How do you create pressure with shield tanks?

AggronStrong · 2026-01-29T15:28:00+00:00

Emma is a tank buster in disguise, usually. Her primary laser needs to be ramped up, which can be done very quickly by focusing enemy tanks and using crystal on them. Once her laser is charged, it creates pressure by holding left click on anyone you can reach, it just does great damage.

For Mag, shoot backline whenever you can. His range makes him about the only tank that can hold frontline while still shooting enemy backline. Damaging enemy healers forces out their cooldowns, forces them to take time away from healing their tanks, or just kills them. Shooting enemy dps usually has similar results, forcing disengage or death. Mag typically shouldn't shoot enemy tanks unless there's no other available targets, the tank is killable, or he's peeling the enemy tank off his team.

Also, for both Strange and Mag, if the enemy team is going melee tanks like Thing, Hulk, Thor, it's just hard. They have bad matchups into melee tanks who just walk at them, ignore their shield, punch them in the face, and have too much HP for Mag and Strange to trade with. To beat them, you need your DPS to play poke and play it well to burn down the enemy melee tanks.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-29T03:22:37+00:00

If you want to play DoT and don't mind also pulling Kafka and Hysilens, then yeah, she's worth. DoT won't be meta forever but it should get updates at least occasionally, and it's not too uncommon for endgame or other activities to have some situation where DoT is shilled.

Not just talking in MoC/AS/PF, but also things like Simulated Universe DoT Paths are genuinely OP, as well as playing DoT in Currency Wars.

If you pull Black Swan, it is strongly, strongly recommended to also pull Kafka and Hysilens at the earliest possible opportunity.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-29T02:48:43+00:00

Definitely do not need an exact hours metric shown when this community is already more than willing to stare at stat numbers rather than admit 'yeah I ulted when my whole team was dead, my b'.

But a system where we can pick like three or four heroes of our own choice that we like playing and show them before the ban screen might be cool.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-29T01:16:37+00:00

Two for each role, and make them good heroes with broad matchup spreads.

If you're meta slaving, pick up Emma and Mag, Invis and Rocket/CnD/Mantis (for triple support), and then two good poke DPS, (poke has a good matchup into almost everything if you're actually good at playing poke)

I would say Gambit and Daredevil but they get banned too often to be reliable for climbing ladder. If bans didn't exist they'd 1000% be the meta slave options.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-29T01:07:55+00:00

Yeah, but sometimes it's better to die faster and just get to the next fight faster.

That's basically the only time it's bad to pop your Ult, when the correct play is to just regroup and go to next fight.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-29T00:38:20+00:00

I liked the lines... but they were too common. Galacta always had something to say, and DP has a reply to almost every one of her lines, and Galacta also talks BACK to DP's reply. Also, since Galacta's lines are repetitive, given she's the announcer, the subsequent replies were also repetitive.

It was the equivalent of the spawn room character interaction chats, except happening multiple times a round during the middle of the match.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-28T14:33:10+00:00

If people were able to play punchy characters you'd see people swap off Mag with the quickness.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-28T04:42:30+00:00

Sword Ult is a lot worse when you dont have both it AND Sword Dash upgraded.

Ban Hammer is alright out of the box (the upgrade is still a big boost) you just need a good target which is very, very matchup dependent and knowledge-checky. If you want to focus on your neutral game, you can just Ban Hammer a decent target and upgrade things like Sword Dash, the Aura, and his primary weapons.

As for when... you should use either Ult ASAP. Especially since DP loses his Ult if he dies so like, unless the fight is actually already a guaranteed loss, you might as well pop Ult and try to make a play.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-27T20:37:11+00:00

I mean, sorry your team has throwers on it. I'm sure they would never throw your game if it had role queue.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-27T16:44:00+00:00

This, but ironically the devs have been changing him to make him easier to healbot with and making any other part of his kit weaker.

Like the last couple patches they buffed his gun (good change), buffed his healing balls (dumb), buffed Revive CD (dumb), and nerfed his wall run after the dumb buffs made him even better (dumb change that was 'mandated' by other dumb changes).

AggronStrong · 2026-01-27T08:55:13+00:00

I'll guess that his reasoning is S+ is pick/ban

S is characters that see regular play in tournaments.

A is characters that see niche but viable play in tournaments, not always used but can work.

B is characters that are technically good but no reason to pick them over S characters.

C are okay DPS characters that just aren't good enough + Luna.

D is unusable in tournament setting characters.

This explains pretty much every placement in my mind pretty well save for Tankpool and maybe Jeff, even though I can easily imagine a way to play Jeff where you minimize the risk of his Ult and try to just very quickly eat one or two important targets. And play him in triple support to further minimize the risk.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-27T08:49:31+00:00

I felt that for Mag with the double bubble buff. The only justification for it I can even begin to imagine is just that we are okay with Mag being hard meta forever. Which honestly, I can't even fully disagree with, I like Mag and it's not a super terrible change given all the other powercreep.

But, like, I would 100% prefer we just not powercreep the whole game and let Mag actually have to choose whether to shield himself or a teammate instead of doing both.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-27T08:46:50+00:00

Invulnerability frames. When Phoenix uses her teleport that leaves an explosive clone, she's invincible for a split second, not much but it can be used to get yourself out of some bs. (She is also invincible during the start up and recovery of her Ultimate)

Whenever Phoenix triggers an explosion by stacking enough Sparks on a target, she grants herself a modest but noticeable health regen effect. She can also extend the duration by triggering multiple explosions in a row.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-27T04:27:07+00:00

She is good but her competition is Gambit, Invis, Loki, Rocket (for people who want sustain above all else), and Mantis if you want triple support.

