Marvel Rivals Winter Soldier Guide – Best Builds, Combos & Domination Strategies
What’s up guys, Librarian Husky here, Bucky has been a solid DPS pick in Marvel Rivals since its release. Despite some weaknesses in the current meta, his utility makes him a valuable hero.
Understanding Bucky’s Gameplay
As an Eternity player on the competitive ladder, I’ll guide you on maximizing Bucky’s potential to dominate your ranked games. Bucky excels as a bruiser DPS, focusing on enabling his front line for success. Unlike dive heroes, like Psylock, Bucky’s strategy involves displacing enemies, particularly tanks, to create more advantageous team fights. While he can off-angle occasionally, his primary role is in the front line, pressuring tanks and securing picks.
When facing divers like Black Panther, Bucky shines in peeling for the backline by dashing enemies away and disrupting their plans. By understanding his playstyle, focusing on tanks, and securing picks, you can effectively carry your team with Bucky.
Mastering Bucky’s Rotor Stern
Bucky’s primary fire blaster, the Rotor Stern, fires three straight-line projectiles that explode on impact. These shots are not hitscan, requiring you to lead your shots at longer ranges. Each direct hit deals 75 damage, with an additional 65 damage from the explosion. Headshots inflict 150 damage, allowing you to swiftly eliminate squishy targets. The explosion damage affects any target within a 5m cone of the impact point.
Understanding the blaster’s mechanics can be challenging, but witnessing its power in action is truly impressive. Notably, direct hits do not trigger additional explosion damage to the target. The blaster has a falloff range from 20m to 40m, reducing damage to 60% at maximum range, equating to 45 damage per body shot.
Initially, managing Bucky’s limited shots may seem daunting, but his kit offers a unique advantage. Using any of Bucky’s abilities refunds all your shots, facilitating potent combos. For instance, combining a headshot with a dash and melee attack can swiftly eliminate a squishy target with 250 HP. Hooking targets allows for a similar one-shot effect on 275 HP targets by landing a headshot and dash. This rapid burst potential catches opponents off guard, akin to a tank-style play similar to Roadhog from Overwatch, focusing on hooking enemies and unleashing close-range blasts with his blaster.
Bucky’s Abilities Breakdown
This is because the blaster fires projectiles, but also because of his passives that give him bonus health for every time he uses an ability, which is absolutely insane.
Taking off angles is usually done by other duelists on the team like Hela’s, Psylocks, you get the idea. And because he can do such great AoE damage with that conal radius that we were talking about earlier, you can kind of see why we’re saying, “Yeah, play this guy in the front line a little bit.” Let’s talk a little bit more about that passive that we were just discussing though, Ceaseless Charge, since it’s going to help us understand a lot more of how we want to play Bucky‘s kit.
Whenever Bucky uses his team up with Captain America, he is granted 30 bonus health. Whenever Bucky uses his hook or energy ball abilities, he is granted 40 bonus health. And finally, whenever Bucky dashes or uses his ultimate, he is granted 50 bonus health. This bonus health fades over time, though, but it is still pretty useful.
This means in theory Bucky can generate 90 bonus health with a hook dash combo and 130 if he throws in an energy ball into the exchange as well. This puts Bucky at 380 HP, which is absolutely insane, making him an insane frontline bruiser. Now, you never want to really use these abilities just to get more shields, but it is a nice thing to know that is happening in the background so you can be a little bit more aggressive if you want to be. Let’s begin delving into Bucky’s abilities, though.
Starting with his bionic hook, every 12 seconds, Bucky can charge a hook for up to 4 seconds that travels further the longer it is held. After half of a second, the hook travels 10 m forward before it hits someone. After one full second, the hook travels for 20 m forward before it hits someone. This is as far as you can charge it for, and the little meter on the right side of the reticle is going to tell you when you’re about to be full charged.
