Thoughts on this guy.
R1s02
Member Posts: 274 ★★
He got buffed recently and Is quite fun to play with, tho what are his uses.
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An in depth guide to The Devil of Hell's Kitchen (Post Buff)
# Daredevil (Hell’s Kitchen)
In recent months, the rework of Daredevil has definitely had quite a mixed response from the community overall. In this time, I’ve been using him extensively in many different game modes and I have to say, I’m really happy with where he’s at now. The more I use him the more I like him; he’s not a game changing champion like Quake but he has some really nice utility now and can be a very useful character in a wide variety of situations. His damage isn’t crazy, but he can hit relatively hard after a little bit of build-up. Daredevil is one of my favourite Marvel characters and he’s a lot of fun to use now which is great. I know the biggest complaints have been about the reduced rate of regeneration as it makes him unusable with suicide masteries, I completely understand where those people are coming from with that as I’m sure he’s a favourite to many others as well, but I can definitely see the reasoning behind it given that he can keep the rage debuff on himself for the majority of the fight. For those that aren’t running suicides though, this champion now has some serious potential, especially with a high signature level. In this guide I’ll go into detail about what he can do, where he can be beneficial and also give you some tips and tricks on utilising his abilities to their fullest extent. For reference, any values that I use below will be taken from a 5\* 5/65 version of Daredevil.
# Overview
To begin with, it’s important to understand that this character is all about managing the combo meter well. Unlike most champions, the new Devil of Hell’s Kitchen will keep increasing and decreasing his combo meter as the fight progresses. Ultimately, his combo meter is responsible for switching between the two modes he has access to, with each one benefitting him in different ways. When your combo meter is at fifteen hits or less, the mode ‘Murdock boy’ will be active. If the combo meter is at sixteen hits or more, ‘Stick’s Apprentice’ will instead be the active mode. There are multiple ways to control your combo meter, which I’ll explain further below. A few important things to know is that: Daredevil has a permanent passive combo shield; his regeneration rate cannot be lowered by anything other than poison and his base regeneration rate is set at 40% of the normal rate for other characters. This is the reason why he isn’t suicide friendly, as willpower will not be able compensate for the damage you’ll be taking from suicide masteries. In addition to these things, Daredevil also cannot ‘miss’ with his attacks. He was always able to ignore invisibility as an Easter egg ability since the character is blind and doesn’t rely on being able to see, but more recently he was changed to ignore all types of abilities that cause miss. As a result, champions like Ebony maw, Darkhawk and Guillotine 2099 are much easier to deal with.
Murdock Boy:
Daredevil will always start the fight with Murdock Boy active. He’ll stay in this mode until his combo meter reaches a total of 16 hits and gains the following benefits:
* 100% chance to shrug off any non-damaging debuff, this can be things like stun, armour break, weakness etc. When this happens, you gain an additional five hits on the combo meter and the ability goes on cooldown for two seconds.
* 3150 Physical resistance against basic attacks.
Being able to shrug off those debuffs can be incredibly helpful. Take Aarkus or Void for example. Aarkus inflicts a coldsnap debuff on you when he is able to land an armour break. The armour break is applied when you’re stood too close to him for an extended period of time, using a full five hit combo would usually be enough time for him to get that armour break/coldsnap combination active. Daredevil doesn’t need to worry about the coldsnap damage because he will shrug off the armour break, therefore avoiding damage over time in the process.
Void is a similar interaction, but one you must be careful with. Daredevil can either be extremely good against Void or completely useless. All of that comes down to how you play the fight though. If you don’t control your combo meter well, you’ll start to apply rage debuffs to yourself which will trigger the damage over time that Void has. However, if you’re good at controlling your combo meter you can easily remain in Murdock Boy and never have to worry about Void’s debuffs, when he tries to apply them, Daredevil will shrug them off automatically. You’ll be able to build up a lot of cruelty in this fight and the class bonus can provide some additional damage as well.
