Within Pokemon Unite Urshifu is a versatile all-rounder offering the choice between Wicked Blow or Surging Strikes movesets. This lets you pick the best build for your team comp and flex between being a very adept diver with sustain, damage, and snowballing.. or a priority target eliminator with elite objective secure, making the enemy have to prepare for both can definitely complicate their gameplans in a draft setting.
Moveset 1 – Rapid Strike Style
Strengths:
+ Surging Strikes will unleash a pretty respectable power spike when reaching level 5 after clearing jungle. Very oppressive gank that can wipe or push back lanes hard to start snowballs.
+ Provided you’re weaving in enough boosted autos to have very high uptime, Surging Strikes enables good early game fighting if you keep your level lead. If not ahead the damage and sustain starts requiring more enemy resources to be burned to really go in.
+ The many dashes of Surging Strikes enables great outplay potential and at times be a tricky target to pin down in close quarters.
+ On top of the sustain Surging Strikes gets with your boosted attack , Liquidation can also provide some very clutch shielding for living an illegally long time. The Defense shred is also not insignificant and can help physical teammates rip through enemies quicker and noticeably speeds up your objective rip.
Weaknesses:
– Arguably the worst early game of any character in the game. Kubfu is USELESS, relies HEAVILY on first jungle clear otherwise it’s basically a 4v5
– Due to being a combo based melee character, Wetshifu is heavily susceptible to CC. If he is interrupted from weaving his autos and Liquidation in between Surging Strikes he can die very easily.
– Often needs to maintain a level lead to remain an especially strong threat in the lategame against many drafts and falls off notably if it’s behind.
Moveset 2 – Single Strike Style
Strengths:
+ Wicked Blow provides fantastic burst damage with an unstoppable chargeup that makes it a premier option for securing objectives or blowing targets up.
+ Ebon Fist’s uppercut variant is one of the best single target shut down tools in the game that provides big damage, TRUE COMBOS INTO WICKED BLOW, resets Wicked Blow’s cooldown and can even go through select unstoppables.
+ All of Darkshifu’s skills have some form of hard CC when you deal damage, making this it surprisingly great at protecting squishies when necessary.
+ Throat Chop’s long dash and boosted autos having some gapclose makes this character at times surprisingly mobile for what it can do.
+ Between Wicked Blow charge’s damage reduction and boosted autos that gives the Darkshifu a shield, this character when running Focus Band can sometimes offer some very surprising staying power.
+ Its first gank is the freest bees secure of your life and still a very competent fighter if enemy laners don’t respect you.
Weaknesses:
– Dark bear is heavily susceptible to poke, he has no self healing so he can be whittled down and discouraged from approaching a fight or an objective to secure.
– Excels at eliminating single targets, but struggles to put out big output past that due to having a fair bit of downtime on its big damage.
– Has pretty slow objective rip overall, so it often needs help from a teammate to rip objectives faster if quickly ripping and flipping an objective for Wicked Blow to shine is needed.
– Can be very reliant on Ebon Fist and Eject Button to really get stuff done consistently, which can make this character sometimes have trouble if fights don’t get decisively ended from its initial onslaught.
Due to the impressive flexibility of this Pokemon, our recommended builds for Urshifu are very moveset dependent. Identifying your gameplan during character select and building accordingly will help you maximize your potential within the match.
Single Strike Style Urshifu
Items: Razor Claw , Focus Band, Muscle Band/Attack Weight/Weakness Policy
Again, Razor Claw is pretty core here. Wicked Blow on hit (even uncharged) gives a free boosted auto and Throat Chop also gives one, so weaving in autos is a real part of this character’s damage profile.
Focus Band in tandem with Wicked Blow charge’s damage reduction and boosted auto shields can make this Pokemon very surprisingly difficult to take down without significantly compromising your damage for properly eliminate your targets.
Worth noting here that full damage bulids are also very viable and good, but you need to play much more carefully and if you go this route, just choose 2 items from the flex slot that are going to be mentioned.
