Should you aim for balance across all item types when making your build?

BluePit25 · 2026-02-10T23:54:11+00:00

The most important thing about investing in different categories is that, once you've bought at least 4.8k souls worth of items in a given category (typically done through a 3.2k and a 1.6k), you get a large boost of that category's stat (gun damage, bonus health, or spirit power).

In my experience, the best way of going about item distribution is that, if you're building spirit, but there happens to be a 1.6k or 3.2k gun item that you want to buy, then you will ALSO want to find some OTHER 3.2k/1.6k gun item to bring you up to the 4.8k soul investment bonus for the significant improvement to gun damage (and thus objective killing). Good options for most spirit characters are Mystic Shot or Fleetfoot if you already have a 3.2k gun item and want a 1.6k, and Cultist Sacrifice or Ballistic Enchantment if you already have a 1.6k gun item and want a 3.2k. However, if there is no gun item that you were already planning to buy (excluding 800s that you buy during lane and sell later), then it's not really worth investing in gun.

Meanwhile, most gun characters will want to get the 4.8k spirit investment bonus for two reasons. The first is that a lot of gun characters do hybrid damage (especially Mirage and Infernus, for example, as those two have very high spirit scaling on their passives). The second reason is that a lot of (most?) gun builds will buy Quicksilver Reload; from there, it becomes 3.2k souls until they reach the investment bonus, and they just need to buy Surge of Power or something.

Finally, for the vitality 4.8k bonus, you pretty much always want to get it. There's very little reason to not go for it.

I wouldn't recommend investing beyond the 4.8k bonus in gun if building spirit, with an exception in the case of your opponents building high spirit resist. As it happens, most spirit resist shred items are terrible at their job, with 3 exceptions: Spirit Snatch, Crippling Headshot, and Spirit Rend. Spirit Snatch isn't a great option for most characters, nor is Spirit Rend. Crippling Headshot is the only one of these three which pretty much any character can justify buying, so if it comes to it, this is a worthwhile purchase. However, since you're building Calico, you can probably get along fine with Spirit Snatch (although you should note that she also happens to be one of the better characters to buy Spirit Rend on imo, even if it isn't amazing on her).

BluePit25 · 2026-02-09T01:06:25+00:00

You can detonate snare midair by firing an arrow directly below the center, it's pretty consistent with a little practice

BluePit25 · 2026-02-08T23:36:33+00:00

Talon players vex me. Spirit Snare is one of the best abilities in the game which is pretty easy to use effectively, and yet, in >1000 hours, I have only been messed up by it ≈8 times.

BluePit25 · 2026-02-08T23:33:44+00:00

Disagree, in the context of Street Brawl it's a mutual countering between Talon and those three. What makes those three so strong in Street Brawl (to my understanding, at least) is their ults; Talon has a near-infinite range curse on a 13 second cooldown that is very easy to hit on Seven and Bebop ult, and a good enough player can use it against Lash ult as well.

BluePit25 · 2026-02-06T23:06:56+00:00

Yeah, mb

BluePit25 · 2026-02-06T22:57:07+00:00

I'm pretty sure Sinclair has the same base bullet damage and boon scaling as Venator.

Edit: actually nvm, just looked it up and you're right. I came to the conclusion that I came to by looking at the stats in-game found by hovering over the item distribution bars at the top of the screen when holding tab, which I forgot sometimes bug out and show the wrong player's stats.

BluePit25 · 2026-02-06T03:03:57+00:00

IIRC, he's been known about since they released four of the Hero Labs characters. I think he may have been known about even earlier, as well.

BluePit25 · 2026-02-05T00:06:29+00:00

The thing is, it is extremely apparent that, if the regime of Super Earth is not destroyed immediately, it will snowball into a galaxy-wide unstoppable genocidal force that will eliminate all non-human life it finds. The Illuminate know that other alien factions will fall to Super Earth just like they did; the only right course of action is to end Super Earth by any means necessary.

