Ronin to R5?

Alright, @Masterpuff , I pulled him a couple weeks ago and just duped him. Why is he so great? I like his abilities, his design and play style are super fluid and fun, I like the customizable fighting style. I just unlocked full suicides, I’ve beaten the Champion boss and am working my way through the rest of Act 6. Have V5 and V1 left to go. How much do you use him at R5?

Comments

Squirrelguy

I expect at least 3 pages, single spaced, with references...

MaxGaming

No I just left mine at r3 but I feel like he is the same story as Massacre good not great

Masterpuff

Ronin
There are tons of places that Ronin is a beast. For starters, I think one of the reasons no one talks about him is he is actually quite challenging to master. His Sig ability isn’t necessary but it can come in very handy and brings some really good utility to the table. And don’t get me started on his animations. I LOVE them. They are probably some of the best and the cleanest in the game. And I like how his victory animation correlates to Endgame, while still having some of his own flair.

Ronin has a lot of passive fury, precision, and cruelty in his kit. He can get up to 7 passive cruelties through numerous ways such as:When he misses or is evaded, Strikes the opponent who would be bled but is immune, or switches stances. When he would be an 8th cruelty, he instead gains a precision passive giving him such a high crit rate that he has almost guaranteed critical hits. This is huge because Ronin’s sword hits have a 15% chance to bleed, but this chance is raised to 100% if it is a critical hit. So with this passive he will have 10 or so bleeds on opponent at a time, which synergizes well with both despair and deep wounds.

Ronin cannot lose these cruelties unless it is through his signature ability, or if he fires a special attack, so it is a good idea to trigger the precision right before firing the special. Although generally you want to save for 3 bars of power, which I will get at later.

Ronin’s stances take a bit of time to get used to staying in them or switching between them. They can be used to overcome lots of nodes, and different obstacles. Each of his 3 stances are connected to his light attacks, the first 3 light attacks are tied to corresponding stances, the 4th light however is not connected to a stance.

Guard Stance:
This stance is not a stance for damage, this is used to obtain more utility. To switch to Guard stance, you need to dash back after striking with your first light attack. This doesn’t have to happen immediately though; you could actually stay still or block a few hits before dashing back and still switch stance. As long as your first light attack was the last one you used it’ll work. You can also use medium attacks to delay the trigger, which you might want to do if a debuff is incoming. Since the guard stance purifies 1 debuff. You cannot purify a debuff 2 times in a row, you must enter another stance to purify another debuff. This is really useful for bleed/poison nodes or the shock 30 nodes. Also this makes him very suicides friendly. On top of that, the guard stance also allows him to parry stun projectile attacks/non contact attacks(Such as Maw’s attacks or IMIW’s Repulsor attacks.) On top of that, he has a 35% chance to perfect block, which is not super useful in lower level content. But it is really useful in disgusting stubborn wars, and it also increases parry stun duration.

Wraith Stance:
This stance is much more straightforward. This stance passively reduces the opponent’s ability accuracy by 40%, much like Blade’s dangersense. This is very useful against Thing and his rock stacks, as well as Electro’s static shock. And it can reduce limbo chance by a lot, but not so much against higher sig Magiks.

Demon Stance:
This is just the damage stance. It gives Ronin the ability to bleed through block, and increases bleed ability accuracy by 75% which would make almost all hits bleed without the precision.

