Kendrak
12-26-2010, 03:24 AM
Fiona Information and Strategies.
An unorganized compendium of my thoughts on different aspects of Fiona.
Movement:
Fiona’s movement is, in my opinion, the worst of all the classes in Vindictus so far. Evie’s hop is much more versatile than Fiona’s roll and of course Lann’s slip dash has invincibility frames and is upgradeable.
Fiona's roll is very unique and to me seems fairly poor by comparison. She does not appear to have any invincibility frames (possibly very few), and the roll itself goes a relatively short distance, maybe 8-10 feet by in-game ratio. Roll seems only useful in very specific situations. These situations vary from roll canceling SP Shield Repair, to rolling away from the final smash attack in Fleeing Gnoll King's rage rushing attack (thanks Andy-Buddy for pointing this out). I definitely recommend against using it as your main dodging tool, but experiment with it for yourself and you may find more uses.
Roll Uses:
*SP Shield Repair Cancel - Rolling cancels the recovery on shield repair and therefore greatly decreases the delay while adding some mobility
*Situational Dodging - Roll should not be used to dodge in general, but there are some specific situations where it is the best option.
Sprinting Smash is Fiona’s greatest movement tool. Executed simply by doing a smash attack while sprinting, this attack eats up a massive amount of stamina but makes up for it greatly by progressing Fiona forward a tremendous distance, probably 6-8 feet by in game scale comparison, and is stander cancelable. The attack damage itself is incredibly weak but it is the fastest possible smash option Fiona has and therefore is widely used with Slashing High and/or Dark Knight/Paladin mode to do extremely fast damage/stun. Learning the technique takes some time, but basically (for keyboard/mouse setup) you’re just holding down shift, pressing any direction and then do a smash attack, immediately press space to guard and then forward to stander cancel, and repeat in succession. You can do as many as 3 per second if you have great execution.
Sprinting Smash Uses:
*Dodging - Sprinting smash is an effective dodge tool because the recovery can be canceled with a heavy stander. It also covers a good distance.
*Slashing High Stun - Because of it's speed and quick recovery when stander canceled Sprinting Smash is often used with Slashing High to stun an opponent by repeatedly slamming them. The mobility also allows one to dodge an enemies attacks while executing multiple smashes.
Defense:
The defense stat is a very debatable one. In theory because blocking reduces all damage once Fiona’s skills are high enough, there is no actual need for defense if Fiona is played perfectly. Fiona CAN be played perfectly, but it is extremely difficult and really unrealistic for us to demand that of ourselves. Of course we should always be doing our best to avoid damage, but there are many instances where we WILL get hit and defense does help a tremendous amount.
Here’s my personal best argument in favor of promoting defense. In a raid such as Nightmare at the Ruins (currently the highest level raid and pretty much all I have to go on right now) Lann’s and Scythe Evie’s are valued far beyond Fiona’s and Staff Evie’s specifically because the enemies can be kept infinitely stunned which makes for the fastest time completed. This is given, which means for a Fiona to keep up, she MUST be attacking the entire time. This means that if the Fiona is focused at all on NOT taking damage by blocking or dodging then she will likely be hurting the raid by not stunning the enemy with all of her ability. So when I approach the raid, I put attacking first, and make sure that I have enough defense to survive the attacks that I will likely take if we are unsuccessful in completely stunning the enemy. This is still a fairly weak argument, but it holds because it highlights that defending and attacking are two separate priorities that must be balanced in any raid. When we are overly defensive we possibly hurt the raid by not attacking/stunning, and when we are overly aggressive we take damage and hurt the raid for having to revive or be healed. Therefore I think we shouldn’t take defense too lightly and consider it when deciding on equipment and skills.
Blocking:
Arguably the most important aspect of Fiona is her ability to block. No other class has this ability and it certainly shows.
Perfect Guard (simply guarding just before an attack connects) is very important to being an excellent shield user. It reduces all durability loss to the shield and with small shield opens up some very sweet options.
