pressnifty
Member
(Proper design on the right. Left drawing was to test a baseball player design.)
HERO SUMMARY
Striker is a close ranged mixed damage hero who deals heavy spirit damage by hitting enemies with your spirit soccer ball. Use your 2 to empower a dash with improved distance and stay evasive with your small hitbox. Use your ult to give your ball increased size and a stun for a short duration.
Not really sure of their lore beyond being an Ixian and some kind of dog demon (joke involving dogs fetching a ball lmao).
GUN
DAMAGE PER SECOND: 56.7
BULLET DAMAGE: 21
AMMO: 14
BULLETS PER SEC: 2.7
RELOAD TIME: 2.6
BULLET VELOCITY: 550m/s
FALLOFF RANGE: 20m - 52m
LIGHT MELEE: 50
HEAVY MELEE: 116
VITALITY
HEALTH: 700
HEALTH REGEN: 2
MOVE SPEED: 8.2m/s
SPRINT SPEED: 1.6m/s
DASH SPEED: 0.62s
STAMINA: 3
STAMINA COOLDOWN: 4.5s
POWER KICK
(5s imbued Heavy Melee Damage duration.)
Your mixed damage source close ranged ability.
Feels sort of like a mina Rake with a short cast time. This ability's short range is compensated by its strong knockback and that it also deals heavy melee damage and a fading slow, making it a useful tool for displacing and isolating an enemy to wail on them with your gun and your ball. This heavy melee damage is only applicable for a short period after hitting the ball, rewarding big melee damage (scaling with your gun damage).
The knockback range also scales with spirit (similar to Mina's 2), granting you +6.4m with Boundless Spirit (and +10.4m with Boundless AND Greater Expansion).
The knockback can be useful when kicking them into your team/closer to your side of the map or away from safety; but it can also be detrimental as you can kick enemies to safety or out of your effective range. To keep enemies in close range you need to kick enemies into nearby walls (similar though process to an Abrams charge) to keep them close.
This ability has a sweet spot, where if you kick an enemy and the ball you can immediately proc the imbued heavy melee damage and kick damage.
The T2 is a big spike in your damage output as it lowers the cooldown by nearly half. (superior cooldown lowers it to ~15s).
The T3 gives you a big movement spike, allowing you to close the gap between you and a knocked back target and making you harder to hit and chase down.
SLIDE TACKLE
(w/o investment, slide takes you +25m)
(w/ 5AP, slide takes you +35m)
(The slide distance buff only applies to the slide performed by this ability.)
Slide Tackle is your gun/movement ability. The knock-up also makes it a displacement tool.
Slide tackle can be paired with other items that give slide distance to drastically increase your distance for quick escapes. This ability is however easily countered by slows/movement cancels, so debuff remover or move speed items are pretty crucial.
Being a slide, it also gives you infinite ammo making it synergise with your gun for crazy DPS. At T2 it gives increased fire rate for the slide duration to increase the potential to output heavy gun damage.
The slide damage is melee and thus scales with your gun, encouraging gun investment. The T1 further encourages gun investment.
The T3 drastically increases your slide distance and move speed, allowing for quicker escapes and further empowering of your gun.
Im unsure if the slide should scale with ability range investment. I feel it could increase the range way too far (also increasing your gun damage), but it could be an alternate way of increasing your resistance to slows outside of building greens. Range also is not useful in this hero's kit outside of the ult, so range investment could maybe work. Feedback to this idea of range investment affecting slide distance is encouraged.
BALL IN PLAY
The Spirit Ball created by Ball In Play is the core gimmick of Striker and is their core spirit ability.
I imagine the ball would have increased speed and less arc when melee'ing or being hit with abilities, granting Striker more control over the ball. I would also imagine the Spirit Ball would have a slight auto aim to account for the ball being fairly hard to control.
Casting this ability returns the Spirit Ball to you, going through walls on its return and also causing damage if it hits an enemy. This makes it useful in not just returning the ball to you once it goes too far but also gives potential to cause impact damage and grant a stack (so long as you position yourself in relation to an enemy correctly) on a short cooldown.
