GBO2 Byarlant: Full flight at 500-550 cost!

This video contains two recent matches I had with the LV1 and LV2 Byarlant on Gundam Battle Operation 2. It is a 500-550 cost general with full flight ability, great mobility, good melee animations, pretty solid melee damage, great stagger accumulation and pretty solid midrange DPS. It has many weaknesses though, such as poor durability, having a large hitbox, no Forced Injector, only having LV2 Flight System, not having much thrust alongside having nearly no mid range custom slots to work with. This suit used to be pretty strong, but the 500 cost meta has changed so much over time, suits are dealing more damage, have easier access to stagger accumulation, stuff like that. It has now reached the point where it is only really usable by flight experts, and even then another suit would produce better results. I hope that you enjoy watching!

Its primary weapon is an arm beam gun with 367 power, 12% heat, 323 RPM, 13 seconds overheat, 0.5 seconds swap time, 350m range and 25% stagger value. This weapon rapid fires for as long as you hold down the trigger, It can stagger quite quickly on top of dealing good damage.
Its primary melee weapon is a beam saber with 2100 power, 2.5 seconds cooldown, 0.5 seconds swap time and standard modifiers. This has fast swap time but doesn't deal that much damage on its own. The downswing is a long reaching thrust with tons of active frames though, so it is easy to use when attacking from the air.
Its first sub weapon is a double arm beam gun with 1050x2 power, 80% heat, 3 seconds cooldown, 15 seconds overheat, 0.77 seconds swap time, 400m range and 25%x2 stagger value. This has modest power, good heat and long range. It is a reliable stagger tool which you can even overheat safely if you need an immediate stun.
Its second sub weapon is a set of beam sabers with 2500 power, 4 seconds cooldown, 0.77 seconds swap time and standard modifiers. This can deal pretty great damage, but the long cooldown time means that you can only use it once in a triple downswing combo. It has amazing melee animations though, with a neutral swing that can easily hit enemies on the ground alongside a very wide reaching downswing.

At LV2 the Byarlant has 18000 HP, 15 ballistic/beam resist and 24 melee resist. It has decent HP, but its poor ranged defences combined with its large size and lack of mid slots makes it very squishy in reality. It has a 30% damage reduction buffer for the shoulders and 10% for the back, but this shoulder buffer doesn't get hit too often unfortunately. It benefits from having access to LV1 Maneuver Armor and LV1 Emergency Evasion for defensive skills.
In terms of mobility it has 145 (148 including ground affinity) hover speed, 215 boost speed, 75 thrust and 72 (78 including affinity) turning speed. This is good on its own; but while using the touchpad ability LV2 Flight Mode it gets full space movement mechanics, +5 speed, +5 boost speed, -15% thrust usage while boosting and instant stagger resistance (as long as it isn't flying too close to the ground). The downside is that this skill is hard to use effectively in addition to it constantly draining thrust, but even worse, you take 1.3x extra stagger accumulation while flying, which means that weapons that can instantly deal 80% accumulation (such as bazookas) will instantly shoot you down. It also gets access to LV3 Flight Control.

In conclusion, I feel that while the Byarlant isn't totally useless or anything, it is quite underwhelming considering that it demands good flying skills. I feel like it deserves a buff to help it keep up with modern 500-550 cost. I think it should get +1000 HP, 75 thrust, LV3 Flight System, LV2 Forced Injector, 3 seconds dual beam saber cooldown time and 70% single beam saber combo modifier. Again, I wouldn't call the Byarlant a bad suit, its the only full flight mode general at 500-550 cost, so it has somewhat of a niche just from that alone. But it is only really worth playing if you put the time in to get good with the flight mechanics. Thanks for watching, and I hope that you enjoyed it!

Music used:

Daytona USA 2, Slingshot

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