The Scarecrow

The Scarecrow is one of the 5 champions dropping in the Echoes of Oz campaign event. Based on previous campaign events, we are expecting to see some sort of guaranteed event for him (such as a Deck of Fate or a Hero’s Path) but, at time of writing, this has not been confirmed.

The Scarecrow brings a cheat death on his passive and a powerful single-target Revive on his A3. This looks to be a standout combo for the Sand Devil boss fight, likely allowing him to duo bosses similarly to Godseeker Aniri (simply build him with enough survivability to endure everything except the Sand Devil’s ultimate attack, then self-revive and A3 revive your damage-dealer too).

He also brings two classic buff/debuff combos: Increase ACC and Decrease RES; and Increase RES and Decrease ACC.

• The Increase ACC/Decrease RES combo drastically lowers the ACC requirements for your team: against a 500 RES boss you would normally need 525 ACC; with both of these active you would only need 185 ACC.
• The Increase RES/Decrease ACC combo drastically lowers the RES requirements for your team: against a 500 ACC boss you would normally need 605 RES; with both of these active you would only need 240 RES.

As you can see, both of these combos open up some very interesting team-building opportunities. The two potential downsides here are: firstly, uptime on these buffs/debuffs can be tricky (and any gaps can result in disaster), potentially needing a champion who can Increase Buff Duration to maintain them (his A1 debuffs should typically be OK since he will only use a turn for A3 if someone dies); secondly, champions who have already reached the required ACC/RES stats without these buffs gain little benefit from them, which lowers his value to them substantially.

The team 1-turn cooldown reduction on his A2 is universally great, making your entire team more consistent at using active skills (though if he’s built with high SPD he might open with this move before allies have used any skills, wasting the first cdr effect in order to place his buffs).

All in all, The Scarecrow is definitely an interesting champion for progressing players, helping them to bypass ACC and RES requirements easily and bringing a backup revive. He’s a strange champion who doesn’t fit the typical archetype of a reviver though, and you’ll need to put in a good bit of work building him appropriate teams who play around his stat manipulation and cooldown reduction. Compared to the other Oz champions, he looks to be the weakest one (the rest are pretty top-tier), but he might end up in some cool teams thanks to his quirky utility.