[pilcrow]

So, I've written and rewritten this.. a lot of times. It's incredibly hard to be both clear and concise because this is something that NEEDS context and details to understand fully - as was demonstrated in the week or so leading up to the solsphere change that led pretty much every Flash player to stop playing it. People made very definitive statements about things they had absolutely no understanding of, and ultimately the arguments most consistently proven right were my own.

I write this as somebody who spent an inordinate amount of time learning the archetype, obsessing over details and tech and reaching a point where I could reasonably say that by the end I knew maybe everything that there *was* to learn about it. I adore the concept of Flash, the weirdly complex puzzle-like gameplay it often presented, and the absolutely unique situations and gameplay it boasted. This is coming entirely from a place of passion, because I want other people to be able to see that and enjoy it.

So. This is going to be very, very long - there's a lot to cover.

The first thing that has to be understood when talking about Flash of Light is that it is an archetype that has an insane amount of friction, at least if you're playing it as intended. 
It also has very little to offer if you aren't playing it as intended, as its most important features (martial lawbreaker and accelerated mercana) exclusively reward playing to its intended playstyle. I'll go point-by-point for this, because each feature incentivises its gameplay loop differently:
- Martial Lawbreaker does nothing on its own because Soldier skills almost universally have less utility, combo potential, and SWA% than Solblader skills, which are weapon-agnostic and innately combo into themselves, while Speed of Light can be comfortably played with a sword because retreating swipe, shinken, and incise are very, very good in the context of Combination Fighter.
- Accelerated Mercana needs both solsphere interactions and Mercalan spells to function to its maximum effect. Solblader's own spells aren't preferred and are ideally cast with a Solsphere in play (Luminous Arc gets an AoE for crossing one, Photon Ring can drag into one, Radiant Splendor, Solace, and Surrender interact with it diectly. Even Lux Relido has an interaction: at 4 Accel stacks, you can bash an enhanced sphere + 2M+4M cast Lux Relido for the glowing proc crit, which is extra as fuck).
This is on top of requiring a casting tool, severely limiting your weapon choices or forcing Holy Sword to use, which can be a very intense tempo loss for Flash in particular. They also don't provide solcharges for being cast, as Faithful Sol only rewards non-solblader Mercalan spells.
- Holy Aura's Light Damage, Light Shred, & FP Recovery only occur enough to matter if you're actively interacting with an enhanced solsphere, as playing around an unenhanced solsphere is incredibly difficult and will rarely proc it. Blazing Sol's FP drain does get evened out by the FP recovery, but the benefit of being in Blazing Sol is startlingly low for the investment, especially compared to Speed.

That's.. pretty much everything that constitutes 'Flash of Light', and it leads to obvious conclusion that if you aren't playing Flash for Flash, you should probably pick up Wall or Speed instead, because they have effects that will actually matter for you and your class combo.
That is fine, honestly - it has an incredibly well-defined niche, and one that is very engaging to play in. The trouble is that it struggles in its own niche.

The second thing that must be understood about Flash of Light is that the Solsphere is clunky. It is an incredibly clumsy, immobile, and difficult mechanic and for that I kind of love it, because it's also the source of all of Flash's complexity. This does, however, mean that the situations that it doesn't cope with can be MISERABLE.

Most people will be familiar with how Speed of Light could easily play around the solsphere, which led to them stacking an inordinate amount of extra damage onto their combos. This was a key part of why people often requested that Speed of Light's Solsphere also suffer the CF reduction, and why the global solsphere damage reduction we got instead was a little mystifying, as neither Flash nor Wall can physically proc it enough times in a turn to hit the full -50% without opponent misplays or an AoE scenario (which the solsphere already suffers at dealing with - your chief options being Execute, Roundtrip, and Retreating Swipe), and the existing abuse-cases (which got plenty of attention in the form of discord screenshots!) would have been better handled by an off-turn per-player dynamic damage cap (I'll explain this later).

Anyway, Flash of Light doesn't get the same ease of use Speed does because of one key flaw - one that is utterly inseperable from the Solsphere as Flash uses it: momentum economy. If you're maximizing Accelerated Mercana stacks to triple action every turn, you are operating on an incredibly tight momentum economy of two 3M Soldier Skills followed by a 1M Mercalan Spell. There is NO room for error here. If you miss an Accel stack, you don't get the 1M Spell. If you miss a 1M spell, you can upset your entire momentum economy and will likely have to either hit 4 stacks next turn or spend it early and go into the turn after that with 1 to re-set. You will likely have to miss your 1M spell to maintain Holy Shield through Bashes, or to use Day Shift to repositioning (more on that later).

