**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
An Anti-Venom Guide. The Remedy For Not Knowing How to Use Him
Rockypantherx
Posts: 3,900 ★★★★★
Aaaand we’re back! Been a while since I’ve done a guide like this, or really any write-up in general, but the mood struck and I thought “Hey, Anti-venom is one of my favourite champs and doesn’t get the credit he deserves, why don’t I do a little something for him?”. And so here we are. As usual I’m going to go through his stats, abilities, rotations, synergies and some general tips for using him. There's a very good chance this will need to be split across two posts because I have a habit of not shutting up.
To begin with, let’s look at his base stats (going off of a 6 Star Rank 3). Unfortunately, his base stats are a bit tragic.
Health: 40,851 (Slightly below average)
Attack: 2849 (Below average)
Crit Rate: 16% (Very below average)
Crit Damage: 150.1% (Incredibly below average, I mean this one is just sad)
Block Proficiency: 60% (Below average, but we’ll circle back to this with his signature ability)
So there’s not much to love here unfortunately, thankfully the rest of his kit does have a lot to offer because undertuned in terms of base stats would be an understatement.
Passive Abilities:
Firstly, we have immunity to Poison and Incinerate. Right off the bat these are some excellent immunities, I’m sure I don’t need to explain why Poison and Incinerate are useful immunities to have. We have nodes like Hazard Shift, Poison over time nodes, Incinerate over time nodes, Freezer Burn, Backblast, Energy Adoption and Thermostat. We also have champions like the Abominations, Apoc under certain scenarios, Bishop, Mephisto, Man-Thing, Mysterio (When he inevitably impersonates Quicksilver and hits you with that damn heavy attack), Toad and now Wiccan. Plus, if you run Liquid Courage and Double Edge, the Poison immunity makes somewhat more friendly. He’s better without them but I run them full time and he does just fine. Great immunities to have, and a good, somewhat unique combination to have.
His next passive ability is gaining +40% Defensive Combat Power Rate per debuff on the Opponent during their Special Attacks. This ability is essentially a form of power gain that allows him to reach his special attacks quicker, which makes his timers less stressful and fights quicker. You will normally have 4+ debuffs on the opponent with Anti-venom, so your Power Rate is usually sitting about 200% of what it normally is during your opponents special attacks. Of course, the major drawback with this is his Block Proficiency, which is sitting at a measly 60%. This, combined with his relatively small healthpool, means actually eating special attacks into your block hurts. A lot. However, two notes on this. Firstly, you absolutely don’t need to use this ability for Anti-Venom to function perfectly fine. His windows are long enough you don’t need it. But, let’s say you do want to use it, what then? Well that’s where his signature ability comes in. I won’t cover it in-depth until later on, but it essentially helps you regen most block damage, which combined with Adrenaline on a 6 Star makes this ability function very well.
Klyntar Debuff and Genetic Memory:
This is really the core of Anti-Venom’s kit, and is where a good chunk of his utility and mechanics lie.
First of all, we have the Klyntar debuff. This is inflicted on the opponent at the start of the fight and lasts indefinitely. If it is removed for any reason it will return after 15 seconds. It has 4 inherent effects, but it is worth mentioning that this is a debuff. Sounds obvious but it means it interacts with his Passive Defensive Combat Power Rate increase, and interacts with despair. It also means you’re scuppered against debuff immune champs or shrug off champs. But that’s class relationships so I don’t really consider that too much of a weakness since it’s shared by most of the Science class.
The first effect the Klyntar Debuff has is that it reduces the opponent’s Physical Resistance by 537.5. I believe this is about a 20% decrease in Physical Resistance, but that fluctuates with Challenger Rating and negative values, so basically, don’t quote me on that. Essentially, it’s an always active small damage increase, somewhat making up for his pitiful base attack. It doesn’t make him hit hard or anything, but it’s a thing and it exists.
The second effect is that it reduces the evade ability accuracy of Spider-Verse Heroes by 100%. This has become a fairly standard ability now for Symbiote Champions, but it’s still useful. It essentially removes the evade of 6 champions inherently (Spider-Gwen, Spider-Ham, Spider-Man, Stark Spidey, Stealth Spidey and Symbiote Spidey), plus Spidey 2099, Miles and Peni Parker if placed on a node with Evade (such as Mesmerize). It is only 100%, so it’s not as good as Venom’s which just doesn’t allow them to evade no matter their ability accuracy as long as he has his Klyntar buff (yes, that is why Spider-Man on Buffet is evading your Venom), however he does have a leg up on the likes of Red Goblin as he has a way to shut down Evade Ability Accuracy further even on these enhanced ability accuracy nodes.