First it opens the counter window up quite a bit. The longer you’re guarding before blocking an attack the smaller the window to counterattack. I even believe that if you’re guarding for 5 or 6 seconds before an attack hits you the counterattack window either closes, or is so small that I’ve never been able to successfully counter after guarding that long. By comparison, if I’ve perfect guarded, the window seems to be almost an entire second if not more which gives me much more time to react and much more room for error. Perfect guarding is rather easy. While I’m not entirely sure about the frame window, it seems that you can guard nearly a second in advance and still achieve perfect guard. It’s also possible to spam guard for successive attacks such as Gnoll King’s screaming charge, or Eklech’s 4 hit combo and still perfect guard every hit.
Second, at rank 9 and above, it gives you the ability to follow up your guard with your normal attacks starting on their third swing. This means you can do a 2 hit Ivy Sweep/Butterfly Swing, or a 3 hit Amaranth kick/Stimga. This is useful if you know the enemy is nearly down, or if you know the recovery of the attack you perfect guarded is long enough to allow for it and you opt not to counter to preserve your shield.
Neither of these options is available to large shield, but it is still prudent to perfect guard when possible to save the durability loss.
Perfect Guard Uses:
*Confirming Counter Attack - Counter attack is generally considered easy to execute, but Perfect Guarding opens the window to execute it quite a bit and therefore makes it much easier to confirm the guard. If you do not confirm the guard you may sometimes be late on the counter and get a Spike Rose or Honeybee Sting accidentally leaving you wide open to attacks.
*Comboing from third attack in string - This is well known but definitely has it's place in high level gameplay. Most will opt for a counter for the stun, but as demonstrated in Papa's spider solo video (posted below) the damage and stun from smashes late in an attack string can be superior to counter, and also saves durability.
Large shield is an entirely different beast with its unique uses. Large shield takes far less stamina to stander, has no knockback when blocking a smash attack with stander, and allows you to stay in stander to block multiple smashes. Also, recovery out of stander is almost nil, meaning after standering a smash attack that has a lot of recovery, many attack options are available to you, basically whatever the enemies recovery allows for is fair game, which cannot be said for small shield because in addition to eating up tremendous stamina when blocking a smash, you get knocked way back and out of stander and often cannot even follow up with anything because you’re so far from the enemy afterward.
Large Shield Uses:
*Blocking Multiple Smashes - This isn't exactly necessary as of right now and much more usage will be required to know exactly where large shield is preferable to small shield, but a good display of its ability is to stay in heavy stander against both spiders. It is no contest in terms of survivability that large shield saves your stamina, keeps you protected, and maintains your positioning far better than small shield can.
Both shields MUST be used heavily and learned well because they will both be very necessary for many future raids.
Attacking:
Mostly outlined in my comparison between Hammer and Sword, I’ll just cover the basics of attacking. This really will just sound like common sense, but many fail to realize the importance of the simple things.
Comboing Tips:
One aspect of attacking is the recoil that most enemies have when being hit by normal attacks and the difference between that and being hit by smash attacks. Normal attacks can interrupt many normal enemies actions and allow you to “combo” them with whatever string you like. The difficulty comes with facing multiple enemies and being able to decide on the fly what string to do, what enemies pose the most threat, and whether or not your attack string will be able to interrupt all the enemies about to attack. Archers, for example, can be very irritating when trying to fight many enemies because your string can be interrupted by their arrows. Therefore it is often prudent to deal with them first, sometimes just knocking them down with a Sprinting Smash is enough, but sometimes you need to make sure they’re dead because you have bigger fish to fry.
