[FB] The ZGMF-X56S Impulse Gundam thread: "Shinn.... SHINN!!"

[WindmanV3]

Unit: ZGMF-X56S Impulse Gundam

Pilot: Lunamaria Hawke

Cost: 2000

Durability: 580

Overall height: 17.76 meters

Weight: 63.54 metric tons

From: Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny

(Take all the following move names with a grain of salt, I'll do some research on them, then get back to this. Also, these are BEGINNERS' notes. I won't go in too much detail, but rather giving ideas for people to elaborate on and fix or improve as needed. After all, we are here to learn about this fun new suit, ain't we?)

JP Wiki: http://www4.atwiki.jp/arcgundamexvsfuvo/pages/344.html

*I've tried to make as much heads and tails off of this as I could. So if stuff looks a bit wonky, I've failed to write it down correctly. My apologies in advance.

MOVE LIST:

Force:

About as simple as it gets, but at least they give you some fun tools to work with.

[A] Beam Rifle

Ammo: 5

Damage: 70

Reload time: 4 seconds.

- Simple rifle shot.

[CSa] Reflection Rifle

Charge time: 3 seconds.

Damage: 144 on all hits. *This means the shield, the shot, then the reflected shot.

*You can not change the trajectory of this move. I've tried. It will just home in on the opponent.

[AB]Separation Attack

Ammo: 1

Damage: 7

Reload time: 10 seconds

- Luna Impulse will detach her upper part from her lower part and fire a simple rifle at the opponent. Holding AB will fire a second shot. Looks the same as a regular BR if she fires her main.

*You can cancel this move into 2AC or even 8AC for a potential confirm.

[AC]Mode Change

Holding 4 and pressing AC will change you into "Blast" mode.

Holding 6 and pressing AC will change you into "Sword" mode.

*If you hold 2 while pressing A and C, Impulse will fire off a beam when going into "Blast" mode.

*If you hold 8 while pressing A and C, Impulse will slash at the opponent, knocking them away. The range on this is really small though...

[bC]Sword Leap *Special Melee

Pressing B and C will have Luna Impulse leap forward with her sword, launching the opponent in the air, allowing them to be hittable upon launch. I am pretty sure there's ways to combo off of it or perhaps even into it, but I don't know how to properly do this. More help would be appreciated.

Blast:

Going into "Blast" mode gives Luna Impulse a lovely pair of long green cannons on her back. Those must be J's at least!

[A]Kerberos

Ammo: 2

Damage: 55 on one hit, both shots connecting hits for 110 damage.

Reload time: 9 seconds

- Luna Impulse will fire a wide beam at the opponent, causing a knockdown. Comes out pretty fast too. This move fires off two beams.

[CSa]Kerberos: Gerobi

Damage: 209 if you fire it straight, if you manage to hit with both beams evenly, it goes up to 220...or so the Wiki says.

Charge time: 4 seconds

- A gerobi that's pretty bendable without problems. Stays active for about... 3 seconds, at the max. What else can I say...? It's a gerobi... It does good damage, it bends easy.... The charge is decent too.

{B}Missile Launcher

Ammo: 16

Damage: 49

Reload time: 18 seconds

- Take notice when shooting. If you're too close, you'll miss. If you're too far, it's easy to avoid. I personally dislike wasting my shots on this which I could be using her BC, but heck...

[2B] Stun Javelin *Special projectile

- Luna Impulse will hurl an electric grenade-missile straight at the opponent, stunning them on contact. This move does 40 damage by itself, and boost-cancelling this move into another 2B WILL knock the enemy down, but consumes a LOT of boost. I'd say, stick with a confirm into a knockdown, or if you are close enough, do an 8AC to change into "Sword" mode, hit them with the 8AC, then just do 5BBB. I've found this works out.

[AB]Rifle Shot

Ammo: 2

Damage: 100

Reload time: 10 seconds

- Luna Impulse will fire a pretty fast projectile which knocks down. Simple enough, I guess?

[bC]Scatter Shots

Ammo: 16

Damage: Varies.

Reload time: 18 seconds

- Impulse will fire 8 shots scattered, but aimed for the opponent. This shares ammo with your B button, so if you used B any time at all, it will get subtracted from your ammo that you might want to use for AC.

This is another strange case... If you are too close to your opponent, the shots will more likely than not just fly over your opponent, and if you got a good distance and fire from anything but optimal angle, not all shots will connect, hence, why I use "varies" for the damage output. Sometimes a great amount of shots will connect, and sometimes, they may not. Like with regular B in "Blast" mode, I am guessing angle and distance are the factors that come into play when you fire this move.

[AC] You force my "Force" mode

- Pressing AC will change Luna Impulse back into "Force" mode.