Special Attacks:
His special attacks have many uses. And they have different utilities and damage.
Sp1:This special has a 100% chance to inflict a disorient, which reduces the opponent’s ability accuracy by 40%. He also automatically enters his prepared stance. The only reason I have really used this, is to slaughter the opponent’s ability accuracy. By firing the special with the Wraith Stance it will reduce the opponent’s ability accuracy by 80%.
Sp2:This attack had really high damage potential, when you use it right. The last hit of the special converts all cruelties to bleeds, so 7 cruelties equals 7 bleeds. This pairs insanely well with DW. When you have more health than the opponent, you deal a burst of damage when inflicting a bleed, and depending on the level, it can be up to 1%. So if you have more health, then this attack instantly strikes down 7% with 7 cruelties, not to mention the very higher base damage of the attack, and the bleed damage itself. This can be increased a ton with the addition of the fury, which is obtained by the sp3.
Sp3:This is generally where you want to go. He gets a passive fury that increases attack by 473.8 attack per cruelty that you have when you fire the special. That’s an overall increase of 3,064.6 attack at 7 cruelties, and it lasts 35 seconds. When you come out of this, you’ll want to build back up to 7 cruelties and his damage will be some of the best in the game. Between the bleed damage, and just raw damage he is a god. By the time this fury is about to expire, you’ll be back at a sp3, and you can repeat. Much like Dr.Doom’s cycle.

Signature Ability:
His signature ability is not required or needed at all. But it is really useful to have. I personally used a gem on mine, and do not regret it at all. His sig allows him to exchange 7 cruelties for a controlled auto evade. The signature level increases the duration of the auto evade. This auto evade does not trigger if you try to parry, block, or dexterity. Meaning it is completely controlled by the player. This is incredibly useful in matches with streams of bullets or undexable specials. This includes P99, War Machine, or even the bullets after the kick in Winter Soldier’s sp2. This isn’t the only part, for each hit he evaded during this period, he gains a fury that scales from about 300-500 attack based off Sig. If the opponent has a ton of hits, then this increase is pretty massive.

Possible Playstyles:
The best way to use Ronin is to build up your cruelty passives as quickly as possible so that you can activate the precision passive. To do that, you need to keep switching stances as often as possible by ending combos after different light attacks. Ronin has a very high critical hit rate when precision is active so his damage gets a nice boost from those two abilities. If the fight is long enough it’s best to start off with a SP3 to gain the passive fury effect. As I mentioned earlier this fury gets stronger depending on how many cruelties you had when the SP3 was used. At this point you’ll be hitting much harder than before. Ideally, you want to rebuild the cruelty back up to seven stacks, activate the precision and fire off a SP2 before the fury expires. If you can do that in time the raw damage of the SP2 will be devastating, only to be followed up by seven stacks of bleed. I would recommend keeping to SP3 and using the big SP2 to finish the opponent off when they’re close to being knocked out. That way you’ll be able to keep the fury up as often as possible.

Sometimes it’s better to stay in one stance or deliberately stay out of a particular stance depending on the matchup. For example, wraith stance is extremely useful against evade champs or Thing. I consider him to be one of the best Void counters as well, since you don’t need to worry about your combo count if you play it right. When you’re up against Void the best way to take him on is to make sure you stay out of guard stance until he places a debuff on you. After that happens, simply hit him with your first light and dash back. Ronin will shrug off the debuff and Void won’t hurt you anymore. You can of course still watch the combo meter to avoid taking damage from it, but it’s not really necessary. With the class advantage to work with as well Ronin is a very strong counter to Void. If you can prepare guard stance as Void is placing the debuff on you should be able to shrug it as soon as it’s applied. You can even wait a brief moment by blocking if you need to. Just remember to switch out of guard stance again after shrugging off one of his debuffs.

Synergies:
He has some decent synergies, however, they are with champs that are kinda meh. So not really worth talking about since they aren’t super game changing.

Best Matches:
* Void
* Thing
* Evade champions
* Electro
* Any champion with non-contact basic attacks like IMIW or Ebony Maw
* Anything where ability accuracy reduction can be useful
* Stubborn global node in Allian
* Poison and bleed nodes since he can shrug them off
* Iceman
Parts of this I used from a write up MegaSkater67’s write up.(Part of the playstyles part and part of the Best Matchups part.)

Masterpuff

That took a while to write up, gotta get back to arena lol

Savage

Nah. Much better skills to rank

unknown

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Masterpuff

Nah. Much better skills to rank

Ah. Great. Number one Ronin hater.