Thirdly, it reduces the Ability Accuracy of Unblockable on Mystic Champions by 65%, which increases to 100% when you reach a 30 combo. Honestly, it’s not a spectacularly useful ability but if you’re taking on a Doom, America Chavez, Tigra or Mangog and might eat an unblockable special attack, well it’ll save your backside in those scenarios. I believe this also applies to nodes, but I’ll be honest I can’t confirm that since it so rarely comes up.
The fourth effect of this Klyntar debuff is that it allows you to inflict ‘Genetic Memory Debuffs’. While the Klyntar Debuff is active, every 10 hits in either champions combo meter they will inflict one of these Genetic Memory debuffs, up to 4 Genetic Memory debuffs total, regardless of the combination of types. There are 3 types of Genetic Memory debuffs: Spectre, Disorient and Decelerate, and they last indefinitely. Anti-Venom can switch which one he’ll inflict by landing his second medium, in the order of Spectre, Disorient then Decelerate. If you don’t want to switch, finish your combo early or with a 4th light attack. When playing Anti-Venom, this is denoted in the fight by 3 icons under his health bar. The selected debuff is mostly Blue with the picture icon in White, while unselected debuffs are the inverse of this (mostly White with the picture icon in Blue). When you’re fighting him the selected debuff has a 50% to switch to the next one when you’re inflicted with one of these debuffs.
“But what do these Genetic Memory Debuffs do?!” I hear you scream across the eternal abyss.
Well, each Spectre debuff will decrease the opponents Regeneration Rate by 16.66%, meaning at 4 you’re reducing Regeneration rate by 66.64%. That’s not impressive at all, but trust me this gets good eventually as we add more stuff on top.
Each Disorient debuff will reduce the opponents Defensive Ability Accuracy by 12.5%, to a grand total of…50%...again, not that impressive.
Finally, each Decelerate debuff reduces Evade and Unstoppable Ability Accuracy by 33%. Few of things to note here. First of all, yes you will reach 100% with these once you have 3 on. Secondly, it is not affected by Class Disadvantage, unlike Slow Debuffs. Thirdly, this does not act like Slow. It only affects the ability accuracy of evade and unstoppable, it does not prevent their effects. So if the opponent does activate an unstoppable while a decelerate or three are active, they will still behave like they are Unstoppable. Decelerate will essentially only stop them triggering.
These seem fairly unimpressive on their own, I know, but once we delve deeper into his utility and rotations I’m going to explain why each of these has their uses, and how they’re decently practical.
Heavy Attacks:
They place a Stagger Debuff for 10 seconds. Maxes at 2. I’m sure we’re all familiar with Stagger, but this is actually excellent utility. It makes him one of the few Science champions able to nullify and deal with Buffs, it’s extra debuffs for his Passive Defensive Combat Power Rate, and it interacts with Despair. Plus it’s just a debuff. I don’t consider countering Diss Track or Whittle Down to be meaningful utility but Anti-Venom can obviously do them extremely well, especially using these Staggers.
Special Attacks:
All of your Personal Passives are paused during them. Simple ability but it means your Furies won’t fall off during your Special Attacks, and it’s really nice for the Signature Ability Regeneration Passives
Special Attack 1:
Ok, the SP1 does quite a few things. The first hit inflicts a 40% Petrify for 20 seconds. Excellent, that means at base, if you have 4 Spectres, you’re reducing Regeneration Rate by 100%, for a long duration, which means if you cycle SP1’s you can normally stack 1-2 of these.
The second part of this special attack is the Accelerated Mutation Passive. You trigger it on this special attack - if it is not already active. That means if it is active, you won’t stack or refresh it. It’s a Purple Passive icon with the Klyntar symbol on it. This lasts for 15 seconds and allows you to inflict another Genetic Memory debuff when inflicting one. So if this is active and you reach a combo of 10, you’ll inflict two debuffs instead of one. Good for getting your utility active earlier in the fight and speeding up your entire rotation.