[6AC] Cutting Edge Technology!!

- Pressing 6AC will change Luna into "Sword" mode.

*You can actually dash out of the animation and still transform into the mode you input. This also applies going from "Blast" into "Force." Or from "Force" to "Blast", or "Force" to "Sword". And yes, even "Sword" to "Force".

Sword:

Going into "Sword" mode gives Luna a dual-sided beam saber to swing with. You could poke an eye (or possibly something else) out with those.

[A] Boomerangs!

Ammo: 1

Damage: 80 *On all hits, otherwise, 44 on not all hits. Taking this from the Wiki here

Reload: 1.5 seconds *As soon as the boomerang has returned to Luna Impulse.

- Luna will convert her weapon into a boomerang and fling it at the opponent, stunning them. As with most boomerangs, you can change it's return-trajectory by dashing in another direction, as it will follow L.Impulse back.

How can you hate this move, honestly? It's fast, it's fun, it's good. It's range is not that bad either....for a 2K. It goes goes a bit further than Lacus, a slight bit less far than Shinn Impulse, and cries herself to sleep when she thinks about Athruns' Boomerang.

[AB]Beam Rifle

Ammo: 3

Damage: 1 shot=60, 2 shots=102, 3 shots=126

Reload: 5 seconds for one shot

- A beam rifle that, when just held down, fires three shot which basically acts as a simple Zunda. When you decide to not hold down the button, only one shot will come out. If you hold it a slight bit longer after the first shot, two shots will come out. The homing on this is kind of poor, so you want to make sure you did hit the opponent with SOMETHING.

[bC] SHINN-RYUKEN! *Special Melee

- Pressing BC will have Luna Impulse charge the opponent, and then proceed to give them a.... well, an uppercut. Does 101 damage by itself on all hits, and can be combo'd into and also from.

Most likely also able to combo off of, but I haven't found anything yet.

*Pressing 8B will slam the opponent down into a groundbounce, allowing for a combo after if you didn't have too many hits in the combo. Mind your height though. Pressing 8B will often just slam the opponent to the ground.

[AC] You force my "Force" mode

- Pressing AC will change Luna Impulse back into "Force" mode.

[4AC] Let's have a BLAST!

- This, of course, changes Luna into "Blast" mode.

[ABC] It is my Destiny!! ...To shoot you so you explode and help me out.

- Luna Impulse will fire off Destiny Gundam towards the opponent. If you shoot it any time when it's out, it BLOWS UP!

Damage and other stuff currently unknown, haven't bothered to check that yet.

The game plan:

~Work in progress~

Things to keep in mind:

Ammo used while in a different form WILL refill while being changed into another form. For example, if I used up my beam rifle shots in "Force" mode, and I switch to "Blast" or "Sword" mode, my BR shots will still continue to refill despite me not being in "Force" mode. If a situation calls for you to change modes, don't hesitate. Your ammo will refill in due time.

Pressing either 2 or 8 plus A and C in different modes is another thing to keep in mind. Say, I am in "Blast" mode, but I want to switch to "Sword" mode, because I baited a melee situation. You can press 8AC and get the sword strike out. Same goes for wanting to switch from "Sword" to "Blast" because you baited the opponent into charging straight at you. Pressing 2AC while in "Sword" mode will have Luna Impulse fire Kerberos.}

And of course, in "Force" mode, pressing 2AC or 8AC will do their respective thing. This is good to know if you don't want to sit through the animation of changing, and actually get some offense going.

~More to come~

[WindmanV3]

(I might accidentally overlook a thing or two here. Either due to my own oversight... And the fact that Shinn and Luna have different cancel routes, hence, the lack of some things you can do as Shinn, but not as Luna.)

Cancel Routes: Force Mode

• A > AB
  A > 3AC/9AC
  A > 6AC
  CSa > AB
  CSa > 4AC/6AC
  CSa > 2AC/8AC
  AB > 2AC/8AC, 4AC and 6AC also works
  
  

Cancel Routes: Blast Mode

• A > AB
  A > AC
  A > 6AC
  AB > AC
  AB > 9AC
  BC > AC/6AC
  BC > 2AC/8AC

Cancel Routes: Sword Mode

There...don't appear to be any cancels for anything she has in this mode. Unless I am doing something wrong.

[WindmanV3]

The difference between Shinn Impulse and Luna Impulse.

The big one. Probably good to write this down as well.

First things first, the most important thing is that you're playing a semi-watered down version of Shinns' Impulse. This means there are some things you can do as regular Impulse, but not as Luna. I'll refer to them by their pilot names from this point.

• First off, Shinn is a 2.5k. Luna is a 2k.
  
