Salmon Run Weapon Deep Dive: E-Liter 4K

The last of the SR behemoths and probably my personal favorite SR weapon, the E-Liter 4K is one a lot of my friends don't like, and it's a shame. You can literally delete most bosses, two shot any of the ones that didn't die the first time you told them to, and you make cohocks cry. You also drop a really good paint line for shoot-and-swim tactics and don't feel the swim speed slowdown of the heavy class weapon as much (since in Perfect Play you're... not really moving that much at all)

As usual, let's look at damage first. I usually try to gather/refresh my own numbers in the shooting range, but there hasn't been an eliter rotation recently so this is memory + Splatoon 2 numbers (which: should be correct.)

In practice, you won't actually ever see 150 damage. It scales from 50 to 150 and immediately gains the full charge bonus, which pushes it up to 600 and grants piercing. Along with increasing damage, charging increases range; in the end eliter has one of the longest ranges in the mode--I think snipewriter equals it and that's it. [snipewriter is actually a little shorter in range, but is the next longest] In general with chargers, you should always be shooting fully charged shots and then using tapshots to manage smallfry and reposition. There are maybe two weapon exceptions and a single scenario for everything else where partial charges should be used. Do not under any circumstances tap shot to kill chum. Either charge to full and gain pierce or retreat.

With the E-Liter, you get four shots. Four shots exactly. I highly recommend counting them, especially when starting out; not only is counting to four easy but you should actually only count to 3: after three shots, refill. At higher hazard percents, your final quarter tank is usually already partially spent on smallfry or repositioning tapshots, so assuming you actually have that fourth shot is a dangerous one. Four shots also means that a bomb or tossed egg leaves you with exactly one shot assuming you had a full tank to start with, so like the dynamo, you need to be very careful about using bombs and tosses. If you did even one tap shot before or after your throw, you can no longer fully charge. You must refill!

As far as strategy goes, it's fairly simple: Find the highest point relative to the shore that is currently spawning fish and delete the fish. Pick 3 targets, remove them, refill, repeat. I haven't been making boss tables, but in this case I think one is very valuable:

Prioritize steelheads, especially if you're the only high-range weapon; otherwise delete what's easy to delete. If you're in a position to take out more than one cohock at once, go for it. Sometimes it's valuable to even intentionally position yourself down a line of enemies to down them all at once, but for the most part you're on boss duty. You actually paint decently quickly and a strafe with tap shots will cover a flipper-flopper ring quickly, but it's far, far more fun to kill them in midair. They're vulnerable from the point they stick their nose out of the ink, so don't hesitate to hurt (or kill a weakened one!) one as the prepare to jump again. Since killing a maws by shooting takes 50% of your tank, there may be situations where that's better than a bomb. Usually someone is throwing one already though, so. Your range means you have a generous kill angle for shooting Slammin' Lids on level ground, which is nice for lowtide; just pay attention to your team so you're not killing the one that's about to be used to squish a boss! In fact, since it's so incredibly easy to just say "nope!" and remove a boss, you do have to have some good situational awareness. Be cognizant of how far your team will have to haul the golden eggs you're dropping everywhere, and be sure you're not accidentally setting your team up for failure by killing things too early. If it's threatening them, by all means drop a boss near shore. Otherwise, wait a minute, spend a shot elsewhere, and then drop that boss.

Stingers are the only funny boss, and are the exception to the "full charges only" rule I mentioned earlier. There are times when your positioning and a stinger's spawn coincide in such a way that it's your obligation to kill it. As a slow moving charger, this isn't often, but it is more than two nickels in frequency so: a stinger pot has 60 HP, and your tap shots do 50. This means instead of tap shots, you should 1/8th-1/4 charge shot each pot. It will feel slower, but it's much, much faster. Chargers are all about slowing down your actions while thinking at a million miles an hour, paying attention, and using exactly enough effort to destroy (which is why I like them, I think).

Ok, I lied, there's one other funny boss. I was gonna save this one for my charger class article I'm planning (I don't think I'll do one for all classes, but chargers specifically will get one at least), but: Fish Sticks. They're goofy and half the time you can basically completely ignore them, but the minute one lands in a high traffic area their priority is above any other boss. The best killers for them are ones that can do it from the ground, but sometimes you gotta swim up those poles. As a charger, you should paint that line--before it lands if you can^[1]--and occasionally you'll need to be the one up the pole killing the smallfry instead of just using it later as a nice perch. Lots of people say snipers shouldn't be doing this, but this was the first silver badge I got and let me tell you: snipers are actually very good at this. IF you understand how. You have two things going against you: your lack of reticle without charging and a perfectly exact tap shot RoF. Your tapshots match the smallfry's rotational speed. With practice, you can hipshot a charger quite accurately (it's really good to be able to do it for the grizzco charger), but if you start doing it too early or late, you'll miss every shot. If you find yourself thinking "boy!! I'm pointing in the right place but all my shots are missing!", stop shooting, watch the spin, and then time your pulls to it. Your kill time, counting the time to paint and mount the pole, is as good as or better than most weapons in the class of "can't kill from the floor, but can paint enough of the pole to get up there and do it".

The final thing I should touch on is movement and position. Positioning is of utmost importance with the E-Liter, and to find good spots you need to keep exits clear. E-Liter is actually pretty mobile, even though you swim a little slow, purely because a tap shot leaves a broad line that's fairly long. You can drop a line, swim, pop up, drop another line, and zig and zag around quite well; it's a good example of a weapon excellent at shoot-and-swim. You can also paint a wall trail OK with tap shots (which is not the case with some chargers), so that's fine if you get enough space to be sure you can pull the trigger twice [I remembered wrong--I use 1/4-1/2 charges for this! Roughly the same timeframe as a double tap, but actually drips down.] (ideally, of course, the wall is already painted, but.). The big thing here is being aware of your exits. Check for inked floors and walls you can make a break for in case things go poorly. Jumping a gap or climbing a fish stick are great exits too; in a pinch jumping off an edge can work, but hoard usually follow you down and you could be jumping from frying pan to fire, so that's a last resort. Your position needs to have at least one direction, and preferably two, where you can break off to get away from an incoming steel eel or buy the time to charge to kill a hoard or get enough room to back away while tapshotting smallfry. Be sure to check your six, and remember the basic paths the hoard takes to get at you: if one of your escape routes is along one of those paths, check that path twice as frequently so nothing sneaks up on you.

E-Liter 4K is ridiculously powerful, and its charge time is honestly not that slow for what it is. If you keep an eye on your tank/count your shots, breathe evenly, shoot straight, and hold your ground, you will make the round where you get this dead easy.

• Salmon Run
• e-liter
• Splatoon
• Splatoon 3
• SR weapon deep dive
• Cohost Post