dguide 1.0

[Ford]

I get bored waiting after I die, so I gradually wrote this guide to keep myself busy.

Ford’s Guide to Deka Version 1.0

Objective: I think Deka is the strongest most overpowered class in MB2, therefore it is only logical that if you want to win on Imperial you would play it. This guide is for people who want to win, not for people who want to be sporting or honorable or whatever other irrational ideal bounds your actions.

Fundamentals (Basics): These fundamentals apply to all Dekas at all times, and I believe if you don’t follow them you will severely reduce your chances of surviving and killing.

• Use stereo headphones or speakers and never play music or have low volume. If a Jedi is sneaking up behind you, or hiding in front of your rolling path and you can’t hear them they will get you. If you hear their footsteps behind you, or their saber ahead of you can usually do a 180 in time to kill them or turn while rolling to avoid their saber. I can’t stress this enough.
• This builds on the first: Use the radar to verify sounds you hear. If you hear footsteps, or the sound of a saber turning off but you don’t see anyone on the radar in that direction you know it has to be an enemy.
• I think the best build is shield 2, turn 2 and firepower 3.
  • Why shield 2?: I don’t think having shield more powerful than 2 makes much difference, since you will usually get killed in 1 hit by a jedi, or get worn down while walking by gunners, or have the shield destroyed by an arc. I just don’t find it that important.
  • Why turn 2?: I find the difference between turn 2 and 3 to be less than noticeable, so I just go with 2. I also have my mouse sensitivity set to high, so I can get the most out of it. If you hear the Jedi coming, you will have enough time to turn once you learn to judge how close they are.
  • Why firepower 3?: The best weapon the Deka has is its intense fire. When you flank the rebels at the side on Lunar, firepower 3 will decimate them. It also helps you wear down the force points on Jedi faster, which is especially important if they are using Q3.
• Use your camera to peek around corners.
• Set cg_crosshairsize to 6. You don’t need the crosshair when fighting close up, but when you are fighting long range it will help a lot for hitting small distant targets.
• Deka is a weapon of mass destruction, so when you want to kill someone you should avoid fighting by trying to slaughter them before they can react.

Strategies against Classes: When I fight, I always prioritize my offense over my defense thinking if they are dead they can’t hurt me. Even when being aggressive though, you should try defend some when fighting Jedi or encountering multiple gunners. Some of these things are facts you should keep in mind, and some are clear methods. Use them at your own discretion. If you don’t like to be called “Deka noob”, then stop reading here.

Target Order when Attacking (flanking):

• When you play Deka you will find yourself in lots of situations where you flank a group of rebels and they don’t hear you behind them. You want to open fire and kill them all, but that is unlikely to happen. The best thing to do is prioritize your targets concentrating on one or two guys and kill them rather than trying to kill everyone and end up getting noone.
• Here is my reasoning for this order: A rational player will want his team to win the round above all else. In order for his team to win, they have do/protect the objective and more importantly survive the round. To maximize the probability that your team-mates will survive the round you should choose targets in terms of how many of your team-mates they are likely to kill. The order you want to kill people in is the from person who will probably do the most killing to the person who will probably do the least.
  1. (Highest) Good Jedi: These are players that you know are really good Jedi, like pretty much anyone from DSI. They will cause your team the most trouble and complications if they are allowed to survive. If he turns before you can finish him off, skip him and move on in the list since it would be too difficult to kill him at that point.
  2. Clones: Clones are easy to kill for Dekas, but they are a big pain for your team especially when they blob your sith. Their high fire rate rapes your gunners too.
  3. Heroes: Projectile kills instantly, plus they have heal and dodge.
  4. Wookie: They are the dekas of the rebel team.
  5. Arc: Pistols hurt.
  6. Elite: Dodge, and some firepower.
  7. Bad Jedi: These are noname people who run around aimlessly holding primary. They can get lucky though.
  8. (Lowest) Soldier: No HP, no firepower. Only the best players can profit from this class.

Target Order when Defending:

• If you are defending an area your highest priority should be to kill the people who are of the greatest threat to you. If you die, you won’t be able to defend anymore. This list is in general, so if a Jedi is near you obviously want to kill him first.
  1. (Highest) Heroes: Projectile does more instant direct HP damage through shields than any other weapon except the lighsaber. Also, since Dekas are a big stationary target it’s almost impossible to miss. You want these guys dead no matter what, even if you have to roll right to them and kill them point blank because they will slowly but surely rape you.