The momentum economy also contributes heavily towards the solcharge economy. If you're getting your spell every turn, then you are building 1 solcharge every turn. If not.. you're not. You also don't get that solcharge if you cast a Solblader spell, as Faithful Sol specifically excludes them, This means that Photon Ring's cost to a Flash player is functionally 2 Solcharges due to the opportunity cost (one well-worth paying for Photon Ring in particular, admittedly) while the others effectively cost 1. Lux Relido.. exists. Invokes are squiffy to begin with, but Lux Relido especially suffers for not giving the 2 solcharges a hardcast Mercalan invoke usually does.

Tied to that is the aforementioned clunkiness - there are seven ways to move a solsphere:
- Day Shift (1m, 1 solcharge, 2r cooldown, target your solsphere and move it to an EMPTY location within 6 range)
- Yester Shift (0m, 1 solcharge, 2r cooldown, solsphere teleports to the place you were at the start of the round, but ONLY if you've moved from there)
- Roundtrip (3m, soldier skill, catches the solsphere if it crosses over it for the duration of the roundtrip, brings it to the tile in front of you at the end)
- Turnover (3m, soldier skill, puts the solsphere on the tile opposite you, but ONLY usable if it's EMPTY. Using 3 excel charges enhances it and then throws it ~5 tiles, and is still prevented by dense objects in the opposite tile.)
- Retreating Swipe (3m, soldier skill, puts the solsphere in the tile you just left. I believe Charge + Retreat pulls it with you?)
- Execute (3m, soldier skill, requires a knocked down target. Executing an enemy within 2 range of the solsphere teleports it to the enemy's location before the attack.)
- Bash (1m, soldier skill, pushes the solsphere, doesn't give Accelerated Mercana. Charge + Bash (2m total) pushes it the full distance.)

Turnover notably has the dubious honour of being the only skill available to Soldier with an Excel Crash, making it the sole synergy available to Exceeding Sol (which lets you spend up to 3 Solcharges for Excel Crash effects on Soldier base class skills). I have to double-check this fact every time. It is absolutely necessary to invest points into Turnover and Exceeding Sol as Flash of Light.

You can theoretically move the Solsphere also by re-casting Solsphere (3m), but this does not preserve its Enhanced state, meaning it almost always has less momentum economy than any other option.

While that's an ostensibly large number of ways to move it, they're all pretty situational (contributing to Flash being technical as hell) but the single most flexible way to move it is Day Shift, which costs 1M and 1 solcharge. You can also move enemies TOWARDS the solsphere with class effects or Photon Ring (1 solcharge).

Setting up Yester Shifts is on the surface the most reliable option but is actually much harder than it seems - Yester Shift's requirement is broken by your turn going before an enemy that moves you, as it will reset on the new round. Using it if you haven't been displaced means finding a way to move first, turning it into a 1M skill at best if you use Hawk Glide or Jetpack, or giving it a 3M startup cost if not.

Since battle circumstances often force you to move towards the enemy to stay relevant, or can separate you from your solsphere, you will often eat these opportunity costs, and I've had many battles where mass displacement (notably, hawk gale was AWFUL for it) meant picking up my solsphere and following the action, typically either using charge + move, godray undertow, or chariot star. The options from then are, at best, an extremely long roundtrip or a Day Shift. 
In any case, this movement meant losing out on Accelerated Mercana stacks, damage, solcharges, and was often negated by the enemy being displaced or moving again.

Any time spent moving the solsphere also means you likely aren't Bashing, Incising, or Shinken-ing it to extend your Holy buff(s), which means that on top of losing out on Accelerated Mercana and Faithful Sol procs, you're also losing out on your buff duration, meaning they'll have to be refreshed earlier and thus cost you more Solcharges. These things can snowball hard, leading to an effect I call '0 or 6'; in a losing battle, you're always at or close to 0 solcharges. In a winning battle, you hit 6 without trying, because you're just not encountering solcharge sinks. (Prinny is a 6 charge battle, in case that wasn't clear.)

The general immobility of the Solsphere is an okay bit of friction: being mobile or able to displace a Flash Solblader *is* a hard counter to them, and I've defeated other Flash SBs using this principle myself. However, its MASSIVE drain on resources is one more thing compounding on the change that, ultimately, killed Flash of Light.

