Spent the afternoon playing as Miko.
Played him off and on briefly since Beta.
Got him from 4 up to 8 today.
I did ok, but I died way more than most Mikos I’ve ever played with, and, while my assist numbers were decent and I even got a couple kills, overall my numbers were pretty lacklustre.
So what am I doing wrong?
Couid you guys please enlighten me on how to play a good, non-dying-often support Miko?
Thanks in advance.
Here’s my Miko gear:
Symbiotic Spores (a legendary that increases Healing Power among other things. (I don’t have BB open so I can’t look at the actual stats.))
A blue Max Health increase item (IIRC it has another increased health after surviving for 180 seconds).
A blue Health Regen item (also has increased health regen after 180 seconds of survival, as well as a shield recharge penalty).
Helix wise I can’t remember, but that gear keeps me up in PvE quite well.
First off, ofc choose plentiful healing, healers oath, etc. Then, take heal thyself. It’s incredibly strong. Walk into battle with cheap healing, health, and either a shield, shard, or attack speed gear. Heal whoever is lowest or is a priority (tanks). If someone over extends, it is no longer your problem. Try your hardest to save them, but do not die yourself, and do not bother grieving. Take the cooldown on Biosynthesis for more emergencies. If you wanna go support, take the increased slow, aoe, and trail to leave massive cc everywhere trapping prey and minions alike. Your primary focus is healing, followed by targeting critical healthers. Do not assume you can kill people. You’re not building for that. The most important thing. Don’t blame yourself if someone dies. Don’t look at your k d and get annoyed. Just look at the healing given stat. If it’s good, then so are you.
I hope this disorganized wall of text is readable. Good luck! He’s a joy to play
Thanks for the gear tips, but, if im being completely honest, im going to keep using my zero cost shard gen / wrench plus one piece of either blue / purple / orange gear.
So I guess im looking for play tips that are less specifically reliant on gear.
EDIT: @epicender584 great tips, thanks!
Your original question seems to be about survivability and the answers given address that. In other words, the right gear can have a dramatic impact on your survivability and a wrench does nothing to improve that.
The odd thing about Miko’s survivability is, unlike every one else where it’s kill them before they kill you, w/ Miko it’s heal your teammates so you heal yourself and they can kill those who are trying to kill you. His lvl 2 right helix option speaks to that. So the more effective you are at healing your teammates (i.e, gear matters) the better off you will be.
I absolutely and totally get what you are saying.
But…it seems that every time I try to switch from my go to - always use zero cost gear, my performance suffers, because I spending all my time running around grabbing shards trying to activate my gear rather than contributing to combat.
Also, then we never ever seem to have any turrets or healing stations built because apparently no one I play with wants to purchase them.
So how do i break myself out of that mindset?
Nothing wrong with a shard generator, I feel weird without mine lol. Especially as a healer, u don’t want to be running around for crystals while your team dies. But, instead of the wrench you could switch out for extra health and make sure you have a good healing item. I agree with the symbiotic spores gear, I run that and since you are healing yourself while you heal others with the beam it helps a lot with keeping you alive. It has healing increase, healing received, and gives everyone around u healing received boost (if we are thinking of the same gear) and that works very well. Otherwise do what the other guy said, and don’t pocket heal or you’re not healing the whole team, but keep an eye on melee more than range. Being a good healer means u need great map awareness and knowing when to let people die. Some are just set on suicide diving and you don’t wanna go down with them.
It depends on the map. For Overgrowth if your team is aggressive then y’all control the lane and you shouldn’t have any issues getting the big shard cluster. Just let your team know I ahead of time that you want the first one so you can be a more effective healer in keeping them up. Most of the time they won’t have a problem w/ it. The other thing you should be doing is farming dead minions. Every time a minion gets killed it leaves shards behind. If you are picking these up frequently and coupled w/ your shard generator you won’t have too much trouble getting the shards you need for your gear and you won’t have to leave your team to farm the shard clusters.
Thanks, guys.
I think, like every other character I’ve fotteb proficient with in BB that I never for the life of me thought I’d be good at, it will just require me to force myself to try new things and keep trying them until I am comfortable with them.
as a healer it’s 100% okay to use a shard generator, as most of the other classes I forgo it though.
If you are dying too many times as Miko then it is more likely for any of the following 3 reasons.
You are constantly at the front line (trying to be combat Miko against experienced players)
The opponents are focusing on you as their primary target
You are NOT stunning, slowing and running away when the opponents are focusing on you
As a side note I will highly ask you the followings as a favor. Please fully heal non tank characters to 100% specially to Galilea. I’ve seen so many terrible Mikos that spend most of their time attacking and when they heal they don’t heal to Max health. I can understand healing tanks 70-90% and then rush to the next player that needs it or start attacking again but don’t heal Characters like Gali to any less than 100%…It hurts them.
