The Orpheus Build (A Training Tool for Speeders)

So as many of you know, I classify myself as a speeder main. I do have slightly more wins as a shooter (thanks guild quests), but the speeder is the ship where I feel most at home. And yet, I've not yet taken it upon myself to write any sort of detailed strategy guide for the speeder. That changes now.

So firstly, you must know who Orpheus is. Orpheus was (and still is) one of the Bay's top speeder players. Many yellow boats, myself included, have a fair amount of respect for the guy. About a year ago, Bastone (a well known Battle Bay YouTuber) uploaded a video of Orpheus coming back from defeat to draw a game. This clip is fairly well known, but here it is if you haven't seen it:

Spoiler: Link (I want to keep my thread pretty)

This clip could be considered a precursor to @TheAntiSnipe's more recent 1v4 comeback, but I digress.

So, assuming you're familiar with that video, you know that Orpheus was running a rather unusual build at the time. Rather than today's nitro/nitro/overboost or tesla bolt/nitro/overboost, Orpheus ran tesla bolt/tesla shield/overboost. This is an odd yellow setup, practically unheard of in today's game. A few hours before writing this, I chose to use this yellow setup, see how it worked, if it was better than what I was using... you get the idea. But I found something quite interesting.

You see, after maybe 10 games with this setup, I feel like a substantially better speeder player. How? Let's run over a few points.

• Most speeders suffer from being a bit headstrong/suicidal, and are offensively/defensively lacking.
• The Orpheus build forces you to learn to play conservatively, and make your attack runs count with a capital "C."
• It also strengthens your capabilities on the attack and defending yourself.

Most speeders often run into bad situations, and use nitro/binitro as a crutch. The Orpheus build takes away that crutch. Playing like this forces a speeder to learn to keep themselves alive, stay out of tricky situations, be versatile, and make their few attack runs matter. You learn to survive torpedo salvos and mortar rounds without relying on the ever-present nitro to Sonic The Hedgehog your way into the nearest bush. You are able to use a strategy I call the "Four Bs":

1. Buff.
2. Burst.
3. Block.
4. Bye!

This strategy is a hit'n'run method for this build, and its full technique is as follows: Applying a Tesla shield, hitting one enemy with both of your weapons, stunning them, and overboosting to safety to reload and recover. You are extremely annoying, can deal ludicrous amounts of damage with a few crits and some time, and have excellent survivability, considering what you just pulled.

In conclusion: Will this be my main setup? Probably not. Has it made me a better player of the game? Hell yes. To anyone looking to improve their speeder skillset... Try this build. You will not regret it. I sure didn't.

 

Just some comments, I watched the video and noticed that's from the time when tesla bolt cooldown was still ~10 seconds instead of current 16 secs. Here's the build Orpheus uses today:

 

Was this the controller/beserker build you mentioned in your thread @TheAntiSnipe?

 

Points to be noted in that video:

1)Explosive Cannon's cooldown is only 12.2 sec rather than the current 14.4 sec

2)Tesla Bolt has a short cooldown of 11.5 or 12 sec,I think so

3)Back in those days, where the firebomb had that older mechanism, those players used firebomb. Old mechanism really sucked tbh.

Anyways,that was before the agility update. Nowadays,it's a quite tough job to predict opponent's next move because of this agility xD. But still,the increase in agility of all boats is a welcoming one to our Bay

 

Are you going to switch over to a big bandage ones you have one upgrades @TheAntiSnipe and using a normal shield? After some discord discussion, that does seem pretty powerful for a speeder.

 

I'm guessing big bandaid plus standard shield > than bandaid + big shield. But as I have neither standard shield or big bandaid I don't know for certain.

 

I wanna know the answer to this too...anyone?

 

Big shield only gives me 619 more hp than std shield. I'd gladly give that up for double bandage heals.

 

Yeah it looks like there is no proper balance between shields and bandages. Big shield is only slightly better than standard shield while big bandage seems to be significantly better than normal bandage.

 

619hp, otherwise known as 10 seconds to a big bandage

 

I wonder if an enforcer used a build like this

 

this build was/is fairly common for enforcers. Less so for speeders... keep in mind the playstyle differences. Enfos are tanky offensive machines, so overboost/tesla bolt/tesla shield makes sense for them. Speeders tend to favor more nitro-heavy builds, meself included.

 

More like was, I don’t think most enforcers would be willing to swap a nitro for a Tesla bolt anymore, or heck even a Tesla shield. I only did so for a while because I didn’t have a good Tesla shield to use.