Sylar | The Wack Combo @sylar1313 | Uploaded June 2023 | Updated October 2024, 5 hours ago.
So, what exactly am I trying to show here. If you pay close attention, you'll see that after I use the ssg there's this weird animation going on that enables a fast lock-on. This animation is part of a larger group that we decided to call "wack animations". It's not something new, a lot of people surely stumbled upon one of them here and there. What was not known is that these animations can grant fast state to a swap in certain cases (i.e. pb+rocket-like state). @DrakePHOSE figured out the details while working on his tech tutorial series.
He hasn't released those episodes yet, but he's made his WIP script for them public: docs.google.com/document/d/1nCHRXOXebwwKLtGdZSjUxP5JsWzGCS_SEeOySXtpuNU/edit?usp=sharing. Go take a look at it, you'll see how much of a gigantic work that is. As a matter of fact I'm insanely hyped about this series of videos, which feels like the culmination of years of work of a lot of people, myself included.

You can find more details about wack swapping there, or stick around and be confused by my approximative explanation just below :D

So how does the wack swap work? Starting from a burst weapon such as the ssg, what you need to do is to fire it, quickly press the heavy cannon key and then the key of the weapon you want to fast swap into, for example the rocket launcher. You have to press it when the wack animation occurs, or you can just spam a couple key presses and you should be fine. Be warned though that the animation doesn't always look like a reloading ssg (or weirdly shaped rocket launcher/ballista and so on, depending on which weapon you're starting the wack swap with). Sometimes it simply looks like the heavy cannon - not sure honestly what makes the visual difference but it's the same outcome anyway.

As I mentioned, these swaps can in theory be used with other weapons such as ballista or rocket launcher. However, if we neglect early stages of the campaign, there's no need to use it since you could just mod swap cancel into heavy cannon with identical results (unless there's a minor speed difference, not sure about that). But the ssg cannot be mod cancelled, so the wack swap acts as a perfect substitute to that technique. In particular if you're using a BAT cycle into ssg - classic way to end it - you can transition into a new fast swap pretty smoothly. Since you're buffering a heavy cannon swap in between the wack animation, this even fixes the breaking of mods typically associated to BATSing, which is a big deal. The other way you could fast swap out of ssg is by punch swapping AND hitting a demon with it: youtu.be/WBR51Dpg5RQ. Which can be dangerous in a lot of cases and does not fix mods breaking.