Thanks for the detailed tips!
How does not being healed right up to 100 percent hurt characters like Gali, etc?
Hate to tell you, is probably not you. As a support, it really takes a good team.
If you learn how to do the spore throw effectively with the stun, you should be good to go.
Get his legendary item. Super worth it. Pick healing gear. I use a green one.
Be prepared for hate mail.
You’ve been educated.
Go get em slugger.
Should I be taking Miko’s “greatly intensifies the slow effect of spore bomb” level 1 augment?
It’s what I’ve been taking almost every time.
Miko was my second to master hero and I’ve logged quite a bit time as it. For PvE, if you want to have some fun, the gear I use is very cheap (blues). You’ll have all 3 activated by level 5 or 6 with little trouble.
This is a fun build which will fall more into 75% attack / 25% support. You’ll do ok healing, but it’s a way of playing that at least makes the story modes fun. In reality, you shouldn’t need to spend more than 25% of your time healing. If you are, it’s not you but your team mate that needs to stop playing suicidal.
Take:
Breathe Deep - You’re not going to be doing much healing.
Heal Thyself - This is great along with your regen
Swift Draw - Stacks with your other reload gear
Sporeshock - Stun for tougher enemies
Pandemic - This is going to do great damage with how fast you’re attacking
Spore Strike - Damage
Bladeslinger - More attack speed with your attack speed. You’ll notice a huge dps increase here.
Biosynergy - More chances to pop Bio for heals
Spore Storm - If you miss the stun, bigger AoE
Vicious Strain - This + your pandemic attacks will melt any spawn points. ie, You can hold one of the final spawn points in Renegade by yourself. Easily. On Advanced.
Once you’re at 10 and your gear is all activated you are going to be cutting through stuff like crazy. It’s a lot of fun and great to break away from “heal-bot” gameplay. At 18hp/s regen + bio you’ll probably never go down unless you do something really stupid. If you’re standing by your mushroom and pop bio you’ll be topped off in seconds and can soak up some serious damage.
With this build/gear, things like this are common:
Once you get used to the insane attack speed/damage and drop your mushrooms at the right places you should be able to lead in kills and probably damage. (And still have room to heal up someone when they need it.)
For PvP I keep the gear simple:
I made a post a while ago summing up Miko for PvP as the following:
Miko, as a healer, is definitely a character where you are constantly factoring in variables all the time. Who to heal first, when to pop bio, when/where to drop the mushroom, is that teammate so far out it’s not worth running in to die also, if an enemy is about dead do you keep your heal on or quickly throw a few kunai to definitely finish them off, when to throw your spore stun (in PvP I’m hoping you pick stun cause it’s awesome for stopping ults dead in their tracks.), etc.
I run a 0 cost shard, legendary healing that heals you for 7% of healing done to allies, and either a double movement speed or double cd gear…
Helix wise I go with all the heals… heal thyself, biosynthesis cool down off healing beam, I do always take the stun over the slow though, I just don’t use it unless a melee rushes me or I can hit a crucial running enemy. Basically just hold the heal beam down always, break it enough to tag minions for fast levels… the spreading poison to nearby enemies off his knives is also great for tagging for exp.
Sorry if that’s hard to read at all, half asleep right now
Get good at fighting with Miko, and you will die much less often, and end up being more useful to your team.
GEAR:
Sprint speed gear. (-reload, 0 activation)
Attack damage gear (unless they’ve patched it, attack damage gear increases his beam’s healing). (double attack on taking health damage, -shield capacity)
Cooldown gear (0 activation)
Cheap gear is important because as Miko you are probably going to be always needed in a fight and don’t have time to shard-run.
Shard generator/wrench is pointless on Miko. He has no particular power spike (mainly lvl2, I guess). His ult is good, but it’s not anywhere near as game-changing/necessary as other characters’.
HELIX:
My build:
http://battlebornforum.com/pages/battleborn-helix-build-editor-miko/?rows=1,-1,1,1,1,-1,1,1,-1,0
First responder worthless compared to +100% slow since it only does anything while you are using biosynthesis and healing, its effect is small (15%), you can already sprint while using healing beam, and you already have sprint speed gear for godspeed Miko.
Heal thyself is for n00bs. If you want to play support Miko, sharing biosynthesis is better in every way since it actually increases your net healing rate (biosynthesis share+biosynth beam stack), you can top up your entire team while healing yourself, healing your entire minion wave, laying down kunai and throwing spores. Efficiency is king. If you are getting hit anywhere near enough as Miko to need heal thyself… then refer to my sprinting discussion after this.