Once you do hit full charge, it’s going to make a very loud buckle sound, so the enemies are going to know that you’re ready to hook. What’s really neat about this ability though is how it hooks on to enemies. Whether or not you hit the hook is dependent on a similar cone radius as your blaster that we were just talking about before. This means it’s really forgiving to hit a hook on a single target, but also that you can hook two or more people at once if you place the hook right.
For example, if I hook a target and there’s another person behind them in that 4.5 m radius, they’re actually going to get hooked in with the initial person I hooked, giving me two free picks instead of just one. And it’s also important to note that you can displace enemies that you hook after you hook them by moving your crosshair to where you want them to end up. If you hit the hook and then immediately whip around, you can then dash them into your team and possibly bring them behind cover or a shield so they can’t get saved by their supports. You’re cutting off line of sight from their team. They can’t even get bubble from Magneto either.
The hook is also Bucky’s main tool to fish for value in fights that last for a pretty long time. And in Marvel Rivals, news flash, um, with how busted support ultimates are, fights pretty often do go for a pretty long time. A super high impact play you can go for on Bucky is to hook a cloak and dagger out of her ultimate and then focus her down with your team to instantly take her out and win the fight. This plan won’t work all of the time, especially if they started in cloak form to dodge you after you hook them, but it is a pretty nice idea to understand if you want to go for some high-v value picks.
Speaking of countering ultimates, the hook is also very good at that just in general. Since it applies a micro stun, you can even cancel ultimates like Doctor Strange very easily if you are looking for it, as well as things like Star-Lord, Loki, pretty much anyone if you time it right, although some are more difficult than others. My main tip for hitting more hooks is to try to pressure enemy shields early in the fight and then charge your hook right when the shield is about to break.
This way, when your team does that extra little bit of damage that you need, you can immediately follow that up with a hook and instantly take out the enemy. It feels horrible to play Vanguard into this. Enough talk about the hook, though. Let’s talk about Bucky’s dash, Trooper’s Fist.
Upon pressing shift by default, Bucky will send himself forward once every 12 seconds, pulling and pushing any enemy around him forward.
Abilities Overview
The target he initially seizes takes 25 damage and anyone affected by the knock back after that is going to incur 65 points of damage. So that single target we hit is going to take 90 damage in total. The dash, much like Emma’s choke slam, works through shields, including both Doctor Strange’s and Magneto’s shield, making it an excellent tool to finish off tanks if need be.
You need to be careful when using it this way, though, since you are going to be very vulnerable if you just dash through the front line. After all, the tank is probably going to be that frontline presence, and everyone else is just going to shoot you since they’re they’re just going to see the guy getting dashed on. Instead, this ability is an excellent tool to deal damage on top of adding additional movement and crowd control capabilities to Buckyy’s kit. Need to take high ground? It’s just a dash away. Need to stop Luna from alting just a little bit longer? Dash into the wall. Need to take care of a pesky Black Panther in the backline? Dash to make him stand still and he’s toast.
The dash is a very simple ability, but the true skill comes out of setting up combos with it in conjunction with his blaster and hook like we were talking about earlier. The ability that is going to set you up early on in fights though is your tainted voltage that pierces through enemies dealing 55 damage to anyone it hits while also slowing them down by 35% for 2 seconds. Contrary to his other abilities that are on a 12-second cooldown, his energy ball is on a six-second cooldown, and you get two of them, making it an excellent tool to poke at enemies, as well as a tool to reload your blasters while you are waiting for opportunities and pressuring enemies early on in the fight.
This ability can also knock down flying heroes like Iron Man in Storm that see tons of play in the current meta. In my opinion, the Punisher and Hela are still better options against flyers. But if you don’t play those heroes or don’t care to learn them, this is still a pretty good option to take out flyers with Bucky. You want to make sure though that you aren’t just throwing energy balls around whenever you want to though.