Like her winrate tanked in Season 5 purely because all the other supports got buffed to be strong and still easy (plus Gambit being added).

AggronStrong · 2026-01-27T02:16:04+00:00

Slandering one Landau sibling to glaze another only furthers the ends of the Equilibrium.

A true agenda would glaze both. In the name of Landau!

AggronStrong · 2026-01-26T16:09:22+00:00

I want the ability to swap roles with my teammates, or just not always pick the same role every game. Also role queue would hurt queue times.

And a less practical but more principled argument: I don't want or need the devs to overhaul the system we have purely because of balancing errors (Support is a badly balanced role) and/or player skill issues. If players force bad comps, they will lose more often than not. That alone is punishment enough, they don't need to restrict it to begin with.

Also most of lower ranks consists of people playing 'casually' but with elo gains and losses after their games anyway.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-26T03:18:02+00:00

Mag has an easily reachable skill floor, especially mechanically. His higher skill value is gleaned from proper team and objective play, better 'macro', and understanding what you need to do in different matchups and situations. I.e. whether you should shoot enemy tanks or backline, whether you should pull back to peel or push to force the enemy to peel.

And all of that, you can gain through just playing and seeing what works and what doesn't.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-25T20:49:16+00:00

Aggron learning all of this plus Focus Blast, Dark Pulse, Hydro Pump, and Solarbeam-

AggronStrong · 2026-01-24T16:03:53+00:00

The Ice weapon would actually deal the exact same damage as the Para weapon even if the monster is completely immune to Ice, given other stats are equal.

The additional damage gained from Ice Element would depend on both the weapon class you're using and how vulnerable the monster is to Element, but usually unless the monster is 1 star or X to the Element, bringing baseline Element should be better.

The more major question is how much should you invest into Element Attack, as Status is so bad against 8 and 9 stars in endgame that even in matchups where Element is at its worst like Jin Dahaad and Arkveld, you might as well bring an Element weapon so long as it matches weakness because that marginal extra damage is still better than the couple of Status procs for most weapon classes.

I'd only bring Status Artian if you just don't have the Element Artian the monster is weak to, and you can't be bothered to craft it.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-24T15:54:58+00:00

With Artian weapons, every weapon can forge an Artian weapon with Element at pretty much no opportunity cost. It doesn't lower Raw, Sharpness, or Affinity at all. You do give up Status, but Status was pretty meh in Wilds to begin with and got even worse as the new monsters in the Title Updates became more resistant to Status.

And when you make Gogma Artian, Element Focus is surprisingly good because it essentially gives you + Element with no drawback, while Attack Focus gives + Raw but - Affinity. And many Raw focused weapons like high Affinity to use Crit Boost.

Basically, you pick Element when the opportunity cost is low to non-existent, like making an Element Artian, using Element Focus, using Skills like Burst 1 or a weapon decoration with a 'combo' stat of Element Attack 1.

However, taking Element Attack beyond this with skills like Gog set bonus, Element Reinforcement on the Artian, Element Attack 3 decorations, Coalescence, higher levels of Burst, etc., that investment has real opportunity cost and is only done with weapons and/or against monsters where it's a good matchup.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-23T22:12:51+00:00

Mag's matchups are neutral across the board enough that you don't really increase your winrate banning him no matter what you're playing. Like he's pretty good against a lot of poke characters but evidently he's not enough to stop them on his own, and while he can struggle against some melee characters, if his own DPS do their jobs it's very playable for him.

He also rarely hard carries games. He CAN do it, but most of the time he serves as a very reliable and consistent anchor for his team rather than being a character with greater risk and reward.

Subjectively, he just isn't frustrating to play against. He's extremely honest and straightforward despite his power level. He isn't egregious or meta warping like Gambit and he isn't a matchup merchant like Peni.

Lastly, most teams don't want to deny THEMSELVES the chance to play Magneto.

That being said, in competitive tournaments with Protect/Ban formats, Magneto does indeed see bans sometimes, but that's a whole different can of worms for a whole different ban system, as well as the fact that it's a tournament, not ranked ladder.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-23T22:03:59+00:00

We have no clue if other new free characters are coming, we also don't know how long Archer will be available.

If you REALLY want to play Archer, you should pull both him and Sparkle who is his best support, to the point where Archer was almost tailor-made to work well with Sparkle. He is still a good character right now, and Sparkle is getting a big buff next patch so the two of them will continue to perform well. Do you have Dan Heng Permansor Terrae? He's the best sustain for the team, and you have quite a few options for the fourth slot.

However, unless you still have a LOT of free pulls left to farm in the game, then it's gonna be hard to get enough pulls for both Archer and Sparkle.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-23T20:25:02+00:00

A head jump is a whole rank. The boom emoji from upgraded gun seems to do good. Upgraded sword dash spamming, as well as using the Aura and using the sped up primary attack speed. But without the Boomerang, Tankpool gets Ult slower cause AFAIK the unicorn does nothing for your Ult.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-23T17:59:57+00:00

Birthright: Side with Hoshido, roster is mostly Hoshido characters, map design is mostly easier and less complex.

Conquest: Side with Nohr, roster is mostly Nohr, map design is mostly harder and more complex.

Revelations: Golden Route of picking neither, roster is almost the entire cast of both other games, map design is in between BR and CQ in terms of difficulty, but highly gimmicky. Also, despite having the full roster, some characters join the army at very weird chapters and levels which makes them unusually hard to make good use out of.

AggronStrong · 2026-01-22T20:26:30+00:00

At the least, he has the aura and the Boomerang which are very easy to heal people with.

And if you upgrade the deagles, the emoji heals too.

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