Hybrid Vindicta by Suzu

17300

This Vindicta build focuses on a hybrid damage profile, with both quick burst and sustained damage, It’s simple in theory but offers a high skill ceiling and strong potential in almost any team composition and game state.

Rapid Rounds upgrading to Swift Striker are core early-game gun items. They give you the fire rate and weapon damage needed to secure last hits in lane, trade efficiently, and pressure the enemy.

Opening Rounds is perfect for poking down full-health targets so you can eventually bring them into execution range for your Assassinate, the burst damage early on can catch enemies off guard.

Extra Charge and especially Rapid Recharge are a decent spike, you have several attempts at executing your enemies with Assassinate and the lower recharge time means you are always a threat.

Optional Early Game:

Counterspell is the best defensive item in the game if used correctly. Its proactive spell parry allows you to completely block telegraphed CC or highly damaging spells that could knock you out of the sky or simply kill you. (Can be used while in Flight)

Recharging Rush is good if you are snowballing and/or confident with spamming Assassinate (your best source of damage early on)

Healing Rite is an option if you are getting poked out of lane too hard and having a hard time, dying is always worse than purchasing green items.

While in Flight, Vindicta becomes a major threat in any skirmish. The Alchemical Fire, Stake and Crow Familiar combo is the key part of this build, you can trap enemies inside the fire for unavoidable damage. Use them and immediately start shooting to bring the enemy as low as possible before finishing them off with Assassinate. In longer fights don’t forget to keep reactivating your abilities as they come back out of cooldown.

Try to join every fight that looks even slightly favorable. Vindicta can snowball a lot early on, and have huge impact compared to characters who are still farming and haven’t reached their power spikes yet. Use Flight to have privileged positioning and angles.

Burst Fire is the most important item if you want to go for the hybrid path, this makes your DPS for the duration of Stake incredibly higher, even more if you have stacked up a lot of Weapon Damage % from your ultimate.

All imbued items like Duration Extender and Mystic Expansion should imbue Stake in most scenarios.

Spiritual Overflow is the perfect hybrid item, as you shoot enemy heroes, you build up charges that grant bonus Fire Rate, Spirit Power, and Ability Duration. Your gun DPS directly feeds into making your Assassinate hit harder.

Once your core damage is online, Leech is the absolute best item to round out your build even if you’re already dominating. It guarantees great sustain allowing you to endure any situation, when combined with the defensive utility of Counterspell and Inhibitor you gain the survivability needed to take encounters against enemy carries and even when outnumbered.

Lightning Scroll works surprisingly well, damage from your ultimate applies a delayed stun and bonus spirit damage. If your Assassinate doesn't instantly execute a target, the resulting stun will lock them in place so you or your team can finish the job, multiple applications stack resulting in a chain of short stuns. Keep in mind it also works without the Assassinate charge-up bonus, meaning you can quickly weave the Assassinate between shots for the stun.

Healbane is great against heavy-healing compositions (like Kelvin or Abrams), you will have amazing healing reduction from other items later on, but this can be an early investment for that purpose, not as essential now that Crow Familiar also reduces healing.

Echo Shard on Stake is a very good option if you’re looking for even more lockdown, this one can never go wrong.

Dispel Magic and Spellbreaker are good defensive options, depending on the state of the game and the enemy heroes, Dispel Magic being the more budget option and Spellbreaker the luxury investment. Unstoppable is also a good contender for that slot if you’re confident in using it.

Mercurial Magnum can be a good pick if you feel like you want more ammo and more damage from your bullets, scales really well with the bonus from Flight.