If you launch this special attack while you already have this passive active, each hit will deal a burst of 1304 Physical Damage instead. This doesn’t sound like a lot of damage, but this scales. So the decreased physical resistance from the Klyntar Debuff increases it, Liquid Courage and Double Edge increase it, and the furies from your SP2 increase it. On my Rank 3 I’ve seen this burst damage reach 11-12k each hit with furies active, on top of your regular damage.
Special Attack 2:
This is your damage special attack, and it’s also the Special Attack that makes this champion…complicated. On activation, you consume all of your Genetic Memory Debuffs (Spectre, Disorient and Decelerate) and gain a Fury Passive for each one consumed this way. These Fury Passives last 25 seconds and grant 2445 attack each. Considering Anti-venom has little damage outside of this attack, you’re going to want to use it, and the attack rating you get is monstrous. However, you also consume those debuffs, which means you lose that utility. For most people this makes him a damage or utility type champion. They’re not necessarily wrong, but I’m going to show later why this actually doesn’t matter nearly as much as most people think it does
Special Attack 3:
This attack inflicts a Rupture Debuff dealing 2282 Physical Damage over 15 seconds. For the longest time I was utterly confused as to why this line was in here, because it makes no sense. Except it actually sort of does. It’s a tiny bit of extra damage, which will be enhanced by the decreased physical resistance from your Klyntar Debuff. But more importantly it’s an extra debuff for not only Despair, but your Defensive Combat Power Rate during the opponent’s Special Attacks, allowing you to reach your next Special Attack just that bit quicker.
However, the main part of this Special Attack is the ‘Evolved Mutation Passive’. Not to be confused with the Accelerated Mutation Passive from your SP1, this Passive is also Purple but it has a Spider-Web design. It lasts 25 seconds, but is refreshed every single time you activate the ‘Accelerated Mutation Passive’ from your SP1. Remember, it’s when you ‘activate’ your SP1 Passive, meaning it has to have fallen off before you throw your SP1 in order to refresh this Passive.
The Evolved Mutation has 2 effects. Firstly, it increases Fury Potency and Duration by 25%. Great, more damage for longer. Secondly, it increases your Genetic Memory Debuff cap by 4, to a grand total of 8 Genetic Memory Debuffs. However, you can still only have 4 of each type. This means that if you line everything up correctly, you can gain 8 Fury Passives from your SP2, each granting 3,056 attack (24,448 extra attack in total), for 31 seconds.
Signature Ability:
Anti-venom doesn’t necessarily need his Signature Ability. It is very nice to have, and sig 1 to sig 200 does give him good benefit, but he can function perfectly fine without it.
The first part of his sig increases the potency of Personal Debuffs by 10% and non-Personal debuffs by 5% for every 10 hits in the combo up to 50 hits (Max 50% potency increase for Personal debuffs and 25% for Non-Personal). Now, unfortunately this is not retroactive, the potency increase only affects new debuffs you place. But it is nice, especially when it comes to utilizing his Heal Reversal and SP2. I should mention that this part of the sig is flat and you get the full benefit at sig 1.
The second part is Anti-venom gives Regeneration stacks, regenerating 20.08-65% of the damage taken from a non-critical hit over 20 seconds. These Regens are removed if his Klyntar Debuff is purified. This includes blocked attacks, so that abysmal Block Proficiency is more than made up for at max sig, and makes baiting heavies and eating specials into block very practical. This is also affected by the recovery mastery, which means at max sig you regenerate 75% of that damage. Plus, these regens are paused during special attacks, so you get about 4-5 extra ticks of the regen per special attack, which is around another total 10% regen. In the end you can get upwards of 80-90% regen of block damage, and that’s not even factoring in Adrenaline. It’s a great ability but not necessary. Nice to have for sure and really helps his kit flow together well.
To begin with, let’s look at his base stats (going off of a 6 Star Rank 3). Unfortunately, his base stats are a bit tragic.
Health: 40,851 (Slightly below average)
Attack: 2849 (Below average)
Crit Rate: 16% (Very below average)
Crit Damage: 150.1% (Incredibly below average, I mean this one is just sad)
Block Proficiency: 60% (Below average, but we’ll circle back to this with his signature ability)
So there’s not much to love here unfortunately, thankfully the rest of his kit does have a lot to offer because undertuned in terms of base stats would be an understatement.