Jedi
Fundamentals when fighting Jedi:

• Everything about the Jedi class is centered around force points (FP). When they block your laser fire, it takes force points. When they use any force, like seeing, jump, and speed they use lots of force points. When you are facing Jedi squarely (head-on) you want to shoot them non-stop; if you stop they will regain forcepoints. Unlike when fighting gunners, not all direct hits have a cumulative effect so you have to keep the pressure on them to get their FP at 0. When they have no FP left, they will be completely defenseless except for their light saber. They won’t even be able to jump.

Defending against Jedi: Jedi have four force powers that have to be considered when attacking, as well as their primary saber attack.

• Countering speed: Speed is the most effective force power a jedi can use against an undisciplined Deka, but when you know how to react to it it becomes their greatest weakness. The two major disadvantages to Jedis when using speed are total defenselessness and a clear distinguishable sound exclusive to Jedis. When a Jedi is using speed, as little as one shot from a Deka will probably kill them instantly no matter where on the body they are hit. When they activate speed, you will hear that unique sound so you know with certainty there is a Jedi nearby. If you don’t see one in your field of vision, you know with certainty that it has to be behind you. When you hear this, you should judge their distance by how loud the sound is. If they are too close, walk somewhere to evade them; don’t try to roll away because it takes too long and while you are folding up you are a sitting Duka. If they are a medium to long distance away, do a 180 and keep walking backwards while shooting; if you are far enough away, they will lose speed too early and have low FP; ripe for the slaughter.
• Countering seeing: When Jedis use seeing, you will hear it like speed. You can easily use this against them. When you hear it, pretend you didn’t notice anything. After a Jedi does seeing, they will usually do one of the following things: Jump up and slash you, if you are near a ledge, use speed and try to slash you from behind, wait for you around a corner, or just walk up to you and slash. If you listen for speed, footsteps, and jump sounds, and be careful going around corners you can get them easily.
• Countering jump: Jump also has a unique sound and if they try to jump up to get you, you will hear it and have time to react. Jedi also try to jump on top of you, so if you see them doing that back up and shoot them out of the sky. They are very vulnerable in the sky since they can’t change the direction they are moving in to dodge you, and they can’t block. If they get directly overtop of you, shoot as far up as you can and back up, so if they land on you they will fall off your front and into the fire.
  
  
  
  
  
• Countering deflects: Deflect is very tough to defend against, and is probably at least tied with saber attacks for the way I get killed by Jedi the most. The worst of it for Dekas is that even if they don’t know what deflect is they still always have a minimum of one point in deflect and it automatically deflects blocked fire. The worst case scenario is that you will have low health and go to attack a Jedi while backing up, and your fire will get deflected back at you with your shield down since you are moving. It will rape you instantly. You could even say that Dekas are so overpowered, they die more by raping themselves than by conscious effort by the rebels. The only way I know to ease the effect of deflect on you is to only move when the Jedi is close to you so that your shield will absorb the fire. When they get close to you you’ll just have to take it.
• Countering saber attacks: This for when they come straight at you, or you can’t otherwise get an advantage against them like when they use force powers. Keep in mind that saber attacks will usually kill you in one hit with shield down, and with shield up and full HP will get you down to 1-4 bars of HP. In other words, surviving a direct close range assault by a Jedi is not likely so you should always just skirmish. By skirmish I mean, if they get near you roll away and shoot them some more from a distance, and keep rolling and shooting so you won’t be vulnerable. If one jedi gets too close, and you don’t think you’ll have time to roll away safely you should backup while shooting him. If more than one attacks, your chances of survival are very low however you can use their group attack against them. When one of them gets near you, walk overtop of him. If you are lucky the other Jedi will kill the one you walked over while trying to slash you. If this happens they will stop to say sorry (indicated by a chat bubble overtop their heads) at which time you can kill them. If this doesn’t happen keep walking over them and shooting at them until you die or they die.

