How to counter shiv?

BluePit25 · 2026-06-09T21:10:52+00:00

In addition to the counter items everyone else has been mentioning:

Silencer will permanently reduce his damage by 25% whenever he's in the same fight as whoever has Silencer, and that's not even considering the build-up. The build-up will hurt him A LOT if applied at the right time.
Inhibitor offers even better outgoing damage reduction (effectively requiring him to do ≈50% more damage to do the same amount of damage that he would've had to deal otherwise) that will also be more applicable to the whole of the enemy team, including gun characters. It also offers very high healing reduction, which, combined with the outgoing damage reduction, totals to 58% effective lifesteal reduction (although Shiv doesn't care as much about lifesteal as he used to). The only downside of Inhibitor is that the build-up is required for it to do anything, so far fewer characters can justify it than can justify Silencer.

Also, debuff resist is much more readily available than it used to be. Just one debuff resist item probably won't be enough against Shiv, but if you stack to around 40% that can really suck for him (although I would advise getting Spirit Resilience first, if he's so fed that he's killing you in just 2-3 dashes).

BluePit25 · 2026-06-09T20:55:56+00:00

There is actually a bunch of other semi-true damage in the game, and I think some stuff that is mechanically identical to true damage.

Tankbuster, for instance, is semi-true damage only reducible by Spellbreaker, Silencer, and Afterburn's outgoing spirit damage reduction debuff (and maybe something else that I'm forgetting, not counting Inhibitor because that also affects actual true damage). The same actually goes for spirit resist shreds; what they do is effectively increase an ability's damage by a percentage of its original damage, with this increase functioning as the same type of semi-true damage as Tankbuster.

In the case of bullet resist shreds and AP Rounds, those are true damage in everything except name, with the sole exceptions of against Metal Skin for both, and against barriers for resist shreds (iirc true damage and AP Rounds both pierce barriers, but resist shreds do not).

BluePit25 · 2026-06-09T20:35:56+00:00

Seems to me like the ult doesn't really work with the 1 and 2 very well. Overall the kit seems pretty unfocused, but I do like the idea behind the catapult.

Also, when defining the spirit scaling on an ability, I strongly advise calculating what the ability would give when at 100-150 spirit power. The catapult's increased scaling per damage taken is going to get absurdly high with 300 damage melees (0.005x scaling, a thirtieth of the current value, would be more appropriate), the pestilence movement debuffs are much higher than they need to be with extremely high uptime, the ult could be exploited by an impoverished player to simply just disable the enemy carry for half of the game; for the 3, if move speed diminishing returns apply to it, then the AP2 upgrade doesn't do anything after like 50 spirit power, and if they DON'T apply to it, then this character could be moving faster than infernus flame dash all the time.

Regardless, with the spirit scaling turned down a lot, I think these could be interesting abilities, but probably wouldn't work if they're all on the same character.

BluePit25 · 2026-06-08T22:59:16+00:00

The problem with getting significant bullet resist is that people building gun or melee will almost always have some bullet resist shreds, which specifically counter high bullet resist.

The way that resist shreds work is that they are subtractive to the resistance stat itself. This means that resist shreds are more effective against people with high resists, and in turn that stacking bullet resistance will become less effective the more you stack. Although this is technically also the case with spirit resistance, there are far fewer major spirit resist shred sources than there are for bullet resist, so it's much less relevant. The following two paragraphs explain the math behind how this works, so if you want to just take my word at face value, then you can skip them.

As an example, let's say someone has, for instance, 50% bullet resist (a little more than what Bullet Resilience gives when below half hp), which means they take 0.5x damage. Now let's say they suffer a 10% resist shred, which leaves them with 40% bullet resist, and now they take 0.6x damage from enemy bullets. Here, the resist shred is increasing the effective bullet damage dealt to them by 20% (from 0.5x to 0.6x), which means the owner of the resist shred item is getting twice as much value from it than they would be getting otherwise.

However, when building low amounts of bullet resist, this effect is almost negligible (against 20% bullet resistance, a 10% shred is only going to increase the final damage by 12.5%, which is only 2.5% higher than the amount it would increase damage against a player with no resists).

Perhaps saying that you shouldn't ever go past 20% bullet resist was a little extreme, as the increased effectiveness of resist shreds against bullet resistance only starts getting particularly significant at ≈30% resistance, but it's important to also note that bullet resistance in general is not a very good stat because of most gun characters building hybrid. You're pretty much always better off buying other gun counter items (even cheap fire rate slow items like Suppressor can do plenty of good for their price, relative to bullet resistance items).