For example; in Boat 4 the first normal enemy capable of smash attacks was introduce. Basically a smaller version of the Gnoll Chieftain these enemies can cause serious hurt to Fiona users who aren’t careful. Their smashes will not affect other normal enemies surrounding them, and they’re often paired with archers. When fighting these guys one must take into consideration the spacing between an enemy winding up attacks, archers potentially interrupting them, and other enemies positioned out of swinging radius. It may be that one of these mini-Chieftains is winding up an attack and you opt to attack an enemy in front of you not focused on the guy behind, sometimes you will be able to reach and interrupt the one behind and end up just fine, but sometimes you won’t. Learning to adjust for these situations is a key aspect to attacking effectively.
Recovery and Punishing:
Attacking against bosses; obviously bosses have different properties than normal enemies and therefore must be dealt with differently. Bosses will not so be stunned by your normal attacks and therefore you have to be much more aware of THEIR attacks. The goal really with bosses is to learn their attack animations and recovery timings and attack while their recovering from a blocked or dodged attack. Many expert Fiona’s will wind up an Amaranth kick while an enemy whiffs its attack right by to get kicked in the back. Learning these openings is key to being successful in boss fights. It is also important to not get greedy with your openings. Sometimes you will only be able to do a very little damage for a boss’s recovery, MAKE SURE YOU DO THAT DAMAGE. Don’t get lazy and only go for the large openings because they’re easy, make the effort to learn when you can get whatever damage you can get, but don’t go for more than the opening will allow. Just because you get away with it once in a while and land an Amaranth because the boss opted to not do his quickest attack after recovering does not make it smart practice.
*Edit*
Delaying Strings for Timing and Positioning
One wonderful thing about Fiona's attacks are that they are very regular and have a lot of recovery. This may sound like a bad thing, but what this gives Fiona is the wonderful option of canceling her attack with heavy stander, or continuing the sequence with either a normal attack or a smash with great delay. This gives Fiona's the ability to precisely space and time her attacks to an enemies whiffed attack on her or an ally. It also allows Fiona to protect herself because she's never forced to commit to a long recovery, she can just opt out of the string altogether.
Thanks Andy-Buddy for pointing this out (I hope I've correctly interpreted what you meant).
*Re-edited* with organization in mind. Hopefully it reads somewhat easier now.
An unorganized compendium of my thoughts on different aspects of Fiona.
Movement:
Fiona’s movement is, in my opinion, the worst of all the classes in Vindictus so far. Evie’s hop is much more versatile than Fiona’s roll and of course Lann’s slip dash has invincibility frames and is upgradeable.
Fiona's roll is very unique and to me seems fairly poor by comparison. She does not appear to have any invincibility frames (possibly very few), and the roll itself goes a relatively short distance, maybe 8-10 feet by in-game ratio. Roll seems only useful in very specific situations. These situations vary from roll canceling SP Shield Repair, to rolling away from the final smash attack in Fleeing Gnoll King's rage rushing attack (thanks Andy-Buddy for pointing this out). I definitely recommend against using it as your main dodging tool, but experiment with it for yourself and you may find more uses.
Roll Uses:
*SP Shield Repair Cancel - Rolling cancels the recovery on shield repair and therefore greatly decreases the delay while adding some mobility
*Situational Dodging - Roll should not be used to dodge in general, but there are some specific situations where it is the best option.
Sprinting Smash is Fiona’s greatest movement tool. Executed simply by doing a smash attack while sprinting, this attack eats up a massive amount of stamina but makes up for it greatly by progressing Fiona forward a tremendous distance, probably 6-8 feet by in game scale comparison, and is stander cancelable. The attack damage itself is incredibly weak but it is the fastest possible smash option Fiona has and therefore is widely used with Slashing High and/or Dark Knight/Paladin mode to do extremely fast damage/stun. Learning the technique takes some time, but basically (for keyboard/mouse setup) you’re just holding down shift, pressing any direction and then do a smash attack, immediately press space to guard and then forward to stander cancel, and repeat in succession. You can do as many as 3 per second if you have great execution.
Sprinting Smash Uses:
*Dodging - Sprinting smash is an effective dodge tool because the recovery can be canceled with a heavy stander. It also covers a good distance.