Passive Abilities:
Firstly, we have immunity to Poison and Incinerate. Right off the bat these are some excellent immunities, I’m sure I don’t need to explain why Poison and Incinerate are useful immunities to have. We have nodes like Hazard Shift, Poison over time nodes, Incinerate over time nodes, Freezer Burn, Backblast, Energy Adoption and Thermostat. We also have champions like the Abominations, Apoc under certain scenarios, Bishop, Mephisto, Man-Thing, Mysterio (When he inevitably impersonates Quicksilver and hits you with that damn heavy attack), Toad and now Wiccan. Plus, if you run Liquid Courage and Double Edge, the Poison immunity makes somewhat more friendly. He’s better without them but I run them full time and he does just fine. Great immunities to have, and a good, somewhat unique combination to have.
His next passive ability is gaining +40% Defensive Combat Power Rate per debuff on the Opponent during their Special Attacks. This ability is essentially a form of power gain that allows him to reach his special attacks quicker, which makes his timers less stressful and fights quicker. You will normally have 4+ debuffs on the opponent with Anti-venom, so your Power Rate is usually sitting about 200% of what it normally is during your opponents special attacks. Of course, the major drawback with this is his Block Proficiency, which is sitting at a measly 60%. This, combined with his relatively small healthpool, means actually eating special attacks into your block hurts. A lot. However, two notes on this. Firstly, you absolutely don’t need to use this ability for Anti-Venom to function perfectly fine. His windows are long enough you don’t need it. But, let’s say you do want to use it, what then? Well that’s where his signature ability comes in. I won’t cover it in-depth until later on, but it essentially helps you regen most block damage, which combined with Adrenaline on a 6 Star makes this ability function very well.
Klyntar Debuff and Genetic Memory:
This is really the core of Anti-Venom’s kit, and is where a good chunk of his utility and mechanics lie.
First of all, we have the Klyntar debuff. This is inflicted on the opponent at the start of the fight and lasts indefinitely. If it is removed for any reason it will return after 15 seconds. It has 4 inherent effects, but it is worth mentioning that this is a debuff. Sounds obvious but it means it interacts with his Passive Defensive Combat Power Rate increase, and interacts with despair. It also means you’re scuppered against debuff immune champs or shrug off champs. But that’s class relationships so I don’t really consider that too much of a weakness since it’s shared by most of the Science class.
The first effect the Klyntar Debuff has is that it reduces the opponent’s Physical Resistance by 537.5. I believe this is about a 20% decrease in Physical Resistance, but that fluctuates with Challenger Rating and negative values, so basically, don’t quote me on that. Essentially, it’s an always active small damage increase, somewhat making up for his pitiful base attack. It doesn’t make him hit hard or anything, but it’s a thing and it exists.
The second effect is that it reduces the evade ability accuracy of Spider-Verse Heroes by 100%. This has become a fairly standard ability now for Symbiote Champions, but it’s still useful. It essentially removes the evade of 6 champions inherently (Spider-Gwen, Spider-Ham, Spider-Man, Stark Spidey, Stealth Spidey and Symbiote Spidey), plus Spidey 2099, Miles and Peni Parker if placed on a node with Evade (such as Mesmerize). It is only 100%, so it’s not as good as Venom’s which just doesn’t allow them to evade no matter their ability accuracy as long as he has his Klyntar buff (yes, that is why Spider-Man on Buffet is evading your Venom), however he does have a leg up on the likes of Red Goblin as he has a way to shut down Evade Ability Accuracy further even on these enhanced ability accuracy nodes.
Thirdly, it reduces the Ability Accuracy of Unblockable on Mystic Champions by 65%, which increases to 100% when you reach a 30 combo. Honestly, it’s not a spectacularly useful ability but if you’re taking on a Doom, America Chavez, Tigra or Mangog and might eat an unblockable special attack, well it’ll save your backside in those scenarios. I believe this also applies to nodes, but I’ll be honest I can’t confirm that since it so rarely comes up.
The fourth effect of this Klyntar debuff is that it allows you to inflict ‘Genetic Memory Debuffs’. While the Klyntar Debuff is active, every 10 hits in either champions combo meter they will inflict one of these Genetic Memory debuffs, up to 4 Genetic Memory debuffs total, regardless of the combination of types. There are 3 types of Genetic Memory debuffs: Spectre, Disorient and Decelerate, and they last indefinitely. Anti-Venom can switch which one he’ll inflict by landing his second medium, in the order of Spectre, Disorient then Decelerate. If you don’t want to switch, finish your combo early or with a 4th light attack. When playing Anti-Venom, this is denoted in the fight by 3 icons under his health bar. The selected debuff is mostly Blue with the picture icon in White, while unselected debuffs are the inverse of this (mostly White with the picture icon in Blue). When you’re fighting him the selected debuff has a 50% to switch to the next one when you’re inflicted with one of these debuffs.
