A 30min episode yet it felt shorter than usual! This was the character growth episode, for both Emilia and Subaru. Recalling Subaru's arguably lowest point right before the speech was brilliant, man has grown so much since then! Things are looking up so much I'm dreading what's coming, this is Re:zero after all and we're only at the mid point of the season. Even the "sv_cheats 1" using knight himself finally showing up only makes me more anxious for what's to come.
Keegen
Gapacho is actually some sort of cryptid, unintelligible noises only perceivable as words for those around him, impossible to capture in image - visible only inside of your mind, shows up out of nowhere and disappears just as fast whenever it's convenient. Someone call the SCP foundation, I think we have a loose one here!
My favorite frame, and another one that has received a massive power-up since his last thread! I mentioned it before but I love Nezha. Strap in, this will be a long post! I play a lot of tanks. 4/5 of my most played frames are tanks. Nezha was what I finally settled down on after playing Rhino, Inaros and Revenant. He's just such an amazing generalist that it's never a wrong move to bring him, no matter the mission. He's very fast with his Fire Walker + passive which makes him a good pick for any speedrun mission, like relics or captures. Damage boost with Blazing Chakram and incredible survivability with Warding Halo makes him a great boss slayer. And Divine Spears (pre-augment) were OK CC if you needed some. He's never the absolute best pick, but he's also never a wrong one. The one thing he wasn't quite great at was AoE nuking, you had to rely on your weapons for that. Of course, this has changed completely all thanks to Divine Retribution! Now Nezha has the complete package, going fast, having a dmg boost, not dying and nuking crowds! This augment turned an ability many people subsumed over into one you base his whole build around. Here is what I'm running on my Nezha:
The most important stat becomes range, you want to get as much of it as you can. Overextended in a no-brainer, so is Stretch. The reason I'm running the Archon version is because I also use Panzer Vulpaphyla with Shocking Claws which makes the Quills it shoots out proc electricity, triggering the Archon Stretch (don't ask me how that works, spaghetti code). This is absolutely not necesarry but a nice to have bonus if you use the Panzer. Your core energy economy mod is Equilibrium, Nezha's 2 causes each enemy it hits to drop a guaranteed health orb. Even if you can only hit one enemy, that's still 30 energy generated for you, and you will almost always hit at least 3-4. The Umbral set is great as Nezha loves all 3 stats it provides. You can easily just run the base versions of the mods and do just fine. Adaptation is another no-brainer, your Warding Halo + your armor + Adaptation will make you nigh invincible. The Arcanes are to taste, although Grace is incredibly good if you have it. Blessing works exceptionally well on Nezha given you are already incentivized to spam his Chakram and generate health orbs that way. This could be Guardian or Augmented as well, both solid options. The Aura is another personal choice, I like Sprint Boost because Nezha's run speed coupled with his slides allows him to completely forgo bullet jumps in favor of just sprinting though the mission. Growing Power is a good option too, as is Brief Respite for some extra shield gating from your Blazing Chakram and Divine Spears spam. Cunning Drift is pretty much the BiS Exilus mod, more sliding and more range - both things we love!
Now that I've explained my mod choices, it's time to talk about the star of the show - Divine Spears + Divine Retribution! This ability requires you bring specific weapons that can enable it. Anything that relies on status to kill will do, for melee that would be anything with Melee Influence (the scaling gets pretty funny if you can hit a lot of speared enemies) or a Glaive Prime with it's guaranteed slash procs. For guns, my favorite in the Strun Incarnon. Build for status and Viral/Slash it outputs an insane number of procs. One important thing to note is that the augment has a specific quirk to it - if you kill a speared enemy in one shot with the weapon's raw damage, no statuses will spread to others. This can be pretty annoying for anything non Steel Path, but I found a workaround. Using your Blazing Chakram is a pretty good way to build up a cascading amount of heat procs on all speared enemies without killing them outright, as the Chakram's initial damage isn't that high. Of course, just using your weapons to kill everything low level is also completely viable.
That pretty much wraps it up! This really ended up being quite a long post, but I really really love this frame. He's the frame I play as most of the time and my reliable ally in any mission as a 95% solo player. Here is a bonus fashionframe of my Nezha to end it on:
Seasonal death counter: 3 (+0, based on how this season started I thought we would have a lot more of those, I feel kinda silly for making this counter now...)
Dragon blood is some serious stuff, not only did it regrow Subaru's leg, it even grew back the bandages and his shoe somehow! Impressive! Regulus really is speedrunning the "most hated character" title, which is pretty impressive as he has some serious competition with Capella and Gluttony. Man is just truly vile.
What a cliffhanger post-ending! Al sounds just as surprised to see someone respond as Emilia did, wonder if he found one of those communicators somewhere and tried using it.
The whole point of having Aegis Gale is to free yourself from the Blazing Pillage spam. That and it's genuinely hard to fit in two augments at the same time without making serious sacrifices to the build.
My solution to the "running out of shields" problem, which is especially prevalent against the Infested, was subsuming Rebuild Shields (Condemn is a solid option too) over her 3 which you don't really use now with no need for it for Blazing Pillage anyway. Pay 500 shields (or much less if you run efficiency) to get almost 7k back every 12sec, pretty good deal!
Edit: Forgot to mention Sentinels are also very good with the Guardian mod, couple it with the Bond mod that I forgot the name of that reduces all companion ability CDs when killing enemies with 3 or more statuses and a Tazicor or Helstrum on your sentinel to prime for you and you can lower the 30sec CD by a lot.
I wanted to revisit Hildryn first cause she's gotten a massive glow-up since her original post in the form of her new augment, Aegis Gale. No longer is she forced into the incredibly boring Blazing Pillage spam gameplay, she can now take to the skies and rain down death like she was intended to! She went from a frame I farmed purely so I can subsume her for Pillage to one of my absolute favorites all thanks to this augment. The augment allows you to turn your Balefire while in Aegis Storm into a burst fire cannon, firing out 4 projectiles with a single button press and adding extra damage to it scaling with your maximum shield capacity (which given that you are Hildryn, should be pretty impressive). Changing it from the clunky charge-up into a burst fire alone is a huge QoL improvement already (especially with the accessibility settings letting you turn it into a proper full auto), but the extra scaling damage is what really pushes your Balefire into a proper endgame capable weapon. My one complaint is that I really wish this would just replace your actual primary fire, having to hold down M3 is pretty awkward. I know there is the augment for her 1 that you could run with this one, but no one is gonna be doing that given how much stronger the alternate fire is compared to the charged primary.
For all of Subaru's faults, man has a determination that I don't think Kazuma would have. One particularly gruesome death would likely be all it took for him to fuck off to a far away place and turn this show into a slice of life (at least until the now unchecked witch cult ran rampart and caught up to him). Subaru might not be the cleverest, but despite some truly sanity-shattering things happening to him he just keeps going.
The eye opening moment is when one of these threads touches on a subject you know a lot about and the top upvoted comment is spouting complete bullshit. See it once and you start to doubt the credibility of every other highly upvoted comment that looks legit but could be just as wrong, you simply don't know enough to immediately disprove it.
Yeah, I've wondered that too. He doesn't even really need a weapon either, just spill his secret and he gets an instant heart attack anyways. Unless I forgot some detail from Season 1 (I very well could, it has been a long while) there is no penalty for suicide over getting killed and with how gruesome most of his deaths are he really could use an easy way out.
Extremely rare SFW Oglaf!
With their Prime just released, I thought it's a good time to revisit this frame. I have little to say about Xaku myself, I never played them much and I'm not a huge fan of their kit, powerful as it is. Xaku lovers, this is your time to shine!