@@koontz1154 That's the hard way to deal with that section but I bet it was such an adrenaline rush. I might have to make a speed build and try that myself just for fun.
@@Dieci-9 honestly it really was, I had made a quick reverse joint build and learned the timing of the laser firing after the beeps. I love that if you boost from the ground it incorporates your larger jump distance into it as well.
@@koontz1154 Yeah, the devs really nailed it with making the game account for momentum, weight and other small but important details. The first time I tried the tank threads and started drifting while firing huge artillery weapons it was such a good feeling. They really nailed the power fantasy of driving these metal titans.
One Tip that i can give after beating the game is that when dying, you can open the menu and respawn faster than waiting for the death animation.
If you do this you don’t get access to the Assembly option to change your build.
Another thing you can do if a boss is giving you trouble is change the voice volume to 0. “Not like this”
@@VesskelGuess you can't fight the institute!
While repair kits might give you a similar AP amount as heavy builds, you also have to take into account damage resistance from different parts. The heavier parts almost always have more. Don't know how it works, but its one of the main stats mentioned on the AC Data screen, Defensive Performance.
Yeah I have no idea how defensive stats translate into damage resistance, as even the lowest Defensive Performance mech sits at around 1000, whereas the higherst is no more than 1400ish - yet a heavy mech can eat bullets for ages and still have plenty of AP left.
Part of this is due to lighter mechs inherently taking far more damage due to being staggered more often, and stagger windows leading to taking critical damage if focused on. Yet even then a heavy mech feels like it takes around half the damage. Part of this might be that the player also gets the ricochet property when taking damage from weapons outside of their ideal range, if they player has high armour values (Like enemy tetrapods).
I’m dumb asl I thought ap was attack power this whole time😭
The heavy mechs will take a lot more punishments to die. They are designed to not be able to dodge a lot of attacks from the bosses.
A mech with higher speed can easily dodge those attacks with a correct timing and directions.
For example, some of the bosses in late game punish heavy mech much more since their attacks become undodgeable for the heavy mech with certain set up. But if you have jumping legs you can jump up and dodge easily with a boost.
@clarkp2125 I know why they did it, I just don't know how the actual Stat works. The difference between low and high numbers is usually only about 200 on a Stat that averages 1200. Is it flat damage reduction? Percentage based? No idea. I imagine 1000 is 100% damage take and 1200 is 20% reduction and so on, but I'm not sure.
@@0mnil0rd I think it works the same as when your bullets ricochet off of heavily armoured enemies - higher numbers multiply the chance of an enemy's attack ricocheting (taking into account the effective range falloff and damage of the weapon).
did a little testing and not only do the coral generator change your booster's color they also change your extension's color (assault armor etc...) AND it also increases its damage by ~50% (i only tested it with assault armor so far but i have to assume it also increases the shield on the defensive extensions)
caveat for #9. if you have a particular armor upgrade like pulse, assault, terminal, etc. make sure that you unequip it from your ac and save it before reseting os or the menu will lock you out of your ac because of "missing parts"
Some more tips: on some Generators it's better to completely spend all your energy than to carefully energy manage and let it restore on its own. These Generators have a very low natural energy regen but have a significantly increased initial energy restore if depleted completely. For example, one of the Coral Generators has a capacity of 4400, and if depleted completely you instantly restore 3300 once the energy begins to regenerate. So it takes a longer time to begin to regenerate compared to other generators, but once it begins to regen you gain 3/4 of the Generator's entire capacity instantaneously. This stat is called "Post-Recovery EN Supply" on the stat screen, something to keep an eye out for if you look at just the "EN Recharge" and overlook otherwise viable Generators because of what seems like extremely low recharge speeds shown on stat screens.
Nearly 4 seconds or more with no juice feels like an eternity though man.
@EpsilonKnight2 I've found it isn't that bad if you get used to it. AB the last bit of EN and free fall, the combo is a good dodge when figured out and having basically full EN as soon as it is back is amazing. Also your core can make that time way shorter, with the aorta I have a 3.86 recharge delay which seems Hella long but really isn't. With reverse joint legs you can even jump without EN for a dodge substitute
@@EpsilonKnight2Not when you immediately get a practically full bar, it's not. You just adapt.
Yep. With quick builds you can dodge most things anyways, QB being for smacking stuff or dodging annoying patterns
that's why those bosses with the coral generators use the coral shield (and some shield users), they use it when they've almost depleted their energy from dodging.
