The tactical suit that Will Anderson used before forming Checking Squad. It is able to generate heat as he cuts through his enemies mercilessly.

Will - Flameblade is an (unsurprisingly) fiery variant of Will Anderson, cooked up as a Neural Sim special. While he does have some attacks of his own, he mostly ends up getting his goons to do all the work for him.

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Attacks and Behaviour

General Info

Will regularly teleports around the arena unless locked into a trigger, gaining brief periods of invulnerability. As well, he'll also generate the "frequency assimilation armor" on his left shoulder while in combat.

This tends to happen around 15-20s after the battle begins. It has an interaction with one of his attacks and serves as a spot for you to whiff shots on, but aside from that, it doesn't seem to do much.

Gun Burst

Will fires shots from his gun before firing one final charged shot. Being hit by the charged shot staggers on hit and also applies a burn DoT at higher difficulty levels. Only the charged shot is remotely threatening, and is pretty easy to evade as long as you keep moving.

Melee Strike

Will attacks you with a series of "slash blasts" (yes that is apparently the actual name for it). Being hit will stagger, and at higher difficulty levels also applies a DoT burn. Will can teleport towards you to get in range for this, but after that he's locked into the attack animation so you can just dodge out of range once and more or less ignore the rest of the followup attacks. While his frequency assimilation armor is active, Will does a larger attack combo. Considering how easy it is to dodge this attack and the fact that he becomes locked into the attack animation, this actually might end up being a desirable outcome.

Goon Squad

No, not that kind of goon.

Will summons two of his Checker Squad buddies to do the hard work for him. Summoned enemies come in two types. I'm pretty sure they have actual names, but I can't be bothered to dig through game menus to find wherever their name is listed and it's not important anyways, so I've taken to just calling them Shooty and Slicey.

Will normally calls out one per summon cast, but at higher difficulties that increases to two. Also at higher difficulties, Will automatically summons a goon when he uses his teleport.

You'll quickly find this out for yourself when playing the fight, but this is the main thing that Will really likes to do instead of actually fighting you. What a slacker.

Shooty

These guys fire ground-targeted attacks that stagger on hit and leave behind a burn zone that deals DoT while you're in its area of effect. Pay attention to where they target so you can apply evasive action accordingly.

Slicey

Sliceys are highly mobile, being able to dash-teleport to you before doing one of two different attacks:

• A ground pound-style attack with an area of effect indicator
• A horizontal slash with both of its arms, having a much smaller range than the first attack

Both of these attacks stagger on hit. Fortunately for you, however, they seem to get a little dizzy after doing their teleport, which means that you get a bit of time to dodge out of the way of either of their attacks.

HP Triggers

Will has three HP triggers, all of which are soft triggers. They all involve summoning members of the Checker Squad, and Will summons more of them at higher difficulty levels.

80% HP

Will summons a row of Shooties that fire ground-targeted attacks in a square pattern that slowly converges towards the center of the map. After firing this barrage, they despawn and the fight continues.

50% HP

Will summons generic mooks in two waves. Both waves must be killed before the fight will advance, and Will is invulnerable during this period. After killing each wave, Will drops U-Energy refills that can be picked up. Note that if you can kill the first four spawned enemies quickly enough, the second wave will spawn in faster, allowing for a small time save.

20% HP

Will summons a wave of Sliceys that swarm towards you to attack once before despawning to resume the fight.

Strategy

Boss HP: 1,156,208

Will specializes in getting as many things on the field as fast as possible. If left unchecked, it can very quickly become quite overwhelming. The solution: just kill him faster. The faster you can push Will to his HP triggers, the less time he has to vomit out mooks to clutter up the arena and generally be annoying.

One side effect of Will both being relatively squishy and having a lot of downtime due to his HP trigger invulnerability phases is that you can use that time to set up a burst damage rotation from a secondary DPS like Cherno - Enigma or Siris - Ksana (yes, even through the 60% Thermal resist; she's just kinda broken like that). You can then sic that burst after his second HP trigger (which also conveniently drops U-Energy pickups) resolves to directly oneshot him and skip the third trigger. How early you can do this will depend on how much burst damage you're able to output, of course, so don't be afraid to limit test a bit.

Team Building

Will has some particularly unique requirements for any potential main DPS pick, needing fast burst to quickly push HP triggers while also having strong mobbing power to chew through the mooks in Will's second HP trigger. This leaves us with two featured DPS picks.

Featured Operative: Lyfe - Infinite Sight

Lyfe's ultimate skill is the key to being able to deal with the second trigger's mook spawns quickly. However, it costs 60 U-Energy at base. Since you probably don't want to take the time to actually generate that much, there's a neat trick you can do to well, not do that.

During the first HP trigger, all those Shootys that Will spawns can be used as targets for your standard skill to trigger the neuronic that reduces the cost of your ultimate for every enemy marked by it. This will greatly reduce the cost of your ultimate skill so that it'll be available to wipe out the mooks spawned by his second HP trigger. Getting the angle right can be a little tricky, and you may need to practice a bit to get your standard skill cast to mark enough enemies for this.

As a less optimal technique, you can also mark the first wave of enemies spawned for the same effect.

Featured Operative: Katya - Dawnwing

Despite not having an elemental advantage, Katya somehow seems to be even more tailor-made to do well against Will. Her standard skill can be used to wipe the mooks spawned by the 50% HP trigger even faster than Lyfe can, and her ultimate ability provides large enough burst damage to skip triggers on its own. A note of warning however - Katya's ult damage comes in two instances: a smaller hit from the ult itself, followed by a burst from the shot fired by active crystals. This is usually the larger damage instance, so make sure that the first hit does not push past the HP trigger threshold, as Will will immediately enter the trigger's invulnerability which means that the second and more damaging hit is wasted.

Supports

More damage is the name of the game here, as Will's squishiness and three HP triggers means that you can keep him animation-locked for most of the fight, reducing the value that CC supports can provide. Mauxir - Shadow Ka also loses value here as her support skill gets basically no uptime between Will's HP triggers. This means that more conventional damage amplifiers like Acacia - Kaguya are the way to go. If you're struggling with this fight however, a healer is of course something worth considering.