3rd item slot is flexible depending on your needs and playstyle.
Battle Item: Eject Button
Basically non negotiable if you know you’re playing Single Strike. Activating Eject Button immediately after releasing Wicked Blow lets you direct the move’s aim to that direction while also sending yourself forward to give you a massive range extension on the move and makes you that much more threatening. Even outside of Eject Wicked Blow plays, the item is still a great general use item and also helps with surprise gapcloses to lock Ebon Fist onto an important squishy. This item alone jumps Dark Bear up an entire tier compared to running something else.
If you’re looking to be able to flex into Wetshifu in blind pick, I recommend taking Full Heal. Not necessarily a bad item to have on hand while scrapping and is basically required for Wetshifu. I don’t really recommend doing this though, as you can make either bear work in most matchups.
Boost Emblem Loadout: 6 Brown 6 White
Probably better to look to a more damage focused flat stat setup here to maximize your burst damage in your windows of opportunity.
Rapid Strike Style Urshifu
Items: Razor Claw , Attack Weight , Muscle Band/Cursed Bangle/Scope Lens
Razor Claw is an integral item on this character for damage, as its constantly weaving auto attacks between Surging Strikes so you’re going to get some procs. Worth noting however that you probably don’t want to be delaying your Surging Strikes to wait out the cooldown of Razor Claw.
Attack Weight is your other best damage item. While getting sufficient stacks from a jungler angle is often awkward, Wetshifu’s 5 gank is so strong that if you’re playing your cards well, you will usually be able to get a few stacks out of it.
The 3rd slot is very flexible.
Best Battle Item: Full Heal
– Basically a non negotiable battle item to make sure you can fight consistently in the face of CC in the lategame. One of your biggest threats are Pokemon that can stun and burst Urshifu, especially at a distance. If you’re not running this, I’m going to assume you’re either bad or trolling.
Boost Emblem Loadout: 6 Brown 6 White
Get big HP number and get big attack number since Urshifu wants to live long time and hit hard. Focusing on flat attack or flat HP is up to your preference here. Both are great value.
HOW TO FIRST CLEAR JUNGLE GOOD AS KUBFU
Although you’ll want to play Urshifu in the jungle, you may have noticed that Kubfu’s jungle clear is.. really bad. Like REALLY bad. If you don’t do it properly or without a Muscle Band, you may find yourself not even being able to make it to first bees in time or barely making it.
But..! There are ways to consistently clear the wild Pokemon in the central area by 9:10. One way is running Muscle Band. Regardless of which items you’re using, follow our early jungle tips for Urshifu to get some very surprising sub 9:10 clears.
Kubfu Clear Optimizations you NEED to do if you’re Full Clearing!
– You should only be charging Rock Smash while approaching a new farm or while waiting for a buff to do its big attack. Outside of that, uncharged Rock Smash into a Razor Claw auto is higher DPS than fully charging it. Fully charged Rock Smash’s gains are kinda pathetic for how long you have to charge it.
– When applicable, use Headbutt to get to camps faster. You probably won’t always get this and things get messy with variable emblem sets, the best case scenario is Headbutt towards the next farm while last hitting another farm while a boosted auto is primed, then boosted autoing towards the next farm.
– Optimize your Razor Claw procs. It has a 1.5s internal cooldown.
– Be sure to do the traditional Buff > Baltoys > Buff rotation. Doing Baltoys last is absolutely catastrophic for a slow melee clear’s gank timer. Please don’t do Baltoys last!
– Try to drag farms towards the next farm you’re going to do while you clear it, so you can save some seconds of walking towards your next farm.
– Recognize when you’ve messed up or are clearing too slow by the time you clear your first Baltoy so you can perform a Baltoy skip which I will go over. I’ll say if its the low 9:23 range or lower by the time you finish your first Baltoy, skip the next one to do this:
The Baltoy Skip
Basically, there are time points where the game hands you an extra bit of catchup EXP for when you get your next dose of EXP. The ones that junglers should care about are the ones at 9:45 and 9:10.
