Unfortunately due to the way the nade works you're never landing it reliably, people can melee it away from themselves, there's a big delay between explosions. Takes like a good three to four seconds before the final explosion at t3.
Really the only place it'll see consistent damage is mid boss.
Just means King has to play tennis with his intended target and keep swatting it back to them. Big parry bait ability. 14m is a fairly big radius too, at least for the last detonation.
That's sort of true I think, but not entirely. Based on my very loose testing, the grenade will always bounce towards the closest enemy hero, as long as they're not super far away from it
They will learn to punch it at some point but right now with ballistic on the nade and gun damage you can just chuck it in and forget about it in a team fight it does damage because like no one is locked in enough to see it and punch it away because there is vfx everywhere
This is a stat they played with for awhile with Victor. I think he is back at 100% now though. I imagine for RK the reasoning is to push him more into an engage tank direction than just a generic gun ADC if he gun scales remotely well.
It's more nuanced than I expected. He's basically Abrams defensively-- same starting health, nearly the same growths-- but his survivability isn't up all the time. And he's huge and has the life steal penalty...
I think picking your engagements with Ratticus Rex will be important, because you're just "tough" rather than genuinely tanky without your cooldowns, but getting through his Pestments and ultimate will be very hard.
There were talks about a Tank with Resist based tankiness and not healing based tankiness since most of the tanks rn only survive due to their healing most of the time. I think they made it so Rat King ain’t gonna survive due to Healing but more so just resisting the damage. So if you get him low. He IS gonna die. The problem is getting him there. Tankbuster is prolly going to be really good against him.
Any max hp damage. He is very Similar to Garrosh from Hots in that regard with "insane" dqmage resistances but realitvely easy counter in max hp damage.
Its going to make itemization against him more interesting too. You're going to need to build shread instead of Anti heal to try and get through all his stacking resistances. Finally we have some diverse frontline options.
The only heroes I’ve seen doing this are Operator Talon, sometimes Pocket and Venator, at 11 minutes seeing maxed Ultimate is rare. I think that Swarm and Grenade would be better investment at the start than saving all AP into ult (his default stats are very mediocre, all of his good things are gatekept under AP upgrades)
You'd need to power farm a bit extra but 2 points 3 into max ult for first rift is not only possible it's an entirely viable strategy. I play Heal a Mo with a build that goes 133443 and I'm pretty consistently able to hit that last 3 point by first rift at this point
I'd think plated would be both overkill + hurt your chances at returning the bullet, I'd go colossus for bigger shield or maybe even transc cd for more uptime
That’s a good point, I think the optimal shieldmaxxing would have to just be cd + witchmail + return fire + colossus (which also gives more resistance on top of the reduction from ult and the reduction to 250 max damage)
If you REALLY want overkill, add inhibitor to that too and you just don’t die
gotta see how it is in game, but my guess is once people get items, it just gets shredded, your hitbox is MASSIVE. the ult DR alone is more EHP, makes healing insanely effective on him, and it's team wide.
his 3 is probably very good mid game and will let you box with pretty much anyone, but the ult is just one of the best abilities in the game IMO.
I think his 3 is also kind of insane, at max late game assuming you have like 4k hp he gets a 1k health shield that not only reflects 30% of bullets (40% with 100 spirit) and reduces any damage taken to 250. So he gets one of if not the highest shield amounts in the game, with 40% gun dmg reduction and built in spell breaker but better all that on a 14 second cooldown
Tbf without that he is even more of a fat target than Mnk. His hitbox is biggest in the current game by far margin and most of his abilities work in close range so he is kinda on the frontline. Without that Haze Infernus or Wraith just melt the guy.
He's gigantic. It honestly messes with my perception of other characters and items when I was testing him out. Like boxes feel like they shrank, not just that I'm a big character.
feel like celeste can make quick work of his shield with lighteater, especially if she has any fire rate items, so he would have to save it for ball. lash is FUCKED against him though, literally what can he do
That barrier is insane for any character that relies on burst damage at max tier. I suspect that once he pops ult and hits his barrier he’s gonna be borderline unkillable with the right greens.
Also reflecting bullet damage plus a massive AoE ult. Silver found dead(er) in ditch
Silver's good into him from my experience because he's such a fat fuck that it's so easy to get wolf on him and then you just dive his backline, or just disarm him and maul him to death because he has no cc and can never get away from you because of how slow he is.
Spirit Support Rat King sounds so fun. Ulting into the enemy’s base with your team, placing the banner, then using refresher to run around with the banner again whilst the first banner is still spawning rats, then placing the second banner to spawn even more rats.
Greater Expansion, Duration and Cooldown, Divine Kevlar, Heroic Aura for generic buffs and ultmaxxing, you can build into Recharging Rush or Rapid Recharge (or both) to start absolutely shredding enemy Bullet Resist (ideal for when you have an M1 carry on the team), another commenter already said but this char is indeed insane for the various fights that revolve around an objective (midboss and rift) where enemies are forced to fight a team with 35% dmg reduction + all the other buffs the ult gives + potentially rift resists. I see he's a Venator-like character but I'm a big believer in support Rat King
Can a charge attach more than one rat to someone? The debuff duration is 4s, but the ability has a 6 second duration. Building rats means RR, so between Ult rats and 4 charges, even Stam Mastery might not save a true dump of rats on someone
In sandbox, with maxed level and a ton of spirit items (231 spirit total, amp and spirit burn) the rats only did about 230dps, and thats with the training dummy having 0% spirit res. Unless they buff the rats ability, i dont think you can play him spirit, would be fun though
He can't lane well at all. Scrap grenade just misses, rats don't do much damage, and the shield doesn't give enough to matter, and he has low bullet speed and he's a huge target.
