Hello everyone,
This is my Seventh character breakdown for Horde. If you haven’t checked out my other guides, please feel free to do so. Just type in Hu1k in the search and my guides should pop up.
-Jack-The Master of the Forge. He is one of the main 4 in Horde. Without him, beating Master Horde is about impossible. His healing and smelting of weapons are a must have for any Master run. However, his skill cards are a bit limited in what works and what you don’t really need. So, this can somewhat make playing as Jack a very tedious and monotonous task.
So, lets get this started and take a look of how to use him.
*** This was put together after maxing out Jack and playing with him on Elite to Master Difficulty***
General Playstyle and Early Levels
Jack is a Support Class Character. His passive will allow a cool-down to your Ultimate by Marking enemies before they are killed. His Personal Skill upgrades (By pressing Y after the wave’s end) are a good supplement to help you do your healing and smelting while Bolting those Swarm in the face!
Top- Health Level Increase
Down- Repair Cost Decrease
Left- Health Regin increase
Right- Movement Speed Increase
The best one to use from the get go is Movement Speed. As a Jack you are like a kid on a sugar rush, you just don’t stop moving. You are like the kid that was chosen to play in every sport-but at the same time. So, having your movement level increase quickly will help you out. Now, this is where it can get tricky. If not playing on Master, you can go with Health then Health regin. However, if on Master just go with repair cost reduction as the Health Perks are so limited it makes no difference.
Now, playing as Jack is a whole lot of fun. His Ultimate in the game is my overall favorite of all current characters. Just being able to play as certain Swarm characters (No Bosses, or Mini Bosses) is so enjoyable.
Now Lets take a look at some early card selections/skills you can apply:
Healing Reach, Zapper Upgrade, Optimizer, Portable Resupply
This is what you would be looking at around Rank 5. The main one to have here is Optimizer. This Card will be a mainstay through out your run. So making sure to have it leveled quickly is a must. Healing reach can also be another mainstay, as Jack’s healing is so powerful it can go through walls-Like WHAT!? So with this, you can safely stay out of harms way and keep you team on their feet. Zapper Upgrade is one you can just toss out the window. It’s a fun card to use early on, but it’s useless when playing on harder difficulties.
Now this leaves portable resupply. This is another mainstay and can help you do some fun things while regining weapon ammo.
Mid Level Playstyle
“Good One” as your buddy Del would say. You made it to the mid levels. Bet you had some fun in getting here.
At this point you probably have seen how important it is to have the Optimizer Card leveled quickly. This is truly a great card for Jack and makes you feel kinda cool having a build item just for Jack. With it also only being a Common Card will help in getting it leveled up.
Now here is where the sad part kinda comes in with Jack. By mid level play you are already locked in with 3 card slots out of 5. The next mainstay you get at rank six. So this will leave only one option left to truly play around with. Jack is fun all around, but the card selection for him is, I feel very disappointing.
But with that and my personal grumblings out of the way. Lets take a look at Jack’s Card selection around rank 9-10.
Healing Reach, Optimizer, Portable Resupply, Healing Upgrade, Repair Speed
This 5 card set can be a final set by this point as it puts you fully in the Support Role for Jack. Healing Upgrade, will be your forth mainstay card as its very important to have your healing ability heal faster for when you are doing those Master runs. Now Repair Speed can also be your final fifth card, but its optional. Being able to repair things faster is a big help for Del, Kat and hopefully Baird. But its up to how you want to play.
High Level Playstyle
“You magnificent beast” You did it. You got some true grit and grim in your barrings and have seen how to play as Jack. Good news, now you can change up how you play as Jack (well depending on the Difficulty being played) to have a little more fun with him.
Now, we are going to do something different here and go over 2 separate High Level play-styles with Jack at level 16.
When doing a run on Master, I would honestly just recommend staying with your Mid level build as you will need all these cards to help you in that run. Or if the map is rather unforgiving you could just Swap out Portable Resupply with Explosive Jack.
Ok so that covers the Master Build. Now lets have some fun. The below is what I call the fun build and its my personal set I use when not doing a Master run.
Optimizer, Healing Upgrade, Mind Control Expert, Explosive Hack, Backstab
This set just makes playing as Jack really fun with the Ultimate. Mind Control Expert will just help your little minion stay alive. Now in normal situations you get full Stim when Hijacking someone and this Card would not be needed. However, with Backstab on, you want to keep them alive for as long as possible to keep getting those kills and extending the Hijack time. Explosive Hack is just a good card all around. Some people even use this in their master builds as grabbing a scion real quick and blowing them up is always fun.
Ok, that about covers the Cards/Skills. Now lets talk about some Breakdowns and Additional Help .
Playing as Jack can cause you to have some weird glitches that are still not fixed. So be mindful of these. If you start a game and you see that you can buy everything in the Fabricator, then you can only quite that game to fix it. Otherwise you wont be able to buy anything in the Fabricator.
Getting your Speed up quickly on your Personal Perks is a must. With as much as you are moving around in smelting weapons and getting your people up. It will help you greatly.
Make sure there is a Del or Engineer playing. If you are going into a match and see no Del in the game, don;t join that game. Well unless you have the fun build going. As you will not be having a good time and will be like, yo where is my Forge.
Portable Resupply will keep you invisible while carrying weapons. So when doing the mid level rank, this card will keep you smelting throughout the whole wave.
Power-Taps. If there is a Tap that is near you and not captured. Stay away from it. As this will make your invisibility go away and become an easy target. So if there is a Tap near your base, I would just try and Capture it to remove this from potentially happening.
Ice-Scions. If Jack had a nemesis, this is it. These suckers can kill Jack faster than Marcus can Chainsaw a Grub. So if you see one coming, fall back in an attempt to flank them with your ULT or just let your allies take them out.
You can Mark-Spam with Jack like crazy. If you have the fun Build set on I would just go around quickly firing your Zapper at enimes until your Mark comes on. As with your passive, this will reduce your cool-down of your ULT if you get the kill or not.
Ask your team to save the last guy. If possible, try and get the last Swarm as one with a crawl animation so you have more time for Smelting. I do this with the fun build since I wouldn’t be smelting during the waves.
OK, that about sums up everything. I hope this can help you out and of course these sets are designed for players playing in random Custom matches. If you find a better set, let it be known below.
If any questions, post them here. Good Luck Gears!
As a special note, this was made by overwhelming request. So thank you all for your continued support
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