As mkb player, i have used free aim more than lock on and aim assist off the most. But, there have been times where i locked on the enemy to make sure my melee lands. I think that's where it shines, a quick turn of your camera to find your target so you can then land a melee or turn it off to shoot.
Also when enemy is aggressing towards you, it’s better locked on for retaliation as you would almost guaranteed to lose track if you use soft lock
Melee or close range semi-auto/single-shot is definitely where it shines the most to have the hard lock. Particularly against faster enemies where it's easy to lose track in close quarters.
One of the final bosses (depending on ending) moves so fast (or teleports) outside your FOV. Soft lock feels like a real pain in the ass during that fight. Hard lock however, most of the time followed that final boss' movement pretty easily. There are definitely times where hard lock's benefits are too good to overlook, even with M+KB. @@mmmao0630
A note on target assist: It's really strong if you're using single shot weapons and find an enemy too fast to track (certain late-game bosses... No spoilers!) Seriously, my AC will turn almost directly facing the camera and nail snipes before I even have a chance to track the enemy. It's worse against most enemies though, I mainly use it on ACs so I can worry less about aiming and more about maneuvering and firing at the right time.
Im currently stuck on chapter 4 final boss, and its so fast that pretty much all my shots miss. I was thinking about trying non lock for that reason.
But even against slower enemies it seems like big one shot weapons like the bazooka are incredibly unreliable so idk how your AC doesnt miss.
I've been using paired bazookas+songbird on treads and at close range it is fun to see my AC torso pivot to aim at something entirely off screen and see the stagger bar jump.
That said, it is definitely not free, you still have to run your enemy's dodges out, or back them to a wall or something for splash damage.
@@habo249I used dual stun needle launchers, pile bunker, and JVLN Alpha. Reverse jointed legs too. The snipers REALLY benefit from the target lock, much more consistent than Songbirds or bazookas. Javelin purely for the raw impact so I could stagger and bolt in with the Doom Spike of Satisfaction.
@@giantflamingrabbitmonster8124it's hilarious with the snipers especially, yeah! Especially good for getting to know a fast boss before I'm more comfortable tracking it and keeping up myself tbh.
Don't forget about missiles too! They already have innate guiding, and tracking doesn't matter if the thing you fire is already homing, so if your build is heavy on (or entirely made up of) missiles then target lock should be on every single time you want to single out an enemy so you don't lose missile locks.
I really needed this. Ive been purposfully avoiding build guide videos so i can stick to my own style, so getting general tips to help improve my time in the game is great. Took me 20 hours to find the extra details button in the assembly screen lol was wonderind why certain stuff wasnt working the way i wanted lol
You're absolutely right, I use weapon bay builds a lot for my lightweight AC builds, it's great for the reasons you stated, letting weapons cool down and reload, but it also helped me deal with longer missions and encounters where I was running out of ammo too soon.
the air time you get from weapons that make you pause for a while to shoot kind of helps sometimes for specific scenarios eg. you stunned the sea spider p2 when you're flying and initially planned to stunlock it but you just got your en depleted. using songbirds for example gives you more time to keep that vantage point
This is the strategy I built my main mech around. Reverse legs, med weight, dual assault rifles, dual songbirds. I hover above ACs and bosses and fire both songbirds downward on top of the enemy. This pauses my decent, pushes me back a bit (upward since looking down), and it gives my EN time to recharge. The songbird damage is usually enough to stagger them, so I then fly around, emptying my assault rifles’ magazines into them. For harder bosses, I swap out assault rifles for gatling guns and use the same technique. I have yet to find a boss I can’t beat with this way. The songbirds raw damage even melts through plasma shields without needing bubble blasters.
Easily my game of the year. I was optimistic but the game exceeded my expectations by a large amount. Gameplay, music and story are just perfect.
One tip I'd recommend if assuming you're using a PS5 controller with Type A controls, swap the Assault Boost and Quick Boost controls with each other. I found having my dodge on the same stick as my movement not only allowed me to respond quicker since I don't need two buttons to dodge, but it also allows me to dodge and keep full control of the camera to track my targets while moving.
Surprised no one is bringing up that you can assault/pulse armor while ACS staggered. Pulse armor is really good for immediately reducing your ACS strain and effectively making you immune to being staggered for a few seconds, but if you have an opponent that likes to melee when you get staggered, assault armor basically works as a burst from a fighting game. Certain aggressive, lightweight enemy ACs get immediately staggered from assault armor at close range, opening them up to counter attack.
