The Missed Potential Of Spray Shooters In Splatoon 3 

I will say this. I'm absolutely completely baffled that Nova doesn't have reverse bloom (as in, gets more accurate as it fires for longer). It would be interesting for extended, longer fights and would make for an interesting literal running gun style. I know that's partially what Squeezer is but you can see the night and day difference between the two weapons.

Alt. title idea: "I want to work as a Splatoon Dev, here's why"

0:33 a little detail some people dont notice is that in the lunchbox where you get the splattershot jr, you can also see the banner that you have at the beggining!

3:11 Cat memes are objectively the best way to express things like this, change my mind

I feel it's odd that Sploosh wasn't mentioned at all. I guess this video was just about the problems with Spray shooter balance changes, and Sploosh is the only one that doesn't have issues on that front? Either way, it's always cool to Chara's alternate weapon identity/balance ideas.

I'm just really glad they never put Sheldon's Maze on any of these weapons, that would've easily killed the game.

It reminds me of Zaps balance history, its last few buffs have made it more similar and in some areas identical to the other two support frontline shooters and its so sad, zap seriously just feels like a 3rd and 4th splash kit atp with marginal differences

Aerospray is based on real life tools called airbrushes, and an important part of their function is adjusting the nozzle to get a different spread angle. If I changed aerospray, I would take inspiration from that and make it so jumping increases the accuracy, like the inverse of s-blast.

The one idea i had for nova was making the damage go from 24 to 25 Making a very slim 4 shot, but youll most likely still kill in 5 o 6 Plus it would one of few weapons to deal exactly 100 damage

Aerospray is an Ammo Knights brand weapon. The other Ammo Knights weapons - Dynamo, Bamboo, and Nautilus - have properties so wildly different from their respective classes that they're hardly worth comparing. Aerospray needs something like that. I can imagine a few unique mechanics that could distinguish Aerospray from other shooters. Hitting an opponent can apply some sort of negative effect, such as marking them, disabling their gear abilities, draining their special gauge, or draining their ink tank. Hitting allies can slightly recover their HP. It can activate a unique firing mode by jumping, with boosted damage and accuracy but reduced paint. These are just a few ideas off the top of my head.

I would love a Nova that gets buffed the longer it fires continuously, better rng, faster strafe, etc. WAYY cooler.

Aerospray being talked about somewhat positively in concept was not on my bingo card ngl I love playing this dumb lil weapon

Regardless of how I feel about Nzap (never been a fan since S2), it does have a slightly more supportive stat spread that manages to make it slightly more distinct from Splattershot. It kinda makes me sad that comparatively something like Aerospray, having something unique in terms of the super high fire rate, is just becoming basically Jr kits 3 and 4. And it feels like we've been here before too, remember S1 Splash-o-matic?

AEROSPRAY MENTIONED WE WON AEROBROS

I miss burst bomb with areospray, it encouraged it to take more fights instead of standing back the whole game

WHAT I thought to this DAY that Nova doesn't get worse RNG?! Please tell me im not the only one

I agree that Aerospray could be a cool idea, where you can get 5 shots in a row for a kill. Like that would be super satisfying, BUT it is just special spam now and playing against 4 OF THEM in ZONES is not fun at all when you are getting a Booyah Bomb or Reefslider every 10 seconds

I've played Aerospray since 2, have like 750ish hours with just that weapon and gotta say... yea kinda sad the state it's in right now. There just isn't a good reason for it to exist when jr. is right there. All it can really do is spam its special and stay alive with movement and while I do love playing the weapon I wish it had something more. Thank you for shedding a bit of light onto this instead of just saying "woah Aerospray bad who cares about it" like so many other people do (the weapon is bad but I care about it so much).

I am so glad I'm not the only one that has a problem with all the special spam and sub spam of Aerospray and Jr! As a Jr main in S2 I played a very hyper aggressive Jr where I pushed up with either armor or storm.. I miss being able to do that, I hate that Jr was reduced to a torp and Splat Bomb spammer..

What about Sploosh?

