As a seasoned gamer with years of experience under my belt, let me tell you about my encounter with Agave from Chaya Squad. Now, this gal might not be the shining star of the squad, but her supporting actress performance is nothing short of admirable, boosting her abilities’ skill damage by an impressive 64%.

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Note: Vidya – Agave has potential buffs coming in the near future. This review does not take that into account and only considers her current state.

As Vidya – Agave, the cinephile gamer, I’ve transitioned from Laevatein and been upgraded to the Heimdall Force. Now, on active duty, I’m wielding an Electric Pistol. The dream was to leave a mark with an Oscar-worthy performance, but somehow, the thrill of the real battlefield doesn’t quite live up to the grandeur in my overactive imagination, despite the solid backup from my fellow soldiers.

Supplementary material

Abilities

When using Agave, her primary ability will be your go-to move in gameplay. To put it simply, this skill fires a projectile that not only damages the targeted enemy but also affects nearby foes with Area of Effect (AoE) damage and restores U-Energy. This skill has four stages, with higher stages dealing more damage. As you cast the skill, its phase increases up to the maximum, though you can also use support skills to increase the phase once you have neuros unlocked, thereby saving some time spent on ramping up. Being in stage 2 or higher grants Agave Crowd Control (CC) resistance, and skill hits at stage 4 also push back the main targeted enemy. If you run out of S-Energy while at stage 2 or higher to cast Agave’s primary ability, it uses all remaining S-Energy for a final powerful blast that deals extra damage proportional to the spent S-Energy (up to double!). However, in actual play, the damage dealt is just average. It’s still impressive and sufficient for most scenarios, but it falls short when compared to other recent DPS releases.

This ability does have a special trick up its sleeve, however. Well, one and a half. If the skill hits an enemy with breakable parts, it does break damage to up to two parts on the enemy while also reducing the cost of your next skill cast. This actually makes her quite good for parts breaking on enemies with exactly two targetable parts (eg. Joseph – Hardened) or enemies where the specific parts being broken doesn’t matter (Nightborne Phantom). But on enemies with more parts that you want to specifically focus down, like either of the Ni-Mechs, the random nature of which part gets damaged on each hit makes it considerably less useful. Also if you kill an enemy with a skill cast then the next one is free, but this is basically expected from a skill this spammable. Oh right, did I mention that it basically has no cooldown? Yeah.

In terms of Stunt Coordination, Agave’s special skill causes nearby enemies to be knocked back and paralyzed when neuronics are unlocked. This ability doesn’t have a fixed cost but uses 20% of Agave’s Special Energy (S-Energy). For every 1 S-Energy above 10 that is used, Agave boosts your entire team’s attack power by 2%.

Reaching the cinematic climax of this B-list action thriller, we have Agave’s ultimate. Its active component is actually quite simple, being just a one-hit nuke with a knock-up and not much else. But rather, it’s the passive effects that make things interesting. For starters, Agave innately has her S-Energy cap increased by 30, but also doesn’t actually regenerate S-Energy passively while active. Instead, you’re apparently intended to shoot enemies to rapidly recover S-Energy via this ability’s second passive. And while it does refill the bar quite quickly, shooting also completely resets the phase level of your standard skill, meaning you’ll have to stack it back up from zero. Capping off the trilogy of passives is a separate resource that Agave generates when she casts her standard skill (up to 100), with casts at higher phases naturally providing more stacks. These get consumed when Agave ults to increase the damage multiplier from 410% up to a respectable 4,410% of her attack stat. Needless to say, you generally want to ult with as many stacks as possible.

In the additional scene after the credits of Agave’s gameplay, you’ll notice her ability called Deiwos Passive. This is a basic yet effective skill that increases the damage she deals when wielding an Electric weapon. Essentially, it means more power at no extra cost – and who doesn’t love a little free bonus?

Overall, Agave’s kit is very much reminiscent of other modern skill DPS operatives, featuring a high-uptime standard ability that generates stacks to roid up an otherwise low-resource-cost instance of big burst damage. And in that sense, she works for the most part. But it seems that in an attempt to put her own spin on the formula, Agave unfortunately loses the plot and suffers from several truly baffling design decisions. Being forced to reset the power of your main DPS tool in order to maintain its uptime is a caveat you’d expect from a character in Snowbreak’s original roster (and not an SSR, either), and the fact that there’s no built-in method of restoring S-Energy without having to rely on her shooting passive (enemy kills and parts hits only give Agave a discount on her skill casts, and don’t refund S-Energy) results in a clunky gameplay loop for even trash mobbing. Furthermore, the resource that her ultimate ability relies on to achieve its big burst numbers is painfully slow to accumulate, taking far longer than both Cherno – Enigma and Siris – Ksana, her closest points of skill burst comparison, while also doing noticeably less damage.