This video is so well made and explained. Your love for the game shows as well. Just finished my first playthrough!
I feel like the ranges in your fcs play a huge role in target assist too, using double Zimmermanns with the best close range chip had my setup hitting people who jumped behind me off my screen while TA was on.
I can attest to this - I play almost exclusively with TA on other than when moving through a level and fighting MT chumps - with a close range FCS and high Firearm Spec arms I can be unloading zimmerman shots into enemies that have dashed off screen behind me.
TA is absolutely the superior tool for close range builds that intend to disorient targets by rapidly moving all around them, and also essential for pinning down someone doing the same to you.
1. In Oceans' Crossing you can quick dodge the laser blasts, have to dodge after the second beep. Also, if you maintain a straight path, you will avoid most of the laser sights or at least it worked for me.
2. My light mech has the orange or coral color.
3. In NG+ you will get more os upgrades and be able to unlock everything though it is handy for resetting in NG.
That's what I did too
Hangar OS tuning completely changed the game for me. It was literally my first unlock, and it makes the game so much more nuanced in terms of builds.
Just wish there were more options. Like increased ammo storage. Faster cooldowns, etc.
One thing to note for Vaati is that, so early on he won't have unlocked all the OS Tunings, but you do eventually get them all. It might give a slight edge to be a bit more optimal early but you don't lose anything in the long run. That and the fact that you can reset them too.
Wow love the assult boost tip of a sending instead of pulling back on the stick. Huge time saver 🔥
The melee cancel works for heavy weapons, too. You can spam your enemy with lock on warnings and then just cancel the attack... until you don't
I was doing this in pvp and it seems like most people aren't aware that it's a mechanic
Really nice video for us that are just getting started with the game.
One thing I would add about tip #5 is that freefalling, while faster as an evasive maneuver, causes the AC to hard land. This makes you lose the charge of attacks you are currently holding, so it's something one might want to keep in mind.
I love that you're really enjoying ac and getting into all the details. It's quite surreal seeing a franchise I enjoyed as a kid getting so much positive attention. Thanks for all you do.
If you're playing the tetrapod legs and dont like that awkward stop that you do midair after quickboosting during a hover, VERY quickly tap your hover button again to go into freefall RIGHT before the quickboost happens. Just like how it keeps your momentum after assault boost, you keep your momentum and can go right back into your hover without any stops or delays.
For those who don't know, you will be able to max out everything on the OST stuff as you keep playing, so don't worry to much about being efficient with it, it's all gonna max out by the end of your second playthrough.
I can't state enough how much I appreciate having channels like yours for games like these. I can't mention how many times I heard something in AC6 that made me go "man I can't wait for Vaati to explain what the fuck that means". You bring a whole other level of enjoyment to these games for me, and I know many others can say the same.
1. On the Booster colors, the easy way to know which generators have which colors is simple: BAWS and Dafeng = Orange, Arqeubus = Blue, Rubicon Institute (aka "Coral" gear) = Red.
2. 15:02 The game actually explains the *3* status effects that it has: go on any weapon, bring up Contextual Help, then point to or click on the small icons the weapons have above their stats. The three status effects according to the game are named: Camera Disruption, Shock, and ACS Failure.
Internal Combustion - Orange
Circulating-current - Blue
Coral - Red
why has it never occurred to me to go under the bridge... i had to start to believe in the matrix to dodge those orbital lasers lmao
haha it never occurred to me that you could even make it over the bridge, that's funny
Use the audio cues to dodge them.
@@VaatiVidyaI dont get it, I assault boosted straight over it and you dont even get targeted until you cross. You may be have to dodge one laser before getting to cover.
Yea once you have the timing, dodging the lasers is pretty easy
Bruh same I was kinda salty about that run saying it was bad design. Turns out I'm just dumb
Melee cancelling was a really popular tech in many of the 3D Gundam fighting games as well. In a PVP context it was a really effective way to force an opponent to not only backpedal but also bait out a potentially high commitment attack for an easy and highly damaging counter-punish.
I can’t speak to how this translates to AC6 PVP but it could make for some really tense and fun interactions.
With staggering fire - I found it to be a very useful thing to do when I made a build with two Iridiums and two Songbirds. Fire one weapon at a time, then fire the next after the first one is done.
