Mastering Counter Itemization: A 3-Step Strategic Guide for Gamers

Uh, Lorezone, my name is Nathan. I'm Eternal Six, and today I'll be giving you a three-step process for counter

itemization. I'll walk you through all the different categories of counter items at the end of this cheat sheet I

made. I'll point out a common trap people fall into with counter itemization, and along the way I've got

plenty of examples. So, at the end of this video, you'll have a much better idea of how counter itemization actually

works in that book. I also made this other cheat sheet, and we'll talk a little bit about it at the end of this

video, but it's really not the main focus cuz I really want to teach you the fundamentals rather than just telling

you to buy X item against X hero. So, counter itemization is problem solving, right? And to solve a problem, you need

to first identify it. So, that's the first step, figuring out what the specific problem is you're facing in

game. So, I'm not just going, "Hmm, their holiday is a problem." You need to think about what about her specifically

is problematic in the current game. Does she keep targeting you with her ults? Or does she do too much damage with her

barrels? Or does she keep getting away with her bounce pads? Of course, items can also be a problem. Maybe you're

playing Mina and the entire enemy team has a bunch of spirit resistance items. Or they've got slowing hexes so you

can't use your movement ability. All of those problems have different potential item solutions. Now, obviously, you've

got limited slots and souls, so you can't counter everything every game. So, you need to prioritize countering your

biggest problems. The other problems you're going to have to adjust your gameplay for, or you're just going to

have to deal with them. And once you get a lot of experience, instead of reacting to the problems, you'll be anticipating

them so that they never become a problem in the first place. Because you don't really want to be reactive with counter

items, you want to be proactive. The next step is to think of and list all the potential solutions. And this is

really just a knowledge check of are you aware of all the counter items in game, what they do, and what heroes they're

good on. So, this second step is also where the cheat sheet comes in. Because for every problem, there's several

solutions. If, again, the problem is that the holiday keeps targeting you with her ults, then take a look at the

counter items in the pick category. Or if the problem is her barrel damage, take a look at the items that help

against spirit damage. A lot of people ignore this next part, but ideally, you want the counter items you buy to also

synergize with your own hero in some way. For example, if you're a tanky hero by nature that gets a lot of health per

boon, you're going to benefit more from percentage resistances, right? Well, if you're a more squishy hero, you'll

probably want to go for items that give you barriers or mobility instead to help you avoid taking damage in the first

place. You could, I don't know, buy witch mail on Mina if the enemy team has lots of constant spirit damage, but as

Mina, you're not really supposed to be in a position to be tanking a lot of abilities in the first place, right? And

again, as Mina, you'd benefit less from the percentage spirit resist that witch mail gives than someone like Abrams or

something. Some heroes have such good synergy with a counter item that it just becomes a core item of her build. For

example, because Seven does a bunch of constant AoE spirit damage, he can very reliably basically permanently apply

spirit debuffs like suppressor and heal ban. So, those items are pretty much always bought on it. And because people

are likely to buy slowing hexes against heroes like Mina and Rave to shut down their movement abilities, it's pretty

standard to just buy the spell magic on those two as core items to clear the slowing hexes. So, the third step is to

make a choice on which item to actually buy. And that means picking the item that best counters the most problems on

the enemy team and fits into your build at current stage of the game. So, the best item generally works against

several heroes on the enemy team, right? Because if you, for example, buy slowing hex only for the enemy Lash, and no one

else in their team has any movement abilities, you're just running around with a somewhat useless item in any

fight that you don't encounter the Lash in. But if they have a Seven or Ivy in their team as well, you could instead

save up for knock down. Because that way, you can still counter the Lash, but you can also cancel the Seven or Ivy

ults with the stun from knock down. So, even though knock down is twice as expensive as slowing hex, the value

you'd get is much, much higher. So, how do you actually fit counter items into your build? Well, it depends on the

price tier of the item and the hero you're playing. I set up my builds like this, where I've got the laning items

and then the core items. And these two sections are going to be the items that I will build in like 90% of my games.

