His passive and abilities are cool looking on paper, buuut, well, yeahhh. I think when attributing his powers to snakes and alchemists, some things were lost in translation. His abilities are suited to a short- and mid-range playstyle, but without staying power, he’s marginally useless in Defense. They subsequently have shit damage for abilities with lesser duration and range. They may as well just give Lavos a Stand made of moldy tofu and it’d be as efficient and powerful as his current moveset.
To be honest, I replaced my 1 because short range melee abilities aren’t that easy to use for console players and I don’t have a definitive opinion on his passive, so I’m just gonna skip ahead to 2, 3, and 4. Apologies.
2’s inability to turn is plain ol’ idiotic. It basically ensures you’re going to suck filet mignon on any tileset with uneven terrain, narrow halls, and pits. If the distance traveled is maybe 1.5 times the length of a Slash Dash and there was a motherfucking option to make acute course corrections, maybe it’d be less meaningless. Going back to the alchemy aesthetic, the broken vials are perfectly fitting, but I’d like to suggest it could have more vertical effectiveness by having freaky ice crystals or alchemically turning the immediate environment turn into spikes which grow an average human’s height before shattering or something. Both the 2 and 4 would have more usage if they actually did anything to Ospreys and other aerial enemies.
3 looks cool, but it feels more like lobbing a balloon at foes rather than a halfway effective ball of lightning. Maybe if it had a pushback function like Twilight Link’s Gale Boomerang there’d be a more noticeable difference to the 4. Also, maybe a Tesla function for enemies not in its imminent trajectory. When it comes to its speed and longevity, I’m not entirely certain if it should be sped up or made to last longer. Maybe if it was smaller or had a homing function or had two overlapping cores; an inner core meant to cause regular damage every 0.8 seconds and an outer core meant to cause less effective Electricity status but functions as the transmorphicifying mechanic.
4’s aerial ineffectiveness aside, maybe it’d be less stupid if it was slower and in combination with the flamethrower, it could also use a slime trail mechanic. Once the drones pass by a still living enemy, there should be a way to make them get more killed. Otherwise, as aforementioned, utterly meaningless. Subsequently, 4’s 30 second cooldown period would work perfectly fine if all of his other abilities weren’t equally retarded.
Lastly, when it comes to the button holding mechanic, I’m wondering if it’s possible to reassign different elements to different abilities, not only because replacing any disables the mechanic for one of the four elements, but also because accessing certain elements on alternate buttons would be better if one’s muscle memory is accustomed to a specific button. I always have to look at the UI to remember which element corresponds to which button, but they don’t exactly correspond to the element tree in my mind. Were I to reprogram the tree, I’d probably put Fire on 1 and Toxin on 4, but since that’s currently impossible at time of writing, I require a lengthy learning period to try to access specific elements on the fly, and more than likely I’ll simply give up, lol.
In summary, he’s good for Survival until the enemy level is around 40 or 50... And I dunno what else. His adaptability and mobility on levels with rocks and infested goo is non-existent. At worst, he’s suited to simple killing (level 40 or lower, hurr), and at best, a support role, which means you’re better off just motherfucking using your Octavia or Protea loadout. To whomever was the lead programmer in charge of Lavos, short range attacks with long range attributes is the sign you’re a fucking genius. XD
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