The reload speed helps Miko avoid clunky reload cancelling/bugs associated with his healing and just makes Miko feel a hell-of-alot more fluid to play (as well as increasing dps, which means you can defend yourself better, are less likely to die, and therefore are more likely to be alive to heal others). Because you took biosynthesis share you already crank healing when using biosynth, so middle helix is unnecessary in my experience. Left is OK but I very rarely find myself saying ‘oh, man I wish I had biosynth/spore right now’… the cooldowns are already low, AND you already have cooldown gear!
Since the nerf of slow I go for the stun. Used to go for sporecloud.
Pandemic is one of my favourite skills in the game. Can’t wait to get it. Toxic transfusion is trash (it heals 15% of the PITIFUL poison damage only… this is roughly 1-2 health per second). Middle option is trash (yay… I can get poison damage on spore… instead of 5+ times more poison damage from every kunai…). Pandemic is amazeballs. Enjoy watching entire minion waves melt from poison damage as you pound the shepherd. This would sync really well with Miko’s legendary, but I always play the short game. I’ve had games of incursion with 180k+ damage, which was 80k more than our Marquis… you want support? Killing waves is gold.
I’m not sure if increasing biosynth’s self-healing effects affect its sharing, too. I assume it does, and that’s why I pick it, but I’d need to test it. Otherwise middle is really good.
Both are good, but speed-on-hit got nerfed and Miko is already super-fast with sprint gear, so I go right for a cool dps increase.
I did the maths a while ago. Increasing biosynthesis’ duration has a larger effect on net healing than decreasing its cooldown. And it really helps you crank healing in an emergency. But either choice is decent.
Doesn’t really matter. Increasing spore area or duration are both good. With slow I used to go for increased duration for god-slows. With stun I go area. Both are good.
Mushrooms die if they get tickled. May as well have double the amount of them to put behind walls for emergencies.
SPRINTING:
You need to get good at sprint-jump-fighting. This applies to every character, but Miko particularly benefits. With sprint speed gear you are a ******* ninja!
step 1) sprint
step 2) jump
step 3) while in air, throw 3-4 kunai (attack speed +20% lets you get nearly the whole clip out in one jump)
step 4) as soon as you hit the ground, jump again (you keep forward momentum)
step 5) throw remaining kunai and chain into biosynth/spore/reload before hitting ground (reload +50% helps hugely with getting these out before hitting the ground again).
step 6) repeat from step 1.
You move like friggin’ Caldarius doing this. If you are taking anywhere near enough damage to need heal thyself, you are doing it wrong. The only thing that will kill you is a stun/slow, but guess what? That applies to nearly every character.
With biosynth share you can be doing this crazy movement and dps, while healing people nearby.
THAT is support. Not holding L2 and wondering why you got merced.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention that sprint speed gear:
a) helps you run away from a fight (you die less often, you stay alive more, you heal more)
b) helps you run to a teammate to heal them in an emergency
His legendary? I find it mediocre at best. What’s it’s value?
Well considering he’s a healing guy and it’s a gold healing item and it adds his poison damage to the power of the healing beam? Seems like the value is pretty worth it compared to other med kit items. I guess if you are worried about the price, sure there is a really nice green one you could use. Just takes a bit longer to heal. To be fair, there are some that are just trash, this one seems worth it to me.
It hurts Galilea because she has a helix option called “it’s dangerous to go alone”. This makes Gal’s swords shoot projectiles which REALLY increases her dps, however, she only has the ability when at 100% health. Her dps takes a huge down turn when she isn’t full health, which is why it’s important to try and keep her topped up on health as much as possible.
If she is even missing one health point, her game is suffering.
As for surviving, others have said it, but one of the most important things for surviving as Miko is to not be in the front lines. You always want to be behind your team so:
A) you can always see their health and know when healing is needed and,
B) your team can use their bodies to block damage that would otherwise be hitting you while you heal them and they take down the person trying to kill you.
Your spores are great for slowing or stunning enemies to help your team secure the kill on whoever is attacking you.
Map and enemy awareness is key as Miko as well as the other team WILL be gunning for you first. You need to use the mini map to see where enemies so you don’t get flanked. This goes right back to "you never want to be in the front lines.
One fInal tidbit that took me a long time to learn:
Your team mates will overextend. It is NOT your job to overextend with them. You will both die. Better they die alone and you remain alive to heal the rest of your team then both of you dying for nothing. That death is not in you. It’s on them.
Miko is easily my favourite character and I’d love to see more of them out there! Best of luck!
