Oh wow, sentries were basically essential from my memory of playing on PS4. Wonder why they rebalanced.
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In the original release, a handful of abilities were significant power outliers: all the automated abilities like sentries and interceptors, Demolisher Blade for all high-HP or armored targets, and to a lesser extent, Missile Rain. I watched multiple players cruise through all fights on Intense without losing once thanks to these attacks. What’s particularly unfortunate about this is that Demolisher Blade and sentries are both starting abilities for some pilots, so right from the beginning, you’ve got some of the strongest attacks in the game, discouraging experimentation. To compensate, the Switch version weakens sentries considerably, and Demolisher Blade is made ineffective against Gladiator armor, turning these enemies from something of a joke into a real threat.
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The revamped balance is OK but defensive skills all feel pretty worthless now. You can throw a little interceptors or a few anti air missiles at the start of the round I guess
Yeah I think there’s only one skill that does any significant damage to them and that’s the Gen 4 Leg Spike (+ Quad Leg Spike) available on only 3 pilots. I was terrified to go without one of them after encountering these enemies
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On the defensive skills, I ended up using shields a lot especially (which if they were nerfed it wasn’t as dramatic as what they did to sentries). I got tired of perfectly good battles suddenly going terribly wrong due to one of my mechs instantly getting blown up by an attack I either didn’t notice, or had no opportunity to dodge/counter because my whole squad was on cooldown while it was warming up. You can keep unbroken shield cover for the first minute of the battle with only one Gen 4 dedicated to it if you spend most of your meta supers on squadwide EP regain: and then the combinations of shields and ample EP lets the rest of the squad attack recklessly with their strongest skills, so that 1 minute is generally enough to win the battle.
The Guardian skill also starts to be viable in combination with shields. In the case where my EP was close to running out and there was still one strong enemy group left on the field, a clutch Guardian made invincible by a shield is something that sometimes worked to distract it for long enough that it didn’t trash my terminal while my mechs sluggishly recovered.
But in terms of attacks, I didn’t find anything too broken. I just spread my points in abilities with a variety of spreads, ground/air targeting, and armor-piercing so I could handle any situation: a good 2/3rds of the attacks in the game are about equally useful now. The only attack that stands out in my memory as especially OP is Super Large Missile, but that’s a character-specific late-tech-tree skill so it’s fair enough that it would be strong.