10-26-2019, 12:34 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-26-2019, 12:40 PM by Gift. Edited 3 times in total.)
Disclaimer: I take no credit for this guide. All credit goes to xMina from NA.
Twin Sword Vella's Skills
To start us off, I'll explain some things that you really need to understand properly about Vella's skills in order to become a flexible and powerful Sword Vella. The key is to not only know what you must do, but to understand why you must do it.
Blade Heart
- This buff is gained by hitting an enemy with any of Vella L normal or R smash attacks. Managing this buff well can increase your overall damage output by a large amount, as well as making Vella that little bit easier to use. Getting hit by any attack or using either Cross-Cut or Double-Cross will take this buff down by a single level.
In total, Vella needs to connect a total of 15 separate hits in order to reach the final level of the Blade Heart buff.
The Blade Heart buff has three levels of power.
The first is gained when Vella connects but a single attack and is the weakest form of the buff. Although it provides only a small increase in damage, it will allow you to pass through opponents when using Cross-cut and offer full invulnerability when doing so, as well as giving a rather large damage boost to the counter.
The second is gained after an additional 6 hits and, as well as further increasing the power of Vella's smashes and counter-attacks, allows her to use less stamina up when using a counter.
The third and final stage of the buff is gained after an additional 8 hits when in the second stage and offers further increases to Vella's abilities. Again, it will increase the power of her smashes and counter-attacks and, as an added bonus, reduce the stamina cost of Cross-Cut to zero.
The most important things to understand about Blade Heart is that, firstly, the higher the level you build before a counter, the less stamina that counter will take up.
Secondly, the higher your level of Blade Heart, the more SP you will gain from Cross-Cut and Double-Cross.
Lastly, a maxed out Cross-Cut at full Blade Heart can easily deal a 15k+ critical damage, whilst a maxed Double-Cross is capable of dealing 10k critical damage (Both with at the attack cap). This adds up to a whopping 25k in total, making her potential damage extremely high.
Utilizing this buff properly in terms of stamina and SP management is key to dealing as much damage as possible whilst keeping yourself safe from harm.
Wind Step
- Twin Sword Vella's dodge. The invulnerability frames on this dodge are absolutely insane, coming in at a whopping 0.8 seconds. That's the length of time from activation where she is completely invulnerable to any sort of damage.
Whilst the movement from this dodge isn't the best in the game, it is still fairly good and, add in the fact that she can use her 2-hit smash straight from it, is a big part of maximizing your overall damage output and survivability
The true strength in Wind Step lies in the invulnerability frames. These can be timed and used to dodge most attacks in the game, easily filling in for when a boss throws an attack your way which can't be avoided by either running or using Cross-Cut.
A good example for this are the large flame circles that the raid boss 'Pantheum' can call forth when in his fire mode. When surrounded by multiple circles, it is very easy to simply time a Wind Step and use the invulnerability frames to completely avoid damage.
Using this technique to avoid getting hit around bosses, it is possible for Vella to stay within a very close proximity whilst staying completely safe, thus further increasing your overall damage output.
Slashing High
- An SP skill that is not unique to Twin Sword Vella, but is a massive part of her gameplay. Slashing High offers an increase to animation speed, infinite stamina for it's duration and complete resistance to knock-down. Slashing high costs 750SP and when maxed out, lasts for 19 seconds whilst providing a 20% increase to animation speed. I'll go over these 3 attributes below.
Animation speed increase - What's important is to realize how this is different from attack speed. Each point in attack speed will increase your hidden base speed, which starts out at 100, by 0.5%. This stat will only increase how fast you swing your weapon and nothing else.
An increase in animation speed will boost the speed of every single action. This includes potion drinking, using feathers, armor repair kits and extends right through to your base running speed, dodge speed and yes, attack speed included.
At +0 attack speed, a maxed out slashing high will give you a 20% increase on the natural hidden 100 base, totaling to a +40 increase. What makes animation speed so special when it comes to attack speed is that it will also give that 20% buff to any additional speed that you have stacked from enhanced weapons and enchant scrolls.
I'm not going to go into any boring math, but in conclusion, the higher your attack speed stat, the greater the attack speed boost you will receive when Slashing High is active.
Infinite stamina - Aah, what really makes this skill to die for. Twin Sword Vella eats stamina like a fat kid eats cake. She needs a lot of it and can easily consume your full bar without thinking. To counter this, there is Slashing High.
For the full duration of the skill, Vella will be constantly at full stamina, meaning that you can spam smashes and level 1 Blade Heart Cross-Cuts to your heart's content whilst never worrying about Vella becoming tired. When used correctly, it is not hard to regain the full 750SP cost back by the time slashing high has run out and you are starting to run low on stamina again, at which point you can reactivate the skill and let the frenzy continue.
Knock-down resistance - Both a blessing and a curse. During Slashing High, Vella will take full damage from all incoming attacks but will be unable to be knocked down, which also includes standing endurance not activating at all.
This little attribute can easily cause you to take far more damage from certain attacks that usually would have knocked you down, thus rendering you invulnerable, by keeping you on your feet and allowing attacks to hit you multiple times (if they are able to do so in the first place, of course).
Whilst not being so bad if you have decent defence, this can be disastrous in raids like Iset, Havan and Siglint, where getting caught in a multi-hitting AOE attack can cause you to be hit for massive damage.
Of course, this only matters if you get hit by those attacks, so you should always be very aware and careful when Slashing High is active.