Characters - Zippy

Class - Acrobat

Combines acrobatic flips with various status ailments

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Zippy can move 50% faster than most characters. When in the air and Zippy's hitbox is intersecting with an enemy entity's, pressing the circle button causes Zippy to do an acrobatic flip, launching him high in the air, gaining 8 Extreme and reducing the cooldowns of Debilitation and Stun Jab by 5 seconds each

Zippy relies very heavily on his mobility, as his overall damage output is below average. In particular, he has a very high speed and he has a special acrobatic flip that will launch him into the air off of an opponent while gaining Extreme and reducing the cooldowns of his Debilitation and Stun Jab, which he needs to fight up close with his opponent, as despite his good attack speed, most characters can easily match or beat him when it comes to simply trading blows.

Zippy's acrobatic flip is not invincible, but provides him with enough velocity to avoid most attacks, meaning if the opponent is not already attacking, Zippy will likely fly clear of it. Making use of this flip to build Extreme and using Debilitation to secure a safe landing and follow-up attack are useful for playing Zippy. Zippy's air attacks also deal more damage than his ground attacks.

Both Zippy's Debiliation and Stun Jab come out very quickly, easily stunning an opponent to let Zippy get a knife combo in before launching off the opponent again for more Extreme gains and reduction on his stunning abilities. Stun Jab acts similarly to Claire's Throat Jab, dropping enemy defense for 5 seconds, but only suffering an additional 50% damage instead of double damage.

Zippy's Astral Glow Extreme that emits a large blast every 2 seconds over the course of 20 seconds that blinds any enemies in range of it, allowing Zippy to approach from behind to attack while the enemy is lashing out. If Blind is successfully inflicted through Astral Glow, Zippy will also gain 60 frames of invincibility, acting as if a full Perfect Block were triggered.

Zippy builds Extreme very quickly across his knife attacks, stun abilities and acrobatic flips, so this can be available as an additional debuff quite frequently.

Developer's Take:

Zippy plays very differently from most of the cast, relying on acrobatic flips for Extreme building, cooldown reduction and to escape enemy attacks, as well as on inflicting Stun and Blind, which also lead to enemy defense drops and invincibility. Since Astral Glow's invincibility functions like a Perfect Block and Zippy's acrobatic flips give him Extreme, he relies less on Perfect Blocking than the rest of the cast.

Though his playstyle seems all-over-the-place, to use Zippy effectively, he needs some strict timing for a lot of his combat strategy. Acrobatic flips not only need to be timed to decrease cooldowns, but making sure Zippy isn't high up in the sky during his next Astral Glow appearance (and hitting nothing) is wasted invincibility frames, and Zippy's playstyle overall provides him a lot of defensive perks without needing to go on the defensive as much.

Timing the end of Astral Glow's invincibility on inflicting Blind is important, too, as if Debilitation or Stun Jab is timed right, the next Astral Glow will appear as Stun ends for the enemy, resulting in more invincibility frames and them Blinded. Between invincibility frames and Stun, Zippy can prevent a lot of damage to himself, and to an area, as well, but if the timing between abilities, flips and Astral Glow appearances are not focused on, Zippy mostly ends up doing nothing more than a lot of fancy flying about with holes in his defense.

Trivia:

Debilitation was not an ability from past Dragoon games, but a Rare Sulfur Ball from Skylight Freerange 2: Gachduine, making his Debilitation ability the only Dragooned ability to come from a rare optional weapon and not through character-specific customization. This particular Sulfur Ball enhanced Zippy's crowd control build by adding stunlock and more speed, and to help Zippy not be a clone of other speedy characters, this crowd control build was implemented for Dragooned.