While you should use them frequently, you really don’t want these abilities to get blocked. Instead, you want to try and anticipate when that shield is going to be dropping and then look to slow the enemy team to set yourself up for an easier hook, ultimate. Pick anything outside of timing. Oddly enough, hitting the ability can actually be pretty hard sometimes. The energy ball travels slightly faster than your hook, but it also travels significantly slower than your blaster, so it’s kind of a weird projectile to get used to. Getting used to aiming this with everything else in your kit is going to take some time. So, just understand that and give yourself some grace.
Use the ball to close the distance on enemies from range so you can get smacking and blasting like you really want to. Before we move on to Buckyy’s ultimate, we need to discuss his teamup ability with Captain America: Stellar Impact. bound to C by default. Bucky can fly to Captain America and collide with his shield, dealing damage to all enemies in a radius around both of them every 15 seconds. Recall that the bash also gives Bucky an additional 30 health, which is nice if he is getting pressured by a ton of divers.
I do honestly think that this teamup is pretty solid, but the only problem is that these two characters really don’t have any synergy whatsoever. Captain America wants to live in the enemy backline, while Bucky wants to sit with his tanks and just farm damage and possibly hit a big hook. Perhaps I have yet to find the true sauce behind this team up, but Rocket complimented with Bucky was much better in my opinion.
Bucky’s Ultimate Ability: Kraken Impact
Upon casting the ultimate, Bucky will send himself up into the air where he will then be able to designate his impact location on the ground. If he does not pick a location by the time he touches the ground, the ultimate will just be slammed on the ground and no charge will be refunded. Targets impacted will incur 80 damage and will also receive a culling debuff that lasts for about 5 seconds. This debuff will eliminate enemies immediately if the red part on their health bar is all that is left.
In specific, that red bar equates to 15% of the target’s maximum health. If the target is eliminated before that culling debuff fades away after 5 seconds, Bucky will get another charge of his ultimate where he can go again. When this occurs, Bucky has 8 seconds before he misses out and has to go back to farming his alt again.
Let’s start getting into the complicated math of this ultimate. Your goal is not to light up the kill feed on this ultimate; your goal is to win the fight by any means necessary. Diving into the entire enemy team just to die is not a good idea.
You have to be strategic with his ultimate. Obviously, you want to hit as many targets as possible to spread out that debuff to as many enemies as possible. However, if you see a target like a Luna Snow or Loki clone out of position, you can go for those first to get a pick and then snowball your value. Furthermore, this doesn’t happen all of the time, but it’s nice if you read the situation correctly.
It is important to note that hitting tanks is technically more valuable than hitting squishies with this ultimate. This is because 15% on a tank’s health bar equates to a much larger number than if it was done on a squishy. Here’s the catch, though. If you are going to hit a tank, you have to trust that you and your team are going to be able to follow up on that damage within five seconds, or else your ultimate is cooked. And if they have supports, chances are you’re not going to be hitting that threshold very quickly at all, let alone 5 seconds. This ultimate is super situational, and you aren’t going to be perfect after watching just one guide.
Bucky’s Ultimate Strategies
It is going to take watching good players and practice to really get it down, which I’m going to be doing because I’m going to be streaming a bronze to GM on Bucky right now. So, if you are specifically struggling with this cooldown, maybe it’s worth checking that out. Ultimates that combo very nicely with Bucky‘s ultimate are Groots, for example, since it pulls the enemies together for you to just go to town and farm. A support ultimate is your worst nightmare when using Bucky Alt, though. When you know that the enemy supports have ultimates online, do your best to avoid starting the fight with your ultimate on Bucky unless the enemies are out of position and instead try to focus the target that has alt with your own standalone kit. This way, they might get scared and just use an alt, allowing you to pop off with your alt later.
Hooking a Luna Snow who has alt is almost always going to result in a positive value trade for you on Bucky. If you were going to take one tip away from this portion of the guide, or let alone this guide to be honest, just make sure that while hitting a big fat alt feels so good, it is infinitely more impactful for you to just get one pick and then just live. It is very easy in this game to do too much and die for it.