One more straw breaking the camel's back is the Tech, and how heavily it interacts with the two Solsphere variants.
Flash is packed with fascinating techniques, but the trouble is that it is INCREDIBLY weighted towards the 3x3 Enhanced solsphere due to the physical, on-the-map, directly-interactable characteristics of it. Even if Radiant Splendor had ONLY increased the Solsphere's size to 3x3 I would ultimately still have enhanced it each and every battle I fought.
There isn't any better way to get the discrepancy across than to list a majority of the tech I know, starting with everything exclusive to the 3x3 pattern:

Roundtrip, Repeating Swipe, Bash, and Turnover proccing Holy Aura. Roundtrip, Execute, Shinken, Repeating Swipe, and Turnover sphere effects (as well as Bash) being usable if you are standing on the solsphere. Roundtrip and Retreating Swipe being able to corner-catch a sphere and readjust its position. Retreating Swipe catching a solsphere exactly behind you. Gating off two approaches by standing on a Solsphere corner. Using Roundtrip or Retreating Swipe for solsphere AoE. Executing a Solsphere if an enemy is standing on it (you target the corner or side - it's solid but expensive AoE). Yester Shift or Day Shift doing damage.. At all. Yester Shift or Day Shift proccing Holy Aura. Retreating Swipe > Yester Shift Combos. Enemy on a solsphere receiving solsphere damage from Photon Ring or other forced movement.

There's almost certainly some stuff I missed, but cut me some slack, it's been nine months.
The rest of the tech available to Flash that doesn't require (but is made dramatically easier by it) includes:

Any kind of needle combo (you can proc it with Holy Aura's effect or any solsphere proc, which are much harder to attain without the 3x3 pattern). Roundtrip, Bash, and Turnover getting solsphere damage. Regular soldier skill + solsphere interactions that show up in the 'solsphere' link on the skill.

This stuff forms a massive amount of a Flash player's gameplan and tech, and playing without the enhanced solsphere is a very, very miserable experience. Trust me, I spent a while scratching my head trying to figure out how it was supposed to function before I watched somebody using Radiant Splendor, which I had previously discounted as dead momentum (I was very stupid and more focused on the Holy skills at the time.)
Ultimately, there isn't really a Flash of Light without the enhanced solsphere, because it alone raises the skill ceiling astronomically high, and without it the skill ceiling flattens you.

The trouble is that using the Enhanced Solsphere comes at a steep cost - to get it set up as early as possible, you need to spend a total of 9M. There isn't any getting around this, you HAVE to place the Solsphere, you HAVE to have 3 solcharges, and you HAVE to use Radiant Splendor or Excel Turnover to enhance it. Excel Turnover is by far the most efficient way to do so, as it procs 1 stack of Accelerated Mercana and can be used to throw the solsphere into a position where numerous skills can reach it even if you move through it on approach (ie roundtrip, godray undertow, day shift), which allows you flexibility in addressing an approaching threat, trying to approach yourself, or preparing setup behind a barrier that mildly inconveniences (but has an immense mindgame effect upon) other players.

So, my 'most efficient' setup as Flash of Light SB/Priest looked like:
Turn 1: Solsphere (behind me, adjacent) > Solcharge
Turn 2: Excel Turnover > 2M Priest Spell (usually Sanctuary) > 2M Solcharge
Turn 3: Options open up. I have 3 Solcharges and my sphere is in position. This usually starts with Holy Shield.

Without Excel Turnover, Holy Shield asks for another Solcharge action, another Mercalan spell, or- oh shit, oh fuck they're in my face already I just have to fight without any more prep now.
This strategy also completely explodes in your face if your enemy is smart enough to just. Stand next to you? Or displace you. Or knock you down (you can do this to other Flash SBs with charge + turnover into their side). Or turn 1 approaches in any other capacity. It's genuinely worse than Ruler setup because raw positioning can apocalyptically disrupt it.


Which means that there's not much left to address, except one thing.
There is no bigger elephant in the room than Solsphere Decay. 
It's an interesting mechanic but implemented in such a way that it absolutely crushes Flash of Light's viability in long battles, strains its momentum economy, and arguing against it was such a sisyphean and depressing task that I gave up on the archetype entirely for (at this point) almost a year, fearing that it would never get a second look. I spent an entire week doing PvP and counting the exact moment where it would cost me 3 solcharges, and without fail it would have turned all but the easiest matchups into a guaranteed loss, and many of those were already hard-fought.
And it was almost worse. Arguing brought it down from 'the solsphere disappears entirely.'

