I have a love/hate with Dynamo. It's an absolute beast, and a roller (my OG fave and former main class), but it's so intensely slow and eats ink like nobody's business. Plus, people insist on swinging it in SR. Don't be everyone.
Always Be Rollin'
| attack | damage |
|---|---|
| Horizontal Swing | 200 max |
| Vertical Swing | 300 max |
| Roll | 400 |
As ever, take note when you can deal 400 damage. Rolling with the dynamo is almost silly, with even a pixel of it while it's "hot" deleting most enemies and dealing a massive chunk to those it doesn't outright kill. Of course, to get to rolling, you need to swing first. Horizontal comes out a tad faster than vertical, and covers more area, but I don't love its damage dropoff--you have to be rather close to be in the 200 window (...not that it matters tooo much; you're just gonna roll it all out anyways). Your vertical can kill a steelhead, so learn its timing well. Like the goofball I am, it wasn't until days before Splat 3 came out that I realized you can transition to rolling regardless of swing type. Just hold the button after any swing!
Now. The greatest thing holding back the dynamo is its ink tank. Second greatest is mobility. Assuming the Splat 2 numbers are still the same (which is fairly safe here), you get about 5 swings before empty. This means that without trickery, you get 4/5ths of a tank for your roll, and dynamo eats that at about 6% per second... again, without trickery. Here's the thing: your hitbox is hot regardless of the speed you're going at, and the slower you move, the less ink you consume. With practice, you can have a hot hitbox while standing, for all intents and purposes completely still. You can practice this with any roller in the SR shooting range--stand on the moving fish's rail, and play with your joystick's angle. Find the spot where the balloon pops without pushing you back![1]
A good roller will know where to hold the line, stopping all oncoming salmonids. And a good team will know what you're doing and not waste ink on the fish walking into death. You can hold the line for glowfly rushes, mudmouth spouts of any type, and clean up smallfry during grillers. Along with moving as slowly as you can get away with (there are, of course, times to put out a burst of speed--like to catch a steel eel tail or to get away from flyfish missiles), you can also just... stop. Roller on the ground. Nothing coming at you. If you're not moving, you immediately start gaining ink back at passive speed. It's slow, but it'll top you off and save you from spending 18% to swing. Furthermore, chum have really short arms. You can stand still and let one come at your roller and bounce you back for a bit with no fear of taking damage!
Egg tosses cost the same as a bomb toss--75% of your tank. This means if you throw an egg, you have enough ink for one swing and then one second of rolling at full speed. If you're throwing an egg, you better be absolutely sure you have the space to fill up your tank more. You are at your most vulnerable after a throw!
Your second greatest weakness is your mobility. You're a heavy class weapon, meaning your swim speed is slow. All of your attacks require a great amount of windup, and, preferably, more than 50% of your ink available. Do not let yourself get cut off from inked floor. Do not forge ahead unless you have at least one teammate behind you and do not do any jumping from ledges. You are not an aerospray. You cannot ink your way back. You will die. I have to tell myself this every round 😅 Pick your position carefully, and let the enemy come to you. You're the team's wall, you set the boundary for their excursions. (and when they forge ahead... it's not your job to save them. Let the fish (and hopefully their life preserver) come to you, then rez them)
So save your ink, walk slow, and think carefully before acting with this one. It's a weird roller because you're physically at the front of the line, but you gotta think more like a backliner. Sometimes, though, you need to just put the pedal to the metal and charge ahead: when an enemy has an absolutely massive health pool. In a goldie search round, goldie will point his nose where he's gonna run when he jumps out of the ink pipe. Get to that path, drop your roller, and as he gets near, charge him. In... patch 2.0? 1.8? they altered goldie's ai so he jumps over your roller faster than before, but you can still get a good 5-8 eggs out in under a second this way (I really wanna know if you can counter his jump with one of your own, but the timing seems... very tight). In a glowfly rush, put on a burst of speed when goldie is near to compensate for the bounceback. When you have someone to cover your return and can get out to a bigshot, position yourself between them and the cannon and charge 'em. They'll bounce you back right into the cannon, effectively impaling themselves as if you had a halberd and took on the calvary. You can do the same with cohozuna if you can get aggro and a wall. You'll likely die in a second from his belly flop, but the damage done is worth it!
One last trick: It's a little risky, but when it works it's veeery spicy--if you're rolling and a maws comes up, get centered and let 'im come. As he pops up, tilt your L stick into a run (and maybe even tilt your reticle down). Your live rolling hitbox should hit him before his jaws can hit you; you are the bomb. This uhh, doesn't always work. It might matter which way his mouth is facing in relation to you. But in a pinch it's worth a try!
technically speaking, you'll always be pushed back if you're practicing during a carbon or big swig rotation. You can still see when it takes damage, though! Also, remember: even if you can't roll over a chum with these two, you can run over a crazed chum during glowflies--those have halved HP! There are honestly lots of sweet roller tricks I'm not touching on here since dynamo's a bear; I'll have to do another roller sooner than later--maybe flingza. ↩︎