Bowling Ball
by Countlessbugs
Aegis
Your Shield has an infinite duration and its Cooldown is reduced by 2s.
Shield
Safe Travel
Gain a 150-750-Health Shield for 3s after you use Charge.
Charge
5
Looks That Kill
Reduce the Cooldown of Charge by 0.6-3s after hitting an enemy with Fireball.
Fireball
4
Heat Transfer
Reduce the Cooldown of Charge by 0.5-2.5s for every 1000 damage your Shield takes.
Shield
3
Fearless Leader
Reduce your active Cooldowns by 10-50% after getting an Elimination.
Armor
2
Launch
Increase the travel distance of Charge by 15-75%.
Charge
1
Guide
Most people use Fernando to go in the enemy’s face and burn them, but often it is hard to stay alive after the kill, or they may be dead before they even secure one.
The following build intends to increase his survivability by utilising Safe Travel aka Bowling Ball in his kit.
Safe Travel V gives Fernando a 750-Health shield whenever he uses a dash. Whenever you are engaging fights, use the dash to get extra HP to duel the enemy. Closing the gap is crucial to use ur weapon.
A rarely used card for Fernando that is put here is Looks that Kill IV. This card gives you 2.4s CD off your dash for each enemy hit with Fireball. Apparently as our build revolves around Dash, reseting an extra dash is always nice. A good point to note is that you can also proc the card against deployables, namely Ying clones and Barik turrets.
Another card is Heat Transfer III. This is a defensive card that allows you to reset your dash if you are in bad position. Having Level 3 of the card allows you to reduce CD of your dash by 7.5s at most, which is usually sufficient to proc another dash.
While having low points, Fearless Leader II is also an important card. The Elimination CDR is critical to reset your dashes and shields, and it interacts with Looks that Kill very well.
Let’s do a little math:
Your dash is 10s CD.
You spend the cooldown dashing in.
You hit 1 enemy with Fireball, reducing 2.4s off your dash CD.
If you eliminate an enemy, you get 2s off your dash CD.
Usually after eliminating 1 enemy you may be in low health already. If your fight lasts 5.6s, you would get a new dash again! Even if it doesn’t, you may probably get a new Fireball as well, then hitting the new Fireball shall give you the new dash basically at all times.
Not to mention if you hit more than 1 enemy with the fireball, you get 1 more 2.4s off your dash.
Last card is just filler. I put Launch to further boost my dash, but you can also run Unstoppable Force for that Knockback. It is honestly no point running that card at a higher level, but having it at Level 1 may not be a bad idea.
Since we got Looks that Kill, you may want to pick Fernando especially when they got Barik or Ying. Having fewer vertical mobility champs like Drogoz, Willo can help you too. You generally don’t wanna pick Fernando when the map is Highground based. For that reason, Ice Mines, Frozen Guards are nice maps for him.
Fights that generally have tight sight lines are great too, such as Stone Keep Church side, Serpent Beach next to the Pillars, etc. Learning when to pick a fight is also important for tanks.
As for teammates your best partners would be tanks that doesn’t rely on shields, like Inara, Raum, Terminus, etc. You would prefer teammates with CC and short CD Heals, namely Furia and Maldamba. Maldamba is particularly nice for its movement speed on RMB. I just don’t like Jenos as much with Fernando.
Talent pick is Aegis. I actually don’t know the value of Scorch in this build without investment in CDR on Fireball, that generally 2s off on Shield might even be better for extra survivability. But if you get tons of narrow sight lines then you may still pick Scorch. It’s honestly just preference.
As the opponent stack up wrecker, you may want to buy Chronos II to reduce the downtime of your dashes and Shield.
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