Pocketpair officially released Palworld 1.0 on July 10. More than a week after leaving Early Access, the game continues to surge in popularity, with concurrent player counts on Steam still climbing. Amid the excitement, Japanese players have discovered an OP new strategy made possible by latest additions to the game.
Central to the technique is Tocotoco’s Megaton Implode skill, which has been in the game since Early Access. Although the skill’s cooldown was increased from 55 to 60 seconds in the v1.0 update, its power was more than doubled, rising from 500 to 1,200 and effectively becoming one of the strongest attacks in the game.
As its name suggests, however, Megaton Implode comes with the major drawback of your Pal self-destructing in the process. Because you had to revive the Pal after every use previously, the move was quite impractical despite the enormous damage.
However, that has changed with the introduction of the new Heavily Armored passive skill. Heavily Armored nullifies explosive damage, and it appears to protect Pals even from the self-inflicted damage caused by Megaton Implode itself. As a result, Pals can now perform the attack without perishing. While the 60-second cooldown still prevents you from spamming the move, the skill’s biggest downside has practically been removed.
Heavily Armored can appear randomly on Mutated Pals and can also be granted through the “Disposable Implant: Heavily Armored” consumable, obtained at random via Glistening Ancient Relics. Acquiring the passive is no simple task, however, as you’ll need to breed and hatch Pals or repeatedly farm the World Tree to create a Pal capable of detonating itself indefinitely.
Even during Palworld’s Early Access, players were enraptured by the destructive potential of Megaton Implode and had been experimenting with passing the skill down to Gorirat in pursuit of maximum damage. Gorirat is particularly well suited to the tactic thanks to its Full-Power Gorilla Mode partner skill, which majorly boosts its attack power. Before Heavily Armored existed, players enhanced the skill through Pal Condensation to squeeze as much damage as possible out of the then one-shot attack.
Following the full release, however, Full-Power Gorilla Mode received a substantial buff, with its rank five attack bonus increasing from 200% to 300%. Combined with the newfound practicality of Megaton Implode, Gorirat builds equipped with both Heavily Armored and the self-destruct skill have attracted renewed attention for essentially allowing infinite Gorilla implosions.
You can further increase Megaton Implode’s damage by pairing Gorirat with support Pals such as Ribunny, whose Happy-Go-Lucky partner skill boosts the attack power of Neutral element Pals. Other Pals also possess partner skills that can increase damage output or attack power under specific conditions even while benched, meaning there could be yet more to experiment with in the pursuit maximum damage.
Palworld is out now for PC (Steam/Microsoft Store/Mac App Store), PS5, and Xbox Series X/Xbox One. The game is also available via Game Pass for PC and Xbox.