Clearing Xatu right after 9:45 immediately puts you to 4 after clearing it instead being just shy of it at 3. Do this for good measure and Kubfu’s clear speed depending your build will usually naturally pace into that anyway.
You also get an extra injection of catchup at 9:10. If you use this in tandem with the aforementioned Xatu delay for good measure, this will basically be enough to put you at level 5 after clearing your last buff at 9:10 while getting to skip a whole Baltoy.
So to go over it step by step:
– Delay Xatu kill until 9:45. Try to have it dragged to as close to the first buff you want to do as possible when you last hit it to save time walking.
– Clear a buff, then a Baltoy, then skip the next Baltoy and go straight to the next buff. That leftover Baltoy just sits there don’t worry about it.
– Start doing the other buff and make sure to have it cleared after 9:10. If done correctly and the enemy jungle is actually being cleared, you will be an Urshifu.
Worth noting that this does not work in practice arena due to catchup mechanics getting finicky with only one person that’s probably not clearly jungle fully on the enemy team.
i’m gonna surge !!!!
WET BEAR OVERALL GAMEPLAN
Where Darkshifu is about big fight-turning hits and squishy deletions, Wetshifu is all about more sustained high uptime fights and immediate and big snowballs. With boosted autos that reduce move cooldowns and gain heal during Surging Strikes, Liquidation’s shielding, damage reduction at Surging Strikes+, and all the dashes in its kit all amount to a difficult to take down character with elite sticking power.
Without a level advantage Urshifu is a lot less overtly threatening. You can’t just ignorantly dash around and stat check everything, but can still do great if you play well. When behind, it’ll obviously struggle compared to other characters – this is overall a gamestate you want to avoid at all costs since you’ll have most of your value as a pick by then. Luckily for this you, this character’s obscene 5 spike makes it excellent at grabbing a strong early lead and holding onto it.
Snowballing and getting that huge early momentum is ultimately a big part of this character’s power. So I’m going to help you how to maintain that early lead and approach later game fights.
Probably the biggest and most common mistake people make on this character is not adjusting their approach to team fights as the game progresses and more players on the enemy team eventually reach their power spikes that can let them fight the character off. Surging Strikes is an incredible 5 spike yes, but also you need to be aware of the fact that part of the reason why the character feels so oppressive in the first 3-4 minutes of the game is because people don’t yet have the tools necessary to stop you with enough CC or damage.
So what does this entail for how you play at later game fights?
For playing to your early lead properly, follow some of these guidelines.
Surging Strikes Basics, the Importance of LIQUIDATION, and Flowing Fists
Surging Strikes Basics
Surging Strikes is 3 dashes, having you dash in the designated direction and dealing damage to every opposing Pokemon it hits. Upon using the first dash, the second dash will be available to be used for a period of time, then the third one afterwards. Every dash gives you a boosted auto attack For duration of Surging Strikes your boosted autos heal you effectively 6% of your max HP when you deal damage to opposingpokemon. The final dash will knock up opposting pokemon and is a guaranteed critical hit.
While you don’t directly see it counting down, Surging Strikes’ cooldown starts the moment you use the first dash. Urshifu’s boosted autos reduce the cooldown of both your moves by 2 seconds. If you land all 3 followup boosted autos after every Surging Strikes dash, your Surging Strikes move can be used every 2 seconds. Weaving in as many boosted as you can is critical to maximizing uptime on your moves for more damage and survival.
There may be odd points in time where you may not want to or be able to weave in an auto after every dash, such as when you’re trying to just close/create a lot of distance or you need to dodge something. Just be sure to plan for your cooldowns being longer accordingly if that’s the case and keep mental track of where they’ll be at after you do your last Surging Strike. Overall though, weave in those autos whenever you can!
