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So A-Bomb is Richard Jones, the classic sidekick to The Incredible Hulk, he was the human guy that always followed the hulk around until they made him into a Blue Hulk. Rick Jones is a very classic character, in that aspect I was not very thrilled when they made him into A-Bomb. To me he was probably the most classic side kick (none power sidekick / supporting character, w.e you wanna call it). It was Rick Jones fault that Bruce Banner become the Hulk, it him who Dr.Banner pushes down to avoid the gamma bomb they where testing where Rick had gone in unauthorized. After that he of course feels responsible for the Hulk and has always been there with him. I personally rather have him as the humanity side of the Hulk, while it did get repetitive after 40 years I suppose.
I actually followed the first season of Hulk Agents of S.M.A.S.H on a weekly basis.
In this show A-Bomb is the protagonist, I would say. Its not the Hulk we see everything from A-Bomb's perspective. He also massively 4th wall us all the time, which kinda worked as they made teh story that Jones has a camera following their adventures to show that Hulk is actually Nice. The concept of this I really liked as Jones issue was always that he knows the Hulk is good ut no one wants to believe him and just see Hulk as a Monster, the cameras is kinda of modern spin on social media to get people to like the Hulk, The monster aspect of peoples predigests of the hulks is of course also a general plot device over the episodes.
And in my opinion this works way better then Ultimate Spider-Man, while I think that neither gets a really great effect of the 4th wall. And I really love good 4th wall humor. But then the key is that has to be either subtitle or out of no where.
For example:
This 4th wall worked great as Fresh Prince in Bel-Air did not use this often, like once a season. Furthermore, its a lighthearted comedy so it could be used without any drawback.
Agent of Smash instead with Jones as it focus uses it constantly, blatantly overly used.
It actually kinda works, not great but I think it was pretty good. Where in Ultimate Spider-Man its horrible. He talks to the audience all the time but not in a good or funny way, its no reason why he does it all the time and its kinda like Scrubs but they over use it, the Deadpool episode was great but the rest (which is that show in general) are pretty bad.
With A-Bomb they went full retard on it and in my opinion that ended up working, not that I think that is not the best ever but it makes more sense if he does it 100% of the time versus Peters, 33%(or some other random number). Because Peter does it every episode but its not funny and its not surprising, it has no shock comedy. A-Bomb does not use it for Comedy he uses it for Comedy sometimes but more in a way that we where watching a streamer playing a game. A-Bomb comments everything fun and boring stuff and makes its just the natural progression of the show with constant 4th wall breaks.
I found it interesting and I wish the game would feature anything of this, unfortunately gameplay wise hes useless and it has nothing of the A-Bomb from the Tv-Show feel to it, not personally wise(hes also a good comic relief in the show and the balance between the hulks, hes the glue). Sure they took his general move set and did something.
Passive:
A-Bomb tanks until he uses his second ability
The way he works his second ability is of course counted as a "Passive". Which is Camouflage.
This gives gives him 50% chance to evade and that all attacks are critical and cannot miss. But its removed on the next attack, however. His first 2 attacks does not remove it and it does not go away by time so he has it like a passive, but then it turns of his tanking ability.
He also starts with 3 stacks of reduction to damage, these stacks goes away per attack and he cant build new ones, which is really weird. None of his abilities generated new armor, I just have no idea why and it seems like a mistake to be honest.
A-Bomb is hard to say exactly where he is, hes kinda lower then average kind of characters. 3-5 or something so I guess 4.
TANKING SUCKS!!!
And I want to say that right away becasue A-Bomb is another character built around tanking. This is a topic that i have beaten on several times and I guess I will do it again, because A-Bomb is kinda interesting, he uses super high evasion to no die after tanking.
His concept is that he starts tanking and then you can activate his camouflage with his second ability, this gives him huge evasion bonus and he stops tanking.
So than you can go to like 50% health, hide and heal up. Or if the team has no support he can go to like 10% health, really pushing the life and then hide away and never go out of hiding.
Which may keep him alive for a while with the high chance of just avoiding anything.
However, this is still CRAP. It sounds good, but as soon as you remember tanking is absolutely pointless you won't play him.
I talked about this just recently again with Hyperion, as why not to tank. Everyone is gonna use non tank abilities. IF we look at he Meta we got characters like Angrir with summon magic, that you can't tank. Nul ground cannot be tanked, Enchantress magic / mind cannot be tanked. Emma(not popular in defence but amazing in offence still) mind, Cloak and Dagger darkness cannot be tanked. Spitfire all stealth moves etc.
No one is getting tanked.
This is why a character like Groot does not work, while he is an amazing tank as he starts of tanking everything he still has no use at all, same with Wonder Man who was the first auto tanker he does not work either.
And this is important in relation to A-Bomb not just that tank does not work but that he is kinda similar to Wonder Man, see Wonder Man's only good part is that he has high base damage and A-Bomb can similarly actually do some damage, with high base damage on his 2 and third ability.
This is where Groot sucked he can only protect and then heal/give turns so he as no offence utility at all. The best type of tank is not a tank like Groot that just defends but a character that can tank and do high damage / good debuffs
Which the game does not have, A-Bomb obviously does not fit for this either. Just like Wonder Man he can do damage and that's it, no really meaningful debuffs and the damage is not high enough.