  
  Next to the cost, there's also a difference in health.
  
  
  • Shinn has 620. Luna has 580.
    
    
    There's a difference in ammo and charge times as well.
    
    
    • Shinn Force mode BR holds 8 ammo. Luna's holds 5.
      Shinns' CSa in Force mode takes 2 seconds to charge. Luna's takes 4.
      In Blast mode, Shinn gets 24 missiles. Luna gets 16.

And of course, another REALLY important thing!

Luna has less boost to use due to her lower cost

It's nice that you have a 2k version of regular Impulse, but not without it's fair share of ups and downs. I've been able to get a total of 6 dashes ending in Overheat.

Shinn has the ability to cancel his Force mode AB into BC. Luna cannot. *You can do a boost-cancel to make it work, but it costs almost all your boost, and thus, is not recommended.

What this means is that some cancels you can do as Shinn will not work when using Luna. I'll make sure to update this as soon as I find out more.

[Lucalibur]

Oh god please, just use the standard black colors. No need to get fancy and hurt everyone's eyes with rainbow descriptions.

As far the Gundam itself goes, it seems each mode is rather simple and one dimensional, but I think that is a pretty nice thing in comparison to all of the other over the top playable suits. Plus I love the pilot.

[WindmanV3]

Oh god please, just use the standard black colors. No need to get fancy and hurt everyone's eyes with rainbow descriptions.

I originally used those to make things look a bit more sorted out...

But yeah, each of the modes have a pretty common purpose to it, but in the end, it comes down to using each mode to it's fullest in a situation.

[altairdooder]

(Take all the following move names with a grain of salt, I'll do some research on them, then get back to this.)

Here let me help you with that.

[WindmanV3]

Quick update:

I haven't found enough videos' of Luna Impulse yet to add it to the thread.

And another thing for a quick reference: I've gone and tested what cancel routes Luna has.

I've found that EVERY current known cancel route with Shinn works with Luna, the only exception being AB > BC in "Force" mode.

If I find anything else or there's some combo's I can note down, those will follow in due time.

[Sabator]

Luna also can't do force CSa to bc. What hurts her the most is the lower boost and shittier swiveling, imo. But IMO she's more reliant on AC cancels than Shinn, and by playing a lot of Luna and getting better with the AC cancels, I can take that back and also improve my play with Shinn, where I used to rely on force bc and CSa cancels way too much. I think Luna is way less capable of "gimmicking" people than Shinn and playing her will improve your Shinn play quite a bit. When a 3k is rushing you down, you'd be surprised how much AB 2AC will actually save you from many standard approaches (master's whip step melee, V2AB with point blank main etc). With Shinn I used to get too caught up with doing all his cancels and using too much boost, and although I'd have learned to play him properly eventually, I feel like playing lots of Luna and then taking that experience back to Shinn made me a much stronger player with both units.

From the preview video I thought this suit would be way stronger than it is, I don't think it's necessarily "bad" but rather 2k cost is already full of dumb shit like Kshatriya and Zeong so it can't really threaten the top tier. I think Assault burst is core on Luna because the only thing that hasn't been nerfed from Shinn is the Sword mode. The boomerangs are absolutely fucking amazing in this cost tier and the melee priority will beat or trade with practically anything in the game. What I can't decide on is whether to burst twice or not, I kind of feel like you almost need to secure damage with 2 half-bursts in sword mode to keep up in the damage race, but positioning yourself and setting this up can be pretty difficult, especially against opponents that know you like to half-burst. I also kind of feel that due to her defensive strengths with bc runaway and ab, she doesn't really need a defensive full burst against all but the most aggressive 3ks (remove turn A from the game please)

Another thing to note is that blast gerobi is still really strong for this cost tier, and I know other people like to use it a lot, but personally I think Luna is for close range support play and should retain Blast mode for ammo rotation with force BR. And even when doing that, NEVER leave yourself with 0 blast main ammo unless you feel very, very safe. Like I said earlier, AB 2AC is her core defensive tool and more than once I've tried to use it only to hear that dreaded empty click.

[WindmanV3]

Disregard my whole list that I posted here before. I took the liberty and checked the Wiki to reflect my findings with the actual numbers, which can be found here: http://www4.atwiki.jp/arcgundamexvsfuvo/pages/344.html

Originally I checked all these numbers by myself, without a clock at my side. This lead to my reload times being a second too quick or too slow from the actual time. My apologies for that.

I was a bit too excited to dig into the details of this suit and I forgot to take proper care of making sure to check frequently if my findings held up or not. Once again, my apologies.