Combo speed is important here. Faster combos means you get out your damage faster and Liquidation off cooldown faster if it’s on cooldown. The animation of auto attacks can also be cancelled with a Surging Strikes dash for some obscenely fast combos that you see in a lot of Japanese Twitter clips, but are generally not something you have to prioritize learning how to do to be effective on the character.
However, slowing down your combo a bit at times is also good in some situations. When needed, it’s also good to take an extra moment to assess a situation or avoid a move before ripping your next dash. With Surging Strikes+, you also get 30% damage reduction through the move’s duration and you technically are getting less uptime on that if you do your full combo too quickly, so this may also be an applicable use of slowing down in situations where you’re just trying to survive.
Liquation can be a Huge Difference!
While Liquidation was near universally based on during this character’s release for being an overly weak move, using this move efficiently can sometimes be very much what can set apart an average Wetshifu from a great one. This move with pitiful upfront damage provides you a small shield per target hit and 30% defense shred on everyone it hits, with the shield capping out at 3 targets hit.
This sounds pretty insignificant at first, but the shield becomes pretty real if you’re able to hit 2-3 people with it. Shielding is damage mitigation that can be stacked on top of things like the damage reduction in the duration of Surging Strikes+ and help make a lot of your healing from Surging Strikes boosted autos go uncontested and stick better. Being able to recognize the best times to go for a big Liquidation is key for helping put all that together into becoming seemingly unkillable.
The defense shred of Liquidation is also a pretty helpful supplement to your damage and for your teammates. While it’s good for damage to weave it in earlier into your combo or when your physical teammates can also hit the target, do keep in mind that you may be putting it on cooldown for when you need it to keep yourself alive. Boosted autos reduce the cooldown of BOTH moves, so Liquidation’s cooldown will also be pretty low if you weaved in all your autos despite using Liquidation at the beginning of your combo.
Combo wise, you’ll usually want to try to weave the Liquidation in earlier after the first Surging Strike that got you in to get your defense shred value. However, in higher stress fights you will often consider saving it for when you’re about to take some heavier fire or after you just got chunked and need to get some padding for your Surging Strike autos to get you healthy again.
This is an unusual Unite move in how it gets used. There’s the initial cast that gives you a moment of unstoppable and deals a small shove with damage to people in a small area around you. You get a combo counter that shows how many hits you’re at, and every 2 hits on the combo counter gives the sure hit CC chain combo attack recast of Flowing Fistsan extra hit to max out at 10 hits and has a minimum of 5 hits.
The Unite buffs that lasts for 6 seconds are probably the most important part of the move. The movement speed and 20% max HP shield can be invaluable for helping you survive longer, but also 30% CDR bonus also basically means that if you’re able to get off a full Surging Strikes combo with all your boosted autos weaved in, you have literally no cooldown on the move for some absolutely brutal sustain and damage potential while this buff is active since you can easily get off 3+ Surging Strikes Combos in this window in ideal conditions and being decently fast. If you still happen to have your ult up and you really need to just rip an objective as fast as possible, this is also a play.
That’s not to say the initial cast and the recast aren’t without their great uses though. The shove and brief bit of unstoppable can be great for staving off a potential CC move about to hit you, such as using the shove to shove a Buzzwole out of its grab before it hits you.
The recast also has unstoppable, even more damage reduction in the duration, and CC locks whatever you hit with it (usually). Pure DPS wise, it’s more efficient to just do a Surging Strikes combo instead if it’s available, however all these defensive properties on the recast still give it some very important uses. You can really guarantee a kill on an important target no matter what CC might be coming at you with this or against a mobile target that may be able to dash away mid Surging Strikes combo. The unstoppable and/or damage reduction can also be leveraged to keep doing damage and power through a big CC or burst about to hit you.
There will often be times where you don’t even have to use the recast or shouldn’t use it and that’s okay. Also, be wary the sometimes people can just.. Eject Button out of the recast and the move becomes really finicky when used on something that’s mid dash or through a wall.
