Everything is rated on a 1-5 Star(*) scale.
Core Stats
Weapon: (*) Off to a bad start unfortunately. Min joins the unfortunate club of recent heroes who have been saddled with a high RoF (Rate of Fire) SMG or Assault Rifle. The armor calculations remain unchanged which means high RoF weapons will tend to lose 50%+ of their damage to armor. This immediately dims Min’s prospects in PVP because she is only going to tickle enemies with her gun, but the nature of her skills means needs to be piloted to get the most out of her… having the player pilot a low DPS hero is never a good situation in PVP.
Defense: (**) She is a squishy, make no mistake. She is similar to Ifrit in terms of defense but she’s energy which means she is a lot more vulnerable in this meta.
Skills
Overload: (****) An excellent instant single-target debuff that screws with an enemy in so many ways it’s downright amusing. This skill seems like it was expressly designed to ruin Dogface’s day - and it definitely does. The combined silence + disorient + ammo depletion is crippling for almost any hero, but some heroes are affected more than others. Dogface is an example of an ideal target, depleting his ammo will instantly “break” his bronze/silver buffs and the silence/disorient ensures he wont be doing anything for the next 10 seconds either. On the other end of the spectrum you have heroes like Mandrake who doesn’t really care about silence or disorient very much.
However, it’s not perfect. The skill has one of the longest cooldowns in the game, 75 seconds base. In the hands of a bot (who often shoots cover and spends half the match running around) this is a punishingly long cooldown that often won’t be ready until Dogface has already killed half your team. Fortunately, the skill seems like an extreme experiment where HHG made the cooldown depend mostly on your weapon hitting enemies instead of just passively charging. If piloted and with 100% accuracy (not easy with her SMG), you can charge this skill in just 10 seconds. The result is that when I want to use this skill I will simply switch to Min, shoot the nearest tank for marshmellow-tier damage, but rapidly charge the skill so I can use it stop Dogface or whoever. This is necessary to get the most out of Min, but it also means you’re losing precious time that you could be piloting a hero who actually does damage.
Feedback: (****) It has a 30 second cooldown, which is a little on the slow side for a support ability, it also has a modest cast time which makes it harder to use reactively against enemy skills. Against a “fully charged” enemy the cooldown benefit for your team appears to be capped at around 50%. The damage is low-moderate, about 20% less than your bronze.
Unfortunately there aren’t many “MUST STOP” cooldowns still pending 30 seconds into the match. If you’re fast you might be able to stall Heimlock’s notoriously slow skills or a transfusion from Moss, but under ordindary fighting circumstances this ability is just going to delay some random enemy skill you probably dont care about by several seconds at most and give your team a noticeable boost to its own skill usage. The significant cooldown boost to your entire team is what makes this a 4-star ability, keeping the game’s momentum in your favor. Min herself will only charge her Bronze with the benefit from this skill but that’s enough to let you chain Overload back to back if you really want to ruin someone’s day.
Smokescreen.EXE: (***) An interesting and useful gold skill. It’s like Mandrake’s invisibility with a weaker heal, higher health threshold, but here’s the kicker - it lasts up to 30 seconds or until the Decoy is destroyed. Min can spend huge chunks of the match invisible and passively healing! The decoy itself is squishy (about 1/3rd of your total HP) but its still a significant amount of damage that your opponent has to do to a worthless hologram just to remove your invisibility, and if you get healed above 50%, its happens all over again.
Unfortunately the downside of this skill relates back to the problem of invisibility and the current metagame, it tends to be extremely binary. Either the enemy has a Mark or some big piloted Mech-DPS that will shred you through your invisibility or they don’t. The decoy itself wont fool a decent player since it pops up at full HP when the true Min was at 50%, but at the very least it will probably save Min’s life from time to time.
Firewall: (******) Now THIS is a platinum skill! This is one of the only platinum skills that I can recommend grabbing for PVP alone - against the vast majority of opponents this skill is basically a lockout against the enemy bursting you down in the first 30 seconds. For each enemy hero, the first time they use a skill, your entire team basically gets the shield from Caine’s bronze for 5 seconds. In all this adds up to 25 shields activated for your team in the beginning of the match, often at the “peak” of DPS when heroes start popping skills and looking for kills.
Under ideal conditions, when enemy skill usage is staggered, this skill is capable of “healing” more than my healers do. Keep in mind that shields don’t take full elemental damage so they can absorb far more punishment than the raw numbers might suggest. Of course the skill isn’t perfect, the shields don’t stack in strength or duration so against teams that bust out all their skills at once… the shield isn’t going to do much. Of course, the shields only proc once per enemy hero so its crucial to capitalize on the early momentum because this skill is dead after the first wave of enemy skills.
This skill is what makes Min truly viable in PVP.
Overall: (****) Min is a great new support hero that should be promoted to Platinum to achieve her full potential. For teams that struggled with Dogface, Min can single-handledly shut him down for the entirety of a match. Unfortunately Min’s 2 greatest weaknesses, Mech Burst and Marks, are both heavily featured in the current metagame. With Panzer and Nightingale both the uncontested champions of their archetype, Min will struggle against such teams. Panzer can tear through Min in seconds and a mark on her is often a death sentence, but with her Plat if you can survive the initial burst of weapon fire, then the ensuing cascade of shields from enemy skills should give you breathing room for some healing and let you turn the tables. Properly using Min will still require a lot of involvement from the player, switching from your DPS to Min multiple times in the match to make sure her skills aren’t being wasted, but if you play her well then you should find her worth a spot on even top tier teams.