“But what do these Genetic Memory Debuffs do?!” I hear you scream across the eternal abyss.
Well, each Spectre debuff will decrease the opponents Regeneration Rate by 16.66%, meaning at 4 you’re reducing Regeneration rate by 66.64%. That’s not impressive at all, but trust me this gets good eventually as we add more stuff on top.
Each Disorient debuff will reduce the opponents Defensive Ability Accuracy by 12.5%, to a grand total of…50%...again, not that impressive.
Finally, each Decelerate debuff reduces Evade and Unstoppable Ability Accuracy by 33%. Few of things to note here. First of all, yes you will reach 100% with these once you have 3 on. Secondly, it is not affected by Class Disadvantage, unlike Slow Debuffs. Thirdly, this does not act like Slow. It only affects the ability accuracy of evade and unstoppable, it does not prevent their effects. So if the opponent does activate an unstoppable while a decelerate or three are active, they will still behave like they are Unstoppable. Decelerate will essentially only stop them triggering.
These seem fairly unimpressive on their own, I know, but once we delve deeper into his utility and rotations I’m going to explain why each of these has their uses, and how they’re decently practical.
Heavy Attacks:
They place a Stagger Debuff for 10 seconds. Maxes at 2. I’m sure we’re all familiar with Stagger, but this is actually excellent utility. It makes him one of the few Science champions able to nullify and deal with Buffs, it’s extra debuffs for his Passive Defensive Combat Power Rate, and it interacts with Despair. Plus it’s just a debuff. I don’t consider countering Diss Track or Whittle Down to be meaningful utility but Anti-Venom can obviously do them extremely well, especially using these Staggers.
Special Attacks:
All of your Personal Passives are paused during them. Simple ability but it means your Furies won’t fall off during your Special Attacks, and it’s really nice for the Signature Ability Regeneration Passives
Special Attack 1:
Ok, the SP1 does quite a few things. The first hit inflicts a 40% Petrify for 20 seconds. Excellent, that means at base, if you have 4 Spectres, you’re reducing Regeneration Rate by 100%, for a long duration, which means if you cycle SP1’s you can normally stack 1-2 of these.
The second part of this special attack is the Accelerated Mutation Passive. You trigger it on this special attack - if it is not already active. That means if it is active, you won’t stack or refresh it. It’s a Purple Passive icon with the Klyntar symbol on it. This lasts for 15 seconds and allows you to inflict another Genetic Memory debuff when inflicting one. So if this is active and you reach a combo of 10, you’ll inflict two debuffs instead of one. Good for getting your utility active earlier in the fight and speeding up your entire rotation.
If you launch this special attack while you already have this passive active, each hit will deal a burst of 1304 Physical Damage instead. This doesn’t sound like a lot of damage, but this scales. So the decreased physical resistance from the Klyntar Debuff increases it, Liquid Courage and Double Edge increase it, and the furies from your SP2 increase it. On my Rank 3 I’ve seen this burst damage reach 11-12k each hit with furies active, on top of your regular damage.
Special Attack 2:
This is your damage special attack, and it’s also the Special Attack that makes this champion…complicated. On activation, you consume all of your Genetic Memory Debuffs (Spectre, Disorient and Decelerate) and gain a Fury Passive for each one consumed this way. These Fury Passives last 25 seconds and grant 2445 attack each. Considering Anti-venom has little damage outside of this attack, you’re going to want to use it, and the attack rating you get is monstrous. However, you also consume those debuffs, which means you lose that utility. For most people this makes him a damage or utility type champion. They’re not necessarily wrong, but I’m going to show later why this actually doesn’t matter nearly as much as most people think it does
Special Attack 3:
This attack inflicts a Rupture Debuff dealing 2282 Physical Damage over 15 seconds. For the longest time I was utterly confused as to why this line was in here, because it makes no sense. Except it actually sort of does. It’s a tiny bit of extra damage, which will be enhanced by the decreased physical resistance from your Klyntar Debuff. But more importantly it’s an extra debuff for not only Despair, but your Defensive Combat Power Rate during the opponent’s Special Attacks, allowing you to reach your next Special Attack just that bit quicker.
