My Best Kelvin Game to Date!

Battleborn Battleborn Competitive Multiplayer Discussion
#1

I don’t mean with Kills and stuff, I mean with Objectives, Placement, Control Tanking (Me running in circles is not the sign of a disorder), support, and defense against a well organized and formulated team. I decided to post the whole match (with the exception of a break seeing as PSN only lets you save up to 15 minutes at a time) to see all what I did. It may kinda look boring to the average person at times, but if you see the control on the map and pushing minions you can see just how fast I make the quick decisions to go to another location. This was also a premade and we were a rag tag random pickup group (besides my brother), with probably one of the best level 8’s I’ve seen as Alani. Check it out here

Also for Kelvin main’s heres a little knowledge for you possibly. The Heaticlair Kevlar (the Blue Armor piece) secondary effect kicks in as long as you don’t have a shield. So during the times I’d have shield and a high health pool you will see my HP jump up 200+ hp every time I lose my shield. It’s friggin amazing for Kelvin (I prefer it over the epic health/heatlh regen as 200 health is a big jump).

Also the permafrost damage reduction on the right helix choice at level 5 APPLIES THE ENTIRE TIME THAT YOU HAVE A SHIELD! Even if your permafrost goes off, as long as you have some form of shield regeneration thats at least +21 (My Epic one has +26) you will have 30% damage reduction as long as you have a shield active. This means that you can eat ult’s and high burst damage extremely well! Not as effective against lower based damage characters, but still, having 30% damage reduction and a 300 shield can stop alot of heat!

Once again, hope you enjoy.

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#2

I’ve mentioned it before, in your Kelvin build thread, this is a mistake. It’s been tested in a controlled environment, you only get the damage reduction while there are permafrost shields ticking down.

It’s possible that the way it works was changed without any notice by Gearbox, but if you think that’s the case, it needs to be tested again.

#3

You can see it in the video. As long as i had shield after bite i had the damage refuction (shown by the yellow shield up effect) It stayed on as long as my shield was active after biting. I didnt notice at first until i replayed the video and as my shield recharged i still had the effect.

#4

Hmm.

I’ll try testing it again later today. Either something was changed, there’s a graphical error where it’s showing the buff on your screen even when it’s no longer active, or I wasn’t thorough enough with my testing.

If it’s the last one I think it may have come about from not checking the damage to a regenerated shield after permafrost has activated. I checked permafrost damage reduction without a regenerated shield, checked it with one, then got rid of the regenerated shields to check if having a regenerated shield stopped the damage reduction from activating even on permafrost shields. I didn’t check the damage on a regenerated shield again after permafrost had been activated once.

#5

Alright, done another round of testing under the same conditions and the results were… confusing.

So here’s the deal, all the numbers I got when I first tested it were correct. 27 damage from Oscar Mike’s rifle without Blue Ice active, 19 when it was, but 27 on a recharging shield before using a skill once the shield recharge gear had been activated. So I went to the next step.

I let Kelvin’s shield start recharging after I activated permafrost with Blue Ice, and fired multiple times. The first round was 27 damage… but every subsequent round was 19. I let him recharge his shield to full this time and fired, and every round damaged for 19. So I thought, “Well, it seems like Blue Ice triggers whenever Kelvin’s shields are suffering from his continuous -20 recharge rate, but not when they are recharging at a positive rate (but the first damage taken immediately puts him back at -20 recharge). The Blue Ice buff must proc off Kelvin’s shield recharge state being at 0 or lower, which is why it buffed him off a full shield.” I also noticed that there seems to be some sort of timer on it, as Kelvin took health damage for a few hits with the 30% reduction after his shield had been destroyed before it returned to 27 damage.

Anyways this seemed like a pretty solid answer, but I kept plinking away with Mike while using Kelvin’s Chomp to trigger Permafrost and that’s when something weird happened.

Mike’s damage dropped to 13 per round for about 4-5 rounds at a time (I wasn’t firing at full bore) before popping back up to 19.

Near as I can guess, it looks like Blue Ice can be overlapped. This is done by using skills close enough together that Kelvin is still losing shields from the previous skill. Furthermore the damage reduction is a cumulative total and not an immediate total, as 27 drops to 19 (30%) and 19 drops to 13 (30%), rather than 27 dropping to 11 (60%).

In real play it’s probably difficult to put this to any serious use. If the shields from the first Permafrost activation are lost, it just reverts to the normal 30% reduction, which means at best you’ll get that extra damage reduction for the first couple hits.

However, I can confirm that so long as Kelvin’s shields are not recharging, Blue Ice stays in effect. Furthermore there is a buffer on Blue Ice that allows for the damage reduction when he starts taking health damage after losing his shield, as well as when his shields have just begun recharging. Overall definitely worth looking at this helix choice on shield-based builds.

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Full Breakdown of Kelvin's Hidden Shield & Permafrost
#6

Interesting. It makes me wonder if you still can get the 60% damage reduction by having permafrost activate with chomp and sublimate and let the shield start recharging. I might start some testing here myself

#7

I know this post is a month old but I just started playing Kelvin. First off, thanks for all of the research you have done, but I would strongly suggest testing against a character other than Oscar Mike, for reasons that:

  1. His tactical rounds do 50% additional damage, and affect the first 15 rounds of his magazine only (until level 5, if the right helix option is picked all of his rounds are ‘tactical’). This means 19 damage would convert to 28.5 damage (unsure of how rounding works in this game) for the first 15 shots, and turn back into 19 for the latter half. Or, in this case, 19 damage for the first half and then 13 for the latter half.

  2. Oscar Mike’s bullets follow the dropoff damage curve, and if he were at the distance standing near the threshold of regular damage and dropoff damage, your results could be obfuscated (until he takes the right helix choice at level 3, where there is virtually no damage dropoff)

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#8

Good point about the first 15 rounds thing, I’d actually forgotten about his passive. That very likely explains the second damage drop off, it was a surprising coincidence that it aligned with the timing of when I chomped a second time.

As far as damage dropoff is concerned, that wasn’t an issue. These tests were performed at point blank range with neither character moving.

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