I just want my Aerospray PG Burst Kraken back from Splatoon 1 man...

8:00 Nova does actually have the least amount of bloom in the shooter class (besides splash obviously), the problem is just that it's base accuracy in that state isnt reliable. (it starts at 90% then quickly goes down to 75% accuracy after 5 shots, which isnt awful but isnt great)

Hey, this is a video suggestion. As someone who doesn’t play splatoon competitively, I play on and off a lot. When I play, I usually play more of the unique weapons like splatana, roller, or charger. Because of this, the shooters are my least favorite weapon class. They all just feel so similar to each other. Can we get a video explaining the differences between the shooters, I don’t get why they aren’t all just the same gun. It’s the equivalent of realistic shooters having 15 of roughly the same gun.

I mained & 5* both NZap kits glad to see it stands out by being the poster weapon for brand new specials in S3 than in S1 & 2 just being a better clone of other shooter kits. Gold aerospray is just a reference kit to NZap 89 kit in S1, imo.

One thing I’ve always wanted for aerospray is splash rng when jumping. I’m sure it’ll never happen, but I can hope.

NOVA MENTION LETS GOOOO

Remember when Chara made a hypothetical Jet Squelcher kit that had Zipcaster as the special? What if they did that for Nova? They would have to give it better accuracy of some kind and buff it in other ways I don't even know where to start. I'm just trying to create a replacement for Splash + Zipcaster that they didn't give us. Nogami clearly doesn't want it because god forbid every special is available to the Shooters and is fun.

Oh, Aero mentioned. My guilty pleasure gun. And for once, I agree with Chara, the potential of spreadfires is wasted. It's a 5-shot at 4-frame fire rate, while Jr is a 4-shot at 5-frame fire rate, so they are pretty much the same in terms of firepower. I don't think it needs any more, it shouldn't be really good at fighting because being an active but evasive gun is in its blood. I would, though, give it a couple unusual accuracy buffs- faster accuracy recovery that guns like SShot and .52 got, so it can be active without tanking its fighting, and bring back accuracy that doesn't change when jumping from Splatoon 1, which would have some fun connotations with the accuracy system of later games. Just these two would make it a lot more engaging of a weapon, it's still weak but you have ways to mitigate that weakness. All these Aero inking "buffs" in the video were actually un-nerfs from that one time when Baller was everywhere for a couple weeks and Nogami subsequentially decided to nuke Aero (on top of nerfing Baller in the same patch). Right now, it finally is where it was back on release of Splatoon 2. Aside from some shared buffs with other shooters like the framedata- which it admittedly got in the strongest quality, but for some reason so did Jr. Jr having shoddy framedata with Aero getting to dance with just the Sploosh could've been such a great way to differentiate the two. In general, it's really stupid how Aero only gets two kinds of buffs- "reluctant nerf reversions" and "Jr got those so Aero gets them too". But then Jr gets buffs on top that Aero doesn't get. Like, okay, I get it, they gave Jr the big tank to make it uniquely good at kitspam, it differentiates it from every other shooter and not just from Aero. But I had a minor aneurysm when I read the patch notes about Jr getting the strafe speed buff. Aero wanted that buff for YEARS, to focus on the one thing it definitively has over Jr- its mobility. But no, instead of Jr being the kit gun and Aero being the mobility gun, they want Jr to be paint gun and Aero to be paint gun but worse. The fun part is that the only thing Jr needs to do what it does is its big tank, the rest can be dragged down to bare minimum- no framedata buffs, average efficiency (that gets naturally bolstered by big tank), 26 damage with no extra multipliers, etc, none of these would make it worse but all of these would make it feel different from Aero. Kits-wise, I'd say prior to 3 Aero actually had great kit design- from "go get me before I zook you" S1 MG, to both PGs with their bursts and panic buttons enabling Carbon-like aggro but with supportive merit, to S2 MG being the king of hard zoning, to even S1 RG that was a nasty pick for TC. Every one of these, even S2 RG that I skipped, had one common tread in their playstyle- present yourself as a threat, evade them, lure into your own turf, take them out at the advantage you've created. A fast, but inherently defensive gun. S3 started Aero off with Fizzy, probably the most perfect sub for it, giving zoning, chip and mobility in one slot, and then... Reefslider, probably the least fitting special that a weapon that can't overextend can get, showing zero understanding. And RG, completely and utterly worthless, 100% outclassed by Neo Splash. What were they thinking. Probably "we should make people not play Aero and pick some of the fun new weapons we've introduced". And then go back on it and make slider a weapon-defining special (D-Flux still does it better). At the end of the day, there's one thing preventing spreadfires from being worth anything- ruthless powercreep. In Splatoon 1, Aero was a genuinely good main weapon, because shooters other than it (and H3) were weaker across the board, it could actually get splats and its only peer in terms of raw ink output was Mini. In the beginning of 2, it was below par, but it could compensate with kits, not even necessarily good ones- just good enough that using a bit more of them through better efficiency and paint matters. By the time it became functional again after Baller-era nerfs, we were well into MPU meta that it could not handle. PG would've been very meta on release, but it barely made a blip in S2 endgame that got so wack that it managed to push out even monsters like KPro and Fizzer out. In S3, it's the same as it ever was, in a game where even its paint output is not that special anymore as most newcomers have big paint (and it comes with half of a kit out of two). At this point, even buffing it to be busted won't do much good, because why pick a weapon that has strong qualities but pays for them in weaknesses when you can just pick a weapon that has strong qualities and no weaknesses?

