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In defense of Black Cat's awakened ability

ErcarretErcarret Member Posts: 3,275 ★★★★★
I feel like Black Cat's awakened ability is often pretty overlooked. You hear a lot of "You don't need to have her awakened" and "You don't need to invest any sig stones into her" etc. While I agree to some extent, I also think that it is insanely powerful at high sig.

First an explanation of what the sig does if anyone doesn't know: at sig 1, she gains nine combo shield charges. These persist between fights. If you lose one in the first fight of a quest, you'll have eight remaining ones in the second fight. If she is struck, she gains a combo shield for three seconds. Additionally, each charge gives her a chance to evade whenever she would be struck while dashing in at an opponent. At sig 1, that chance is 4%. That means you have a total of 4x9 = 36% chance to evade when you have all of your charges. At sig 200, she has a 99,99% chance instead. These evades last for one second and make you lose a charge as well, even if you're not struck.

So, what does this mean? Well, for instance, you can use it strategically. Are you in a really crappy situation where you know you're going to get hit by something? Possibly something big? Something you know you can't dodge? Well, what if you had a 99,99% chance to dodge that big hit? Wouldn't that be just neat?

In the example below, at around 0:43, you can see me completely evading Piggy's SP2 (which I can't dodge for the life of me). I was in a really tough spot since he decided to go unblockable right as he threw his special, but I decided to try a hail Mary with the evade and it worked flawlessly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA98auEfCjs

It doesn't always work - if you watch the entire video, you'll see one charge activating before me actively trying to use it. In that instance, I was going for a heavy attack when Piggy decided to evade himself and then punishing me. I evaded a few of his hits but since I was caught so off guard, I didn't manage to get my bearings before he got a few hits in. That's why I only had 8 charges by the time he threw his SP2 later on. Luckily that decreased evade chance didn't mess things up for me.

This is extremely powerful. While the potency of it does decrease every time you use it, that really only comes into play in questing. If you're using her in something like Battlegrounds, where you only have to fight that single fight, you are free to use up her charges to your heart's content. This makes her an extremely safe option there. You just have to stay really aggressive so that you are, in fact, dashing in when whatever comes at you...well, comes at you.

It's sort of similar to Kitty Pryde's ability to phase through attacks when dashing in, although admittedly nowhere near as game-breaking since Black Cat has a finite number of charges and is unable to use it reliably over and over again.

Regardless, hopefully this little write-up does open some eyes to how awesome of an ability Black Cat's signature ability is. Nine Lives, indeed.
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