Ivy Community Build

The latest major balance patch (probably the biggest balance patch deadlock has ever seen) has finally done something that no patch has ever done before. After countless patches of nonstop nerfs, this patch has buffed EVERY single character in the game, as well and items. The main winners remain to be spirit characters at the moment, with most gun character becoming irrelevant (including raw gunivy being deleted from relevance). Though Ivy has lost about 60% of her original damage scaling since shop rework, the insanely short ult cooldown (despite the knockup removal) and the perma tether helps with a tempo-oriented Ivy playstyle. Super minor movement speed cap buffs and health changes also support a movement speed playstyle once more, and is a indirect buff to siphon (Alongside the major siphon rework/buff in the major balance patch). This can give a on-hit/debuffer Ivy playstyle significant relevance in the game.

Your laning phase should revolve around this core principle: Your Lane trading and Damage output is low. Your Lane waveclear is very good. You should play around this fact. Do not use kudzus for poke damage, and instead use them to prioritize and clear the wave (Or get T1 camps to prevent the enemy from invading with the downtime that they have). Almost always, you lane partner will have far more poke and damage output ready, and will likely have weaker waveclear than you. Play around your lane partners strengths, where you focus the wave, and your lane partner deals damage. By playing around your strengths in lane, you will have a far better lane experience. You will not have significant lane pressure/damage output until you get your tesla bullets with 4.8k gun investment powerspike. You can also get HSB to apply more lane pressure. Don't forget to get boxes and t1 camps throughout waves, BUT ALWAYS BE SURE TO BE ON THE SAME PAGE AS YOUR LANER! You either both apply pressure, or both get boxes. Doing separate actions is not good.

During your laning phase, you will generally first obtain your kudzu bomb/thorns, then your stone form, and then your tether. When you get tether, never use it to trade offensively, save it exclusively for when you kill healer minions, so you can replicate healing with your lane partner. Later in lane, you will play around your stone form T1 and T2 upgrade. When stone form is unupgraded, use it purely as a defensive option. At T1, you can begin to pop it outside of combat for sustain. At T2, you can spam it out of combat for insane sustain. Feel free to use it every time its off cooldown if you don't expect to fight the lane opponents for the next 15 seconds. Can be combined with tether when you grab the healing trooper to also give your lane partner a smidgeon of health alongside the another abundance of healing you are providing. Extra health is a insanely powerful item in lane to stay very sustained, as the T2 stone form AP upgrade rush works very well with it, and makes you a hard target to kill (especially when being dived.)

When choosing what items to buy in lane, you want to purchase Capacitor as fast as humanly possible. The sooner you buy it, the more impactful it will be. An optimal build path example in a game may be (Extended Magazine -> Tesla Bullets -> Titanic Magazine -> Capacitor -> Rapid Rounds -> Swift Striker). Though this may be optimal, it is not realistically possible every game, and for that purpose, items like healing rite and extra health help you stay sustained with rapid regeneration, sprint speed for box running, and more max health to increase effectiveness of healer minions and T1 stone form bonus HP% heal. These items will help you stay alive, while safeguarding you from feeding in the lane. It may delay your powerspike, but it will keep you from doing poorly in lane. Once you buy capacitor, you can essentially OUT-DPS anyone for the next 5-7 minutes. This is also because you will get swift striker and T3 tether very shortly after tether, making you farm speed and early damage output absolutely insane.

Your early game power spike occurs at around 8-11k souls. You will remain insanely strong up until around 18-20k souls, where despite dealing a lot of damage, you will be lacking survivability. Because of this, after you utilize the early game powerspike, you want to use this advantage to constantly steal enemy farm and/or secure your own farm. You will be the fastest t2/t3 camp clearer in the game at this time (only beaten by Venator), so focus on securing camps while leaving sinners for your other teammates who are otherwise inefficient at taking camps, but like taking sinners. Any enemy that will attempt to rival you in a solo lane will likely lose to you, so you will have a lot of control. Despite this, be aware you can very easily instadie if it becomes a 1v2 and someone roams to you in lane. While doing all of this, you will rapidly acquire a large amount of souls that will allow you to reach your second major powerspike: Siphon Bullets. Feel free to buy items before siphon bullets, such as slowing bullets, enduring speed, and definitely bullet resistant shredder.