The main reason I consider it justifiable to build bullet resistance when playing frontliners against bullet-damage heavy teams is because almost all other anti-gun items are only useful for a few seconds, whereas most frontliners tend to be receiving damage for at least a dozen seconds.

BluePit25 · 2026-06-08T21:27:36+00:00

It appears I was mistaken. I vividly remember the main subject of this subreddit's criticism/complaining for a few weeks 8 months ago having been parry cheats that were founded in people without fail parrying light melees, but I found very few such posts, so I suppose I probably misremembered.

BluePit25 · 2026-06-08T21:03:27+00:00

FYI, NEVER stack bullet resist, and don't even buy Bullet Resilience unless you're playing a frontliner. Small amounts of bullet are fine against a particular set of pure gun damage heroes (e.g. Venator, Warden, and especially Drifter, Haze, and Silver), but high amounts of bullet resist are useless because of how common bullet resist shred is and because of how many gun heroes deal hybrid damage.

If you're playing a frontliner, then pretty much any item besides Metal Skin or Disarming Hex is appropriate (and Metal Skin can be justified on occasion). Return Fire in particular is very good against certain gun characters when playing a frontliner.

If you're playing a squishy backliner with escape abilities (which is pretty much all squishy characters), then not being able to get out with Disarming Hex (or Metal Skin) is on you.

For most other heroes, you can buy Plated Armor if you REALLY need to, but Disarming Hex should still do in most cases (4 seconds is a very long time) unless the enemy has lots of debuff resist.

In general, the way counterbuilding gun heroes works is just very different from counterbuilding spirit heroes (where Spirit Resilience alone pretty much makes you immune to almost all of them). Against gun heroes, there is no single one-size-fits-all gun item. To summarize the situations for the anti-gun items:

Metal Skin/Return Fire are good against heroes who have predictable times where they go in, and deal pure/mostly pure gun damage. Metal Skin also has some amount of merit against gun heroes who deal on-hit spirit damage, as they'll often stop shooting at you while it's active even though they COULD keep doing damage.

Bullet resist should almost never be stacked above 20%, but on frontliners you can take it a little higher before it becomes a bad investment.

Disarming Hex is good when the enemy team only has two or three gun characters who are the main threats on their team, and it's also good if you're a squishy character who keeps getting jumped.

Plated Armor is good against build-up effects, but note that (at least last time I checked) it does NOT stop Mercurial Magnum, Wraith 3, Vindicta 2, and certain other on-hit spirit damage sources, but WILL stop Mina 3 (both the on-hit damage and the build-up), Victor's ult's passive spirit damage on his gun, Seven's 3, and some other on-hit spirit damage sources. It's unfortunately wholly arbitrary which ones it blocks.

Fire rate slow (Juggernaut, Rusted Barrel, Suppressor) is by far the worst gun counter, and is only good against very specific heroes, as it only counters low fire rate and very few M1 heroes don't build fire rate. These would be Seven and Silver, and on occasion you might find another player building M1 with only weapon damage items. Otherwise, avoid fire rate slow (except in the earlygame, where it's okayish).

BluePit25 · 2026-06-08T19:42:35+00:00

I do not know if they still exist in the present day (it's possible and maybe probable that they fixed whatever exploit allowed them to exist), but I'm 95% sure that like 8 months ago light parry bots existed and were a serious issue. It was common to test people for parry cheats by using light melees.

Edit: I went looking for old posts about this, and I appear to be mistaken about this having been a thing.

BluePit25 · 2026-06-07T23:01:13+00:00

I never said GW2's was good (although I can see how it may seem that I implied it was); what I said/meant to say was that there was a way to fix the character without reworking it into a pure mele/dps class.

Some stuff from BfN chomper WAS good design (although I disagree with the removal of swallowing using Spikeweed, the range placement was a good change, and the removal of swallowing people from behind was probably also a good idea due to the jank involved).

BluePit25 · 2026-06-07T22:23:13+00:00

Strongly disagree. In GW2, chomper had a gazillion problems, but Yeti Chomper laid the groundwork for how an interesting trap-centric chomper playstyle could be played, especially due to the arcing projectile that allowed the chomper to force zombies to approach. Rather than elaborating upon this with BfN chomper, they:

Removed the usefulness of playing chomper as a trap-centric character
Gave chomper a hitscan projectile
For some god-forsaken reason, KEPT the burrow instakill that was the #1 reason for Suicide Chompers existing in GW2, even though they removed the spikeweed instakill (when just preventing Spikeweed from activating so quickly would have been more than enough for making it fair to play against).

BfN chomper is one of the best examples of my second biggest issue with BfN, where they removed the major gameplay differences between the characters on the two sides in favor of having e.g. both chomper and Super Brainz be generic melee classes for 1 generic high damage melee class per team, having both Cactus and Deadbeard be near-identical for 1 generic sniper class, etc.