And I try to limit these items so that I leave room for counter items as well. The goal I often go for is to fit these

within the nine slots we unlock at the start of the game and have the total value be around 30k souls. At an average

rate of 1,200 souls per minute, that means I'll finish these items at around 25 minutes, at which point it's pretty

common to have like one or two workers down, right? So, that means I have some extra slots unlocked before I even

finish my core build, leaving me enough room to pick up counter items as well. So, then the other categories I've got

in my builds are going to be those counter items. I've got some optional laning items, usually tier one, and

these are generally pretty easy to slot in because you're essentially investing 400 souls to counter your lane. You can

sell the item for half the price whenever needed. If you buy rebuttal and you get a single kill with it in lane,

it's pretty much already paid for itself. And if extra regen or healing rate helps you survive a bad lane, then

that's totally worth it. Then in the mid game, you'll often pick up tier two or tier three counter items. 1,600 soul

items you generally don't really want to sell, not until very, very late into the game anyways. And tier three items you

pretty much never, ever sell. So, these are items you're going to have to leave open slots for in your build, or they

will potentially delay some of your core items, right? Which could be worth it. I cannot tell you exactly when it's worth

it because it just depends on each and every hero, build, game, and item. So, you need to play lots of games on a hero

to figure out when it feels okay to delay or substitute certain items. I'd say just try it out. If you delay or

replace one of your core items in favor of a counter item in the game, evaluate afterwards whether it was worth it. And

then late game, almost everything depends on the game, so I just put the remaining late game tier three and tier

four items at the bottom of my builds, and I pick from those as needed in game. And these are going to fill up any

available extra souls I have, and I might sell a tier two item here and there if the game goes on for ages to

make some extra space. Some heroes have very slot efficient builds, naturally resulting in more space for counter

items. In general, utility and support heroes tend to have a little bit more room for counter items, while carries

and damage heroes often need to get certain items to hit their power spikes and actually do damage. So, to recap,

the three-step process is to identify the specific problem, think of the potential counter item solutions that

also synergize with your hero, and that step you can pretty much do before you even start a game, right? You can do it

in your build. And then pick the item that deals with the most problems in the enemy team and fit it into your build.

Now, before I go over the cheat sheet, I want to quickly explain a common trap people fall into with counter

itemization, and that is buying defensive items when behind. Might be counterintuitive, but when you're

behind, generally the last thing you should be doing is stacking up a bunch of green items. A rule of thumb for

counter itemization is to buy defensive items when you're ahead and damage items when you're behind. You want to build

defensive items as a luxury when you're ahead to keep your lead. If you're far ahead and you die, your death timer will

be longer, and the enemies get a soul bounty for killing you as well. So, you want to avoid throwing your lead like

that. While if you're behind on the other hand, that's exactly what you want to happen, right? You want your enemy to

throw, and you need the damage to punish them when they do so. If you start filling up your limited slots with a

bunch of green items, not only will you likely just die anyways because you're behind, you're just further crippling

your already low damage output. So, when you're losing, buy damage items to help you shut down that fat Rave when she

oversteps. Now, this doesn't mean that you should just ignore green items altogether if you're behind, of course.

It also depends on how far behind you are. It's just a general rule of thumb for the items you should prioritize.

Also note that because resistances are percentage based, they do get more value the more health you have, which means

that resistance items, and also some barrier items that scale with boons, by the way, are literally less valuable

when you're behind because you get health per boon. So, the further behind you are, the less health you have, and

the less valuable resists are. While shred items on the other hand, which I'll explain more later, get more

valuable the more resist someone has. And when the enemy is ahead, chances are they've got resist as well, right? So,

when you're behind, it makes more sense to prioritize some shred items instead of some resistance items. And just in

general, building counter items when you're behind is tricky because you have less slots and less souls to work with,

right? And it's easy for the enemy to counter your counter items when they're ahead as well. You could buy warp stone

when you're behind to avoid a Paradox swap, but she could just easily pick up a slowing hex, and then you spent 3,200

on a warp stone you can't even use. Or you could buy a slowing hex or a disarming hex for the fat Rave that's

