Heroism: Black Widow

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to Heroism! Every wednesday, I'll be featuring a single hero, talking about pairings, synergies, and strategies for both using and facing the hero. I'm going to start by featuring the title character of this blog, Black Widow!

Black Widow

Black Widow is one of the three "starting" heroes, alongside Iron Man and Hawkeye.  She stands out, however, because she is one of the best deals for starting early PVP  Unlike Iron Man, whose PVP strength is largely tied to a limited time only costume, Grey Suit Black Widow is one of the better PVP characters and is available right out of the gate for a bargain 45cp.  Her Tactician costume makes her a force to be reckoned with.  That makes her ideally suited for low level PVP, since she's both cheap and effective for a very long time.

This costume is the good one.
Ugly, but good.

Unfortunately, without the Tactician costume, she's terrible.  The Infiltrator option is much worse, providing only a marginal benefit and only then after she's been attacked.  Tactician Widow, on the other hand, gets free counterattacks on nearly every non-stealthy, non-psychic attack, and her attacks are stealthy to boot, allowing you to dodge annoying protects and finish off weakened targets with ease.

The major drawback to using Black Widow at low levels is that she relies heavily on her Level 9, Widowmaker, to do serious damage.  This means that if you want to sandbag (keep yourself at low levels) you're going to need to spend some quality time with the airplanes to make her useful while maintaining your low level.  That's not to say she's useless, but she is much less powerful, and without her level 6 she's basically worthless.

On the bright side, she's probably at least level 3-4 because there aren't many other options at low levels to progress through the game, and most players have used her for at least a few missions by that point.

Widow is quite good in PVE, in case you're worried that this purchase will not help you if your intent is to play through the game and not sandbag or pvp at low levels for a long time.  She's an excellent, almost mandatory addition to your stable of heroes.

PVP Strategy:  Using Black Widow

Not pictured:  Dead members of the opposing team.

On Attack

Black Widow excels at ruining the day for every single Blaster, or character who relies heavily on buffs.  With Widowmaker and Flying Kick you can demolish most blasters in a single turn (or very close to it), or kick the buffs off a problem character while leaving the blaster stunned.  If there's no blaster, you go directly to the problem character and hopefully set them up to be six feet under before you even have to take an action.

If the character you want to stun doesn't have any buffs, that's ok too:  Just use Widow's Bite to apply Weakened and hopefully that stun while you're at it.  The chance to stun is 75%, which is high enough to be fairly reliable.  There'll be the occasional match where you fail to stun at an inopportune moment and swear you'll never use Widow again, but then you'll come to miss the guaranteed damage, stealthy attacks, stuns, and counterattacks that she brings to the table.

Good pairings with Widow are other characters who can focus fire effectively.  Psylocke, Iron Patriot War Machine, Juggernaut, Cyclops, Blue Costume Quicksilver, Omega Sentinel, or any other hero with Deadly Crits will be a good choice to pair with Widow.  Also, if your agent can grant additional turns to Widow, she can eat up opposing teams singlehandedly.

Poor pairings are generally protect heroes:  No sense in minimizing the number of counterattacks you get, since it's one of her best features!

On Defense

Don't use Black Widow on defense if you can avoid it:  At low levels it might be ok, but at higher levels players are much smarter about facing her, and her AI is somewhat bad.  It often doesn't attack the same target that it puts Widowmaker on, and the AI rarely focus fires down individual team members, which is what Black Widow excels at.

PVP Strategy:  Facing Black Widow

The first and most important thing to do when facing Black Widow is to avoid attacking her until the rest of her team is dead.  The only exceptions to this are attacks that apply Off Balance, Generalized, or otherwise incapacitate her to prevent her from making counterattacks.  She counters almost every single attack, so you want to avoid taking all that extra damage until the end of the fight, when you can mitigate it.

Additionally, her AI is not so great, so if you avoid taking lots of extra damage from her counterattacks you should be OK.