Stick’s Apprentice:
In a way this can be considered the more offensive of the two forms that Daredevil has access too. With this one, you no longer have the ability to shrug off non-damaging debuffs but instead gain other types of utility. When attacking, all of your attacks will lower the opponent’s defensive ability accuracy by 65% as long as your combo meter doesn’t fall below 16 hits. Ability accuracy reduction (AAR) is extremely useful in a lot of situations, it can help you get around evade, autoblock, thorn like abilities and much more. With so many champions and nodes in the game now there are lots of situations where this is beneficial. In addition to his AAR, he also increases his critical hit rating by 900 until he switches back to Murdock boy. This is passive and cannot be nullified, staggered, fate sealed or stolen. Non-damaging debuffs increase his base attack by 605.5 each. Rage is important for this very reason, it will increase his damage output and trigger willpower at the same time, so you'll be able to hit harder and recover some lost health simultaneously. It’s important to know that the potency of his attack increase is lowered by 5% for any additional debuffs that may be active on Daredevil. That being said, it’s still worth stacking them as much as you can to maximise your damage output.
# Special Attacks
Special attacks for Daredevil are important for a number of reasons. Whilst they give him access to his biggest sources of damage, they also play a key role in controlling his combo meter, which I’ll explain how to do later on. For now, it’s important to know what each of them can do so that controlling your combo will be easier to understand.
SP1- This attack consists of seven hits and will grant you a precision buff (+700) for fifteen seconds. This is mainly used to quickly increase your combo meter and reach sixteen hits a lot sooner. If you chain into this attack from a six-hit basic combo, that’ll be a total of thirteen hits when combined. The precision can work quite nicely when in Stick’s apprentice mode, as you'll be boosting your critical hit rate from two separate sources.
SP2- The most important of the three special attacks and one of his best options for increasing damage. Daredevil will strike the opponent three times and lose five hits on his combo meter for each hit that lands on the opponent. So, each time you successfully use the SP2 you’ll be losing a total of fifteen hits from your combo meter. These hits are consumed to apply one bleed debuff on each strike of the special attack, for a maximum of three stacks. If you don’t have enough hits left on the combo meter, the bleed will not be applied, so you’ll want a minimum of fifteen hits before you use it. In addition to the bleed stacks, daredevil will also gain a twelve second rage debuff at the end of the attack. When it expires, this rage debuff is converted into a fury buff, increasing his attack rating by 1931.2. However, you can actually bypass this delay if you want to get the fury buff sooner for any reason. Rage is a non-damaging debuff and can be shrugged off when Murdock Boy is active. So, if you use this special attack to bring yourself to fifteen hits or lower, the rage is immediately removed, resulting in two things: Five more hits will be added back to the combo meter and the fury buff will activate as this happens, removing the need to wait for twelve seconds after the attack ends.
SP3- Another great option when it comes to increasing damage, especially in longer fights. By using this attack, you’ll be able to activate a seventy second righteous wrath passive effect. Essentially, what this does is add direct bleed damage to basic attacks with a 35% chance on each hit. It works in a similar way to Nightcrawler’s deep wounds, where the damage is applied instantly rather than over time. Due to its long duration, you can actually get a very significant damage increase from this ability, even more so when you have the fury buff active as well. Since this effect is still, technically a bleed, it will still remove thing’s rock stacks, which is really useful when combined with his ability accuracy reduction. You won’t ever need to worry about his unstoppable because he won’t be able to gain enough stacks to use it. What’s interesting about this method of bleed is that it will completely bypass the empowered immunity node, which Thing can be a common placement on in Alliance Wars. You’ll be able to use this bleed to remove his rock stacks without attempting to apply a debuff, so he won’t be gaining power from it like he would normally.
# Signature ability
Whilst not essential, daredevil benefits massively from his signature ability. I think if I was going to consider taking him to a high rank, I would want to have this before I did. He gains a great deal from being at a low signature level, but then gains a great deal more by being at max signature level. Both are quite important for a few reasons. To begin with, the first part of his signature ability will allow him to gain a rage debuff whenever he leaves Murdock Boy and instead enters Stick’s Apprentice. This rage can stack and gives him access to a near permanent healing effect from willpower if you play him the right way. Rage from the signature ability will not be converted to fury, that only happens when rage comes from his SP2. However, don’t forget that whilst in Stick’s Apprentice, every non-damaging debuff you have active on you will still increase your attack rating by 605.5 each. Ultimately, if you’re able to stack up these rage debuffs you can still gain a decent boost to your damage output. As his signature level increases, the duration of this rage debuff will increase.