I really think it’d be cool to make it where Aerospray gets better range and a much tighter spread while jumping, since it has “Aero” in the name. The tight spread would slightly hinder its paint and being airborne is inherently a risky position to take, but the more reliable shots and longer poking range would be cool. As for Nova, I’d probably say something like having, say, every second or so of continuous firing would fire bigger and stronger shot, like some kind of rapid blast into a charge shot. It’d make it feel like some cartoon ray gun and would improve its fighting capability by having greater size and damage, at the cost of taking a small chunk of your ink for every big shot. It could even have little ink rings around the big shot to make it look like a planet. And for clarification’s sake, this does not make it a semi-automatic, no mashing is required. You just hold the button like any other shooter, but it fires a big shot on a cycle alongside its regular fire.

Zap 🤝 splash until splatoon 2 Jr 🤝 aerospray today : Be the same weapon with a different kit

I have always thought that nova could have the opposite mechanic of others shooter by make the spread tighter the more you shoot but idk if that’s a good idea

2:07, this is a bit anecdotal but when introducing my friends to splatoon when they played previous team shooters, a difficulty curve that was expressed that the straffing speed did feel too sluggish (especially considering limited gear early game)

I wonder what could happen if Sprays were a unique class but with mechanics similar to shooters, like what happened with Brushers who until the release of Splatoon 3 were considered Rollers.

I wonder why Sploosh-o-matic wasn‘t mentioned? Is it not considered a Spray Shooter by competitive players?

I’m an Aerospray main and I haven’t minded the painting buffs since that’s the weapons big strength (outside of that random 3% one they did relatively recently. No idea what that’s about) I play aero as a skirmisher and I think it’s first kit works really well for that, sub helps it fight and poke and special has its uses with the weapon. Has a fizzy slider combo which is cool. Can’t say the same for RG though. I do think I’d like the changes you suggested for spray. I also think it just needs burst bomb again. The synergy it has with spray is amazing. I do see where you’re coming from with the fact that it’s slowly turning into jr, but I think that isn’t hard to fix and the changes you said would help. (Also you are right, hitting the 5 shots with the weapon feels so satisfying lol) Anyway that’s my thoughts on it as an Aerospray main

I’ve fought several teams, EXCLUSIVELY gold aerospray. That’s a level of war trauma that not even Cuttlefish could comprehend

I luv my custom Jr. Its unfortunate that wave breaker is in such a tough spot rn.

2:35 I main splatter shot jr in everything he's saying is actually right for both sides I don't really like the buffs that the weapon got but I'm also appreciate it because I kind of need it for having a beginner weapon against zooka per se

I'm still annoyed about Nova being bad, but I still play the weapon unironically with the gambit strat.

