Fight bots that use holy water

Most of the enemies you come across in PVP are actually bots. Often, but not always, they can be recognized by still having the standard Mercenary title over their character and by sending an emote at the beginning of the fight.

Most of these bots use holy water and the amount they carry varies. I have personally seen between 1 - 8 holy waters.

So how do you fight them without wasting all your valuable pots in the first 3 seconds of the fight?

### Potion strategy

First of, you need to outlast their holy waters by spamming low-cost defensive pots. I use c.def and lizard tail. These two pots trigger a holy water usage, and when they use ther hw, i use them again. My current build holds 8 pots each of these types. As your health goes low, you heal up and you wait till the usage of c.def + lizard tail doesn't trigger any more holy waters. That means that they are out of hw-pots which is when you go crazy and spam pots till you kill them.

Note, since they spam holy water, that means that they have far fewer of the normal kind of pots, making it probable for you to win even if you only have 1 hp pot left when their hw-pots run out.

The philosophy against holy water users fight i that you have to make them waste more potion weight than you do when they use a holy water potion.

I have noticed that there is a delay of ~2 seconds between holy water usages from bots. This opens up for a strat where you do a complete dps spam at the first 5 seconds of the match (during active scarab/incense). Even if they clean all your pots, you just reuse them and use the delay before next holy water pot to do enough damage to kill your opponent. This actually works pretty well. It has two conditions though:

1. You have quick reactions on reusing pots, and you can activate them all pretty much at the same time.
2. The enemy doesn't use ying-yang artifact (if enemy uses this artifact it makes you unable to kill them during your own artifact timing making it pretty much impossible to win since you have allowed the enemies holy water pots to clean away your big important pots).

### Artifact strategy

#### Regular holy water users (most of them)

Some consider the grail to be a counter to hw-users since it has a 50 % chance to block holy waters effects. I don't like it though. Using the shield makes you spam the big pots during the time the enemy still has hw-pots left. And if they have 6 hw-pots and you have 4 big pots (i have 4 aim and 4 agi+str pots each) they have a good chance to defeat you. Sure, you can get lucky, but I don't like to rely on this kind of RNG. Another reason is that it's useless if you come up against non-hw users, which i find to be the case maybe 1/3 of the time.

I myself often use scarab, and even if it's tempting to use the artifact at once, it's often a waste of an artifact to use it during the time in which you wait for the enemy to use all his hw-pots. So don't get to eager, wait to see if they use hw before you use your artifact.

IF THE ENEMY USES BOTH HOLY WATER AND SCARAB, YOU GET DESTROYED. AT LEAST IF YOU FOLLOW MY GUIDE. If you know a better solution, please share.

#### Fight holy water + scarab

There is a way to counter them, but that makes you weaker against the other foes :

use upgraded holy grail (with upgrades you can get a way better negation effect than 50% i.e lvl 4 is 60%) cast it just after they trigger scarab. You can also use Yin-Yang artifact, but without pots his buff is a bit low. Grail makes your pots last longer.

AND use 2 holy water pots to cancel their burst while they use scarab. (bots are slow to reload damage pots after holy water)

as defensive pots, def + lizard or def + eva and 2 to 3 damage burst.

**main difficulty :** you have to be reactive and manage to cast the grail on time and to manage the heal + the def/liz reload if enemy hw works + the use of your own hw. --> this requires some practice.++

and this doesn't work well against human players, especially because they have a brain...

Author:

Crust

- Last week i placed 8th at the ranking with 5011 points. This doesn't mean much, but it shows that my strategy somewhat works.