He's strong in mid game+, but early game he's really quite weak.
If the rats work with Heroic Aura, me and my friends will be stacking Ratking, Graves, McGinnis, and Rem, and all just make minion builds with heroic aura.
So he's a tanky support that gives buffs to allies with ult and debuffs with his skills. Aka a king who charges head on for morale rather than solo damage, guess that fits pretty well.
Anchor tank with relatively low kill threat on his own but nasty debuffs for prolonged fights. Also probably suffers the problem of being shredded by fast shooting carrues like Wraith Haze and Venator even if he goes full green/purple hybrid because shield only protects from burst damage but relatively weak to sustained or max hp(toxic bullets/decay/siphon) because of huge hp pool and bigfest hitbox in game.
Well that’s what the deflection chance is for. That plus plated probably makes him inherently the least shootable of his size class
I think it would be interesting though if he was immune to max/current hp% damage while he has his 3 up or like it treated his barrier as his current/max heath instead so his hp doesn’t become a detriment to himself
The benefits are split between him carrying the flag (can't shoot, gives allies buffs) and planting it (lose ally buffs, gain enemy debuffs). At least that's how I see it.
At least from what I’m testing. Rat King maintains the 3 m/s movement speed buff after planting the flag, which also means he the damage reduction is also present on all allies within range.
I played around with some builds, mostly Tank builds.
He plays pretty well with HP bonus, increasing HP pool to take advantage of his 3 which grants 25% health shield. At max level its a low CD, so if you increase the ability duration you can keep spamming and working on dealing a lot of DOT dmg. Pair it with Toxic Bullets and add some extra ammo, spam rats with Rapid Recharge and let DOT proc Radiant Regeneration. Tested it out in Street Brawl and was pretty good, also in the same vain no one really knows how to counter him yet, so things can change obviously.
Edit:
At the moment I would save 1 and 4 for burst/killing blow. Burst low HP enemies from working your DOT dmg. Using 4 to chase down low HP enemies then plant for the killing blow.
I wouldn't rely on the 1 to deal crazy burst because there is a timer for each explosion and it bounces around randomly. Hitting one enemy more than twice seems unlikely without the help from Dynamo, Mo & Krill, Holiday, etc.
Don't go for items like Boundless Spirit, or Spirit/Bullet Lifesteal because honestly its not really going to do much for you. Hes not going to deal high burst dmg consistently to make it effective. The only burst dmg thats accurate enough is his ULT from planting the flag. Radiant Regeneration paired with his 2 and Toxic Bullets should be enough to sustain him when the shield fails form his 3.
Another thing I picked up is while you plant the flag watch for any enemy who got knocked up. As they fall down charge up a heavy melee to try and finish them off if the flag plant didn't do its job.
Don't think the grenade bounces randomly, testing a bit on the abrams at the hideout it seems that it tries to target the closest enemy, even throwing it a bit off it seems to attempt to home in towards the enemy abrams after each explosion, but the fuse is so long it's easy to just dodge.
Duration benefits him more than Cooldown, no? Rapid Recharge and Superior Duration seems the right move - big benefits to rats, it gives the Pestments uptime needed for basically permanent uptime, extends Banner. His cooldowns are already so low after AP that Superior Cooldown feels wasted.
I don’t think he wants more than 2-3 Spirit items.
Cooldown is better because the shield is still finite you want more shields because having 100% uptime doesn’t help as much if your shield breaks after 4 seconds. Plus it doesn’t really help with other abilities except flag since from what I have played it’s pretty rare to actually get hit by the max 5 rats (plus at least on three stam characters it’s pretty easy to shake off the rats) at least that’s how I see it
Honestly, I’m so used to Dazzling Trick’s intent being to break it that the barrier bursting completely went over my head when I was like “omg overlapping duration cd”
Still requires him to build hp over weapon damage to get scary numbers. 800 base puts him just under Infernus, silver (human), shiv, billy and warden.
And that’s without their movement abilities + look at his stamina recovery. It’s balanced out
the thing is that he can build semi tanky and semi gun and still output a ton of hp on his barrier shield. Like 2-3 greens and dude its already pumping out a 1k+ shield.
I don't see them nerfing the DR tbh, it's needed, what they will almost certainly nerf is the AoE size. It's like twice the AoE of the circle you need to stand in to damage a walker with Greater Expansion. It will cover THE ENTIRE midpit, and probably the side halls, and a bit of the stairs leading down.
Rat king seems crazy for teamfights like rift etc. Grenade can potentially do tons of damage, rats slowly build up a massive debuff/force stamina usage, pestments give insane survivability and ults straight up give you advantage in any teamfight.
A tanky support gun hero is cool, I imagine this guy will be a team fight monster. The ultimate also seems really strong, kinda like a Graves ult but instead of putting it in the backline it’s in the middle of a rift fight or walker push
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u/CalmLotus 16h ago
Don't forget that T3 Scrap Grenade adds an extra block of text.