One small thing to note: Aerospray's ink consumption buff was just reverting another S2 era nerf and restoring it back to its original stat that it was when it was released all the way back in S1.

I think that Aerospray should get the dual squelcher treatment. That would solve pretty much every issue it has. Nova is also simple to fix. Just make it so it gets more accurate as it shoots continuously.

I like how you put in funny cat memes in this video

I think it's funny that the starter weapon is being buffed in a way to make it better at top level but the Aerospray is exclusively treated (both by the player base and devs) as a turf war only weapon. I really hope Aerospray can get a proper identity, hopefully something between Sploosh and N-Zap that plays forward in order to get paint control but is good enough at fighting to actually pressure with good skill

I feel like they kept buffing Aerospray paint hoping it'd eventually compete with TW reeflux, but they don't understand reeflux is required in TW because it has a global range painting special it can fire off while pixel painting the base. Which is a required role because all the maps are hallways.

I love Jr simply because of that bigger ink tank. In fact it's the only one of the spray style shooters I love BECAUSE of the bigger ink supply. Nova feels like a worse NZap or splattershot to me and whilst I don't mind using Aero from time to time, it really does feel like a cheap imitation of Jr sometimes.

I wish Nova was made a lightweight with worse paint and ink efficiency. I feel like it would promote Nova as being something used to support the team with damage and paint and is one that can quickly relocate around the map depending on the situation. It probably needs additional balancing but at least it's the start of an identity we haven't really seen from other midline shooters

i don't know why specifically this video, but hearing your voice made me smile all goofy-like, thanks chara :] /gen

You forgot the other big Aerospray play: feeding.

Huge fan of the Splattershot Jr, but I personally hate the competitive modes. I almost exclusively play turf war, and am very happy when splatfests roll around so that I can get a glimpse of what competitive turf war would be! I like having the ability to play the objective really well if I perform well, and that's what SSJr does for me in turf war. I enjoy the current state it's in, but know firsthand that it feels very bad in the proper competitive modes.

As someone whose been an Aerospray Main since I finally started playing Splatoon back in 2 I absolutely agree that this weapon could be so much cooler if it was given changes that were actually cool or interesting. Aerospray has potential to be a really cool support weapon I think but Nintendo just keeps buffing things that either aren't much of a problem or things that the weapon was already good at. Why are you giving me a paint buff, that's what I'm good at! TRY SOMETHING ELSE!!! I really like the ideas you suggested here. A faster fire rate would be awesome and as someone who actually likes to pick fights with this weapon I'd massively appreciate it. Anything that pushes Aero away from a special spam playstyle is a win in my book. People tend to say Aero is an unhealthy weapon a lot and while I get what they mean I disagree. Maybe it is right now but Aero at its core is not unhealthy. RG in particularly is STUPID unhealthy because of the kit! Sprinkler booyah... very cool Nintendo. MG however, besides Slider cheese I guess is perfectly fine and I love using it because the kit lets me play Aerospray in a cool way. Aerospray really does have potential to be super cool and awesome and it genuinely frustrates me how much its reputation has been dragged through the dirt over the years. My hope for Splatoon 4 is that Aero gets something new that will help it not only become a bit more viable but also push it away from the special spam playstyle. Whether it be something less extreme like the changes presented in this video, or maybe something more out there like a new exclusive mechanic like a double jump or wavedash. Just spit ballin here but I think giving Aero an extra movement option would give a lot more incentive to play it. Just balance it properly yeah? I know a double jump in particular could cause trouble but the idea is worth exploring me thinks. Anyhoo those are my thoughts. I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks Aerospray can be really cool if handled properly. It just needs a bit of love and care to flourish. Just like all weapons do.

Nova makes the second weapon weapon Nintendo straight up lied about.