Now put it all together.. getting that illegal Wetshifu sustain is basically a game of leveraging your defensive resources and trying to use them in tandem with each other and tracking your cooldowns well. Don’t neglect the value of your Liquidation and Flowing Fists as defensive tools to help overcome later game fights and tough matchups!
General Gameplan
Wetshifu is about snowballing and oppressive sustained dives. This darker bear is your single strike build and more focused on landing big fight turning hits, deleting key targets with Wicked Blow and Ebon Fist, incredible securing with Wicked Blow, and acting as a great potential source of secondary CC.
In the earlygame, your first gank is near guaranteed to easily secure all the bees with a Wicked Blow after a bit of chip damage from yourself or other players. It can also still be a huge punish on enemy laners getting overzealous or if you can land a big Eject Button + Wicked Blow. Regardless of whether or not you jungle swap yourself out the jungle for a hungrier carry like Mystical Fire Delphox, Tyranitar, Garchomp, or Decidueye afterwards, your general theme will be just being a constant presence for securing the other bees contests and early objectives.
During teamfights, your general gameplan as this character will shift between being that of a full time assassin or that of a secondary peel, depending on what the matchup calls for. While this character is a very far cry from its rapid striking counterpart for sheer constant DPS, Darkshifu is still a competent fighter as long as you can land your Wicked Blows and land timely stuns with Throat Chop , though its very prone to getting chipped down, especially without a Focus Band to extend your life.
Generally, if protecting a big backline carry from a diver is of importance, Darkshifu offers some surprisingly great stopping power with full charged Wicked with its shove and Throat Chop’s on demand stun. Ebon Fist can also stuff a lot of potential dives and save a backliner’s life, especially if a really long lockdown with its knockup or the ability to ignore certain unstoppables are desired.
As an assassin, preserving your Ebon Fist ult and Eject Button are going to be very critical for doing your job effectively. Eject Button is an overall huge boost to your threat range as this character, since it can be used to greatly extend Wicked Blow’s range for some surprising hits or just as a quick gapclose for getting in range for casting Ebon Fist and comboing it into your free Wicked Blow , or doing the directional variant to throw your target into your teammates if you can’t take them out by yourself. You can’t really 100-0 targets reliably with just Ebon Fist > Wicked Blow without a 1-2 level lead though if you aren’t able to hit much else before the Ebon Fist, so be sure to let your teammate’s damage pressure contribute a bit of chip damage before pulling the trigger. Hang around in bushes ready to flank or with your team and utilize Throat Chop and Eject Button’s big gapclose capabilities to surprise your target once they reveal themselves.
Learn your objective secure ranges too, as Wicked Blow is one of the most powerful and dependable secure moves in the game. The unstoppable, great burst range, and accessibility makes it an incredible option for securing objectives that you should always be able to have on the ready for an objective.
Optimizing THE PUNCHER – Getting the most out of your skills
EJECT WICKED BLOW – MUST KNOW TECH
If you are playing anything other than Eject Button on this character, you are probably trolling or running a flex build for Wetshifu. Why? Eject Wicked Blow.
To do this, simple input your Eject Button immediately after releasing your Wicked Blow to fling yourself forward with the hitbox of Wicked Blow out. The direction of the Wicked Blow’s hitbox also follows the direction that you Eject Buttoned in as well, so be sure to account for that.
Especially when used in tandem with Throat Chop, this is a massive increase to your threat range that lets you land potentially devastating Wicked Blows from surprising positions. This item single handedly makes you go up or down a whole tier.
First thing’s first, when you use the unite move ebon fist, it will reset the cooldown of your Wicked Blow, which means you can can land combos like Wicked Blow > optional boosted auto > Ebon Fist > Wicked Blow for some absolutely devastating damage.
This move has two variants that that are often referred to as the Shoryuken and the Buster Wolf.