*Slashing High Stun - Because of it's speed and quick recovery when stander canceled Sprinting Smash is often used with Slashing High to stun an opponent by repeatedly slamming them. The mobility also allows one to dodge an enemies attacks while executing multiple smashes.
Defense:
The defense stat is a very debatable one. In theory because blocking reduces all damage once Fiona’s skills are high enough, there is no actual need for defense if Fiona is played perfectly. Fiona CAN be played perfectly, but it is extremely difficult and really unrealistic for us to demand that of ourselves. Of course we should always be doing our best to avoid damage, but there are many instances where we WILL get hit and defense does help a tremendous amount.
Here’s my personal best argument in favor of promoting defense. In a raid such as Nightmare at the Ruins (currently the highest level raid and pretty much all I have to go on right now) Lann’s and Scythe Evie’s are valued far beyond Fiona’s and Staff Evie’s specifically because the enemies can be kept infinitely stunned which makes for the fastest time completed. This is given, which means for a Fiona to keep up, she MUST be attacking the entire time. This means that if the Fiona is focused at all on NOT taking damage by blocking or dodging then she will likely be hurting the raid by not stunning the enemy with all of her ability. So when I approach the raid, I put attacking first, and make sure that I have enough defense to survive the attacks that I will likely take if we are unsuccessful in completely stunning the enemy. This is still a fairly weak argument, but it holds because it highlights that defending and attacking are two separate priorities that must be balanced in any raid. When we are overly defensive we possibly hurt the raid by not attacking/stunning, and when we are overly aggressive we take damage and hurt the raid for having to revive or be healed. Therefore I think we shouldn’t take defense too lightly and consider it when deciding on equipment and skills.
Blocking:
Arguably the most important aspect of Fiona is her ability to block. No other class has this ability and it certainly shows.
Perfect Guard (simply guarding just before an attack connects) is very important to being an excellent shield user. It reduces all durability loss to the shield and with small shield opens up some very sweet options.
First it opens the counter window up quite a bit. The longer you’re guarding before blocking an attack the smaller the window to counterattack. I even believe that if you’re guarding for 5 or 6 seconds before an attack hits you the counterattack window either closes, or is so small that I’ve never been able to successfully counter after guarding that long. By comparison, if I’ve perfect guarded, the window seems to be almost an entire second if not more which gives me much more time to react and much more room for error. Perfect guarding is rather easy. While I’m not entirely sure about the frame window, it seems that you can guard nearly a second in advance and still achieve perfect guard. It’s also possible to spam guard for successive attacks such as Gnoll King’s screaming charge, or Eklech’s 4 hit combo and still perfect guard every hit.
Second, at rank 9 and above, it gives you the ability to follow up your guard with your normal attacks starting on their third swing. This means you can do a 2 hit Ivy Sweep/Butterfly Swing, or a 3 hit Amaranth kick/Stimga. This is useful if you know the enemy is nearly down, or if you know the recovery of the attack you perfect guarded is long enough to allow for it and you opt not to counter to preserve your shield.
Neither of these options is available to large shield, but it is still prudent to perfect guard when possible to save the durability loss.
Perfect Guard Uses:
*Confirming Counter Attack - Counter attack is generally considered easy to execute, but Perfect Guarding opens the window to execute it quite a bit and therefore makes it much easier to confirm the guard. If you do not confirm the guard you may sometimes be late on the counter and get a Spike Rose or Honeybee Sting accidentally leaving you wide open to attacks.
*Comboing from third attack in string - This is well known but definitely has it's place in high level gameplay. Most will opt for a counter for the stun, but as demonstrated in Papa's spider solo video (posted below) the damage and stun from smashes late in an attack string can be superior to counter, and also saves durability.
