For Honor‘s new mid-season update, launching Jan. 29, brings along many exciting changes to the game, but the most notable is certainly its new hero, Juren. Clearly modeled after the mythical Chinese general Lu Bu, Juren is a chaotic, selfish brute that looks only after himself, turning every match into a 1v7 fest.
A Wu Lin hero, Juren has several fighting styles that all blend together into a cohesive, fast, and heavy-hitting character that’ll strike fear into the bones of all who face him (and those that are on his own team, too). With his massive spear, Juren can use piercing thrusts and slashes from above that deal massive damage, reminding me of how the Lawbringer uses his Halberd. It’s got a fairly good range, too, making him a good choice for closer-ranged fighters.
Where Juren thrives, though, is his utilization of his gigantic size and physical strength. He can grab people and slam them against the ground, punch, disarm, break, and knock folks’ teeth out, all the while using his spear to dish out additional damage. This is reflects his Wu Lin background, given how many of the heroes in this faction utilize hand-to-hand combat on top of their powerful weapons.
However, I have a feeling Juren will be most beloved by players due to his feats. When trying him out, I got the sense he was a troll pick due to how his feats work, though they are a tremendous way to buff yourself if you’re a solo player.
As Juren was clearly inspired by Lu Bu, a semi-legendary general of ancient Chinese history well-known for his constant backstabbing and betrayals of anyone he had worked with, Juren, too, loves to backstab his own allies for personal gain.
He can heal and restore stamina by slaughtering not only the enemy creeps, but his own as well; he can literally give the enemy team vision of his allies, gaining a permanent shield for any teammate that dies in the meantime; he can gain buffs for each dead ally; and can cause the entire server save himself to take extra damage, basking in the glory of chaos and slaughter.
Those feats alone make him a totally unique and different character to anything we’ve seen in the game over the past nine years. I mean literally, he can cause so much damage to his own team that it’s not even funny, but what’s important is what he gains from that. In the hands of a skilled player (which I myself am really not), Juren can backstab his teammates and become an unstoppable force of ancient reckoning, easily outmatching his opponents in skill of combat.
The permanent shield, if you were to time the feat perfectly and even coordinate it with your team, can grow substantially and become a genuinely strong buff that’d give your enemies a very bad time.
It’s an interesting direction for Ubisoft to go into with this character, and I’m excited to see the devs switch it up a bit, giving us a character that doesn’t fit into the usual formula (or even the more recent, 300 abilities per attack formula).
Juren and the patch go live today, Jan. 29.
The post For Honor’s new hero, Juren, is pure chaos and the perfect choice for solo players appeared first on Destructoid.