Attack against Jedi:

• When Jedi are totally defenseless:
  • When their force points are at 0.
  • As they are swinging, if they don’t have Q3 defense.
  • When they have their saber off.
    • When they are using speed.
    • When using mind trick.
    • When hacking.
  • When shot from behind.
• Killing Jedi: The best way to take advantage of Deka and firepower 3 is to kill Jedi instantly from behind, so that you don’t have to actually fight them.
• Shooting technique: Remember that FP are the Jedi’s only defense with their saber up so when you shoot them you want every shot to hit them. No matter where on their body that you hit them (except the back), it will go towards reducing their FP.
• How to tell Jedi have 0 FP: When you hear the Jedi pain sounds like, “Ow!” it means they have 0 FP (or they got poisoned, which is almost as bad for them). This is the critical moment while attacking them. When it happens give it all you’ve got to keep landing shots; it will probably only take two or three.

 

[-TS-]

tl;dr

 

[Lessen]

Did you copy-paste this from somewhere or are you just slightly out of the loop? Q3 doesn't exist anymore, except in some of the FAs. Although maybe you just haven't played saberist enough to learn about swingblocking.

 

[Deli Pastrami]

Where is the section on how to make a stuffed rolled meat?

 

[Xelis]

Did someone say meat? Also, tldr

 

[Damn Polak]

you forgot about discharge, energy management and quick deploy

 

[Lessen]

can we talk about power management? What's it good for. The most obvious answer, to me, is that, especially with Firepower 3, it lets you regenerate your shield WHILE keeping your shield up, letting you act as a theoretically infinite bastion against gunners, at the cost of not having as good of an answer to saberists.

But I wonder if there's more to it than that. For instance, does there exist an honestly good strategy that makes use of the ability to convert shield to ammo?

Deka balance and strategies is actually a real interesting topic that doesn't get thought about much on account of people being more likely to just complain about deka existing at all. Discharge makes it quite possibly impossible for a Jedi to kill you head-on, but without safe shield regen or quick deploy to roll away, you're the most vulnerable to sustained gunner fire.

I will say that a big reason fighting a Deka or SBD is frustrating is because it seems extremely difficult to tell what build they have in the heat of battle, and more than any other class, the droids can dramatically change their vulnerabilities by changing builds. I like how variable they are, but I don't like the amount of ambiguity it creates when fighting them. That being said, I've never tried that hard to sit back and analyze an SBD/Deka before fighting them, so it might be my fault. Cort and Mag armors both have visual indicators when the SBD is attacked, meaning that as soon as you realize an attack is ineffective, you can switch tactics. Blast armour doesn't have as much of an indicator, but owning it means the SBD is weaker in other regards, so I don't really mind.

SBD is kind of particularly weakened by good team coordination (as in: shouting out what kind of armor the SBD has as soon as you know), but that degree of coordination doesn't happen except, presumably, in the mythical European 6v6s.

I would like if the Deka's shield changed opacity or even color based on how much is left. I'm not sure if I think the three special abilities ought to have visual indicators or not. Not sure what the indicators would look like, and not sure if I mind having to force a response from a Deka before I know which way it's specialized. I do mind a little.

 

[StarWarsGeek]

Power management is actually my favorite deka ability. I use it all the time unless there's jedi spam in which case I'll pick discharge. I typically play shield proj 3, shield str 2, hull 0, fp 3, adv log 1, power manage.

As you said, ammo to shields with firepower 3 is fantastic and makes it very difficult for you to run out of shield if played carefully. Combo that with shield projector 3, and you can walk around without ever taking your shield down.

Generally the only time it's worth converting shield to ammo is when you're up against jedi and there's no gunners around. Turn your shield off so it regens, and hold down shield-to-ammo while you fire. Lets you put out practically an infinite stream of fire, especially if you tap fire repeatedly instead of holding it down.

Only downsides to this build are that you have no way to kill jedi who jump on your head and ion blobs are even more dangerous because low hull HP. But ions are practically game over for any deka setup anyway, which is why I don't end up playing deka much. Not too fun to play a class that's rendered almost completely useless by a 5pt ability.

 

[Damn Polak]

protip against EMP nades (might work on ion blobs, dunno):
as soon as you see an incoming attack, begin transformation to rolling form
this way you'll be ready for retreat&regen, don't have to take additional shots after getting emp-stunned