Large shield is an entirely different beast with its unique uses. Large shield takes far less stamina to stander, has no knockback when blocking a smash attack with stander, and allows you to stay in stander to block multiple smashes. Also, recovery out of stander is almost nil, meaning after standering a smash attack that has a lot of recovery, many attack options are available to you, basically whatever the enemies recovery allows for is fair game, which cannot be said for small shield because in addition to eating up tremendous stamina when blocking a smash, you get knocked way back and out of stander and often cannot even follow up with anything because you’re so far from the enemy afterward.
Large Shield Uses:
*Blocking Multiple Smashes - This isn't exactly necessary as of right now and much more usage will be required to know exactly where large shield is preferable to small shield, but a good display of its ability is to stay in heavy stander against both spiders. It is no contest in terms of survivability that large shield saves your stamina, keeps you protected, and maintains your positioning far better than small shield can.
Both shields MUST be used heavily and learned well because they will both be very necessary for many future raids.
Attacking:
Mostly outlined in my comparison between Hammer and Sword, I’ll just cover the basics of attacking. This really will just sound like common sense, but many fail to realize the importance of the simple things.
Comboing Tips:
One aspect of attacking is the recoil that most enemies have when being hit by normal attacks and the difference between that and being hit by smash attacks. Normal attacks can interrupt many normal enemies actions and allow you to “combo” them with whatever string you like. The difficulty comes with facing multiple enemies and being able to decide on the fly what string to do, what enemies pose the most threat, and whether or not your attack string will be able to interrupt all the enemies about to attack. Archers, for example, can be very irritating when trying to fight many enemies because your string can be interrupted by their arrows. Therefore it is often prudent to deal with them first, sometimes just knocking them down with a Sprinting Smash is enough, but sometimes you need to make sure they’re dead because you have bigger fish to fry.
For example; in Boat 4 the first normal enemy capable of smash attacks was introduce. Basically a smaller version of the Gnoll Chieftain these enemies can cause serious hurt to Fiona users who aren’t careful. Their smashes will not affect other normal enemies surrounding them, and they’re often paired with archers. When fighting these guys one must take into consideration the spacing between an enemy winding up attacks, archers potentially interrupting them, and other enemies positioned out of swinging radius. It may be that one of these mini-Chieftains is winding up an attack and you opt to attack an enemy in front of you not focused on the guy behind, sometimes you will be able to reach and interrupt the one behind and end up just fine, but sometimes you won’t. Learning to adjust for these situations is a key aspect to attacking effectively.
Recovery and Punishing:
Attacking against bosses; obviously bosses have different properties than normal enemies and therefore must be dealt with differently. Bosses will not so be stunned by your normal attacks and therefore you have to be much more aware of THEIR attacks. The goal really with bosses is to learn their attack animations and recovery timings and attack while their recovering from a blocked or dodged attack. Many expert Fiona’s will wind up an Amaranth kick while an enemy whiffs its attack right by to get kicked in the back. Learning these openings is key to being successful in boss fights. It is also important to not get greedy with your openings. Sometimes you will only be able to do a very little damage for a boss’s recovery, MAKE SURE YOU DO THAT DAMAGE. Don’t get lazy and only go for the large openings because they’re easy, make the effort to learn when you can get whatever damage you can get, but don’t go for more than the opening will allow. Just because you get away with it once in a while and land an Amaranth because the boss opted to not do his quickest attack after recovering does not make it smart practice.
*Edit*
Delaying Strings for Timing and Positioning
One wonderful thing about Fiona's attacks are that they are very regular and have a lot of recovery. This may sound like a bad thing, but what this gives Fiona is the wonderful option of canceling her attack with heavy stander, or continuing the sequence with either a normal attack or a smash with great delay. This gives Fiona's the ability to precisely space and time her attacks to an enemies whiffed attack on her or an ally. It also allows Fiona to protect herself because she's never forced to commit to a long recovery, she can just opt out of the string altogether.
Thanks Andy-Buddy for pointing this out (I hope I've correctly interpreted what you meant).
*Re-edited* with organization in mind. Hopefully it reads somewhat easier now.