Kinetic: The ranged bruiser that shouldn't exist

Vainglory Discussion Heroes, Builds, & Items
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Some background music for my very first sentence.
Kinetic didn’t get nerfed last patch.

As most of literally everyone predicted, Kinetic, the biggest permaban of last patch, is still disgusting in this patch too. This is especially after some of her biggest competition for bot lane was nerfed, most notably Kensei.

If you have played Casual in the past few days you may have come across a disgusting build called SM BP Kinetic. This build is single-handedly so rage-inducing that some people may decide to not play casuals entirely, and jump into ranked queue for the first time in 3 years to avoid the complete aids that is a ranged carry who does as much damage as a normal carry but who also can build two defence items. Essentially, old WP Vox, but even worse.

Now, why the hecc is that?
Well, let me explain with the proper math why Kinetic is so damn disgusting.

Firstly, we need to talk about her early trading. Ranged heroes in VG have very oppressive laning phases against Melees and other ranged heroes who have shorter range than them. A prime example of this is Adagio into Vox. Normally, Adagio is best at fighting melee characters who he can easily splash fire onto or land his ult on, but against a low range character like Vox he can fully utilise his base damages. This is why ranged carries with longer ranges either tend to have very little early game power (Such as Baron) or drop off hard in the late game (Such as Adagio).
Kinetic isn’t like that.

Let’s do the math.

Let’s put Kinetic up against my favourite :b: oi, Blackfeather. They’re going to simply AA each other to death, so all we need to do is calculate their perks and base stats. They’ll both have Blade and BoE as their starting items, so that’s 20 WP and 4% lifesteal (which I can’t be bothered to calculate). I’ll use their level 1 stats, because they’re the easiest to find.

Kinetic

64 + 20 + (4+2) x 4 WP per AA (108)
721 HP
20 Armour and Shield

Blackfeather

81 + 20 WP per AA + 5 x Stack CP (101 + 5-25)
657 HP
20 Armour and Shield

So, Kinetic does 90 Damage an AA and Blackfeather does 84 + 4-20 damage.
Since they have the same base attackspeed, they’ll hit each other at the same time.
So, if we simulate this epic AA battle, we get.
Kinetic HP: 721 - 637 - 549 - 457 - 361 - 261 - 157 - 53 - Dead
Blackfeather HP: 657 - 567 - 477 - 387 - 297 - 207 - 117 - 27 - Dead

So, they kill each other. What’s the big deal?

Now, consider the fact that Blackfeather has numerous disadvantages that I didn’t take into account. Considering Kinetics range, she could likely get 2 free AAs before he even touched her. Blackfeather being melee means he has to fight closer to the minion wave. Kinetic has a much more powerful and spammable ability at level 1. Sure, Blackfeather might have his B for short trades, but Kinetic can punish him with her absurdly long range. Plus, Blackfeather falls off late game. Kinetic doesn’t.

If you actually look carefully at Kinetics stats you’d be surprised at how disgustingly strong she is. Incredibly high base HP level 1. A godly passive for both early game and late game. Attackspeed that matches Vox. Range equal to Baron at level 6. High scaling attackspeed. It’s frankly horrifying how a character can have so much without having any glaring weaknesses.

So now, lets talk about Kinetics late game. With a build of SM BP SSw Defence Defence, Kinetic becomes the strongest WP sniper in the game aside from Baron.
97 + 100 + 55 + 100 + (15 + 25) x 4 = 352 + 0 ~ 160 WP
That’s nasty. Plus, with BP passive being so strong, and Captains stacking so much health, you’ll be stacking for free.
But sure. Maybe that much damage isn’t oppressive enough for you. Maybe you want a bit more.

So did I mention she has a stun + 50% 1.5 second slow which travels the length of a screen, travels incredibly fast, has an incredibly misleading hitbox and is incredibly hard to notice in teamfights.

It probably sounds like I’m ranting at this point, but I’m just here to help. I am the messenger before the apocalypse that’s clearly right in front of us. Ban Kinetic. Ban Kinetic twice. Hell, ban her all four times if you can. People are definitely going to be abusing her when battlegrounds comes around, so just avoid doing casuals during those events. She’s literally just old WP Vox when he was meta. I love Vox’s playstyle when he goes CP. I find him interesting and fun to play. I’m the same with Kinetic. But when a ranged carry can build two defence items and still chunk like a madman, I’m sorry, I’m banning you.

Note: Ranged bruisers are a possibility, but in all honesty, they have to be low range characters. This is why I don’t still rant about Vox. Now that his base WP got shafted, he’s much more manageable and can’t just BP meme his way to victory. Kinetic, on the other hand, has literally no weaknesses whatsoever. Especially the range thing.

I’ll be talking about :b: ony next week.