Thirdly, I have tried to update the info from the Wiki into the move list as accurately as possible, but my skills of understanding Japanese are ZERO, which means I had to use the web translator to get most of this stuff for you, which may lead to some newly added info being a bit oddly translated.

I do hope this clears up some miscalculations and give you a more accurate look on what the reload times are as well as info regarding those. I'll add more to that later.

[akai_GO]

So over the past week or so I've put kinda an embarassing amount of time into comparing Luna's Impulse and Strike Gundam (considering how much I loathe Gundam SEED) trying to decide if it's worth the purchase.

 

The 2500 Impulse I'll certainly admit is better than Strike. On paper, Luna's Impulse and Strike are very similar, with Strike having a couple of things better and Luna having a couple of things better. But more importantly, after messing around on 2500 Impulse and watching some videos, I think the two play really differently despite their similarities.

 

Impulse seems to use Blast mode very little compared to how much time Strike tends to spend in Launcher. Maybe this is because Strike's Main is slightly faster reload and Force Impulse (which players tend to spend a lot of time in) is much better than Aile Strike. But also, I see players that spend a decent portion of the match going around in Sword Impulse, whereas I almost never see Sword Strike happen until someone is right on top of an opponent or vice-versa.

 

In brief, Strike seems to play the back support role more - staying mostly in Launcher supplemented with Aile and IWSP when available - while Impulse seems to play more forward in the field in Force and Sword. Now, for a 2500 cost suit I think that's ok. But I wonder if it's not risky for the 2000 cost version.

 

Thoughts? Whose our primary Impulse players? We have one or two I think...

[Sabator]

The tradeoff is pretty simple. 2k Impulse gets to be good all the time, whereas Strike gets to be bad 80% of the time and absolutely amazing for the remaining 20%. It depends on playstyle. If you like playing conservatively and then going in and making big plays with IWSP, you'll prefer Strike. Luna plays a much more active and close range role in pinning the enemy down. The main thing both units have in common is that they both like to go full HAM in sword mode when they burst, although Luna is somewhat better at it.

 

Overall it's definitely worth the cost. Luna Impulse is only an average unit, but Strike is one of the worst in the game and it isn't really a contest for me.

[akai_GO]

Related question: are you of the opinion that Luna Impulse is a 2k worth learning, or is one just better off learning the stronger 2500 cost Shinn version?

 

 

Also, for anyone that currently owns her, if you'd like to fill in some of the combo damage values for her since I don't currently own her, it would be greatly appreciated

 

http://www.dustloop.com/wiki/index.php?title=Impulse_Gundam_(Luna)_(EXVSFB)

[Sabator]

Luna and Shinn are practically the same unit, so learning one is to learn both. Luna just loses some cancels.

[brett_]

They're pretty important cancels though - you definitely cant really play YOLO like you can with Impulse.

[Sabator]

Luna can still do 5ac > ab cancel, so she can practically insta partsplit from any mode that isnt force, which coupled with her general sword form unnerfed-ness means she spends a fair amount more time in sword mode, or at least that's how I play her. It feels like Shinn "defaults" to force mode whereas Luna switches modes a lot more often, partly to rotate ammo and partly to get access to that 5ac > ab cancel. Whereas Shinn is a lot happier to simply fly around in Force mode and poke with csA and hop around and stuff knowing that he has sub cancel to bail him out of any gross scenarios.

[akai_GO]

Luna can still do 5ac > ab cancel, so she can practically insta partsplit from any mode that isnt force, which coupled with her general sword form unnerfed-ness means she spends a fair amount more time in sword mode, or at least that's how I play her. It feels like Shinn "defaults" to force mode whereas Luna switches modes a lot more often, partly to rotate ammo and partly to get access to that 5ac > ab cancel. Whereas Shinn is a lot happier to simply fly around in Force mode and poke with csA and hop around and stuff knowing that he has sub cancel to bail him out of any gross scenarios.

 

Well it's not a →Sub cancel route that she loses, it's the Sub/CSa→BC routes that she loses; she can still do the A/CSa→Sub routes too. So the insta-split Sub is just as available as Shinn's version, but what you lose is Shinn's ability to BC-quick hop out of those two moves if you're caught vulnerable in them, right? Besides Sub→BC just in general being a strong cut-resistant and mobile movement path?

[crimsonstardust]

I might be wrong about this but I think CSA charges slower for Luna, cause when I use Shin Impulse it seems to charge faster (though I dunno how essential this is to either versions)

[akai_GO]

I might be wrong about this but I think CSA charges slower for Luna, cause when I use Shin Impulse it seems to charge faster (though I dunno how essential this is to either versions)

 

Yes, 1.5s for Shinn, 3s for Luna.

 

Her a number of other attacks Luna has a 1s longer reload rate.