However, the main part of this Special Attack is the ‘Evolved Mutation Passive’. Not to be confused with the Accelerated Mutation Passive from your SP1, this Passive is also Purple but it has a Spider-Web design. It lasts 25 seconds, but is refreshed every single time you activate the ‘Accelerated Mutation Passive’ from your SP1. Remember, it’s when you ‘activate’ your SP1 Passive, meaning it has to have fallen off before you throw your SP1 in order to refresh this Passive.
The Evolved Mutation has 2 effects. Firstly, it increases Fury Potency and Duration by 25%. Great, more damage for longer. Secondly, it increases your Genetic Memory Debuff cap by 4, to a grand total of 8 Genetic Memory Debuffs. However, you can still only have 4 of each type. This means that if you line everything up correctly, you can gain 8 Fury Passives from your SP2, each granting 3,056 attack (24,448 extra attack in total), for 31 seconds.
Signature Ability:
Anti-venom doesn’t necessarily need his Signature Ability. It is very nice to have, and sig 1 to sig 200 does give him good benefit, but he can function perfectly fine without it.
The first part of his sig increases the potency of Personal Debuffs by 10% and non-Personal debuffs by 5% for every 10 hits in the combo up to 50 hits (Max 50% potency increase for Personal debuffs and 25% for Non-Personal). Now, unfortunately this is not retroactive, the potency increase only affects new debuffs you place. But it is nice, especially when it comes to utilizing his Heal Reversal and SP2. I should mention that this part of the sig is flat and you get the full benefit at sig 1.
The second part is Anti-venom gives Regeneration stacks, regenerating 20.08-65% of the damage taken from a non-critical hit over 20 seconds. These Regens are removed if his Klyntar Debuff is purified. This includes blocked attacks, so that abysmal Block Proficiency is more than made up for at max sig, and makes baiting heavies and eating specials into block very practical. This is also affected by the recovery mastery, which means at max sig you regenerate 75% of that damage. Plus, these regens are paused during special attacks, so you get about 4-5 extra ticks of the regen per special attack, which is around another total 10% regen. In the end you can get upwards of 80-90% regen of block damage, and that’s not even factoring in Adrenaline. It’s a great ability but not necessary. Nice to have for sure and really helps his kit flow together well.
Post edited by Kabam Habanero on
14
Comments
So, now that we’ve broken down his laundry list of an ability kit, how do you actually play him, what are his strengths, and what are his weaknesses. I’ll start with three main rotations: Short Fight, Long fight, Heal Reversal.
For short fights his rotation is somewhat simple. You want to reach an SP1 before 10 hits (so you’ll throw the special at 8-9 hits in your combo meter). This can be achieved by throwing at least one heavy into the mix. I like to go Heavy-5 hit combo-1 or 2 hits into SP1. What this allows you to do is place all 4 of your Genetic Memory Debuffs by 20 hits in the combo meter, halving your normal 40 hit ramp-up time. From there, go to your SP2, fire it off, and watch the damage roll in. You can choose to go for more SP2’s or start this rotation again from there. But if they’re not dead you were probably better off going for the long fight rotation.
For longer fights, you want to start your rotation off the same. Get to your SP1 before 10 hits and throw it. There is an argument to be made for not throwing this SP1 and just going for the SP3 first but it’s up to you. After throwing that SP1, race to your SP3 to get your Evolved Mutation Passive, making your furies more potent and increasing your debuff stack limit. Once thrown, you want to line up an SP1 to reactivate your Accelerated Mutation Passive, which will refresh your SP3 passive. From there you want to race to your SP2, ensuring 7-8 debuffs are on the opponent, throw it, and watch the damage roll in. My R3 hits 22k crit mediums following this. From there you can either go for another SP2 or keep throwing SP1’s to keep your SP3 passive active or cash in on the Physical Burst damage. It sounds more complicated than it actually is, but you do have to know what you’re doing.
