A tale of 2 cats – An analysis of CCB#4 Arclight

Introduction

CCB#4 Arclight was brutal. It took almost a whole week for the first W1 830 clear; the final 8 man was only accomplished right before server reset (such that there was not even a finish screen); legends like Ines, Suzuran and Crownslayer made max risk only to get optimised on the last few days. Yet the thing that most people remember is probably Tragodia + Leizi permastalling the Traffic Towers. Here’s an analysis to what makes Tragodia irreplaceable, why the other cat is a secret MVP, and why it was impossible to optimise 4-Sui out.

Matryoshka Dolls

Any analysis of CCB#4 is incomplete without mentioning the Traffic Towers (TT). Everything about them screamed unwallable – short pathing, 4-block requirement, and exploding after death to reveal a fast moving invisible guy called the Traffic Officer (TO).

Amidst the numerous numerical changes, TTs have an infamous tag where their first explosion spawns a second TT, and only when the second TT dies do they spawn the TO. The difficulty of this tag is deceptive. It’s like the bell curve meme.

The bottom 10% is like “No‼ I have to deal with two of them”;

The middle 80% is like “If I establish my perma-stall it doesn’t matter if there are one or two”;

The top 10% is like “No‼ I have to deal with two of them”

But the real difficulty in this tag is that spawning a new TT breaks any control chain you may have established. There was an infamous perma-stall theorised early on involving Liskarm/Ulpianus/Gnosis where you keep 3 wolves on Liskarm, spam Ulpianus S3 on the ball to stun the TTs, and then use Gnosis S2 to cover the downtime. The only problem is that Ulpianus S3 and Gnosis S2 both deal direct damage when they apply their CCs, so the stunlock immediately falls apart once the TT loses its first HP bar, leaking the TO.

 

Diffusing Bombs

Tragodia S3, however, is the perfect answer. His cages block the TT regardless of their block requirements, the cages snap the affected unit back to the centre of the tile, and the invisible TO is blocked and killed immediately. Tragodia S3 cages linger for 30s or 3 hits, with a cooldown of 40s. So to establish a permastall, you have to battery his cooldown to under 30s, as well as preventing the cages from taking 3 hits. The first is done by batterying above 0.33/s, and the second is done with Leizi S1. TTs have an attack interval or 5s and the cages will be stalling up to 2 at the same time. Since Nervous Impairment innately cancels 3 attacks and the cages can take 1 hit from each TT, 20s out of 30s is already accounted for. You just need Leizi to use Leizi S1 to interrupt the next 2 attacks for the cages to survive the full 30s.

The astute amongst you may have realised that Leizi S1 is only 22SP for 2 charges, and the 0.33/s batterying requirement for Tragodia S3 is already accomplished by Suzuran. So why was Suzuran cut from the final run, but not 4-Sui which only provides 0.25/s?

 

Getting Run Over and Shot

You know how Columbia is based on the US? CCB#4 gives you the real USA experience. Sometimes you can be having a good day and suddenly get run over by a car; and sometimes you just get shot by a guy for no reason. This is what it feels like dealing with the Crossroads (CR), and Rhine Lab Engineers (RLE), arguably the hardest part of the run.

“Mathroshka doll TT isn’t the hardest part of the run? Whaaaattt!?”

No they aren’t. The biggest reason why it took so long for a W1 max risk is because these 2 guys are such a menace.

Let’s begin with CR. They are incredibly fast moving, cannot be shifted, and continuously hits 1.2 tiles in their orthogonal directions. Their pathing means that no range tile on the map is safe. The only way to stick any your ranged units is to block and kill them before they start doing their laps.

