Check out this fight in BattleBots: Bounty Hunters - Witch Doctor (Season 1, Episode 10)
After beating Slap Box, our next step in the bracket was against the rookie horizontal spinner Malice. Malice had just beaten Tracer, and had been dishing out big hits for the whole event. HUGE has historically struggled with horizontal spinners, and we were excited to be able to give our Tegris parts their first real test in the arena. We stuck with the same armor configuration as against Slap Box, but swapped blades to better target parts of Malice’s weapon (and also spin up a little faster).
Malice got some great hits in on the wheels to start the fight, and we were really happy how they held up. The legs however were the other side of the experimentation coin. Because tegris is a layered material, the hits far away from the mountings caused the layers to begin to delaminate. Once this happened, they were sucked into our own blade and ripped away, leaving us struggling for mobility. Soon after, some metal shavings became caught in a drive motor, causing further mobility issues as it would lock up intermittently. We ultimately became stuck in the screws at the end because this wheel was having trouble consistently rotating.
While we would have loved to have won this fight, Malice was too tough for our hits to do any damage besides splitting open their weapon disk (which cut their belt). We couldn’t damage the frame, or the drivetrain. HUGE didn’t take much direct damage from Malice, but their hits ultimately disabled our support legs and hurt our mobility majorly.
We learned that the tegris wheels held up very well to horizontal spinner attacks, giving us the time we needed to disable Malice’s weapon. We also learned that running a single piece of tegris as a leg was not sustainable, and we’d much rather learn that in a bounty bracket than in a true tournament fight! Ultimately, this was a really encouraging fight for us, showing promise in our developing strategies for this type of opponent.
Photo Gallery
Note the extra top armor that Malice added for this fight.
During…
…and after the big hit that disabled Malice’s weapon.
Malice after the fight, showing the damage to their “Purple Pain” weapon
Seeing the doubled-up tooth marks was a cool marker of this weapon style
Doing what Tegris does best, dissipating the energy while holding it’s structure and not cracking!
Photo Credit: Dan Longmire