I’ve pulled a 6* super skrull recently. He’s always been a champion I’ve seen nobody using or even talking about so i decided to mess around with him and see what all of (or rather the lack of) fuss was about.
Now I did R2 him, and my personal opinion on him is that he is actually a fun champion to play. Now feel free to disagree with me and believe ranking him up was a poor choice, but he is actually a cool champion to play who requires thinking and has a lot of cool utilities which I love. (I also had a ton of T4 cosmic in the overflow and all my cosmic are ranked up so it was either him or drax to rank up)
DamageNow this is super skulls arguably “worst” aspect. His damage. On base he has nearly the worst damage in the game (only beaten by air Walker and kind groot), however he has a way of gaining furies by hitting the opponent, each giving up to 380 attack rating at R2, you can have up to 5 of these which gives around 1.7k extra attack (not much). However it does actually get better from there. Using the L2 can covert armour ups into furies increasing attack by 400 for 25 seconds. Not only are these long furies but they don’t have a stack limit and when played right he can gain up to 10 of these (on top of the 5 from hitting) which can get him around about 5.7k extra attack. However most of the time you have about 8-10 on you in total based on how exactly you ramped up. And the damage doesn’t stop there. He can trigger nova fists, dealing a 1.8k damage incinerate Debuff every single hit, this increases with the fury buffs so they can deal up to 4-5k each. So his damage definitely isn’t awful, but it takes the right ramping up to get.
His Ramp UpTo get him ramped up it’s best to just hit them until you get to your L2, by then a cosmic overload cycle will most probably have happened and will be towards the end of the cosmic overload buff. Then before you launch the L2, parry medium at least 3 (recommended 4 or 5) times then launch the L2 this will convert your armour ups into furies, then wait out the cosmic cycle doing as much damage as possible and then hit into the opponent to gain the furies. You need 8 fury buffs on you to trigger nova fists so the less armours you built in the first half the more furies you need to make up for it. It’s a slightly complex ramp and in longer fights you’ll want to L3 at the start for an aptitude buff so yeah, his damage isn’t the easiest to get like Corvus or Ghost but it’s not awful and you can pull it off in most AW fights or such content. And trust me once he does get that ramp things die QUICK.
UtilityNow yes the damage is lacklustre, however this man is PACKING on the utility. I’ll make a list of the things he can access and then elaborate on some of the more important stuff.
- Vigilance
- Undermine (very cool)
- Incinerate immunity
- Shock immunity
- Incinerate debuffs
- Falter
- Pretty much 100% uptime on armour (good for Havok)
- Power gain when duped
- Lots of buff gain (great for 7.2 etc)
- Block penetration for weeks
VigilanceMiss fail is useful both offensively and defensively, especially now that we are seeing miss become such a more common mechanic, I mean recently Prof X, Tigra, Super Skrull, Guilly 2099, Invisible Woman, Stryfe, Ebony Maw and new buffed hood all have it. Not to mention all the new nodes that use it
UndermineMy favourite auto-block fail in the game. Hands down. Just read the description of it.
Better than true strike and sense, it can counter Peni Parkers autoblock is the big thing. It also does wonders against champs like Medusa where you don’t know if he is going to autoblock until it happens. It does require you to be in cosmic overload and have 4+ fury buffs but if you follow the above stanadard rotation that’s not an issue as it just happens naturally. Even better the fury buffs can apply through the block so if they’re autoblocking every single hit it really doesn’t matter.
FalterHis falter isn’t super consistant or prominent in his playstyle, however it allows you to be aggressive and make risky plays, it also then places an energy vulnerability on the opening which increases your damage still after that. It only triggers when they miss which is so useful and lets you control it well against a lot of opponents.
Block PenetrationFury buffs grant block penetration and incinerates reduce block proficiency by 50% each so you can in fact do more damage through the block then on basic hits, this is good for the L2 as well as that attack gives you a lot of pushback so it can’t be punished, and anyways if it could be then the falter will save you anyways.
Fantastic 4 synergiesNow one of my favourite things about super skrull is that placing him in the team with one other emmener of the fantastic 4 will give that member the synergies the other 3 members give them. I love running him in war with HT, giving me my full F4 synergies with a champion slot free. I also do use Super Skrull for a couple fights especially against dark hawks where I can miss and autoblock fail him at once.
Final ThoughtsSuper skrull is an example of good but not great character design. It’s clear they had high visions for the character but eventually ran out of time, which is a shame. Because of how many different factors alter his damage adding or subtracting from one or two of his numbers could have a huge difference, and clearly kabam didn’t want to risk making him too much. Now he definitely doesn’t have a lazy design, they just ran out of time. This is clearest with his synergies, the ones he has are super unique and interesting, however he only really has 3 (one with IF, one with Doom and then the F4 ones which are 4 separate synergies but really only count as 1 seeing as 3 apply at once based on which F4 member is in the team). It’s also obvious in his animations, his specials and basic attacks all look great but they could’ve added just that last 1%, for example his fists are made of the same rocks as the Thing, but none of his moves really dig up the ground or shake the screen like things mediums. I don’t believe this was lazy design, just a running out of time issue. It would be great if he got a value only update, if they just took a month or so to really tweak him to get him to a slightly more polished level, his damage needs just a small increase and some of his buffs need a little more/less duration just to make him flow more evenly.
Despite this I still love him and the challenge of clearing harder content with him, on top of his great synergy dynamic just make him my go to cosmic these days for general content clearing. His freedom of rotation is kind of similar to CGR, In that there are many ways to use him and it’s good fun to try figure out how to do certain things. Feel free to have other opinions and I’d love to hear from any other Super Skrull players (although I wouldn’t bet there are many of them) on how they use him and their best rotations. (And if anyone knows how to get the unblockable and nova fists at the same time please do share)
Edit: when I say feel free to disagree do try keep it civil, just because I ranked up someone you don’t like doesn’t mean you can bully people (looking at THAT thread)
