Black Cat - How good do you have to be?
Polygon
Member Posts: 4,510 ★★★★★
Only a few hours left of level up and i was going to r2 her with a generic, but I’m seeing people mention you need a lot of skill to make her worth the rank up (or worth the rankup over Mantis).
I’ve just been getting the card on me then throwing sp2 and if I have the BW striker i activate it for bonus damage, but I don’t heavy counter to stack up the card (at least not in BGs) .
I also don’t bother with viscous because i only run 1 in DW. And the BW relic makes it so you kinda always want to run sabotage even if they dont have abilities that fail.
I’ve just been getting the card on me then throwing sp2 and if I have the BW striker i activate it for bonus damage, but I don’t heavy counter to stack up the card (at least not in BGs) .
I also don’t bother with viscous because i only run 1 in DW. And the BW relic makes it so you kinda always want to run sabotage even if they dont have abilities that fail.
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Comments
Mutant: Nightcrawler,
Skill: korg, stealthy, nick fury, killmonger
Science: all spiders, thing, scorpion, overseer, void, modok
Mystic: rintrah,
Cosmic: hulkling
Tech: all those pesky autoblockers, like omega sentinel
Rank her up ASAP
My recent matchups, mine is r1 unduped black cat no suicides
Like Tigra knowing most special and heavy punish openings makes ramping black cat much faster. Her heavy reach isn’t as good as Tigra’s so this takes even more precise spacing and light attack whiffs to close space. Knowing how to reliably intercept also makes her ramp quicker.
She also takes a lottttt of match ups you wouldn’t intuitively think she’s good for. While not necessarily a skill there’s definitely a knowledge requirement with nodes and champs to use her to her full potential.
Honestly, I think she’s the best Skill 7* with possible exception of Mantis. See if @Ercarret has any videos.
Dr. Zola
I think that a lot of people think she is more complicated to play than she is, at least for the situations where you'd most often use her over other champions. I largely follow the same strategy as you, OP. I transfer the Card to me and then launch an SP2, and after that I generally win. Building up the cruelty passives by kicking the Card back and forth between you and the opponent is a way to maximise her bleed damage in fights where you don't use her DAAR, but you don't bring her into fights for her bleed damage. It can be quite respectable if you are good at building up those passives, but her main value will always be her DAAR and the power that lies nestled into that piece of utility is severely underrated by a lot of people.
That being said, I think she has a skill ceiling that shouldn't be underestimated either, especially when you get her awakened and the sig starts to rise. When she's unawakened, you have to play a little carefully so as to not lose your combo. As soon as you dupe her, you get an instant set of combo shields that makes her a lot safer to play aggressively with. As the sig rises, her chance to evade attacks also rises - to the point where you can intentionally trigger it to evade tricky special attacks or other hazards that you want to avoid. It's less useful in questing since it's a depleting resource, but it's amazing for Battlegrounds where you can use the evade charges freely.
One thing that I think a lot of people miss about the Black Widow relic is that it, once awakened, grants Black Cat one of her cruelty passives whenever she causes one of her opponent's abilities to fail. This means that you'll automatically ramp those up against most opponents/nodes that you want to use her against, or whenever you fail the relic debuff itself.
If anyone's interested, I'll leave a couple of compilations I've done. The first is a little showcase of how a great of a counter she is for a lot of annoying mystic champions, like Rintrah, Morningstar, Man-Thing and America Chavez.
If anyone needs some inspiration for how to use Black Cat vs some 8.3 bosses, I've also got you covered.