I decided to finally avoid the temptation of spamming 500 missiles to see what else her kit has to offer. So I imposed 2 restrictions on myself and played until I got a win:
- must have 0% ability power
- Can’t take any upgrades for pulsar torpedos
Took me 3 games to win, the first was very close, the 2nd was a travesty of matchmaking not even worth touching the keyboard for, the 3rd went all 7 rounds.
So the first snag the build runs into is with powers. Only two powers specifically affect her mediblaster, medimaster (crits) and stinger (shots deal +10 damage overtime) and even here stinger scales with ability power making it suboptimal. Crits also felt less impactful in stadium than the equivalent perk in normal mode, but that might just be me.
Then for our other non-torpedo choices, blink boosts (more shorter duration blinks) is an anti-synergy with her attack items that encourage high airtime and glide uptime, there are two ult upgrades which are incredibly questionable on a hero who has a very low chance of building 2 ults in one round until the late game, and then there are 3 hyper ring powers
The winning build I got ended up being stinger, black hole (ring slows enemies 35%), hyper healer (passing through ring gives 50 overhealth), and Rally ring (allies passing through ring decreases it’s cooldown by 1). Rally ring was very mediocre I was just trying to build a super hyper-ring to see how it was. I would’ve been better off taking medimaster earlier in the game or orbital alignment (longer orbital ray that follows you) late game
The build ended up turning me into a ranger. Stinger though without scaling is still really good in early game and is especially nice since its damage is immune to falloff, and Juno has an item that increases ranged damage as well. Black hole is good since if an enemy is chasing you down you can shoot the ring in front of them and get really far away and once you get Hyper Healer you also get a bit of bonus health from it to protect yourself.
Since I was so far from the action I did not have to invest heavily into survival upgrades allowing me to get a very strong gun that was powered up when healing allies and by round 7 I was almost doubling the healing of any other support in the lobby while rarely dying. Weapon speed upgrades were very viscerally satisfying on Juno’s gun and it was fun trying to juggle going back and forth between hitting different targets to get stinger active on as many as possible.
It’s definitely weaker than the missile builds but it’s still viable and a fun alternative. I think if they replaced one underwhelming power (e.g. Rally Ring or Orbital alignment) with something that synergized well with weapon power then it’d actually be a fairly strong build