How to Hou Yi

[deplorable gollompus]

I don't understand Hoagie (my loving name for Hou Yi). The devs call him ability based, I think he's ability based, but no one ever builds him with cooldown. Do people just build him wrong, or do you not build cooldown on him despite him having the slowest autos of any hunter?

[RecalledDread]

I think most people play him as an ADC, so they tend to build attack speed with the usual complimentary items (lifesteal, penetration, crit).

I don't really see him as ability based. His mark still augments his basic attacks damage, the ability effects it gives (stun, slow) help to land them. So I tend to play him as an AA based god, with abilities to help land basics (though I'm terrible at landing his abilities, which may be why I go AA based).

[deplorable gollompus]

Messaggio originale di RecalledDread:

I think most people play him as an ADC, so they tend to build attack speed with the usual complimentary items (lifesteal, penetration, crit).

I don't really see him as ability based. His mark still augments his basic attacks damage, the ability effects it gives (stun, slow) help to land them. So I tend to play him as an AA based god, with abilities to help land basics (though I'm terrible at landing his abilities, which may be why I go AA based).

I've built him with Hydra's (after its first buff and before this nerf) and did pretty well, can land that hydra auto after your hit his 1 100% of the time, and with his 2 up it does quite a bit of damage. And I just feel like a dork walking around autoing at the speed of the snail despite having 3 attack speed items.

[Pegasus]

Messaggio originale di the power to smell the future:

I've built him with Hydra's (after its first buff and before this nerf) and did pretty well, can land that hydra auto after your hit his 1 100% of the time, and with his 2 up it does quite a bit of damage. And I just feel like a dork walking around autoing at the speed of the snail despite having 3 attack speed items.

unless u know every single angle on the map where u can land double or tripple bounce 80% of the time team fight and 1v1, build cdr on houyi is such a waste.

[deplorable gollompus]

Messaggio originale di RoofCatA:

mediocre hunter with escape is what he is right now.

Ricochet is hard to recommend for beginners. You either shot randomly or spend 5 seconds targeting wall at jittery angles and then still do random shot because everybody moves. I can see pro, which "live" in this game having every step and angle counted do that. Not so much a casual player. Probably best used in small coridors where you just can't miss at least one. Midlane harpies special? And you have to turn away from your actual target for a sec to do that. How cool is that for an otherwise AA hunter?

Mark? Handshake before killing. If opponent has full health, he gets no advantage at all for the first hit. Helps you see Loki, Izanami, Ao Kuang on minimap. But has quite long cooldown. Also some other hunter may have realtime damaging ability or stun there. So what's best - kill or plan to kill? Considering his less than stellar dps, it just makes him ok after a while or probably good against fat targets thinking they can stay in battle forever even with 30% health.

Divebomb - nothing special about it.

Ulti? You have to stun somebody, to do real damage with that ult. And even then it goes on for so long, you need like 3 stuns to hold the target in place. Or Hades?

His best feature in current form is probably his passive against other crit centered hunters and that mark against invis gods. Maybe.

I'm not sure he is the weakest hunter. But also not the strongest one either. You don't have to love them all.

I don't think he's bad now, he's fairly balanced, leaning towards being good. And I find him to be fun, but I suck major ♥♥♥♥ with him. He's got more teamfighting presence now, which is why I actually like him more now than I did when he was OP, and his escape is still braindead. Tbh I would've been happy if they had nerfed his escape and nothing else.

[SegaSunset]

I love using Hou Yi, he's an exceptional duelest.

His autos might seem slow but they're heavy hitting when used as pokes or for finishing off gods. (For me) Building CDR or too much ATKspeed will lack the power to shred someone down at one go if you're able to utilize his full kit on one target.

I like to build transcendence, warrior tabi, lifesteal(asi maybe?), qin's sais, crit(I prefer deathbringer), and titan's bane.

You can go for the ol' classic poke combo of stunning them with 2 & bouncing your 1, followed by some autos.
The full combo I like going for is marking them with 2, then centering the ult and immediatly stunning them with your 1 so they can't get out. You can follow up with your leaping 3 if you feel safe but they'll most likely already be dead if they have no beads/aegis/escape online.

[DENIS_Biomechanoid 🍑]

I have a total of more than 1500 hours spent in Smite matches and a mastery 10 Hou Yi.

I love hunters because how broken they are.

And let me tell you that building cooldown on ANY hunter is pretty much a waste of an item slot. What you need is to stack as much Power, Penetration, Attack Speed and Crit (optionally) as possible.

The classic build: “Warrior Tabi/Ichaival/Asi/Qins Sais/Titans Bane/Deathbringer” still works very well.

Also you can remove “Ichaival” from the abovementioned build and start your build with “Transcendence” instead for infinite mana and lots of power (my preferred way to build him).

The “Titans Bane” can be swapped for “Wind Demon” if you want to go full crit.

This is all you need to know in order to not suck horribly as Hou Yi.

You need experience to learn how his abilities synergize and you also might not want to actually use ricochet bouncing it off the walls (I literally never do that because despite my experience I am still just a casual noob) and you better off just using it to stun marked enemies directly.

[EmethSAS]

Cooldown isn't necessarily a "waste" on l ability-based Hunters, but it is certainly sub-optimal in most cases. Hunters are designed to be ADCs (regardless of whether they are more "ability-based" for a Hunter, it's relative to other Hunters, not to the rest of the gods, so ALL Hunters are basic-attack-focused compared to the rest of the gods in the game) and have the benefit of great DPS with their basics, so in the majority of cases greeting CDR for extra utility on your Hunter is unnecessary when you can get more utility more efficiently from other gods. So if you're building CDR on a Hunter you should have a very specific reason for it for a specific situation.

Most of the time Hou Yi has no need for CDR if you know what you're doing with him, and using CDR can range from a crutch to a down right detriment to him... And while his abilities can be powerful, I don't think he's ability-based in a way that requires him to depend on his abilities as much as other Hunters, so I have him classified as a Hybrid in my Hunter's build guide. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=760789515

As to how to use him: Ricochet takes practice to learn the general angles but can be incredibly useful for pike and clear (try messing around in a Custom if you don't want to look silly in a regular match), the Mark is great for targeting down one person and especially for the stun with Ricochet, Divebomb is one of the best Hunter escapes in the game for letting you get out of harm's way and THEN DECIDE where you want to go, and his Ult is not necessarily meant for damage so much as zoning, which can be killer for a Hunter to be able to choose an area to zone off and determine the positioning of a team fight that way... He's fallen off recently with his need combined with Mage ADCs returning and rendering most Hunters sub-optimal except for basic-attack-focused outliers like Jing Wei and Rama, but his versatility is the reason he was such a dominant Hunter for so long until just the past few months. That versatility gives him a high skill baseline as well as a high skill ceiling though, so just keep experimenting with him.