I wish nova got more expanded upon, because as a main weapon I honestly enjoy it a lot. It has a cool niche of being a midline paint bot, with the vanilla kit being great at constant location. It's honestly a playstyle I enjoy a lot and I wish the weapons stats didn't feel so undercooked.

aerospray was the first weapons i really liked and i wish it had some of these changes especially the kit i barely play it anymore and id love something that would allow me to play more aggressive since i already do that with aero

I think it would be cool if Aerospray had better initial accuracy but exponentially scaling accuracy falloff; it loses 1% accuracy per shot plus 0.5% per shot per shot. This would give it the sort of initial splatting power it would need to be unique from Jr., while keeping it inaccurate in the long term.

i remember when Nova came out and i expressed disappointment in the fact that it didn't feel like it had any solid identity. Reddit thought that was an idiotic take for some reason.

Aero is sad to me since I feel like this could be an insanely cool idea for a weapon. I feel like reverse jump rng for it would be an insanely cool idea. And Nova I feel is a mod playground of a weapon (by that I mean I feel like it’s so flawed that it might as well become a completely different weapon). I did a weird rework that makes it more like jet squelcher in a way since anchor shooters seem kind of lacking imo aside from jet

I'm pretty sure Aerospray mg WAS supposed to be a more aggressive kit, it just fails to come together outside of beginner turf war. The fizzy bomb can be used for movement and damaging enemies to make the kill time better, and the reefslider can combo with the fizzy for kills and moving foward, where the gun can paint to take space aggresively. But slider doesn't enable aero like it does on dread and tetra, and slider is so good at painting the zone that MG ends up playing paint spam anyways.

Odd that neither the Sploosh-o-matic nor even the Custom Splattershot Jr. were included in this video.

I really like the idea of Aerospray being more of a high-skill version of Jr. As right now it kinda feels like the opposite of that - mostly just a weapon that is used in ways that are cheap, spammy, or just unfun. At very low levels of gameplay it's a weapon that mostly cheeses fights between new players - it's very good at spray and pray when nobody is particularly good at the game. Then once players get good enough that charging with an aerospray will just get you splatted (probably by B-rank, this isn't a very high bar), Aerospray just becomes really unpleasant to have in the game. The only particularly good use of Aerospray I've seen is running around behind the enemy lines in turf war to paint, while using the weapon's light weight to run from any fights. It's very annoying to deal with and ties into a lot of what I dislike about turf war. Then in basically any other mode, the weapon tends to feel like a liability for whatever team it's on, given how little it contributes to fights. So making Aerospray into a stronger, but more difficult weapon would probably be healthier for the game at all levels.

Every time you release a video, my content extension mod gets a little bit bigger. Please do keep making videos!!

I had Splattershot Jr. at the beginning of Splatoon 3 game

when the jevil music starts playing:

Oh my god a video on my fest main (Annaki Nova)

07:56 didn't you say that Nova just have the max shot deviation (40 iirc) all the time? It still kinda make that statement true, but yk, just making sure

aerospray with inkjet is a cool idea

Wait, you're telling me all this time I believed Nova had a unique mechanic that wasnt actually on the weapon?

Course Sploosh has been power crept so hard that literally almost any comp weapon can just pop fly it out of existence.. also doesn't help where you're at ideal range and then the random spitballing makes ya lose the skirmish. At times there's shooters that actively makes them worse at turf/ranked because RNG bullets and bad Latency just doesn't mix.

Seeing spray shooters being reduced to special spam sucks because a bunch of people I know used to play only aero and only spam specials because it’s easy and it works. It stinks because it builds bad habits and it’s hard to get better when you are randomly shooting the ground a pressing the R stick all game. Jr is fine since it’s a starter weapon but it feels bad to watch so many people be reduced to special spammers instead of branching out to some of the other shooters with better skill expression and better playstyles. It’s not even fun to stomp on players that can’t fight back because all they know is running around and painting a ton. Spray shooters should do a better job at helping beginners build their skills and branch into more weapon types and playstyles

1:08 I feel like the devs got rid of the bulky ink tank because allowed player to spam subs in 2. For example you can throw 2 autobombs without any ink saver sub.