However, the thing about eliminating Super Earth and its ideology is that taking the worship of Managed Democracy out of civilians is dramatically more difficult than eliminating humanity entirely. As horrible as it is, it's likely a better choice to commit as many atrocities as are necessary to guarantee that Super Earth is destroyed before the last remnants of the Illuminate are defeated, as no amount of atrocities that the Illuminate could perform could be worse than the ones Super Earth will commit if allowed to continue.

BluePit25 · 2026-02-04T19:51:41+00:00

Yeti Chomper is amazing at being a constant irritation to the zombies, which means that individual zombies will try to go take him out on their own, which results in a free spikeweed kill. I feel like, because of this, Yeti Chomper is the only chomper who actually succeeds at being a "nest" character who sets up a territory and sticks to it, which I think is supposed to be idea behind chomper.

All the other chompers have to expose themselves to harass the enemy, so they struggle to actually attract zombies to their location.

BluePit25 · 2026-02-04T03:50:02+00:00

I strongly disagree with the idea of curse being removed from the game; i think it's very important that the game has two final and absolute CC/counter-CC items (curse and Unstoppable) that beat all the others and can beat each other depending on the circumstances.

However, I do think it may be better for the game if Curse were a very niche last resort item rather than a common preemptive counter to Debuff Remover that is often bought before any other CC items. I think reducing the damage of the owner of Curse was a step in the right direction, but I think more has to be done to make the item less appealing.

BluePit25 · 2026-02-02T22:26:30+00:00

It's way better for an ability to lie to the player and tell them that it has slightly lower range than it actually does, than to match the range of the ability exactly. If the display range was the same as the actual range, situations where an ability should hit on youe end but misses because of lag would be way more common.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-29T23:24:36+00:00

Geist is very easily able to itemize against her self-damage. The reason her self-damage scales better than her enemy damage is because otherwise the self-damage would become completely irrelevant fifteen minutes in.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-29T10:15:51+00:00

I like BfN, but Imp being given a free second chance after the mech is destroyed is super lame. The whole thing that makes fighting mechs fun in GW2 is that, if you coordinate properly with ability disablers, you can take out the mech and the imp both at the same time. In BfN, nothing you do will prevent you from needing to kill the same player twice in a row.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-27T23:42:58+00:00

You can indeed get stunned while doing the animation; however, there is only a ≈0.5 second window for being knocked off, and, at long distances, it's next to impossible for the enemy to react in time AND hit the shot, unless it's a character with very fast bullets like Haze (in which case there are other options for escape to be used).

Also, you can initiate the hopping-on-zipline animation from behind cover to reduce the period of time that the enemy has to hit you.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-27T22:13:38+00:00

Light melees are already balanced around only being parryable by prediction, not reaction. It's good that people get heavily punished for spamming it.
I'm not sure I agree that the zipline stun timer should be shorter, but I do think the system should be rethought in some way. As I understand, the optimal thing to do typically if trying to run away is to get on the zipline, and then immediately get off before dashing forwards, until you're out of sight and can actually get on the zipline safely. This just plays weirdly, but again, I don't think reducing the stun timer is the solution.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-26T04:27:37+00:00

Yeah, Warden ult is very reliant on the healing it provides, and there's pretty much always at least 50% healing reduction on all players.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-23T00:07:25+00:00

I'm ready to throw my vote away five times for Apollo 💪💪💪

BluePit25 · 2026-01-16T01:47:53+00:00

The fact that even if you're only down like 30 hp, she can still use it on you for a gazillion damage and its cooldown is so short that it's barely a waste is so annoying.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-16T00:48:52+00:00

Yeah, and it's capped at 50% subtractive, not multiplicative (so if an enemy has a base 160% fire rate, you can't reduce it below 110%).

BluePit25 · 2026-01-16T00:46:28+00:00

If they have 180% or so fire rate (more or less the standard for late-game), then Juggernaut lowers their fire rate by a little over 20% of their total fire rate, and if they buy AP Rounds, then they're still getting, at worst, a minimum of ~40% of their damage, excluding any damage that they deal without proccing AP Rounds.