Finally, your Heal Reversal rotation. This is a simple spam SP1 rotation to stack as many Petrifies as possible. When fully ramped and set up, Anti-venom has one of the most potent heal reversals in the game. If duped, your Spectre debuffs will have increased potency, taking their total effectiveness anywhere between 79% to 100% (You can only reach the 100% if you throw an SP2 to remove them then replace them with the increased potency from the sig, which I don’t recommend). So you have 80% base reduction, which you can then stack Petrifies on top of. Each one of those is 40% but the sig will eventually increase them to 60% each, and since you’re constantly recycling them you will see the full potency increase. Assuming you can keep 2 up most of the time, that brings your total regen reversal to 200%. At this point, without Despair, he is now equaling Void in terms of Regen reversal. If we factor in Max Despair, then Anti-venom reaches the 100% reduction max from that mastery when you have 2 Petrifies up. 4 Spectres, 1 Klyntar Debuff, and 2 Petrifies. 7 total. That’s a 300% reduction in healing, and a 200% reversal. I don’t recommend using your heavy attack in this rotation if dealing with Regen buffs as you’ll stagger them. Also, don’t use him on Masochism. Just…trust me. Don’t.
So, onto Strengths and Weaknesses. Of course, the most glaring issue with Anti-Venom is that darned SP2 removing all your Genetic Memory debuffs. The common misconception is that he loses all his utility when you do this, which is only partly true. Take a walk with me and we’ll explore why.
First of all, the SP2 only removes the Genetic Memory Debuffs. That means you still have your Poison and Incinerate immunity, the Staggers on your Heavy, the shutdown of evade on Spider-Verse heroes, the reduction in ability accuracy, and your Petrify. The only things you actually lose are the Spectres, Disorients and Decelerates.
As shown above, you don’t actually need or want to throw your SP2 when going for heal reversal. Firstly because landing more petrifies is more effective, but also because the vast majority of damage is coming from actually reversing the healing. It more than makes up for the missing furies, sometimes even way more. Therefore the SP2 isn’t a problem for your Spectres because you’re not using it.
For Disorients, I’m going to be honest, the Disorients in and of themselves are not useful. Even at max they only reach 75% ability accuracy reduction, which just isn’t reliable. No, the disorients are best used in two scenarios. The first is where you actually need a disorient. Think of the Meltdown node or Mr Negative. You need a disorient on the defender to avoid the meltdown damage on knockdown, and Mr Negative can’t invert your controls when suffering from disorient. While placing a permanent disorient is useful in both of these circumstances, the SP2 can still present an issue since you’ll knock the opponent down without a disorient. Here we arrive at a very important workaround for both this debuff and the decelerate. If you throw your SP2 at an increment of 8 or 9 combo (8,9,18,19,28,29,ect) You will land the Disorient during your Special Attack, allowing you to get around the consumption of your initial disorients. Now, this only works if your icons aren’t greyed out. For some unknown reason, and a part of me feels this may be a bug because it makes no sense, if you hit your max of 4 or 8, and use an SP2, Anti-venom automatically selects Spectre again rather than the last selected Genetic Memory debuff. It’s infuriating. So you have to be at most at 3 or 7. The second place the disorients are useful is mitigating matchups where you’re using him for other things. Let’s say you’re using him against Bishop for the incinerate immunity and regen of block damage. You don’t need Spectre or Decelerate in that matchup, so use Disorient. It will lower the number of prowess he gains, making his special hurt less, but it is not a necessary part of the matchup, therefore removing the disorients on your SP2 doesn’t massively impact his effectiveness in that matchup (interestingly the disorient also prevents Kitty from gaining prowess. He’s not a great Kitty counter but if needs must…).
Finally, the decelerate. This is where the SP2 actually stings. Evade and Unstoppable counters are not something you really want any downtime on, so having to build up your debuffs again limits his effectiveness in these matchups past the pitfalls of Decelerate vs Slow. Yet, there are steps we can take to somewhat remedy this unfortunate situation. We can use the Disorient trick where we throw our Special Attack on an increment of 8 or 9 in the combo, and if we have our SP1 Accelerated Mutation passive active, we can land two decelerate debuff during our special attack. At base, that’s a 66% reduction. Not the best, but significantly better than nothing. However, if your Anti-venom is duped, you can actually get these 2 Decelerates to equal 100%. If you are at a 50 Combo or above when you land them, each one receives a 50% boost in potency, which takes their total effectiveness between them to 99.99%. Of course, this suffers significantly if you’ve already hit the debuff cap, which is quite likely in all honesty. In that scenario, there isn’t much you can do to protect against passive unstoppables and non-spiderverse evades. If it’s active unstoppable buffs you’re dealing with, then landing a stagger or two on the opponent before launching your Special attack can protect you from those unstoppables while you build your decelerates back up.