5 Likes
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Yeah you must’ve got rekt by a few Kinetics and thought she was OP. She’s far from OP, Baron, Ringo, Gwen, Kestrel are all better WP carries in 5v5.

3 Likes
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If you’d like to present some points or evidence, then we could have a conversation.

Other than Baron, I can’t really see the others being a move valuable pick in any situation. Maybe Kestrel if you get a bunch of characters you can hard counter, but missing out on picking Kinetic (if she isn’t banned) really isn’t going to help you with that.

I’m far from being one to get destroyed and think a character is OP. Most of the time I actually have a more conserved opinion about characters. I thought Kensei on last patch was pretty mediocre and I think that Anka in draft mode this patch is actually straight up pretty bad. What I do react to is when characters that require incredibly low skill are incredibly strong. Sure, maybe Kinetic isn’t a solo carry god like Baron is looking like he could be, but she’s consistent, has strong utility, and has incredible base stats.

Reading this back makes me realise that I should just ignore these two sentence responses and go on my merry way.

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Stats only scare people. She’s squishy as hell and she actually did receive a nerf. She had a bug where her BP stacks would stack up like melee instead of ranged so she got stacks faster. Sure she’s a lane bully but one dash doesn’t somehow make her uncatchable.

3 Likes
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the problem i have with your example is that you mostly measured kinetic’s strength as a single unit. this is a team game, sure one melee person can’t kill kinetic alone, but we use dive heroes for backliners. in your example against bf, while you did mention him having his b and perk, his A also has execute, and, like you mentioned, it is a ranged vs melee example, so kinetic will obviously be in a huge advantage, but against divers and those with similar range, how well would she fare in a 1v1 in situations where she has and hasn’t stacked?

her weakness is how she has to stack up constantly to keep her basic attack good, otherwise her basic attacks are meh. not to mention, in the early levels, missing an A without having your B means losing all your stacks with the high cooldown early on

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I personally don’t find it challenging at all to get her stacks at any point in the game. That could be just me. For all I know people could find that difficult. But hitting lane minions with a long range skill shot is not difficult.

To prevent her getting stacks you have to

  1. Take all the jungle/not push lane to stop her stacking off minions
  2. Have a clean engage where she would get like, 1-2 stacks before the enemies got onto her
    Or
  3. You hope she messes up

Problem with those are that
1 is impractical.
2 is incredibly difficult when there’s a wall of 2-4 people between you and her
3 relies on the opponent being incredibly bad

I still stand by the fact that she’s incredibly reliable. She’s not a 100/100 every game (nobody is) but she’s the type of character where having a basic understanding of the game makes her an 60, especially with a bruiser build.

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Neh BF is OP he has missing health damage and can block her Ultimate with his C.

You actually said that BF falls off lategame… That’s a joke right. WP BF in the right hands is disgusting. He can block two hits with his ult. And once he stacks enough BP stacks he can finish an entire team through his A which will reset after each kill.

He too builds SM BP.

Kinetic is squishy and very vulnerable to a good diver.

A good Ringo, they are rare I know, can wreck just about everyone because he can move and shoot so fast its insane. A VG Silver Ringo can murder just about everyone effortlessly. His skill ceiling is so freaking high that we usually regard Ringo as mediocre but that’s on the player not the hero…

8

BF op? Lol, he is far from op.

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I know I was using the same arguments he was using for Kinetic…
:wink:

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I don’t see the point when you compare BF kits with Kinetic. They are two different heroes, and they serves different roles. For example: you can’t say a hero who can execute health (which means dealing more damage to tank) lose to a normal hero just because they have lower stats.

In my opinion, Kinetic is rather weak. She is good at laning phase since she can keep 4 stacks all of the time, making her damage pretty high, but duo to team fight, if her team isn’t the one who start the combat first and if she doesn’t get the stack beforehand, her damage even worse than Skye. (test it out. No peeling for her will make her damage = Ardan-full-tank’s damage, lmao).

So, the point is you don’t know how to counter her, not she is OP.

First, don’t let her stack or make her stack drains out. You can counter this by picking Mage heroes who can constantly poke from afar (aka Samuel, Baron). If she can’t come closer to stack, she is useless.
Second, her Ultimate is shit if your Captain bodyblock.
Third, her B’s Cooldown with Spellsword is 8s. So in that time, focus her first. Her stun duration is about 0.5s, which can allow assassin like Koshka, Taka still catch up with her.
Last, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, stop walking up to let her shoot you with A. My gawd, people below rank 10 never know they mustn’t get poked - no matter who does the poking.

P/s: I never lose damage to a Kinetic whenever I use Gwen in Bot lane. Moreover, I never lose damage to her whenever I use Baron/Varya/Samuel/Celeste/etc. in Midlane. (except my team feed her too much and didn’t know about stop getting poked)