As a secondary bonus his signature ability also allows him to ignore a portion of incoming direct damage when landing attacks. This refers to things like thorns, rock shield damage from Korg or static shock from Electro. This makes Daredevil a great solution to the Electro Luke found in Act 7 as he’s able to completely ignore the static shock damage and make the fight incredibly easy. He benefits from this ability when in stick’s apprentice, so you would want to try and stay above sixteen hits whenever possible. I would recommend using SP2 attacks when you’re at a combo of 30 or using heavy attack at a combo of 25, so that you’ll drop to 15 hits and immediately switch back again. This way you’ll be able to continue refreshing the rage debuff; increasing your attack rating and allowing you to heal from willpower.
For reference, here are some of the values at various signature levels to get an idea about how it scales and whether or not you’d like to invest more signature stones into these abilities. These numbers are based on a 5\* 5/65 version of Daredevil.
Rage duration:
* Level 01: 6 seconds
* Level 10: 6.67 seconds
* Level 20: 7.33 seconds
* Level 50: 9.14 seconds
* Level 100: 11.89 seconds
* Level 150: 14.50 seconds
* Level 200: 17.00 seconds
Percentage of direct damage reduction:
* Level 01: 50.00%
* Level 10: 54.52%
* Level 20: 58.24%
* Level 50: 67.23%
* Level 100: 79.49%
* Level 150: 90.20
* Level 200: 100% (Completely ignores thorn-like damage at this point)
See next comment, too long to fit into one
Daredevil doesn’t really need any of his synergies to be useful, but he does have some really good ones available to him. For me personally, I’m quite fortunate that many of his synergies are with champions that I use on a regular basis. He has four unique synergies, three of which are extremely valuable and he also has two standard synergies as well.
Standard Synergies:
* Teammates Level three: When paired with Luke Cage or Iron Fist all champions on your team have 5% increased perfect block chance
* Nemesis Level three: When paired with Kingpin or Mysterio all champions gain 6% attack. This one is a bit more useful as Kingpin also has a unique synergy with Daredevil as well. Daredevil will have a 50% chance to gain a five second rage debuff whenever he would block or be struck by an attack. If you wanted to reach sixteen hits quickly, this synergy would be a great way to do it as each one he triggers will be shrugged off, adding five hits to the combo meter each time that happens. Kingpin would gain 15% attack rating whilst unstoppable and can’t be evaded through the use of passive abilities whilst unstoppable is active. You’ll find this synergy in Kingpin’s champion information page in game.
Unique Synergies:
* Fisk’s downfall: This is my favourite synergy overall, it’s fantastic for controlling your combo meter and brings a new level of utility altogether. When Spider-Gwen or Punisher (the original version, not 2099) are on the team, Daredevil gains his own ‘miss’ mechanic. When charging a heavy attack, any incoming enemy attacks will miss daredevil for 1.5 seconds. That may not sound like much but you can get very creative with this synergy. The most obvious use for this one is to throw heavy attacks safely into the opponent’s block or mid combo, giving you an easy opening to drop your combo meter by ten hits. What’s even more interesting is that you can actually use this to avoid entire special attacks. If you time it correctly, you can charge a heavy when the opponent is using a special attack and completely ignore the damage. It’s extremely useful for hard to evade specials or those consisting of a lot of hits, like a winter soldier SP2 or War Machine SP1. You can use it for almost any special attack in the game, especially if you combine it with dexterity or blocking. Coupled with his regeneration from rage debuffs, this synergy can be a brilliant way to make himself more sustainable. If you’re worried about the recovery time of a heavy attack being punishable by the opponent don’t be, the miss ability remains active for 1.5 seconds no matter what you do. You don’t need to wait for their attack to end before letting go, you can release it immediately and play the heavy attack animation whilst they’re still mid-special. You’ll be completely safe by doing it that way and free to block or dash back if you wish to do so. Alternatively, you may be able to punish their special attack whilst they are recovering from that instead. The bonuses for Spider-Gwen and Punisher are much more straightforward, Gwen will gain an extra 3% attack rating per Spider-Sense charge whilst Punisher gains 10% attack rating and 50% fury buff duration. The attack increase for Gwen can be particularly good if you're running the Gwenom rising synergy for her as well, which adds a further 10% base attack per Spider-Sense charge and increases the cap to six charges, not five. She can hit very hard when fully ramped up, she’s one of my most used champions, so I’m really glad that she gets this extra synergy from Daredevil.