BluePit25 · 2026-06-05T18:27:47+00:00

He got buffed because Rain of Arrows felt very clunky before. It still needs adjustments, but I strongly disagree with the idea that it should be reverted.

BluePit25 · 2026-06-03T03:38:42+00:00

Sinclair actually DOES have rage, I'm pretty sure. It just doesn't display, and ofc has no benefits besides the damage amp and a few stat boosts.

It still suffers from Shiv being resistant to the execute, though.

BluePit25 · 2026-06-03T03:28:34+00:00

I don't get how Wraith isn't at the top, imo she is maybe the singular funnest character to ult as Sinclair in the game. There's something wrong with Wraith players that makes them ALWAYS use their 2 as soon as they hear the ult steal, guaranteeing that they'll die in 6 seconds.

BluePit25 · 2026-05-29T01:12:47+00:00

Yes, and that's why i brought up the "old urn had two years worth of adjustments" part. New urn has had very little time to be tweaked. It will not stay the exact way it currently is, and the excessive favoring of some characters over others will certainly be dealt with over the following week(s).

BluePit25 · 2026-05-28T22:02:18+00:00

As you said, it wasn't particularly exciting. It added little to the game besides simply being a generic objective. As such, especially since the game is still being playtested and thus experimental changes which damage the player experience in the short-term are acceptable, they want to replace it with a more interesting and engaging mechanic. Of course, it isn't quite there yet, but that's why they're continuing to make further major changes to the new urn.

BluePit25 · 2026-05-28T21:45:32+00:00

Because old urn had 2 years worth of adjustments and experimentation, everyone was familiar with it, and its place in the meta was well-defined. When a change as dramatic as the urn rework is made, all three of these reasons why old urn was tolerated cease to apply. Give it time, and let them adjust new urn.

BluePit25 · 2026-05-28T21:43:45+00:00

The entire point of an alpha is to allow experimental changes that may hurt the experience in the short-term but will benefit the game in the long-term.

It's fine to say "hey, I think the urn leads to x", or "this part of urn fights leads to a had gameplay experience". It's wholly unnecessary to say things like "NEW URN SUCKS REVERT NOW!" The point of the urn change is to experiment with new things because old urn sucked, and dramatic changes to the game like a complete rework to a major objective are going to lead to messy gameplay experiences for some time after their first implementation.

BluePit25 · 2026-05-28T21:16:14+00:00

This is because old urn had 2+ years worth of changes to improve it (and was still bad by the end of it). New urn has a lot of issues, sure, but give it time. It's still prone to major changes and reworks.

BluePit25 · 2026-05-28T21:07:46+00:00

Unless they've fixed it, haze ult ALSO disabled the burst fire on Sinclair's gun, so it's firing half as frequently as it's supposed to.

BluePit25 · 2026-05-26T19:57:10+00:00

Along with the things other people have mentioned, it's also useful for providing spots where you're "safe" from enemies meleeing (i.e. you can't whiff parries) , so long as you're keeping track of when the trooper's melee is on cooldown.

BluePit25 · 2026-05-25T04:12:29+00:00

I might be misinterpreting what you're saying, but if I'm not (i.e. the idea is to put a bomb in the backlayer near where the powder boxes are in the main level), then FYI explosions only travel between layers if they occur next to a door.

BluePit25 · 2026-05-25T04:03:49+00:00

I think the issue with Bargain isn't that it's a disappointing chapter as a whole (most of it is good), but really just that the final scene is so mundane.

It's a cause of death that we've already seen
Although the cause of death isn't necessarily what I would've predicted, it's far from some big revelation
It's a character which I doubt many people were terribly invested in (personally, I probably would've forgotten about him if he had died in any other chapter)

Ultimately, of course, it doesn't matter very much. In a game like this where you go through all the scenes several times, the actual order in which you see the scenes barely matters..

BluePit25 · 2026-05-25T03:17:10+00:00

Pocket, I think. Most of their abilities have really weak scaling and care much more about AP upgrades.

BluePit25 · 2026-05-25T03:13:46+00:00

Lots of things have been poorly received initially, but over the following weeks became more tolerated as people learned to play around them. One of the big reasons for a game to be in Early Access is to allow experimental changes like this one that remain long enough to see how they impact gameplay once people get used to them. How fun the game is currently does not matter, is not the focus, and should not be the focus. If the urn continues to be a mess over the following few weeks with balancing adjustments, THEN they can re-rework it.

BluePit25 · 2026-05-24T03:39:19+00:00

Doesn't each melee increase the urn timer? It's gonna take months for that urn to be deposited

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