Solsphere Decay takes a difficult-to-manage momentum economy and asks you to pull another 3 Solcharges out of your ass, as well as another 3M exclusively for the purposes of continuing to play your class. 

This has adverse effects on Flash of Light as a whole in some ways that aren't necessarily immediately clear.
- The first is that an immense amount of Momentum gets sucked up by the Solsphere. To be precise, if you enhance from round 2, then by the end of Round 6 (just before it decays), you'll ideally have spent 6*7 = 42 Momentum. Of this, 9M (21%) of it will have beent spent on prep. Assuming this is a solcharge-intensive battle, you now need to spend another 6M to Solcharge + Enhance, not counting momentum spent to get into position, if it decayed in an awkward spot. By round 12 (again), you'll have spent 15/84 momentum on the Solsphere, or 17%.
This cost is often compared to an evadie maintaining Fortune Wind due to the 5 round timer, which is deceptive: Fortune Wind is 3m off the bat and lasts until Round 5, at which point you will have spent 3/35 momentum on it, or 8.5%. At round 10, this continues to be 8.5%. Even adding Ring of Pearls into the mix comes up to 17% on round 1 and 12% at round 10, because RoP lasts 10 rounds. Effectively, the cost to play Flash of Light is over double the setup needed to play a viable evade. This is not counting an attempt to play an Evadie Flash of Light, which.. is pretty much impossible at present.
There are also more efficient forms of evade and more efficient examples of setup classes, such as Verglas, which for 6M gets up to 10 rounds of IPGuard or Greaves, ice sheets to make further setup cheap (10M total to get IPGuard AND Greaves, and for 11M you can fit a Crawling Spikes in there too), and then only has to play the class normally to get 40 evade on a functionally permanent basis.
- The second adverse effect is that being on a timer offers a perverse incentive: you now want to play more quickly and more efficiently so that you aren't wasting precious time. Casting Invokes as Flash of Light was already a questionable decision, but worth it in certain circumstances (divine shower to draw in an enemy or on a fleeing enemy, divine judgement to negate light res stacking, bypass some defenses, or get Weak! procs on certain bosses).
As it is now, you have about 32M to play with an Enhanced Solsphere (not 35, because the turn you enhance it on counts towards the decay) of which a hard invoke costs a whopping third of. Saving up Accel Mercana to 1-turn cast an invoke is an even bigger investment, costing 3 Soldier Skills (9m!) of actions to prep for (a total of 9 + 7m = 16M, half your time!). Previously, this was a way to ensure you could confirm a Divine Judgement or surprise somebody with a Divine Shower. Currently, this actively cripples you, given during that time you are NOT building solcharges other than the pithy 1 you gain from the invoke itself. Remember, you can't choose not to use accel mercana, and even if you could, if you're casting 3M spells you aren't building AM to prep for an invoke either!
- The third adverse effect is that this affects players in a poor situation far more than it does one in a good situation. If you're in a 6 charge battle you really aren't bothered by the 3M it costs to enhance. If you're in a 0 charge battle, it confirms the loss. It's a 'losemore' mechanic by any measure, which feels like kicking you when you're down given how much Flash can already lose by.
- Finally.. it doesn't lend itself to any interesting gameplay pattern. It isn't adding anything particularly dynamic to Flash of Light, or Solblader in general. Anyone who already held the advantage still has it, anyone who was already disadvantaged still is, and the practical effect on a Flash SB's gameplan is that you either hold back and be completely incapable of dealing with the problems thrown at it or you reserve a whole turn for dealing with the inevitability of decay.

Remember, enhancing the solsphere isn't a 'bonus effect' you can go without like Charge Mind is to an evoker. It's.. kind of just a core component of Flash - the ways every soldier skill interacts with it mean that you are definitionally at a loss if you play without it.

Which is why every Flash player dropped it. There's just better things to do with your time.

I mentioned before that every argument I'd made - many of which show up in this post - before the update was eventually proven right. But the one thing I was catastrophically wrong about was that Speed of Light players would continue to use the solsphere, that they would Excel Turnover it mid-combo for functionally the same effect as before. Instead, they all kept using swords and only used the unenhanced sphere as a boost-pad.
Except for one. A couple months ago I saw a Speed player try to use the solsphere as a combo tool - the first I'd seen since the update, in 7 months. They even did the mid-combo turnover enhance. They lost horribly for it, because they didn't have Holy Shield or Holy Wings up, and their opponent had already jumped them at round 2.