The Shoryuken will generally be the one you’re using most of the time to help you guarantee picks on your targets with the combo into Wicked Blow or just locking people down in place for a really long time. As you ready your Wicked Blow, you can also shift your positioning around to try to line up more enemies to get hit by it, as you’ll often be able to do that to also nearby teammates or people foolish enough to try to collapse on you while doing this.
The directional Buster Wolf variant is far more situational, but still has real merits and is probably rather underexplored. Here are a bunch of potential use cases to explore:
Additionally, it also has the Bound property that Slowbro and Mimikyu’s ults infamously have, albeit not as functional. However, it’s still able to go through many forms of unstoppable (not all of them) and being able to know the ones that it can do that to is potentially game changing. While more labbing work needs to be done on which ones it can do this to, here are some of the ones I know off the top of my head that Ebon Fist can knock something out of.
About Wicked Blow:
Aside from the obvious big punch with big crit damage and % missing HP damage to opposing pokemon in an area of effect when you sweetspot a charged one, this move has many other applications that can help you close out some more kills or live more interactions. This is still the bulk of your damage though, so be sure to get good at hitting it.
First off is the damage reduction and unstoppable you get during the charging, which can help you power through damage and CC before getting off your move or just while trying to escape something. If you can time a Focus Band proc or healing from a teammate while this is going, your heals also essentially get bigger value from getting to stick better because of you taking less damage.
Landing Wicked Blow also gives you a free boosted auto, which when combined with a Razor Proc is surprisingly good extra damage. You don’t have to do a fully charged Wicked Blow for this as well, as doing an uncharged Wicked Blow(call it the Sloppy Blow) will still give you this boosted auto. Very nice for helping stick to targets that are about to run out of Wicked Blow’s range so you can stay on them with Boosted Auto’s gapclose property and optimizing your objective ripping, since doing a not fully charged Wicked Blow also gives you half the usual cooldown.
About Throat Chop:
This is a long dash that stuns everyone hit and gives you a free boosted auto. Very good for gapclosing, going over walls, being an immediate stun, and plus version also reduces Wicked Blow’s cooldown by 2 seconds for better general fighting.
Since the cooldown is fairly long, you generally want to hold onto this move to help you close ground onto your targets when the time is right or leverage the stun to facilitate your teammates. When using it offensively though, the damage from the move itself on top of likely Razor Claw ready boosted auto still contributes a fair amount of damage while helping get people in range for Wicked Blow and Ebon Fist.
Some people may also find it more consistent to string this move into Wicked Blow if they skip the immediate boosted auto after Throat Chop and using more of the stun’s uptime on charging Wicked Blow, which may be more helpful for targets with a dash or Eject Button at the ready that they can just use after the boosted auto.
About Boosted Auto:
This is.. surprisingly important for this character since both Throat Chop and Wicked Blow give you one for free and goes underappreciated. It functions as gapclosing dash when its up and used, which has great applications for sticking onto targets better or using farm to help you escape some hairy situations, such as using Boosted Auto to go through wall between jungle and center via the center Baltoy.
When you land a boosted attack, Urshifu is granted a shield for 3 seconds which can help you survive longer and get more value out of healing sources like a Focus Band proc if you manage your cooldowns correctly.
Just be careful about auto piloting out boosted autos while you’re in a precarious situation. You don’t want to be accidentally flinging yourself back into a fight with it!
These are Pokémon that our team has determined URSHIFU is strong against. URSHIFU will generally be able to shut down these opponents playstyle's or have the advantage in a one on one fight.
These are Pokémon that our team has determined URSHIFU is weak against. These Pokémon will have the upper hand in a fight or be able to exploit URSHIFU's weaknesses.
PSA: THE GUIDE IS NO LONGER MANAGED OR UPDATED IN ANY FORM, AND WILL NOT BE FOR THE FORSEEABLE FUTURE. Joe thanks everyone for their support (and ad revenue ;) ) and hope the site helped improve their play and hopes you kids enjoy your lives. We encourage you to use the information here in combination with Unite-DB and Mathcord as a jumping off point for your own builds.
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