'Not A Villain' Webcomic - Bandit's Special starts.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 141

The Bandit's increased speed is like replacing a child with an Olympic runner in a toddler race.

And you finally get to see the incentive I had made from the last update! I re-scripted the middle panels and included outtakes. 😀

Thanks for voting and reading!

23 Comments

… how much lag is there for the new incentive?
It may still be buggy with the update, or maybe I just checked in between server file swaps….

I am anxious for this battle, and hopefully, more answers on how things work!

I think the outtake might’ve been better than the original. It was definitely better than the re-script.

But is he actually blind or is it just an appearance thing and can he detect an opponent through other means? Last time we saw this special at work, it seemed like he was listening to her hp fall.

Well, it drops his perception stat to 0 (or at least it did last time) which should render him blind. He likely had some other means of detecting hp for the other fight. He could see the world in a way similar to how Kayle does, which might let him get around parts of the blindness.

Makes me wonder how a status effect such as ‘blind’ is presented to the user. Do they just see a blurry screen or what?

I’m a bit confused as to why she is trying to dodge the attack instead of simply activating her own special. The last page showed that it takes her (including reaction time) less than a quarter second to do so, which is significantly less time than it would take to move any meaningful distance in trying to dodge Bandit’s attack. And since the game pauses to allow special intros, it isn’t like she has to worry about a delay between activation and the special actually taking effect.

She has already activated her Special. It takes a bit of time to appear, and Bandit has just become extremely fast, so she’s worried about him getting a hit before Nice shows up.

What we know (and Kleya doesn’t) is that he wants to get hit by Nice, so if he tags her at all in this charge, it will likely be for only a few points, or at least not enough to take her out… because Nice hasn’t shown up yet, so if he knocks her out too quickly, he won’t get to find out how it works.

That doesn’t make much sense to me, because every other time anyone has activated a special, the game pauses to play the special’s animation, and it is activated immediately. In her fight against the ‘mage’ girl, there was only a minimal difference in the activation times, but the Nice still appeared before she could do anything.

And just because he wants to get hit with it, doesn’t mean he won’t hit her hard now, and then finish her off with a 5 point hit with the nice around. That way he wins and gets to see the special in action. You are right though, it is some dramatic irony that she doesn’t know he actually wants to get hit with it.

On the page before, it says

Bandit Special
-0:00:11 initiated

NICE Special
-0:00:15 initiated

So Bandit got his special off 11 seconds in (6 seconds after the no-Specials timeout), and Kleya got hers off 4 seconds later. Bandit’s Special does its little intro, then he charges. He can move very fast, so he may hit her within the 4 seconds before NICE starts its intro. It matters here specifically because Bandit’s Special makes him so much faster. “Mage girl” wasn’t fast enough to get her attack in before the NICE special came up.

At least, that’s my interpretation… granted 4 seconds seems too long for the difference between Bandit’s motion and Kleya’s, but .04 seconds (or even 4/60 seconds) doesn’t seem long enough for even Bandit to get over there and hit her before NICE shows up.

I believe those are milliseconds (11/100 of a second) and I also believe that once a special has been activated, the others are cancelled and you have to attempt to activate them again. So, they both motioned to activate the special at roughly the same time but Bandit’s setup routine was faster than Kleya. Once his entire intro is done, Kleya has to re-swish to start her special all over.

We saw that Kleya could activate her special in the time between Danni starting a kick and finishing a kick. I think the question here is can Kleya activate her special between the end of the Bandit’s intro and his attack? It might be possible (we’d have to time how long it takes to swish your hands vs jump out of the way) and if it is, then she probably made a bad decision. But considering that she appears to have some history with the Bandit (which she is starting to realize in the last panel) and the real fear of losing (he only needs two hits and if he gets one before NICE she has definitely lost), she probably went with the more cautious decision of staying alive.

Actually, unless I’m horribly mistaken the times we’ve seen the Nice special effectively insta-activate she was subconsciously hacking the system to make it appear immediately. What we are seeing this time is the normal activation speed of Nice.

What makes you think she was hacking the system? No one seemed suspicious of its activation speed or anything. Danni didn’t seem at all surprised when she was stopped mid kick by its activation.

Well, we have a maximum time (remember that includes reaction time, which for an Olympic sprinter is over half that time (.1 seconds). And don’t forget lag!) for the hand swishing. As for dodging, I recall mythbusters doing some experiments along these lines for dodging a bullet, and came up with taking roughly half a second to physically move your body enough that a bullet aimed at center mass would not hit you. So, that puts her special activation at around 3-4 times faster than a human is physically capable of dodging. Of course, these aren’t real people dodging, so she could be faster, but I’d personally go for the special activation.

Of course, there could be some sort of minimum delay between two specials being activated that we don’t know about, and would explain why getting your special off first is so important. Otherwise the second person would be able to activate theirs before yours can accomplish much of anything.

P.S. Also, she seems to be a bit stressed out there, and is on a time crunch. She could be acting a bit more instinctively than logically, though that seems a bit unlikely for her character.

I remember that Mythbuster episode! I personally thought they could have been faster if they had just dropped 🙂

I never thought she hacked an immediate activation.

Maybe his extra speed allows him to take advantage of that extra 1/8 of a second?

In any event, how does she know his special lets him move that fast? Was that from an older strip? Usually she sees the attribute changes in her ‘hacker-view,’ but there wasn’t anything there about how his special worked.

It’s the same special (or at least appears to be) he used in his last fight against her. It drops all his perception points (or whatever) to make him blind, but in turn boosts his speed to crazy levels.

Personally, if faced with a blind target charging me, I’d jump and stick my legs toward him, he cannot grab the legs blind, and a swing would probably miss and cause him to run at super speed right into a kick. fleeing either direction gives a 50/50 chance that he will choose to angle towards your direction and hit you, and if he misses he still has a guess where you are.

That might not be a good idea. If their last fight has any similarities to this one, then whats probably going to happen next is that the bandit is going to kick at her, like he did in his last fight when he used this special.

However, all he may have to do is stick out his arm and clothesline her, depending on how far she can get away from him. But it looks to me that on this page, that the bandit is either going to miss her narrowly, or clip her.

I think the fact that bandit kicked last time is the strongest indication that he won’t do it this time. He’s smart, and knows his opponent is smart. He knows the same tactics aren’t going to work (or will be less effective) a second time. If he does kick, it’s because he wants her to counter it, but I’m banking on him hoping to hit her hard, then take her out with a second blow while her nice special is up. That, or he’s hoping that the nice special only hits once and so he’ll do a small hit, wait for it to counterattack, then get serious once it goes away.

Bandy sure proved you wrong.

That’s his official new name now. Bandy.

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 141