Do it right and it means you can keep up a pretty much constant stream of explosives heading downrange, since it covers for the reload of each one. Plus, like you said, if the enemy dodges one shot, they might not be able to dodge the next, and it means I can take advantage of the Staggers the constant explosions put them into.
I’ve decided AC 6 is my favorite soulsbourne game, it has sword, shield, and guns (must be a reference to bloodbourne or something)
Also has body horror!
AC is not even close to any of the souls games 🤣 it’s not even a Soulsgame tbh. It’s like saying Forza got cars so it must be reference to Halo 🤣 shields , blades been in other AC games too. Moonlight blade /sword was in Armored core 1 for example 👌🏻
@@Adrian-L3x4 In terms of play style, difficulty level, and developer (literally FromSoft lmao) I'd say it's relatively similar. It's the least similar but still similar.
@@Adrian-L3x4That's the joke
@@14dyingstars you sneaky bastards 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 enough of “human contact” via comment section then 🤣
I finished this game 3 times, I did all the endings and I'm wanting more, I'm in love with this game
Got the first ending myself earlier. Easily the best NG+ modern From has ever done. Hooked me when it turned the easiest mission into one of the toughest, and not in a slapped-on way.
Wtf bro😂im still in chapter 2
@@epolist5 The campaign is not very big 😂, It took me 2 days to finish the first time
@@epolist5Hahaha same here, but i got 2 kids so its hard to grind for some hours repeatedly 😂
@@cybertruckeralphaWhich mission do you mean?
What a beautiful game, absolutely loved it, can't get enough of it, I really hope we get another Armored Core game instead of waiting 10 whole years. This was my first AC game ever and I just fell in love with it.
We can probably expect some DLC at least, as per armored core tradition.
@@broccolidiego2053Be fun to have a white glint cameo. Wouldn’t be the same one, cause I’m pretty sure this is a different timeline, but them wings of light live rent free in my head
Beautiful? Get your eyes checked it’s the most ugly game this year
@@WhySoSeriousSenpaithe fuck lmao
@@WhySoSeriousSenpaiYour trolling is pathetic man.
You guys are going under the bridge??? I just dodge the orbital lasers.
You can also AB cancel with a melee attack. I use this in tandem with melee cancelling to get in close with some of the slower melee options. You also maintain some of the AB momentum when you enter the melee animation which is really useful for the pile driver which has a really long wind up on its charge attack. You can take this a step further by AB cancel into Melee cancel. Happy hunting.
I am face-in-hands right now realizing that I was supposed to travel under the stage for the orbital laser section. I've played the mission 3 times now, but because I always use the heavy tank legs and had maxed the heal amount, I would have enough supplies to simply make it to the checkpoint. That and I managed to dodge the first laser so I just assumed that was what I was supposed to do.
There's a whole pathway to get under it right outside the door 😂 I use a lightweight mech so it was my only option, with a pitstop on a platform I found on the right side of the bridge.
That's the beauty about AC, you can take multiple builds in to play it different ways, my first attempt I took a mid weight and went underneath, but died at the boss, came back and tanked dmg like you with a heavy my second play on NG+ I used a light build and avoided the lasers or as it was about to strike dodged out of the way
I made it through even with a light-medium build, you just have to dodge the laser correctly. But i also didn’t know there was a way to completely avoid it, i assumed it was just like the Eye on the Strider and dodged 😅
I mean Carla compliments you for doing it that way saying shes never seen someone dodge the lasers like that before or something like that.
14:10 If you get familiar with the shoulders and arm weapons you use, it can actually be beneficial to fire both at the same time if you pair it with another weapon fired just before impact as a sort of forced roll catch. An example is firing both rockets on your shoulders and firing a charged rifle shot as they land. It’s not consistent with every weapon, but when mixed up with spacing weapon shots it creates intense binds for your opponent, forcing them to choose between two sources of intense damage, or dump resources avoiding it all.
One thing that many people forget: energy restores not only on the ground, but also during the free fall. So you can continue your flight, if you have decent EN regen
Unintuitively coral generators are usually the best if you want to get as much energy as possible without touching the ground.
They take way longer to start but once it happens you'll have more energy without touching the ground than any other generator could give you in the same amount of time without touching the ground.
Props to you, my friend. One of the scarce few times when a sponsorship crack a smile in my face. Well done!