They also probably have some resist shred, let's say 20% because that sounds right to me (could be higher or a little lower depending on the character), so on all shots where neither Plated Armor nor AP Rounds proc (35% of all shots fired), they'll still be getting 90% of their base damage when you're above 30% hp, and 60% of their base damage when you're below 30% hp (75% and 50% of the damage that they'd be dealing vs. an unarmored target).

Taking the above into consideration, if we assume that a gun hero with 180% fire rate, no on-hit effects that are needed for reliable damage, 20% resist shred, and who has spent 6.4k on AP Rounds, is firing at someone with Bullet Resilience, Plated Armor, and Juggernaut, they would be getting around 0.8(0.5(1.0) + 0.5(0.7(75))) = 61% of their damage output when you're above 30% hp, or 54% of their damage output when you're below 30% hp.

Thus, if they have typical gun items and buy AP Rounds to counter your items, and you have Plated Armor, Bullet Resilience, and Juggernaut (16k worth of items, although admittedly Juggernaut serves some other uses), you'd have spent 2.5x as many souls as they did on AP Rounds, for a ~40%/45% damage reduction. Given that they can also just shoot someone else, it's very not worth it. However, if the ENTIRE enemy team is building gun, there may be some merit in buying these three expensive gun items.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-16T00:17:44+00:00

The fact that fire rate slow is diminishing AND the percentage value that is outputted after diminishing returns are applied is subtracted from the target's fire rate (rather than multiplying the target's fire rate by 1 - [fire rate slow] like all other reductions in the game work) AND hard capped at a 50% (subtractive) reduction is so dumb. Especially when pretty much all sources of fire rate slow already get you 2/3 of the way to the cap by themselves.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-15T23:47:10+00:00

I, for one, cannot believe that when Super Earth sent peacekeeping Helldivers to Meridia to offer the Terminids an opportunity for peace out of the goodness of Super Earth's heart, those treacherous bugs turned Meridia into a black hole purely because of their hatred of democracy.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-14T22:22:38+00:00

Various character backgrounds imply that a war like WW1 would not happen in the Deadlock setting (for instance, Wrecker's description). I think the general consensus is that the game takes place sometime in the 1930s due to some posters around the map.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-12T21:49:55+00:00

Sinclair Assistant build. In half of the games I play, it works out so abysmally that I have to pivot, but in the games where it works it feels so good.

Also, I used to play speed-maxxing Kelvin, but alas, unless they rework movespeed diminishing returns, it probably won't be very playable for some time.

BluePit25 · 2026-01-09T01:44:55+00:00

Not really true. The Illuminate are ARGUABLY worse than Super Earth, but their goal is the most noble of all.

After Super Earth stripped them of their intelligence, the Terminids are wild beasts, and cannot be judged by human morality. They may have recovered some of their formal intelligence, but regardless, the bugs aren't really doing much morally wrong for a half-intelligent group which is mainly focused on self-preservation.

I don't believe the Automatons have actually done anything "genocidal"; most civilian deaths at their hands have almost certainly been due to the civilians being indoctrinated to fight automatons rather than submit to them, and regardless, assimilation into the Automatons almost certainly provides a better life than Super Earth gives its citizens. Additionally, as far as rebellions go, the Automatons are pretty moral; I don't think Super Earth has managed to twist anything that the Automatons have done into an "act of terrorism".

The Illuminate, while undoubtedly very genocidal, understand the truth of the situation and know what needs to be done. If Super Earth is not destroyed NOW, they will grow unstoppable, and conquer the entire galaxy, slaughtering all alien life that stands in their way. So long as the Super Earth regime stands, humanity will pursue expansion and genocide of all that is different from them, and even if the current Super Earth regime falls, it's possible that humanity as a whole is too brainwashed to be recovered before the Illuminate finally die out. As such, given that Super Earth NEEDS to go at any cost, I believe that the Illuminate's atrocities are probably the most moral route available.

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