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Howard Nerf?
Maxwell24
Posts: 413 ★★★
Yes I know the Buff isn't out yet but from what his abilities say it's not much of a buff. His furys are now capped at 50, have less potency, no crit damage per stack, and your can only can them when you stun the opponent, and are not infinite, and now his heavy attack remove your armor ups to infict not so good armor breaks. He also didn't gain much utility he now has stun on sl3, heal block on sp1, and suppression on sp2. From a overhaul I wasn't expecting them to nerf his damage and give him meh utility, I personally love this character and I dont like what they are doing to him
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2. His fury only last 10s each but each buff and debuff expire 1 at a time. So if you have 50 furies, it would take 500s to lost all of them but you can gain more than you lost.
3. No his heavy not remove his armor up, it's remove opponent's armor up and place armor break on them.
4. Like that guy i saw said, he isn't RNG fest and those debuff are move to another part of ability, only power lock/drain replace with Suppression Debuffs, poison and shock are removed.
Look at it this way: if they acted like normal buffs (for ex Hyperion's furies), they wouldn't make it a special ability and note it in the champion's description.
While some of the debuffs he inflicts were ones that he already had access to, now he has much more reliable access to them that doesn’t rely on RNG on his sp2. He should be able to deal with nodes like vigour or Diss Track much better now than he could before, along with potential many other matchups as well.
Overall, the main changes made resulted in a trade off of big damage increase with a long ramp up and little utility, for a lower damage increase with a much shorter ramp up and more utility. While we can’t say for certain how good or bad this buff is, it certainly has potential.
He's basically another parry/heavy champ, wich is super boring. As for his utility, this 10% power rate reduction is nothing big compared to normal power lock. Heal block is fine. Sp3 is useless now. Well, you may want to go for it to land a heavy on limber, I guess, but again, that's because he relies on his heavy now. And on top of that they added mash thing. Wich doesn't look good imo, I hate coward node, and that mash makes you tap block more then you did last mash. How do I know? I read his description. The only thing that may be difficult to predict is his damage output, but I didn't mention it until now.
The 10% power reduction can be stacked multiple times. Sure it's not as great as power lock but it's still something, probably allowing you to chain multiple heavies after it. You say sp3 is useless but then give a use for it after. It also allows you to place a passive stun to gain furies in places where regular debuffs won't work. No one knows how Mash works yet so idk how you can say that. Dude, if you are on Coward, you might as well use the node to your advantage by dashing back and dealing with the opponent, no ones asking you to play Howard in his normal playstyle on it.
Also, the heavy thing is a matter of personal preference and can't be used to bring a champion down. Quake, Mags, AA,etc. rely on heavies, does that bring them down, nope.
Likewise, when the spotlights for Terrax and Moleman initially released, many people believed they would be pretty good, however on their release they ended up being subpar champs. Hopefully, the patch will go live today and we will be able to get a good look at how his buff actually turned out. Until then, we can only theorize how good or bad he may be, but we can’t actually make any definitive decisions on how his buff actually turned out until we can test him ourselves.
"Button Masher Extraordinaire
Rapidly pressing the Block button at different times in the fight grants Howard special MASH! Bonuses. Each MASH! bonus requires more presses of the Block button than the last within the same window.
In the Pre-Fight Menu, Howard can activate the Auto-Masher which lasts for the duration of the fight. While Auto-Masher is active, all MASH! Bonuses will be handled automatically for Howard.
While fighting as a Defender, Auto-Masher is always active."
I mentioned coward node as it also wants you to tap block a lot, and doing it in every fight didn't look fun imo. Sp3 - got different use, wich can occasionally deal with limber. I.e. his current sp3 use is lost.
AA can stack nt on specials, but if you can't heavy, you most likely won't use him. Quake doesn't need to land heavy, she's kinda bad example here. Mags has unstoppable. Hype doesn't need it as much and has great reach for heavy. Not sure about htd reach distance.
Also you'd need 10 power reduction debuffs to power lock opponent in normal fights, 20-30 on increased combat power rate node (getting to 20 with those expiring seems to be annoying at least). Not sure how would it work with power gain champs/nodes.
I have htd as 6* and don't use him. Won't use him after buff most likely. With tigra and manthing he was ok option for damage in any fight. His change is far from hood declined buff, and I don't care about htd, but I can see why some people would not be happy with his buff
Also everyone keeps gassing up this power lock, but who actually used that with Howard? It's happened to so randomnly and what function did it serve than to potentially spam some more heavies when using Howard for fun. That some function can potentially be done with these suppresion debuffs. No one used it for utility.
Duck was mostly used by people, who didn't have better options, I guess. A lot of characters are lame. Say he's your first 6* and you have 5* buddies for synergy. And boom - you use him.
Also I'm not comparing his power control pre/post buff, I'm only looking for any value he can provide after the buff. For me - none. If he becomes worse for people who used him before the buff, it's pretty sad.
Wait and see, if more people will use the buffed up HTD wouldn’t it stand for reason that it’s better then the previous iteration? Regardless of what the 5 say.
Swedeah simps
No one was EVER hyped about a 6* Howard pull and no one EVER ranked up their terrible pre-buff Howard (except his tiny fanclub). This buff is amazing, and sounds like a TON of fun. He no longer needs synergies or a long ramp up or reliance on RNG. Amazing buff. Beautiful.
The same people complaining about the Howard buff are the ones who made "IM GONNA QUIT MCOC" posts after pulling a 6* Howard pre-buff. Makes you think.
Can't wait for all of these stupid threads to age horribly in a few hours when the patch drops and everyone realizes that Howard is a beast now, so much fun and way better then his past self.