Built a PC january 2023. 13700K, 7900XT, 64gb of RAM, 980 and 990 pro M.2's and a 65" LG OLED TV. I saved up for a while and made it happen and i couldnt be happier. AC6 is especially fun on that TV. Great vids as always bro!
Nice dude 👌🏻
@@Vman_95 thanks bro!
Quick note on the coral generator, it actually really good if you specifically deplete all your energy because it basically gives you back 75% of your energy bar when it recharges.
It's really good and funny when doing it in PvP. My friend forgot that and when he thought I was cornered after a dodge spam, he yelped when I suddenly AB'd right past him laughing
Loving this game, also there is a “status effect” where you get infinite EN during certain parts of the game but it might be a stretch to say it’s a status effect.
That's a mission specific perk yes, not a status effect.
In case you make another one of these, you can charge weapons while going in for charged melee attacks. This makes things like the energy lance pair very well with shoulder laser weapons (same with R hand energy weapons). While doing the charged lance attack, hold down both shoulder buttons, and by the time they’re staggered you can unleash both at the same time for crazy damage. As a bipedal enjoyer, I was struggling to figure out how to use the laser scatter cannon, but this did wonders for me
I also loved that AC6 had ultrawide support right out of the gate. So many devs make you wait for a patch or modders.
Armordecor’ is so important I’ve spent like fifteen hours making custom emblems and decals for my knightly AC line. Coats of arms, scrolls with Latin passages, bundles of arrows and wreaths, creeping red thorns, my AC’s look like they’re FOR THE EMPEROR.
Love the idea of hangar bay plus manual purge
The general strat in my mind is to build the mech so that you have 3 weapons on at perfect weight but then a forth one that puts you over and you remove any of the four that seem least relevant for that mission. Have the capacity to drop your weight even further if you want more speed. An adaptive mech with changing movement is really cool
Also if you have seen the video of armored core without weapons, melee is really good against other ACs
Where in the world is this "hangar" coming from? Even when he says it he's clearly showing a screen saying "Weapon Bay" and then he refers to the upgrade as "hangar" for the duration of the segment. Does he even know what a hangar is? I respect and appreciate the video but it was just throwing me off so much and no one else is mentioning it.
It was referred to as 'hangar units' or 'hangar core' in a previous armored core game.@@Redkasquirrel
Damn Vaati is going crazy with these Armored core uploads 😂
In the hanger, if you enter photo mode, you can see your weapons resting on some mounts to the right. They actually change depending on what you equipped as your weapon choices. It’s a cool Easter egg
You can see em without photo mode, admittedly I didn't notice them until I used it tho.
Another note about the Melee Cancelling: you can do this with Shoulder Weapons aswell. Example: if you have Stun Needles equipped and need to dodge, there's a window during startup where you can quickboost out.
Especially useful if you know for sure that the needles aren't hitting.
Another interesting tip is some melee weapons that can be charged like the DOUBLE TROUBLE chainsaw and HMMR will act as makeshift shields while holding the charge allowing you to take slightly less damage and preventing you from flinching. You'll still get staggered if you sit there and try to block constantly but it's a nice way to armor through attacks before closing in for the chop. You have to be careful though as quick boosting undoes the block for a short time so that will still get you hit within the gap.
Shields in general are pretty powerful and able to almost entirely negate attack damage and stagger if you time the parry right.
Man I need to finish the game 😅 you are killing it Vaati! Loving all the content 💖
same bruh I be watching his videos instead of playing
Reguarding the S ranks, I assume its based on end credits earned, along side speed.
In a lot of missions you can run through them and only deal with the target, but some of those missions say on the right side objectives at the brief screen "bonus for other enemies" and you will see in the bottom right you earn credits for killing enemies. Personally i've only had that issue once, but I think as long as you have a good ratio of ammo consumed to bonus pay its good (Don't use a high cost weapon to kill things that only give you low amounts/just go past them and prioritse big targets)
A prime example of this is the (as spoiler free as i can say) The scanning one for credits. If you pass all /some of the credit earning wrecks and only scan the OBJ ones, you're not gonna get S Rank even if you dont take any damage or use any ammo. You need to min max your credits earned-Credit cost to get S Rank. I found a dual shotgun build with Cheap multi lock missles works well for getting S Rank (can take out small enemies for low cost, bigger targets [MT's] only take a shotgun shell or two)
20:12 another broken thing about the compass :
It does not care about invisibility.