10k up on everyone, but it'll be very easy for her to just buy the spell magic. Chances are she already has it

anyways. And then again, you've spent your limited souls and slots on a useless counter item. So, instead, you

want to, like I explained before, be proactive with counter items when you're even or when you're ahead to find

advantages and prevent problems like a fat Rave from arising in the first place. Shut her down early by buying

slowing hex before she can afford the spell magic. There's always exceptions, of course. For example, if you're behind

because you keep getting afflicted by Pocket, and that's been the sole reason you've died the last two times, buying

counter spell, even though you're a little behind, might just be the correct play. If that one item is generally the

difference between you being able to play the game or not, then it's going to be worth it, right? Or if you're maybe

playing a brawler and you're not doing too well, but your Haze is popping off, you could, instead of playing for your

own damage, build some utility items to peel for your Haze. And maybe buying some tank items to stay alive for just a

little longer, even if it's only for a few seconds, could be worth it if your Haze has plenty of damage to kill

everyone anyways. All right. So, to help you bridge the knowledge gap of the second step, I'm going to go over all

the counter item categories and explain what problems they're designed to solve. Feel free to just take a screenshot of

the sheet if you want it, and you can also find it in my Discord, where, by the way, we also do free coaching

raffles for the coaching streams every Saturday. The purpose of this cheat sheet is mainly just to give you an

overview of counter items, and if you're making a build, you could go over the categories and grab the items that best

synergize with your hero. As you can see, the items are sorted by the problems they deal with. So, if your

problem is people on the enemy team are moving around too much with their movement abilities, there's the items in

the movement category that can help you with that. Now, while making this, it was sometimes a little hard to draw a

line on what is actually a counter item, but for example, like Stalker gives bullet resistance shred, but in game,

you don't go, "Oh, they have bullet resist, I should buy Stalker." And there's a bunch of items that give like

5 or 10% spirit resist, but you don't really buy cold front specifically to counter spirit damage, right? All right.

So, the first category. If you're playing against heroes that buy healing items or have built-in healing, so

something like an Abrams, a Victor, or a Haze with from Barrack Burst, buying anti-heal is going to be a great idea.

There's these six items in the game that reduce healing by a certain percentage. For example, heal ban applies a 35%

healing reduction debuff when you do any spirit damage, and it heals you if a target dies while under this effect. And

toxic bullets is a build-up item, so you need to shoot the target repeatedly to proc it. The build-up is different for

every hero, so some heroes just naturally have an easier time applying it. And if you proc it on a target, it

cuts their healing by 30% and deals percentage max health damage over time, making it more effective the more health

your enemies have. If you or you and a teammate apply any combination of these items on the same target, they stack

diminishingly, but only if you're applying different items. So, heal ban plus heal ban doesn't stack, but heal

ban plus toxic bullets does. But you don't get 35 plus 30% is 65% healing reduction, you get 55% healing

reduction. It's diminishing. So if healing reduction is important against the enemy team, you want to diversify

the sources of anti-heal on your team. If your teammates already have some healbanes, consider buying for example

toxic bullets instead if it's good on your hero. And I really just encourage you to read all the counter items and

just all items in general because without all the information, you can't really make educated decisions on which

ones synergize with your hero, right? Healbane procs on any spirit damage and I think literally every hero in the game

has some kind of spirit damage. So while Silver, for example, could proc it, she doesn't have nearly as much reliable

multi-target spirit damage in her kit as someone like Seven, right? So it's naturally just going to be a worse item

for her. And for example, toxic bullets and the gaze damage scale with spirit power, making those items slightly

better on heroes that invest a lot into spirit. There's lots of movement in the game, of

course, and being able to shut down movement abilities is often very important to be able to secure kills.