Although Agave may not be the star character some players envisioned, she certainly has her practical uses. Her ease in handling parts-equipped elite mooks greatly enhances the overall experience of mobbing, and the S-Energy discount when damaging breakable parts provides Agave with a reasonable skill usage rate against bosses where such tactics are effective. However, compared to Haru – Absconditus, her mobbing is less efficient, and her burst damage, which is contingent on a significant time delay, is underwhelming. As a result, players find themselves yearning for an enhanced version of Agave that addresses these shortcomings and lives up to the summer blockbuster potential she initially promised.

Manifests

While Agave doesn’t earn herself rave reviews, her manifests sure do their best to try and change that. Manifest 1 decreases her standard skill’s S-Energy cost and reloads bullets into her gun on cast, which goes a long way towards improving her skill uptime. Meanwhile, Manifest 2 applies a chunky Final Damage buff to her standard skill casts, providing a new and undiluted buff ensured to have maximum effectiveness. Further releases in the series don’t disappoint, with Manifest 3 boosting her shooting S-Energy regen and giving her standard ability even more party tricks, this time a defence debuff that applies on direct skill hit. Rounding things off is the usual M4 skill ratio boost, applying to Agave’s standard skill in this case, and the closing scene at Manifest 5 provides another Final Damage buff that this time applies to both her standard skill and ultimate.

No really, they’re actually all pretty good. I’d go for M2 at least, but pushing further only really comes with downsides of the extra fragment cost and the fact that you’re investing into a DPS that’s “just” above-average in performance.

Logistics

Agave’s supporting actresses in Chaya Squad puts on an admirable performance, providing up to a 64% skill damage boost to both her standard and ultimate abilities. It’s good. Use it. Ideal logistics stats are just as straightforward, with attack and Alignment Index being the ones to get. Much like Agave’s playstyle, it’s pretty simple.

See the supplementary material for a logistics calculator to help you optimize your loadout.

Weapons

So before we get into actual weapon comparisons, I’m just going to cover all the options that aren’t Agave’s shop or gacha gun. To make a long story short, none of them are worth using because they don’t boost Agave’s S-Energy cap. As well, they’re all off-element which locks you out of Agave’s ultimate ability neuronics, Deiwos passive, and the Final Damage boost from M2. I’ve included them on the damage comparison graphic anyways in the interest of completeness but seriously, don’t bother.

Now, weapons you should actually be using. Both her event weapon Pure Verdure and Snapshot Ace in the gacha do similar things. Both increase Agave’s S-Energy cap by 20 and provide a stacking %DMG boost when using her standard ability (skill damage and elemental damage are actually the same thing as far as damage calculations are concerned). That stacking boost also happens to instantly dip the second you fire a bullet out of the gun. When you then remember how you’re supposed to deal with Agave’s S-Energy issues, you can see why I’m not the biggest fan of her kit.

But while that’s all that’s included with the shop gun’s general admission ticket, upgrading to a premium movie ticket also gets you a drink, popcorn, and some extra functionality from Snapshot Ace. For starters, you get a permanent skill damage buff which helps bring the value of that category of buff closer to parity with the shop gun, even surpassing it at T2. However, the real magic comes in the form of a damage taken debuff that gets applied to enemies when the weapon’s buff is fully stacked. It doesn’t actually display the debuff on enemy status bars the last time I checked, but I assure you it’s there. But visible or not, it’s a pretty rare modifier that won’t have its value too diluted in most situations, giving Snapshot Ace a substantial boost in performance.

Conclusion

So is our resident film fanatic worth the trouble to get?

I’m a bit concerned about the quality of your gameplay. To be precise, it’s not possible to make it so easy, as a fan. In fact, those who played it and it’s not possible to make it so simple, as a fan.

I understand the limitations of the story and its consequences, and it’s a little over the top for the gameplay.

Hopefully the sequel is better.

Supplementary Material

Link

Includes:

• Logistics optimization calculator
• Weapon comparison calculations at both M0 and M2

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2024-09-03 15:31