To me this reminds me a lot of Hearthstone taunting, a lot of cards has taunt and they suck. The game budget taunt as 1-2 stat minus which for most cards is a horrible trade, while the game do have a few good taunt cards the wast majority is really bad.
On a maybe unrelated note the Marvel Avengers Alliance, people that are new in Hearthstone to also for w.e reason always love taunt and does not see the horrible stat cost. I recently been teaching my 2 bosses the game and they keep telling me, we need to get taunt, especialy in Arena where those really bad card appears-
Anyway don't, taunt is to costly for the stats.
And this is how it is in MAA as well, it seems that tanking is counted as something vastly good by the developers and they refuse to give a tank good abilities. Even if A-Bomb could tank a lot more teams he would still suck.
Purely defensive utility is not good. Just overall tank characters always get the short end of the stick.
Another thing that is important to not is how he sucks compared to Groot to. While I like the idea of him, first you tank, then you hide, heal up, tank again etc. Its a reactive turn from the player!
This is a huge different from Groot which is by automatic. When Groot dies the other becomes tanks and he has 1 hp as a new character which is 100% support (and if the cant hit through tank he cant die pretty much ever) all that happens on auto.
For A-Bomb's passive to work you have to manually activate his second passive. This is a really bad.
For example, say that A-Bomb has 75% Health. Here you likely does not want to stop tanking yet, you still have 2 ablative(damage reduction stacks) etc. So you attack that turn not going into camouflage
However, they all focus him and he simply dies from 75% Health. Nothing unusual with that in the game.
You have to get lucky more or less and have him at like 30-40% hp maybe 50% and then use it to stop the tanking. Even at like 60%, do you really wanna stop tanking now. Simply put its bad. If he had auto entered his hidden form at half live or something that would be vastly superior to how he is now.
Basically the way I play A-Bomb is that I just ignore his tanking completely, and try to use camouflage all the time to lower the damage he takes.
While I then try to finish them off with his third ability, simply tactic with him clearly is 2->3 sometimes 2->1->3. Just forget about the tank passive.
Abilities:
Clearly what you want to start with his A-bombs second ability, Chameleon Punch. This actives his extra passive Camouflage and it does high damage. The enemy it attacks gains rattled, which makes them take more damage from counters and follow up attacks. Which is good versus Tacticians as A-Bomb is an infiltrator and will then counter then.
Otherwise its pretty crappy, if he cannot counter its not that good, well I guess hes fine on level 15 as than you can active his counter ability. Still if it would be AoE it would be a lot more useful
No this attack is all about getting the good passive and not using the tank passive.
After this his first ability is useful as it does not turn of the camouflage. And it has no Cooldown so you can use it until the second ability is back up again.
This attack gives flanked, making it stack with his rattle debuff. Then it also givs pain train which becomes a worse and worse debuff each time it attacks. However, just as with Gwen pain train is not very appealing to use. The end debuff is not worth while, its just wide-open a really low tier debuff.
This is kinda how he works, you hide and then you spam the first attack.
Then when you can finish someone you use the third ability.
This ability is really good and by far his best ability(I am counting the second as a passive here).
It has huge base damage, its a typical finisher but with that base damage, it does a lot.
All his attacks are critical from camouflage and it has deadly critical, he also has exploit opportunity on all attacks but someone else has to set those up. IF they can he can do huge damage with this attack + as it does higher damage the less health he has, it does work great with hiding away at low health.
After this you will have to reactivity the camouflage and this really sucks. First of all if A-Bomb has low health to use this attack for max damage, revealing himself afterwards means he will tank again...and die with his low health.
Annoying...
Overall losing the 50% evasion and critical etc is simply bad and you are forced into using the second ability as soon as possible. This is why a typical lorder(if you lack the finisher set up to kill) is 2->1 ->3 doing the 1 in between gives the 2 time to refresh you can go and hide right away after using 3.
Ultimate:
Here is a real downer for A-Bomb.
This is one of the worst ultimate in the game by far. Its nothing to talk about really, it does extremely low damage, so while his third ability is really strong this does nothing! And it also removes the camouflage for no gain.
It has a few debuffs but none of them are particularly strong.
I do not really get it, to be honest. This is just such a lack in the thought process, really low damage should equal good debuffs / some kind of support for the team. But as its a 100% offensive move I would assume it should debuff, but it does not. It does exhausted turning of Tacticians, which is ok but for an ultimate...there are better versions of exhausted like Frigid, that would obviously not fit hm but for an ultimate,,, it should simply not be the basic debuffs. And after this it does so bad debuffs, off-balance so you cant counter. What is it to counter? No one does counter able attacks pretty much. Likewise the even worse debuff, cornered is also on this ultimate that prevent tank action. Which may affect the agent and that will likely not affect the game at all.
Its an ultiamte with 2 100% useless debuffs and 1 low tier debuff and zero damage. Absolutely horrible.
Verdict:
A-Bomb has no ultimate, we can argue that his third ability is an ultimate, its a typical finisher. Regardless he lacks a 4th move.
The second move is to active his good passive.
His base passive is utter crap...
Yeah he is bad,
He has an ok combo with 2->3. And he does perform mediocre as just spamming 1-2 while hiding.
But then no ultimate....no utility he cant regain his armor stack which is just weird.
Very weak, 4/10. And the more I think about it the less points I want to give him, I like the novelty of the concept but its a pointless concept. So that's a generous 4.