Cloaked ennemies still appear on the compass, and are very easy to spot that way
How often do you encounter those except the mission where you investigate a BAWS plant?
@@lukasadamson6091 I have no clue I'm playing slowly with a friend, I'm at the end of chapter 1
I clicked on this for the AC6 tips, not realizing you're the guy who creates the awesome Elden Ring lore shorts. That is, until your voice started sounding familiar to me hahaha. Thanks for this entertaining and informative channel!
Fair to say that this video dropped at the exact right moment for me -- I'm still working my way through Chapter 1 at a mission-a-day pace (partly because I want to savor the game, partly because I'm trying to see how long I can go without getting killed in a mission, and partly because I don't want to get too far ahead of my BF, who I talked into getting the game despite his not being a _Soulsborne_ fan and who almost immediately realized why FromSoft is known for unforgiving prologue bosses), and I felt like my performance could use a shot in the arm now that the rust has been knocked loose.
On melee cancelling, I'd like to note at least in 1v1 situations against faster targets, you'd benefit more from using Kikaku (the thruster with the maximum melee thrust and lowest consumption) as it's pretty much made for the technique.
Not only does it make your meele go much further, it also has really good QB for the amount of distance you get for melee.
I've been pretty much making a melee build work for the entire game and Kikaku is extremely good since some melee weapons tend to whiff on faster targets without the maxed out melee thrust.
I was actually beyond ecstatic when I got into the first mission and learned the game actually supports ultrawide (and no 60 capped fps). I've been using a 34' LG ultrawide for 3 years now, can never go back, and it's always so upsetting when a game doesn't support it, like Elden Ring, for example. I'm happy to see you're enjoying it as well!
It's interesting that you can't go negative in this game. Something I remember about Armored Core 2 I think it was that was kinda haunting experiencing it the first time was I ended up going so negative one time that my debt was cleared and while my AC was the same as normal, all my pilot information was reset to the default - I think the implication either being that a debter came for my pilot or something of the sort. Considering how it is a thing in the stories that debt could make pilot's take on experimental augmentations and stuff it's definitely something they were probably thinking about.
As somebody who hasn't played since the PS2 glory days, this is what I needed
4:40 I think Target Assist is affected by the FCS equipped, since most of the explanations under contextual help for the FCS shows the "aiming assistance performance" at certain ranges, so if you've equipped an FCS made for long range with low close range assist like the VE 21-B your close range shots under 130M may miss more when you go hard lock (though the ideal and effective range your weapons equipped should also be considered else shots would just ricochet).
the target assist penalty is an additional modifier on top of the FCS target speed
On the S-Rank: Sometimes you cannot get it without doing additional stuff. For example on the refueling base, you gotta get at least some of the enemies that give you combat logs. I did it over and over again with minimal dmg taken and it was A. When I got those enemies (while ignoring the fuel tanks even), I got an S Rank.
Are you sure? I only shot some in fly bys to the first mandatory enemy, then skipped every enemy until the last batch directly in front of the mission target. killed those in a drive by as well. Still got an S.
@@Warmaka Oh wow, I did not know that. I always assumed it would be impossible without those.
Good to know that LG is one of the competing factions in the dystopian future of armored core 6.
This video is so good! I beat the game already and didn't know about the radar lmao.
I found weight control was really good on my ultralight build, because it allowed me to swap a couple of weapons depending on the mission that would otherwise just put me over the limit without having to redo my mech. The penalty for a little overburden is a lot less than switching out legs.
I'm really glad I already knew most of this stuff, but there were definitely a few helpful tips for me. Another important thing to note in the, "How to fire weapons" category is that staggering your damage helps make sure you don't use all of your damage to stagger an enemy, only to not have something ready to deal damage when you overload their ACS. I still get over-eager many times and fire all my weapons, only to facepalm when the enemy recovers only to have taken 1-2k damage.
Quick Turn is one of those things that I know conceptually is very useful, but in the moment I just completely forget about... Kinda same w/ core expansions... I tend to use Terminal Armor not cause i necessarily need the safety net, but just cause it goes off automatically. I know assault armor is OP from the couple of times I've remembered to use it, but those occasions were few and far between
it's also kind of silly that they give you three charges of Assault Armor; the cooldown is so long that you rarely have the time to use all three.