Make sure that you don’t overstep your limit and only keep going when the opportunity presents itself. All right, but now that we have discussed all of Buckyy’s abilities, let’s start talking about what counters him. In the current season, Bucky really struggles into characters like Emma and Magneto. Against these characters, Bucky always has shields in his face, and their shields don’t go down easy, either, making it impossible to find a hook. And if you do find a hook, Magneto is just going to bubble it. And against Emma, she’s just going to put her shield up the moment she hears that buckle off of your hook, or she’s just going to be in diamond form and beat you up.
So, um, good luck. That’s all I can really give you for those characters. The Thing is no better since he can’t get tossed around either by your kit. It’s just annoying. As far as DPS go, Hela is really annoying since she thrives at long ranges where you don’t as much. Flyers are also pretty annoying if they are good since they will always play in cover and dodge your energy balls, making it impossible to catch them out. Supports do not have any interactions to note though other than Ultron for the same reason as the other flyers and also just support alts, but that really just goes for the whole role.
As far as who you want to play with as Bucky, obviously shields like Strange, Emma, and Mag are good for you. Groot is also absolutely incredible since he can wall off every single one of your hooks and make it the most free pick of your life. Penny is just funny since you can hook enemies into her minds and just insta nuke them. I don’t think this is good, it’s just funny, and you always have the cap team up too, but uh the other tanks are just so much better, at least right now. So maybe that’ll change in the future.
As far as the other DPS go, Storm used to pair super well with Bucky, but in my opinion, the Punisher has currently been taking that spot over him since he provides just so much more pressure overall. This doesn’t mean Bucky is necessarily bad here. He’s just not the best pick. Bucky is also really solid with a Punisher next to him since he can just obliterate the enemy front line very easily. Supports are simple and the same in every single guide for the past 6 months.
Luna and Loki
Luna and Loki are considered top-tier characters in many situations. They excel individually but truly shine when paired strategically. While Luna boasts exceptional speed and versatility, Loki brings a unique set of skills to the table. Together, they form a formidable duo that can dominate various game scenarios.
When it comes to specific team compositions, Luna and Loki stand out as reliable choices. Their synergy allows for seamless coordination, enabling players to execute complex strategies with ease. Whether facing formidable opponents or navigating challenging missions, this dynamic duo proves its worth time and time again.
In competitive gameplay, Luna and Loki’s strengths become even more apparent. Their combined abilities create opportunities for decisive victories, making them a popular pick among seasoned players. Understanding their individual strengths and weaknesses is crucial for maximizing their potential on the battlefield.
Character Dynamics
In terms of character dynamics, Luna and Loki complement each other exceptionally well. Luna’s agility and offensive capabilities mesh perfectly with Loki’s tactical prowess and deceptive maneuvers. This synergy enhances Their overall effectiveness, allowing them to outmaneuver opponents and secure strategic advantages.
When considering team compositions, Luna and Loki often serve as the cornerstone of a successful lineup. Their ability to adapt to different playstyles and scenarios makes them versatile assets in any situation. Players who master the intricacies of these characters can unleash their full potential, turning the tide of battle in their favor.
Moreover, Luna and Loki’s individual strengths enhance each other’s performance, creating a symbiotic relationship that elevates their gameplay. By leveraging their unique abilities in tandem, players can unleash devastating combos and overcome even the toughest challenges. This synergy cements Luna and Loki’s status as a powerhouse duo in the gaming world.
Strategic Gameplay
When it comes to strategic gameplay, Luna and Loki offer a wealth of tactical options for players to explore. Their diverse skill sets open up a range of possibilities, allowing for creative strategies and innovative approaches to gameplay. By leveraging Luna’s speed and Loki’s cunning, players can craft dynamic tactics that catch opponents off guard.
In competitive settings, Luna and Loki’s strategic value becomes even more pronounced. Their ability to adapt to changing circumstances and exploit enemy weaknesses makes them formidable opponents on the battlefield. Whether engaging in high-stakes matches or intense showdowns, players can rely on Luna and Loki to deliver exceptional performance and secure victory.
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