Voidray guide - advanced

We previously saw the basics of voidray and the different ways for you to carve your way through victory.

Now voidray is much more about quick thinking and reflexes than other ships. When an opportunity presents itself you want to figure out instantly if you should take it or let it go. Wandering around wondering if you should or shouldn't probably means you shouldn't.

Lane phase is the trickiest part of your game. You get a nice sidelane for yourself, but you're the weakest ship in the game. So you want to find ways to either farm around and outpace your direct foe, to go farm safely without hurting your team much, or straight up win your lane.

You may start warp 2 speed Nova, you get a couple hundreds minerals, then sneakily warp out to come back with some fighting capabilities and eventually help your team pushing enemies back.

\_solofarm\_

Some moments later, you may want to go solofarm. If you think you're the best around here after winning 200 voidray games and that your team doesn't need farm anyways, just don't. You'll only end up being the reason why your team lost.

You'll need some upgrades without which solofarm will be much less efficient:

-Flux Vanes, warp, speed, blink and blink range, 1 shot lasers, nova. Flux Vanes and warp are must-have. You want to get speed and blink upgrades as soon as you can to make it safer for you. Lasers and nova makes it so you kill creep quicker, so they respawn quicker aswell.

When going solofarming you need to be aware of a few things:

-enemies mobility, you need at least +0,1 speed over everyone

-enemy position, if you couldn't locate all enemies for 5 seconds, get out.

-allies needs, you may be the carry, but you want to let your allies farm. Say they finally push after a couple minutes of containment while you were farming, don't go and nova farm between enemy towers... You'll earn contempt of your allies and lose their teamspirit, and when critical situation arises, they'll remember it. Also what do you think is better: a voidray alone with 15 beam, or a voidray with 10 beam and a raven with blackout? Allies can get plenty good stuff for pretty cheap, including ones that'll make your solofarmer life easier such as radar, scan, observer.

-enemy upgrades: radar, scan, observer, blink flux vanes, cloaked wraiths, whatever tool they have to catch you and cancel your warp. The more they have, the more cautious you need to be.

Solofarming is mostly needed when the rest of the fleet has little potential to push/break contains.

\_Battle Voidray\_

The other way to build and play is to upgrade combat stats, and disregard mobility. Getting beam and shields to straight up win fights against the likes of leviathan, carrier while getting some abilities needed for general or specific matchups (nova to farm without interrupting beam damage, cloak against overlord to dodge plagues and contaminates, lasers to have a strong nova against interceptors... detailed matchups in veteran guide).

With this build you want to moonwalk to keep yourself well positionned. The easiest way to do so is to to quickly alternate move orders and stop orders (S key). Move orders gives your ship a course, stop order makes it so your ship acquires the closest target. If your ship is about to leave beam range, it will bounce forward as if this beam were a rope attached to you and your target. There are ways for the enemies to disrupt it, but you also have ways to stay effective despite that.

You won't need blink for a while unless it is necessary to dodge damaging abilities. Warp is a good pick, allows you to move to a fighting lane, and help secure kills or pushes.

In the end, you'll likely end up with a tanky beam build, with possibly the same kill potential, but with well farmed allies aswell.

Unless you're playing on your own (covered in veteran guide), there is no precise upgrade threshold you need to use to be able to start the killing. Watch your allies to pick up opportunities to get involved, and when you storm in, watch enemies with critical abilities and their energy to anticipate what's coming at you and bail out in time.

Another thing, don't force your tank to come and save you. Your dreadnought is twice as important as the enemy one. From missiles to blackout, it can cover so many attacks that would be fatal to you, while you unleash hell on these foes. If you lose it, all the damage that would be absorbed and mitigated by the tank will hit you next times, for the rest of the game.