* Secret of the hand: Another huge bonus for Daredevil. Whenever Psylocke or Elektra are present on the team with him, he can inflict a non-stacking twelve second disorient debuff on his opponent when they get knocked down. Disorient will reduce the opponent’s block proficiency and defensive ability accuracy by 35% each. Again, that may not seem too impressive at first glance, but if you couple this with the ability accuracy reduction of Stick’s Apprentice, you can actually achieve a 100% reduction and maintain it for the full duration of the fight. As long as you keep watching the combo meter and throw a special attack or a heavy attack at regular intervals, there’s essentially no cooldown to it. Think of it like Falcon’s lock on ability, since falcon got a buff, he’s been pretty widely regarded as one of the most useful skill champions available and for good reason. 100% Ability accuracy reduction is incredibly powerful and can be used to shut down a lot of abilities and nodes. Daredevil is capable of achieving this for the entire fight without the need to wait for a cooldown. Now I’m not going to say this is better than Falcon’s for a few reasons. The first one being that you would need to reach a combo of sixteen hits before this can be applied and the second one being that it requires a synergy. But either way, that for me is a very impressive piece of utility and certainly something that Daredevil should be recognised for. This method could be a great alternative if you have Daredevil but don’t have Falcon in your roster. The only other place falcon would be superior is when facing a debuff immunity node, as you won’t be able to apply the disorient debuff in these situations. In return, Elektra will gain an additional 20% power when landing critical hits and Psylocke has a 25% increase to her special attack damage.
* Rule of Law: If you’re a fan of She-Hulk, this one might be quite nice for you. Champions involved in this synergy will gain 10% increased attack rating and Daredevil (Hell’s Kitchen) will have a 20% chance to inflict a stun debuff with his special attacks. The synergy champions are Ronan, She-Hulk and Daredevil (Classic), but they don’t receive any other benefits aside from the increase in attack rating.
* Strength of Martyrs: When Nightcrawler, Ghost Rider or Captain America (the original version) are on the team, Daredevil will gain a 60% increase to his cruelty buff duration and potency at the cost of an additional five hits from the combo meter. Synergy champions will benefit from a 10% health increase as well. I personally wouldn’t ever use this synergy; I think it makes controlling his combo meter unnecessarily more difficult and the payoff doesn’t really justify that. It could potentially be useful in a couple of situations, but overall, it’s just not worth worrying about.
# Playstyles
With Daredevil, you want to be switching modes as often as you can to maximise damage in a standard fight. For others, it may be more beneficial to stay in one of them rather than using both, an example of that would be void as I explained earlier. For most fights though, you’ll want to build up to sixteen hits as quickly as you can. After reaching that point, you’ll switch over to Stick’s Apprentice and gain a rage debuff if your Daredevil is awakened. You should notice a small damage increase now if that’s the case and if you have any missing health, you’ll then start healing up from the willpower mastery as well. There are two things you can do now depending on what you would prefer to go for. If you throw the SP2 early and your combo count falls below sixteen hits as a result, you will immediately shrug off the SP2 rage debuff and get a fury buff without the delay. If you continue to build your combo meter so that you stay at sixteen hits or more after the SP2, you will instead gain the twelve second rage debuff (a great way to get the healing if you don’t have the signature ability). When the rage debuff expires, it will automatically activate a fury buff. By keeping that delay, it can make it much easier to keep the fury buff up during your next special attack for increased damage. It’s still possible to do that without keeping the delay, but you can actually combine the two methods to get two stacks of fury by alternating. So, for your first SP2, if you stay above sixteen hits and delay your fury, you can then throw a second SP2 falling below sixteen hits to activate another fury buff on top of it. To ensure you do fall below sixteen hits, throw a heavy attack prior to using your second SP2 to check that your combo meter is at thirty or less hits at the time of the special attack. A likely outcome of this is that by consuming the rage quickly, you’ll instantly be pushed over sixteen hits again, resulting in two fury buffs at once and a rage debuff giving even more attack rating. The heavy attack will also mean that you have at least one cruelty buff active and by returning to Stick’s Apprentice mode, your critical hit rating will passively increase on top of that. Bleed debuffs from the second special attack will be stronger as a result of the first fury buff too, giving daredevil a very decent damage output overall. It’s nothing game breaking, but it’s certainly not bad by any means, my critical medium attacks will often be between 6,500 and 8,000 damage in this situation depending on class relationships, nodes, resistances and so on.