The bottom line is, I’d argue the only thing Anti-Venom actually has to trade in for damage is his Decelerate debuffs, and arguably his Disorient debuffs. Even those have some workarounds (especially if that selection thing is bugged, which I suspect it may be). He still has immunities, buff control, etc. And those are all useful things. I certainly found him to be one of my most used Science champs because he fits a lot of modern science nodes really well. However, his decelerate, reliance on special attacks, reliance on debuffs, somewhat long ramp up and certain tradeoffs are inherent flaws in the champ. He is extremely versatile and pretty potent at most of what he can do while being sustainable, but in a lot of ways he might find himself sidelined in favor of other champs in our current meta of specialists rather than versatility. Still, I’d argue he has one of the most potent and consistent heal reversals in the game, a great immunity set, unique buff control in the Science class, and debuffs for days.
Synergies:
Anti-Venom doesn’t gain too much from synergies, but he does play a key role for some other champs. With Venom and Carnage he reduces the ability of Buffs on Symbiote champs by 50% (This is almost completely useless). With Green Goblin his Klyntar and Genetic Memory Debuffs are immune to ability accuracy reduction (Might be very, very situationally useful but Green Goblin is so bad you’ll never use it). With Punisher his Fury effects gain 30% against Villains, which is damn near excellent, or it would be if Punisher weren’t so terrible and difficult to get as a 5 or 6 star. The Agent Venom one is alright, it allows you to deal a burst of Physical Damage equal to 40% of your Modified attack when you inflict a Genetic Memory debuff, which scales very, very nicely with the Furies.
And then, of course, the big one. Time Travelers with Spidey 2099 and Doc Oc. Anti-venom makes the opponent immune to buffs for the first 10 seconds of the fight, which is great if you’re using Anti-Venom for buff control. This is maybe most famous for how useful it is for Abyss Darkhawk during the Symbiote Carina’s Challenge. Doc Oc gets a really nice bump in damage I can confirm (having a R3 Oc myself). And of course, Spidey 99 places a Wither at the start of the fight, which I’m sure most people know by now absolutely opens up the champion and makes him one of the best power controllers in the game.
He also has two incoming ones with Knull and Mr Negative, both top champs in the game. He doesn’t get anything from Knull but it does give Knull Unblockable Specials. Nice. With Mr Negative he gains a 20% chance to trigger a regen when inflicting a Genetic Memory Debuff, healing 10% of missing health over 9 seconds. It’s not particularly frequent but it’s a pretty nifty synergy, especially if you run recoil.
Conclusion:
Anti-Venom is an excellent champion with a lot to love about him. His combination of versatility and specialism makes him a good snag for any sized account, especially one trying to round out their science class. He has his problems and tradeoffs, but they’re not quite as bad as they’re made out to be, especially when you are comfortable with knowing to mitigate them. I wish he didn’t have said problems, I don’t think he would be too overpowered without them, but this is the champion we’ve got. And what we do have is a champion that hits pretty decently, has a ton of utility, that will find uses in most places in the contest. If you’ve managed to pick one up, firstly congrats, but second of all, have another look at the guy. He’s no Mr Fantastic or Human Torch, but he’s closer to them than most people realize.
what’s up teach
Thank you
I recently pulled a 6* anti venom
I will read this when I have time
Dr. Zola
Also, I had to choose between Anti-Venom and Negative for my first Science R4. Went Negative, and have zero regrets. But man, Anti-Venom is so good. He is slept on so much. Utility for days.
Awesome job man!
You’ll never outheal recoil unfortunately, since you’re only regenerating a proportion of damage you actually take. It would take firing off a ton of specials to pause your regens enough to net a positive, which when considering recoil just isn’t worth it. Unless you’re running the Mr Negative synergy you’re not really going to mitigate recoil
However regenning block damage does mean you’re taking less damage overall in a fight compared to most champs with recoil. Most fights you’ll only lose 10-20% due to suicides masteries, even less if you run coagulate. And that’s maybe being harsh depending on crit RNG and the matchup. I run him with them full time anyway and it works well enough
Great tips on planning when in the combo meter to throw SP2 to ensure you'll place the desired debuff. Hadn't thought about taking advantage of special hits to go above 10 hits.