These four items temporarily prevent target from using their movement abilities and capacitor even disables

stamina usage as well. But of course, it's a non-targeted projectile and a less accessible item because only a few

heroes have good synergy with it. But when playing against heroes like Apollo, Calico, and Furnace, Mirage, any hero

with some kind of movement abilities, consider picking up one of these. Knockdown is of course a classic counter

item example, and when you use the active on someone, it summons an anvil above their head and knocks them down,

stunning them for half second. But crucially, the stun duration increases to I believe it's 2 seconds on airborne

targets, making it a great counter against of course Vindicta and Great Talon, but also against Ivy, Seven,

Bebop, and Lash, who all have airborne ults. Or even Celeste and Holiday, who just spend a lot of time in the air. And

because stuns also interrupt channeled abilities, you can use it to cancel for example a Haze or Dynamo ult as well,

which is very useful if you don't have any other ways of canceling those in your team. If you're playing against a

pick hero like Bebop or Holiday, these items are going to be your friend. You can for example use warp stone to avoid

a paradox warp, counter spell to parry a Holiday ult. And by the way, if your question is, "Can I counter spell X

thing?" The answer is yes. You can counter spell quite literally anything. But of course, it's most valuable to

counter spell important, high damage, or crowd control abilities. You can use the spell magic to get rid

of a Vindicta stake or also a Sloan hex or silence wave, which we just talked about are items that help set up picks,

right? Of course, the game has a whole lot of debuffs and crowd control CC, including

some of the item debuffs we've discussed so far. But fortunately, there's some items that can help you against all of

those. Reactive barrier gives you a barrier that procs whenever you get hit by hard CC, so it's stuns and

immobilizations. If you're playing against a team with lots of abilities that proc this item, like Vindicta

stake, Abram's charge, Haze sleep, Seven's done, this is a great item. Debuff reducer, weighted shots, and

blood tribute give you debuff resist, reducing the duration of all negative effects applied to you. And the spell

magic and divine barrier remove negative effects completely, excluding hard CC. But the spell magic only works on

non-ultimate debuffs, so it can't get rid of a Pocket or Wraith ult, but divine barrier can. And you can also use

it on teammates, having the cool down when you do. And then unstoppable makes you, well, unstoppable, which means

you're immune to crowd control for the duration. Just like all the other active items, you cannot cast it while you're

stunned or slept, so you need to use it beforehand. So this is really an item you buy when you want to commit to

something. If you want to commit to diving the enemy team or commit to using your Dynamo or Lash ultimate and make

sure it doesn't get canceled. If you want to deal with heroes that rely on shooting their gun, like Wraith or Mina,

there is items with fire rate slows and disarms. For example, suppressor slows the target's fire rate when you do

spirit damage, so it's great on heroes that have lots of consistent AoE spirit damage, right? And Juggernaut slows down

people's fire rate when they shoot you, so that one makes more sense to buy on frontliners. And then phantom strike and

disarming hex disarm people, so those completely prevent the target from shooting for a few seconds. If instead

your problem is that the enemy team has heroes that rely on casting their abilities, think of a Yamato or a

Pocket, you can them by reducing their spirit's power with spirits up, or you can silence them with any of these

three items to completely prevent them from casting their abilities for a few seconds. For example, silence wave just

sends out a wave that silences people in front of you and also does some damage. And silencer is a build-up item that on

hit, so even without having to stack the build-up, already reduces your target's outgoing spirit damage by 25% and when

fully built up, it silences the target as well. There's several ways of reducing the damage you take. So first,

there's barriers, which give you temporary health that cannot be healed up, but does benefit from resistances.

Spirit shielding and weapon shielding both give barriers, and barriers again work against all damage because it's

just temporary health. But the difference between them is the way they proc. So spirit shielding procs when you

take a lot of spirit damage in a short time frame, and weapon shielding procs when you take a lot of weapon damage in

short time frame. Of course, there's also spirit resist and bullet resist, which reduce the damage you take of that

type by a certain percentage. And just like healing reduction, resists stack diminishingly. So the more resist items

you stack, the less effective they get. Counter spell is a unique one, of course, because it allows you to

completely avoid spirit nukes, so it's great against something like a Lash or a Yamato. And metal skin is kind of the

bullet damage equivalent of counter spell, right? Because when active, it makes you completely immune to bullet

