Talk:Ruby Rose/@comment-35941743-20190210045235/@comment-25936766-20190216030959

Ok, I'll try to explain my point again, more carefully.

Ruby is great at mid-range and long-range. She's shit at close-range, especially CQC. The show tries to present the idea that Ruby should simply learn to fight CQC because "she's useless without her weapon", except that is shot down by the very first episode of this series, she's not useless, and insisting on that idea is nothing but an example of limited creativity.

What Ruby could - and IMO should - do instead, is not "get better at CQC cause she's shit at it", but instead "learn to use what she's good at better so she doesn't end up needing to rely on something she's bad at".

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Let me use an example: Mass Effect 2 Infiltrator Shepard. At least mine.

The "iconic" weapon for that class is the Sniper Rifle and the only weapon they can use sans SMGs and Pistols. They are meant to sit back and snipe, with Incinerate and AI Hacking to help out the team. Naturally, I excel at long-range, but what happens if an enemy gets in my face?

>I could punch them. But that only works on the weakest enemies, any foe that is an actual threat will endure those punches long enough to kill me.

>I could use the SMG or Pistol. But depending on the enemy they may not be very useful, plus just switching to them takes time and even when effective they may not kill the enemy fast enough.

>I could order a squadmate to use a power to save my ass. But sometimes their powers are on cooldown, or they're downed and I'm too much of a cheapskate to use medi-gel.

So while those 3 are options, they have limited utility. What I find most reliable is to just use the Infiltrator's Tactical Cloak to take aggro off me, and run to cover to keep sniping. Or to put it in another way, instead of trying to do well at close-range, I use what I have to keep doing great at long-range without issue.

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And that's something that Ruby would be better off doing. She's already pretty good with her Semblance. Instead of improving at something that she's bad at and won't be that useful to her in a real fight unless the plot demands it, she could simply take advantage of what she already is great at to keep doing what she's great at.

She could use her Speed to dash away if someone gets close, for example. Hell, she can literally fly around, and before that she already often used her weapon to quickly move around. She is perfectly capable of maintaining her ideal range, and just as capable of quickly recovering her weapon if it ever gets out of her hands. She just has to use what she already has.