Your ult is not as impactful as last patch with this build, but you have it almost twice as often. This means the previous rule (ABAD - ALWAYS BE AIRDROPPING) applies even more, where its hard to waste an airdrop ultimate when its on such a low cooldown. Your airdrop will feel insanely impactful after you upgrade it to T3 (after you get T2 stone form and T3 Tether at around 20k+ soul count). With silence, its very easy to hard focus a specific enemy and kill them almost guaranteed, often preventing escape, combined with the ultimate silence, ultimate slow, and both your capacitor active, and you slowing bullets/weighted shots purchase. You will notice with this build that around the midgame, it will be insanely hard for enemies to escape you because you will gradually keep getting more slows (mainly dash slows) which are insanely impactful. Slowing bullets, Capacitor, and Colossus all provide dash slow, and when stacked, it basically makes your targets completely immobile, even with slow resistance. All of this combined makes you effective at assisting in picks for the team

Your second powerspike begins as SOON as you purchase Siphon Bullets. This is because, already before this point, you will have a consistent and fairly good source of DPS. When you purchase siphon bullets, you fill in the problem of having a small amount of health, instead giving you a big boost in HP due to health investment, and increasing your sustained-DPS based playstyle that makes you win sustained fights far easier by stealing HP from enemies, essentially turning fights from now on against your Ivy Build into a ticking time bomb, where if a fight goes on for longer than 8-10 seconds, then the enemy will likely be completely out of resources and die to you. Very good items that complement this powerspike are headhunter, and toxic bullets, making your sustained pressure over longer fights very effective. Both of these 3200 items scale well into the late game, as does siphon, meaning you will keep getting stronger the further the game goes with these three items. Don't forget to buy spirit resilience!

After siphon bullets, you generally are online, and want to play a somewhat slippery/mobile/annoying playstyle where it is hard for enemies to catch you, and playing around that fact. Also, After siphon, you need to keep a close look on what your team needs in terms of debuffs, or what you need in terms of survivability to remain relevant. Inhibitor gives a great survivability bonus with a big spike in health, and massive damage reduction. If you feel tanky enough, silencer is a great alternative. Typically, one of these two items will be bought after siphon. Once you have one of these items, you WILL buy colossus. This item is severely overstatted at the moment, and provides one million stats. Health, Damage, Resistance, Health investment bonus, and a MAJOR dash slow (30%) which is one of the largest and longest sources of dash slow in the game. After colossus, you will likely have ended the game by then, optimally. If the game goes on, continue to purchase Late Game Defensive Optional 6.4k green items to stay alive. Consider replacing BRS/Swift striker with better alternatives.

This powerspike generally occurs after you buy colossus. You can either buy colossus right after you purchase siphon with another 3.2ks (This is an early buy), or you can buy colossus after buying one debuffer 6.4k item, being either inhibitor, silencer, or crippling (This is a later buy). Between these two buy points, you will have around 4000-5000 Max HP, not accounting for the fact that you will gain and heal far more with siphon bullets. This makes you INSANELY difficult to kill, practically making you immortal, unless you get dynamo ulted, mo and krill ulted, holliday lassod, which can be countered by not positioning poorly and/or purchasing unstoppable later. You become a sustained DPS monster that heals, cant die, debuffs, and can act as a frontliner. Continue to use your ivy ultimate, and utilize the fact that you have 5 movement slows and 3 dash slows by this time (move slows: Kudzu, Ult, Slowing bullets, Capacitor, Colossus) dash slows (slowing bullets, colossus, capacitor [capacitor disables stamina]). Your character essentially becomes a being that can do everything in the game.

If the game somehow gets to this point (often 30-35+ minutes), you will run out of slots. This build is very optimized and slot efficient, but at a certain point your early game items will need to be swapped out. Good choices for swapping out these items include the following: Swift Striker: Burst Fire/Spellslinger/Ricochet. Bullet Resist Shredder: Crippling Headshot. Titanic Magazine (Only replace if you have spellslinger): Transcendent Cooldown/Lucky Shot/Unstoppable

The order of all the items in this build all are super important. Generally, The core build path is 100% the way to go, Left -> Right, with an exception to the spirit items. After you buy all the core items, you need to HEAVILY think about itemization based on what the strengths the enemy has, and what weaknesses you can abuse. All annotations are in depth for every late game optional item to help you towards the direction of proper itemization. Additionally, Almost every optional category is organized to where the leftmost items are generally going to mean they are used far more often than the rightmost, with the categories labeled "Laning/Mid/Late Extras" being an exception to this rule. The testing items section also ignores this rule.

Ability 2: §600 Ability 3: §1200 Ability 4: §3600 T2 Stone: §2800 T1 Bomb: §4400 T3 Tether: §11600 T3 Ult: §22600 T3 Stone: §30100 T3 Bomb: §40600

Start kudzu in lane. Take bridge control with your lane partner ASAP. Lineup a kudzu to throw right as the troopers land. The first time troopers are shot in the head, they stagger and stand still. Use this to keep them in the kudzu. Repeat these lineups for the next wave, and then you will have a kudzu bomb ready to throw right as the third wave spawns, without needing to upgrade to an extra charge. You can also, instead of using it on 3rd wave, use it on the min 2:00 T1 Camp