[Unity] Phantom Blade - Kill or Damage? Solved!
SOLVED!
Conclusions are that all of your Damage equipped, on Melee Weapon, Ranged Weapon, and Armor pieces, contributes to Phantom Blade damage. Different Diamond Levels of Guards have different amounts of HP. The player's own Assassin Rank and Diamond Level doesn't seem to matter, but all of their Damage Stats from their sword, gun and bracers together, does matter. We can Quickshot any guard in the game except LV5 Defender and LV5 Brute with the equipment in my vid.
/u/SerHolmes is the one who really did the calculations. He's amazing.
(LONGVID: https://youtu.be/WDd70OfK49g)
I'm not sure if we can exceed the Health Totals of LV5 Brutes and Defenders with stats, but I'm excited to try.
This is incredibly cool, this is really the first time that the Assassin's Creed community has definitive knowledge on what defines whether your Phantom Blade will Kill or only Damage an enemy. I think it's also quite interesting that this mechanic of the Phantom Blade Assassinating some guards and only doing Stealth Damage on other guards is a mechanical precursor to Hidden Blade Assassinating or doing Stealth Damage to guards in AC Origins. This likely means that this was planned for quite a while, but Ubi didn't think it'd be well-received for the Hidden Blade in Unity and Syndicate, so they just let it be for the Phantom Blade instead. For Origins, they judged that the mechanic was finally well-developed enough to attach to our Hidden Blade and build their whole Stealth system around it successfully. Neat stuff.
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OLD POST HERE
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One of my viewers, LegoCobblestone asked:
"How are you insta-killing any guard you quickshot?"
My answer? I have no idea. It wasn't always this way, and I distinctly remember playing AC Unity and having only Gunners be consistently quick-shotted. This is a video of me testing different possible answers and trying to logic it out. If you guys have any other things for us to test, we should try them out and see if we can find some kind of consistent Cause-and-Effect across situations.
It's NOT having a Legendary Bracer equipped.
It's NOT having a high-damage Main Weapon.
It's NOT having a high enough Diamond Level.
It could have something to do with me having beaten the game and Dead Kings.
I can't unequip Skills in Unity, so I don't know what effect they would have on it.
Does anyone have any ideas for where to go from here? Watch the video to see the actual stuff I tested in motion. It's insane. I have zero clue what's causing this. I love it, don't get me wrong, it's a freaking BLAST that I can just tap L1 and cause INSTANT DEATH during my Stealth Reaper runs. It makes everything much less stressful and frustrating, and it's 100% something I'm grateful for. I just have no idea what causes it. Which means I don't know how to cause it in the games of other players. Which I want to do. Everyone should have this power.
Unfortunately the person on The Hidden Blade who knows the most about Unity is you, DAZ. I have a nearly fresh install of Unity, having made it past the Roi des Thunes assassination but not much further. I could confirm that 1-shot doesn't work for me and tell you what Skills I possess. Playing through Unity is not on my near term to do list.
The Leo K Discord server seems to have figured it out.
Conclusions are that all of your Damage equipped, on Melee Weapon, Ranged Weapon, and Armor pieces, contributes to Phantom Blade damage. Different Diamond Levels of Guards have different amounts of HP.
The player's own Assassin Rank and Diamond Level doesn't seem to matter, but all of their Damage Stats from their sword, gun and bracers together, does matter.
We can Quickshot any guard in the game except LV5 Defender and LV5 Brute with the equipment in my vid.
/u/SerHolmes is the one who really did the calculations. He's amazing.
I'm not sure if we can exceed the Health Totals of LV5 Brutes and Defenders with stats, but I'm excited to try.