In longer fights you will want to play a little differently. Before going into the SP2 rotation you’ll want to start off with a SP3. The reason for that is that you’ll gain a significant increase in damage throughout the fight due to the righteous wrath passive. It will enable your basic attacks to do considerably more damage than normal, which is only amplified by the fury buffs and rage debuffs you’ll pick up later in the fight. After using a SP3 you’ll want to get back to using SP2s until the righteous wrath passive is coming to an end. It’s always good to try and have another SP3 ready for it ending so that you can reactivate it straight away, but it’s rare that this will be necessary as fights usually aren’t that long. The seventy second duration gives you more than enough time to get most opponents down.
When ability accuracy reduction is a priority for you in a certain situation, you’ll want to be at sixteen hits as quickly as possible. SP1 can play a big part in this, it consists of seven hits and can get you across that threshold quite easily. If you can successfully land a normal six-hit combo (his second medium hits twice) and then chain into the SP1 you have thirteen hits from that alone. You lose damage by using this method but it gives you access to that important piece of utility when you need it. It’s also a great method to use for unusual nodes like ‘crit me with your best shot’ due to the precision buff you get from the SP1 and precision passive from Stick’s Apprentice. If you aggressively combine SP1 with frequent heavy attacks, you’ll be able to switch modes constantly and stack up the rage debuffs whilst stacking the precision and cruelty buffs at the same time. The increased critical hit rate will help you deal with the node and the cruelty will try to compensate for some of that lost damage by not going for the SP2 or SP3.
# Strong Matchups
* Anything where ability accuracy reduction is concerned: Autoblock, evade, explosive personality etc
* Alliance wars. He can be a good attacker and defender on path 5. He’s a regular on my offence team due to his ‘miss’ synergy with Gwen for section one. He’s also great when M.O.D.O.K. is placed in section two as well. His ability accuracy reduction can disable the protection in both sections, removing the need to knock down or intercept your opponent. As a defender he could shrug off stun debuffs from parry, making it more difficult to land a heavy attack against him.
* A good counter to Aarkus and Void as explained above. Other tricky opponents like Thing, Killmonger, Korg and many more.
* Buffet: Daredevil does have buffs, but he has full control over when he activates them. If you only use SP3 attacks and refrain from using any heavy attacks, the only buff he will gain is the precision from dexterity.
* Masochism: Similar reasons to buffet. He has up to three debuffs that he can apply, bleed, parry stun and disorient with the Psylocke/Elektra synergy. If you avoid parry and stay away from SP2, he can easily bypass masochism nodes.
* Any fight where thorn-like damage is present, his signature ability and ability accuracy reduction work well together to avoid that. At signature level 200, he will be able to completely negate this damage.
Naturally, there are a lot more situations where he can be a great asset to your team but these are just a few examples of where he can be beneficial. As you continue to use him, you’ll start to see more and more fights that he would be good at.
# Final thoughts
Overall, I think the Daredevil buff was a great success personally. In my opinion, he’s not overpowered but at the same time he’s a very useful champion to have and for me, that reflects the character well with the types of things he would take on. He’s one of my favourite Marvel characters and it’s great that I now thoroughly enjoy using him in the Contest as well. Hopefully, after reading this, more people will be able to feel the same way as I’m sure he’s also a favourite to many others. He may surprise you after you become more familiar with what he’s capable of.
he's immune to regen reversal(Spectre,Petrify) and also Miss(Falter,Tunnel Vision, ProfX, Ebony Maw, etc.)
for those 2 reasons alone i took him to r3, most hate on him cause he's terrible with suicides and doesnt have massive damage out of the gate but he def has his uses for me.
but most of all because he's fun, rank up the champs you like, otherwise the game becomes stale.
Maybe drop a link or something
This also kinda explains why everyone seems to tag you when someone pulls ihulk @Crcrcrc
This allows you to get an MM combo + an MLLLM on one parry since the stun is increased due to 100% perfect block chance, so after starting the match with 1 intercept MM then doing 3 parries you would have 14 rage stacks, and then you would trigger immortality and be close to an SP2 so you could heavy and fire off the sp2 granting a lot of damage.
So a fight would be: MM intercept, then parry MLLLM, parry MLLLM, parry MLLLM, trigger immortality somehow probably from the mediums killing yourself which would allow you to ramp up more, then throw an SP2
What do you think?
I wish I had that much free time
@MrInsanity wow, this actually ramps him up super fast. I could have survived, but I was curious how much damage I could do if I went full kamikaze insane mode.
I should pair my new six star with my five star Dormammu @Crcrcrc?
sooooo I should pair my new six star with my 5* Dormammu @Crcrcrc