Fun fact: did you know the last unpicked tag in the W1 820 run was RLE Atk+ Atk Range+? These guys are probably the most threatening enemies on the map. In fact, the first W1 max risk clear had to rely on Yu S3 RNG to nullify more than half the shots from these guys. A RNG-free clear was not found until someone…

 

Let the Cat Out of the Box

I mentioned a secret MVP cat, and her name is Mon3tr. The actual true damage she offered was the natural replacement of the pseudo-true damage offered by the Lapp2/Blaze2 that everyone was trying prior to this point. She has flexible (re)positioning, and helps to deal with the CR on her own while also providing healing to the other units. Her being true damage instead of elemental meant that Suzuran S3 provided her enough damage to hit essential damage breakpoints to deal with the CR. The removal of Lapp2/Blaze2 also means that Yu gets to run his S2, which surprisingly also allows him to tank the CR in Mon3tr’s downtime.

Mon3tr was one of the units that is somehow hit by more tags than any other unit in the games. Most notably, she suffers from the general attack speed down tag, as well as the medic attack speed down tag, which really hindered her offensive recovery. 4-Sui was used to help Tragodia cycle at the time, so she also happened to use it for batterying her own skill. Out of 42 enemies on the map, Mon3tr (and Yu) killed 37 of them.

 

Master Chef – Cat Food Edition

With current understanding of CCB#4, Shu and Yu are thought to have critical roles in the 880 clear independent of providing the 4-Sui bonus. Shu is the second unit to be deployed ever, to stabilise the opening of the run by providing essential healing and blocking; Yu is directly gathering, blocking and killing the dangerous enemies. You may think Nian and Ling are just there as accessories for 4-Sui, but surprisingly they collectively infringed on Suzuran’s role. Since Shu and Yu were perpetually on the field for the first half of the run, deploying Nian completes the 3 Defender bonus which grants Mon3tr a noticeably attack speed bonus, which helped not only with cycling, but also with reaching the damage breakpoints to kill the CR in her skill. Ling S2 on the other hand, meant that Tragodia + Leizi could permastall despite not having Suzuran to push his CD to sub-30s.

 

Hell’s Kitchen – Los Angeles

Despite not making it to the final 8-man roster, there was a 9-man strat involving Nightingale and Exu2 that I want to highlight. This strat uses Exu2 S3 to redeploy Shu below Tragodia after Shu holds down the line at the start, and cycles Tragodia S3 with Shu S3 instead of Leizi S1 (shoutout to Exu2 hard-tanking the crossroads). Since Shu is redeployed, Nightingale was used to keep the rest of the team alive instead. Despite not getting an 8-man clear, it had extremely lenient timings where there was little pressure in all of DP, SP and survivability (and would have been the low-op record if not for the 8-man clear that happened right before server reset).

 

The Holy Grail

A 7-man max risk clear is the Holy Grail of CC, but for CCB#4, it seems that a significant paradigm shift may be needed to accomplish it. Specifically, Mon3tr and Tragodia both requiring batteries in this record means that it may be difficult to replace 4-Sui entirely, and yet it is the only place with room for optimisation.

1.     Mono-Saileach is already as few Vanguard as we can run (1 unit)

2.     At least 3 units are needed to deal with the right portals – 2 lanes that need hard-blocking, and a healer to survive against the Engineers. (Mon3tr, Yu, Shu or Mon3tr, Yu, Nightingale) (3 unit)

3.     Tragodia + Leizi or Shu is needed the permastall the middle portal. The Tragodia/Shu strat needs Exu2 for redeployment so 2 units needed here regardless (2 unit)

4.     Mon3tr being offensive recovery hugely limits her battery options. A single Suzuran or Ptilopsis can fulfil Tragodia’s battery requirements, then you will need another battery for Mon3tr. Or you can just run Nian + Ling for the same unit count (2 unit)

With that, it seems like 8 units is the lowest we can get with the Tragodia + Mon3tr strat. If we want to go lower, do we replace the 37/0/0 KDA Mon3tr, or do we replace the permastalling Tragodia? It will be another half a year before we find out?

 

BONUS: Our favourite penguin

Once a CC gets down to 7-man, something very interesting happens. You can pick the risk corresponding to roster size instead of 5 deploy limits, this means that we get to use our favourite penguin – Magallan. It goes without saying how getting more deployment limits can change strats drastically. Does the penguin challenge the cats?