Astra Ultimate Cancel interaction study
Hey y'all. I don't normally make posts like these so bear with me.
>Disclaimer: I do not claim to own this interaction, but I did discover it on my own.
With the release of Norma, as well as Pompey's appearance in Deadly Assault to facilitate her release, it's been a blast to field Evelyn once again and get close to kill runs. For the purposes of this post, I would like to focus on one aspect of Evelyn's optimal stun rotation:
Astra's Ultimate Cancel Tech
Because of Evelyn's long Chain Attack animation, it is important to squeeze out as much time as possible from knowing your stun thresholds, Charged Attack cancelling, and Tether point management, in order to fit as many Chain Attacks into the stun window. Now depending on whether or not your Astra is M1 or not, her Ultimate (every 2nd and 4th stun at M0 | every 1st and 3rd stun and M1 *not including Thrall*) is an integral part to learn how to utilize to go from 5 Chain Attacks in a stun window to 6 Chain Attacks.
Immediately swapping into Evelyn after casting Ultimate, waiting for the forced Quick Assist prompt to go away, swap to your Stunner, and then swap back into Evelyn just takes way too long. Hence why we do certain inputs to get Astra out of her Cadenza state and remove that forced Quick Assist prompt and go from there.
This sequence led me to this awkward scenario all the time with Norma specifically:
https://reddit.com/link/1v44z73/video/vzmr46j24xeh1/player
No matter what I did, my final snap on Evelyn would land outside of the stun window. Because of Norma having 1 less second for her stun extension than Lighter, coupled with her Quick Assist being longer than Lighter's, those extra moments caused me do something closer to 5 and 1/2 Chain Attacks per Astra Ultimate.
That is until an idea sparked
Now normally, as seen in the video above, we recast Cadenza on Astra to trigger a forced Quick Assist for the last Chain Attack. However, it never specifies it had to come from Astra specifically. So what if the Quick Assist came from the Stunner instead? Trigger and Pulchra have one, but they don't have a Stun extension gimmick. Nangong funnily enough has both but is for an Anomaly-centric team.
Leaving us with our favorite two choices between Lighter and Dialyn, and our new contender, Norma.
Lighter of course does not have a Quick Assist in his kit, but doesn't need it since his 3 second stun extension compared to Dialyn and Norma's 2 second stun extension allows for Astra to re-enter Cadenza and fulfill the 6th Chain Attack fine.
Dialyn, even if it is possible to do 5 and 1/2 - 6 Chain Attacks, has always preferred to swap 1 of them for a 2nd Ultimate. A very potent utility that makes her desirable in almost every team imaginable. Her big fist attack without enough resources can be a Quick Assist, but you would never sacrifice it in that way.
Norma in a sense has the worst of both worlds, but tries to make up for it in very high personal damage. However, she has a very interesting gimmick about her own QA > Chain Attack conversion.
Being that it is a simple Quick Assist if she does not have enough of her own resources to do the conversion. And it is fast.
Fast enough to do this:
https://reddit.com/link/1v44z73/video/j446lv7h1xeh1/player
During Astra Ultimate stun windows, it is possible for Norma to not have enough of her resources to make use of her own Chain Attack conversion, but can instead have Evelyn use Astra's 2nd charge of her Chain Attack conversion by simply providing the Quick Assist to facilitate it. Because of the speed at which this can be performed, Evelyn can successfully fit in that last snap within the stun window to deal maximum damage.
Keep in mind that Astra is NOT in her Cadenza state anymore and we did not redeploy her into the field, so you have to remember to put her back to upkeep her buff.
I just wanted to share this neat trick I found. Hope it helps y'all.