Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Some Doomfist Thoughts

I have 40 hours on Doomfist, which isn't much compared to those peeps who REALLY play Doomfist, but I've learned a lot from playing him including when it's just not working and when it worked so well I don't know quite what happened. I love a good mystery, so let me just type out a few things that I do know about the character and how I play him.

He's the bad guy

Not only is he the bad guy, he's the leader of the bad guy team called Talon. That isn't the reason I play him though. Originally I started playing him because I had been owned by him so many times playing Reinhardt, that I wanted to play him more to understand how he plays.

His achievements are hard to get
To get his Air Strike achievement, it feels like you typically have to be in a "125" position on the map already, which are a little hard to get to and you have to have an enemy kind of not moving around when you launch it.  A "125" position is somewhere high enough that when you launch Doomfist's Siesmic Slam ability, he will come crashing down to build up enough speed to fully charge his Siesmic Slam to 125. The really good Doomfist players will always talk about "rollout" spots where they use geometry to get themselves kind of stuck in a strange high up area of the game and then use this to slam down on people and get around. It's hard . . . I'm not good enough yet to do these things. Mercedes also taught me a neat trick about getting high up by using his ultimate, so . . . there's still hope for me. :)

To get his Cratered achievement, you have to catch all six members of the other team in his Meteor strike ultimate ability, which almost never happens since everyone is typically super spread out and even more so when they see a giant red circle on the ground where he's going to hit. I'm still waiting for that perfect Zarya ultimate combo with my meteor strike . . . maybe someday.


He's challenging to play
The number one comment I hear from my buds when they play the Mystery Heroes arcade matches is that Doomfist is their hardest character to play. Blizzard marked him as a 3-star difficult hero, and I believe that's because to play him, you are always being put smack dab in the middle of the action. If you've expended all your cool-downs and are in the middle of the action, you're about 1 second from dead. You have to save a cooldown to get out of the action to hide, and you have to know where that safe spot is.  If there isn't a shield tank or a good corner to hide behind on a map, I probably won't play him . . . probably . . .

After 40 hours, I still find him difficult to play, but also super fun because:

It's awesome punching people
Seriously, punching someone and watching them fly into a wall from your punch is amazing. Doing a huge uppercut and sending other people into the air is hilarious. Where as widowmaker might get a full charged headshot on someone and get a "one shot, one kill," Doomfist fully charging his punch and smashing someone will get a "one punch, one kill."  I like that kind of power.  It's great for killing squishies.

He causes mayhem
One of my favorite things about playing him is the confusion people can have from when he's bouncing in and out of combat and just throwing people off their game. Knocking the tanks around and out of the way opens up people that were previously hiding behind the shield for attacks from your team. I'm all about the mayhem.

He has some cool skins
I own some good ones . . . just look how awesome these are . . .





His original skin is pretty cool too.

That's on my desk at the office btw

If you're really interested in playing him, watch a few vids
I'm not going to link any here, but simply searching Doomfist Guide on YouTube is going to net you a handful of them. They have way more tips and suggestions than I could ever give. I've watched a few of them and they really do help and they also help just knowing that even the pros struggle with this character sometimes.

Happy Dueling!

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