I picked up Druid/Priest in the weeks after I dropped SB/Priest, which was a time that involved a lot of experimentation trying to find a class combo to replace it.
Druid is a lot more effective in every role Flash filled - it has more offense, more party support, more healing, better mobility, less stat strictness, about as good survivability, I can destiny it, and it comes with a companion that's about as cool as the Solsphere and a lot fuzzier.
But it's a lot less fun, and nowhere near as intricate and interesting to play.


What are the solutions? How do you fix this?
I could probably quibble a lot and offer many different suggestions, but instead I'm going to make a single, definitive set.
Ideally, further adjustments are made after if necessary, and other issues with Flash are later looked at such as its economy (though I feel like much of this is going to help resolve that), SB's class kit not interacting with Accelerated Mercana, or Divine Spark's lack of interaction. That's all for another time.

The solutions are as follows:

- Flash of Light's Solsphere starts at 3x3, but must be enhanced for the extra damage & glowing proc. (Ideally, Radiant Splendor still applies a solsphere proc to everybody standing on it.)
- Allow Wall & Flash to extend their Solsphere Decay with Excel Turnover & Radiant Splendor.. and potentially through other mechanics (Execute? Protect procs?)
- Remove the Solsphere damage reduction mechanic.
- Solsphere damage now scales with Combination Fighter.
- Faithful Sol applies to Solblader spells that do not consume Solcharges.

Implementing these changes means that:
- Flash no longer plays on a timer that demands perfection.
- Flash can handle rushdown moderately better.
- Flash prep is much more flexible, allowing Flash to cross-class with other prep classes or play evade AT ALL.
- Excel Turnover and Radiant Splendor's differences are now meaningful, one contributes to Accel Mercana and one benefits from it, and both are more liable to be used mid-battle than as prep.
- Speed of Light still doesn't get tons of free damage off of Solsphere, everything is well.
- Hard-casting Lux Relido does not deprive you of 2 turns of Faithful Sol procs, and neither do Luminous Arc or Radiant Surrender.
- Casting Radiant Surrender and Radiant Solace is no longer a massive self-own on Flash.
- I will stop complaining about Flash of Light being dead.

Something I said I'd address later is a 'off-turn per-player dynamic damage cap'. This is a change that would robustly cover ALL current abuse cases, as well as potential ones within the concept of a Solsphere damage cap.
- A solsphere dealing damage to a target outside of its owner's turn now applies Solsphere Fatigue LV X (X = the Solsphere's damage) until the start of the target's next turn.
- A solsphere with less or equal damage than Solsphere Fatigue's LV deals either nuisance damage (~1-5 pts, to preserve anything that could proc off of it) or no damage. Either way, it still applies Glowing if enhanced.
- A solsphere with more damage than Solsphere Fatigue's LV will apply the difference and set the LV to its damage as normal.
- Solsphere Fatigue is ignored and never applied during the turn of the Solsphere's owner.

For example, if you used Chaser to cross over three enemy solspheres, one unenhanced worth 30 damage, one enhanced worth 65, and the third unenhanced worth 40 damage, you would take 30 damage, then 35, then either none or nuisance damage, and you would be Glowing.

Which means that a melee DH is not going to inherently cause more Solsphere procs to themselves than, say, an axe ghost, that solsphere stacking is completely ineffective, that an ally with Scarlet Twister or Forced Move can still benefit the party by pulling enemies into a solsphere, and all without affecting a solblader's ability to combo with the solsphere on their own turn, and also an enemy is not better off for walking across a weaker or unenhanced solsphere first (as simply only allowing 1 off-turn proc would incentivise).


Also, it's likely that a lot of Flash's problems plague Wall of Light even though it isn't as dependant on the sphere, but as I was never a Wall player I can't really comment on that. I don't know what state that archetype is in.

Ultimately, I'd like to see Flash become a viable archetype, and while I'm not convinced it can survive in the current hyper-damage meta even with these changes implemented, it'd definitely have a better shot.
I want to see it in a place where I can build a character around it again. Several, even. And I want there to be people I can teach its mechanics again, because in my opinion it's genuinely the most fun, satisfying, and intricate collection of mechanics this game has to offer, and is the closest you can come to a spellsword in the game, incentivising and empowering both spell and sword. Though I had a love-hate relationship for it, its highs were genuinely high and came primarily from a deep understanding of it and intelligent use of its skills.

I'm passionate about it for a reason, and I want other people to see that reason.