Without investment Spirit Ball will deal 145 Damage with 10 stacks. (including base impact damage.)
With Boundless Spirit Spirit Ball will deal 137 with no stacks, and 689 with 10 stacks. (including base impact damage.)
With Boundless Spirit and T3, Spirit Ball will deal 1057 Damage. (including base impact damage.)
Note this damage is high and building 10 stacks on an enemy would take incredibly long and they'd likely die before this point. 10 Stacks is used as an example.
T1 is a minor buff to buffer rushing the T2, which gives a significant boost to your mobility.
WRECKING BALL
Wrecking ball is a short cooldown ult that increases your spirit DPS potential and disrupts enemies.
This ability would feel similar to a Viscous Ult except you control it. You can kick your ball through the enemy team (it now having an increased hitbox size) either causing a big stun or forcing enemies to dodge out of the way. Dodging is made difficult however by the increased ball speed.
T1 gives your ult more uptime in a way that is similar in nature to Paradox, Wraith or Pocket Ult's lowering cooldown on T1.
T2 increases your duration to 9s. With Superior Duration, you can reach 11.5s duration (and 1.28s stun).
T3 is a massive spike to your ball damage. This upgrade would be saved for towards the end of the game when enemy health pools are higher or against tankier heros/builds as it deals percent max health damage.
This ult would be a great tool for contesting Mid Boss as it stuns from a safe range, as well as rebounding in the Mid Boss pit to continually stun.
BUILD IDEAS
Gun Focused
Surge of Power on your 1 or 3 and activate before sliding to increase fire rate with infinite ammo from slide. Quicksilver/Mercurial Magnum for a free reload then Boundless Spirit + Leech for big survivability.
Lifestrike for easy proc with abilities to get free health.
Stamina recovery for synergy with naturally high stamina from Ball in Play T2.
Burst fire/Fleetfoot for slide distance synergy/fire rate.
Spell slinger because of short cooldown on 1, 2 and 3 for more fire rate.
Crushing fists because of easy procs on abilites, and you're already close range ideally on this hero.
Spirit Assassin Focused
Cultist Sacrifice to help with farming (due to low gun investment). Weakening headshot for 4.8k gun investment. Crippling for resist shred.
Arctic blast to hold enemies in place for easier aim with ball.
Spirit Snatch easily proc'd by abilities.
Boundless gives massive spirit spike.
Focus lens gives you huge potential for assassinating people if you have good ball control, escalating exposure synergisiing with this. Spirit Burn's DOT increases with Escalating exposure for more Spirit DPS.
Ethereal Shift when lategame when you're getting constantly jumped and your 2 doesn't cut it for helping you escape. (Could also get Debuff Remover.)
Hyrbid Melee
Crushing fists easily proc'd by abilities.
FORGOT TO ADD HUNTERS' AURA. Should definingly be bought for this build for bullet/melee resist shred.
Crippling Headshot for further shreds and heal reduction.
Frenzy for resists and speed.
Witchmail/Siphon Bullets for survivability in lategame.
Debuff/Behind in Souls
Build focused on teamplay and working with allies.
Mystic Slow + Slowing bullets for crazy slows on enemys between your bullets and your spirit ball. Slowing hex to stop movement abilities.
Alchemical fire synergises with your slows + the knockup on your 2 and your stun on your 4. Use vortex web to drag enemies back into your ball/Alchemical fire. Tie this in with Arctic Blast to keep enemies in.
CRIPPLING HEADSHOT would also be a good buy for reducing resists to help your allies.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Very happy with this hero and think they have a massive skill ceiling to output crazy spirit damage. However this hero would be really hard to pick up and potentially gimmicky. They'd also be easily countered by movement slows, so counter buys would be crucial.
The melee's built into the kit is probably overkill, and could instead do light melee damage, as otherwise its too easy to proc melee items if its a heavy melee.
Any and all feedback on the kit would is encouraged, much love!