damage for a few seconds. A lot of these defensive items are conditional, so for example, escalating resilience gives you

stacking bullet resist when you shoot people. So if you're a gun hero that needs some extra ammo and shoots fast,

this item is great against bullet damage heavy teams. Plated armor is unique because it gives you a 30% chance to

deflect bullets and a 50% chance to prevent on hits. So it's mainly bought as a counter for on hit build-up

characters like Mina, Ace, or Furnace, and also against build-up items like toxic bullets and Inhibitor because it

slows down their on hit application rate by quite a lot. And to counter resist, there is of course resistance shred. So

shred simply reduces the amount of resist someone has, increasing the amount of damage they take. And these

are some of the most valuable stats in the game because shred is essentially just a damage amp slash multiplier for

you and your team. So as an example, here I've got my guy's bomb, which deals a 100 spirit damage against this Ram

with 0% resist. And now I punch the Ram with spirit strike, so he will have minus 6% spirit resist and he'll take

106 damage from the bomb. Now if Ram buys spirit resilience, he'll have 30% spirit resist, so the bomb will do 70

damage to him. And if we apply spirit strike's minus 6% shred again, he'll have 24% spirit resist, so he will take

76 damage from the bomb. So that means the more resistance someone has, the more valuable shred becomes, right? Six

damage on top of 70 is a proportionally bigger increase in damage than six on top of 100. Just like with healing

reduction, shred stacks diminishingly and with the exception of rusted barrel and crippling headshot, the same sources

of shred do not stack with themselves. So you need to diversify the sources of shred in your team to shred as much as

possible. Also note how escalating exposure is not in here, that's because it does not shred any more than mystic

vulnerability does. What EE gives you is spirit damage amp, not shred, which means that the increased damage it makes

you do against the target can still be reduced by resist and your teammates also do not benefit from it. And you'll

notice that pretty much all of these shred items aren't really often bought as counter items, but rather just as

core items in builds because shred is just such a valuable stat. So people just pick whichever shred items best

synergize with their hero and put it in their core builds. There's also two unique items that don't apply shred, but

still directly counter resist. Tankbuster, which deals percentage current health damage that bypasses

spirit resist completely, and armor piercing rounds, which is a direct counter to plated armor as well as it

gives your bullets a 50% chance of becoming completely unavoidable, also bypassing resists. And finally, we've

got the miscellaneous counter items over here, which don't really fit in any of the other categories. Rebuttal is a

melee counter, it gives you some melee resist, but most importantly, it massively reduces your parry cool down.

So it's especially great to bait out melees when enemies think your parry is still on cool down. Extra stamina can be

useful in lots of situations, of course, but it's also nice as a counter for example against Warden, who takes away

your stamina with his flask. So having some extra stamina early on to make sure you can escape his cage can be nice.

Also important to note that unless it's specified in the description of a slow, slows do not slow your dashes. So buying

stamina against some slows can be effective as well. But there's also enduring speed, which specifically also

gives you slow resist. And of course, we've got cursed relic that counters literally anyone and

and also removes all non-ultimate buffs from them. But it does come at the cost of reducing your outgoing damage by 10%.

Like I said at the start of this video, I also made this hero specific cheat sheet just as a bonus to give you some

examples of items that are specifically good against certain aspects of heroes. So for example, one Great Talon arrow

easily procs spirit shielding, so that's a good item against him. And while Wraith's ultimate is difficult to react

to now with counter spell and it also disables your stamina and movement abilities when it hits you, so you can't

really dash or warp stone to safety, you can still use e-shift after her ult hits you to wait it out. But yeah, like I

said, the point of this video was really to get you to think more fundamentally about counter itemization. So really try

to use your critical thinking skills rather than just blindly following a chart. All right, so that was the video.

I hope you now have a better idea of how counter itemization actually works. Good luck in your games and if you enjoyed

the video and learned something, consider liking, subscribing, leave a comment, or join the Discord if you have

any more questions, and I'll see you guys in the next video. Love you. Bye-bye.