I love short-range shooters. I mained Sploosh in S1 and 2, and now main dapple dualies in S3. I found Chara's argument that not every gun should be tuned for competitive play interesting. @ProChara Why shouldn't Sploosh be balanced for competitive play? Why do you say a midrange meta is healthier than a short-range shooter meta? I feel like I'm missing some basic ideas about the way Splatoon is designed.

In fact at 3:39 aerospray is 180p just like jr 🤷🏾‍♂️

Sploosh is also really weird. it could easily be one of the most brocken and annoying weapons, if it didn't have that abysmal range with the rng giving it even less optimal range. Now it's just a braindead feeder that instantly becomes a brocken weapon at close range. It has so many overtuned stats it's not funny

Junior is my least favorite weapon design in the game. As an introductory weapon, I think Splattershot would be much better at teaching the game mechanics than something like Junior. As a short-ranged support shooter, I think Splash and Zap are both better weapons to learn how to play support with, as they actually having some fighting capabilities, which Junior doesn't. As a spray shooter, I think Aerospray is just more fun and has more potential to be reworked into a more interesting weapon, as well as having a really cool visual design. And as a stand-alone weapon, it has the single most annoying gimmick in the game. It's never fun to fight against, and it's only really fun to play for sadistic purposes. If I had to remove a single weapon from the game, it would be Junior.

and then theres jet squelcher which is even longer range jr and aerospray but its fire rate is bad too

Imo change all shot, Jr, zap, nova into splashes. ... Remove jump rng in general. ... Remove inaccuracy in general.

When you first enter the game, the game teaches the player its different from other shooters. Turf is essental and allows you to control the pace of the game by denying the other team access to areas. This coubled with bombs allows the player to control the movement and pacing of the game in a back and forth style. Then you learn the game and its the complete opposite. Kill power is skilled and control is unskilled. Players do not care about turf control and except for sharking no caution will be taken when blasting through the other teams ink to go splat them. Spray shooters are great for getting turf and trying to control that turf but fall short in the fighting department requiring far more effort than fighting specific weapons. With their entire main playstyle being hard countered they are usually left with the other less fun thing they are good at: special spam.

I only use splatter shot jr for squid partying

literally played a ranked match last week and the fking aerospray on the enemy team got 15 booyah bombs like tf 😒

Chara! What if super chumps can be buffed by type of sub buff you wear on your shoes

Nice ff9 soundtrack

Yknow how Sega brought on sonic fans to make and write for some of the games, and they ended up being better than the sonic team ones? Nintendo should hire Chara to work on balance patches.

I love Nova, I wish it was better S4 on the new console better be what we hoped S3 would be 🤞

You forgot about sploosh. 😊😅😊

They should just keep junior and scrap the rest of the spray shooters + nzap

Nah I actively disagree it should be perfectly viable for anything to see competitive use if possible picking a select few to just say this shouldn’t be allowed to be good is silly. If I could do that I would just delete chargers but they’re unfortunately here so we need to balance around that fact

You forgot sploosh but its fine design wise so i get it

Does sploosh not count as a spray shooter? I feel like any attempt to change aerospray into a fighting weapon would encroach upon splooshe’s niche

At least splash is different

She shoot my spray till I splat

hey chara? i was wondering how the heck do you use custom douser

spoon

Me when no sploosh:

can you make a 9.0 tier list

guys i need some help literally 2 sec ago i played some s2 because why not and WHY DOES THE SENCETIVETY FELL SO SLOW NOW??? i ran max on both stics and motion and it fells so slow did they change that in the transition or something? because i never did then or am i just going insane?

Yummy

Can someone please explain what the dual squelchers did in S1?

New video ❤

love how you're dissing on the Jr community... walking on thin lines their buddy... Cjr community is one step around the corner, and you don't want to mess with them... their torps hurt like hell, if they can figure out how to actually use the kit competitively, I might just show y'all how to play em in this last Splatoon 3 tournament... on tower control mode

Where sploosh?

Oh great. Now this channel's going to be nothing but "the missed opportunity of x" for the next few years because the game is "over"