HulkBuster, the overlooked buff.
Okay another champion overview, this time i will be going over specific niche lanes in act 6 where HB excels, and i will also be looking at his ability to clear both V2 and V3 incredibly fast.
So before i go into this, i wanna refute a common talking point ive heard used against HB, this is that he relies too heavily on the AI. to people struggling with this, have no fear because there is a simple solution.
If you finish a combo with your opponents back against the wall, press block and then immediatly throw l2 99% of the time the AI will hold their block, and you will get the power drain off the l2, or longer stun off the l1.
So first, lets look at act 6 and some very difficult problems that Hulkbuster can demolish.
Starting off with Energy adoption ice + bubble shield + diss track, the problem fights on this lane are rogue, KM and iceman (soon to be changed to havok)
HB works for energy adoption ice with armor breaks off every special attack, since armor breaks stop the coldsnaps from applying and obviously with his shocks and armor breaks he works excellently for diss track, now the main reason i mention this lane is because of the Nerf (that is actually going to make it much much more difficult, iceman does not insta kill you with the coldsnap due to the lowered attack values, you have about 50% health so most options that work for this lane work for ice man) that is happening to this lane, where iceman is being replaced by havok, this is going to lower the numbers of proper counters to this fight by quite a large amount to i believe only 4 champs, HB, havok himself, quake (but hard to use against havok), and warlock but he really only gets damage after l2s with the armor breaks stacked and is quite hard to make work with diss track. so that is an incredibly niche fight in act 6 that many people may be forced into ranking HB for if they dont have the other options.
now moving on from that, there are 2 thunderstruck lanes/fights in act 6, both of which HB works excellently for, having shocks is obviously quite a niche utility and being a usable champion alongside that is even more rare, for the lane in 6.3, the list of champions that work well is quite small already without any shrug off abilities or annoying bits like power sting and power drain that are provided on king groot, but have no fear, HB can reliably solo this, i have done it myself unboosted quite a few times.
HB is also an excellent option for any armor break havoks (6.2.2 lane, v3 3.2 lane, and 6.3.3 havok boss all have this) due to his power drain and unblockable off of special attacks, allowing you to basically press a panic button and stop yourself from losing the armor up, and also having 2 refreshing armor ups on top of this makes it quite hard for havok to do any detonations on you provided youre playing well.
now onto variant, HB is able to just melt variant healthpools in one l2 cycle, and has insane survivability to go through whole paths by himself.