Optional Laning Phase situational
Minigun Focus Go check out my build "Rey's Minigun Build" for a minigun focused version of this build that I keep up to date. You can have all my simplified builds hearted for fast easy switching between playstyles based on your enemys. All my builds have roughly the same first items so its easy to switch build even after 10 minutes in.
Turret Focus Go check out my build "Rey's Turret Build" for the turret focus version of this build. I also have a simplified version of this main build called "Rey's Simplified Hybrid Build" which has the exact same main path without any clutter of optional items or guide text.
Please Heart This Ive spent lots and lots of time dedicated to working on all of my builds so that i could help McGinnis players get better with McGinnis. I appriciate all of you for your support!
Discord: reythepastel Add me on discord if you want to learn more about the build or about mcginnis! I play mcginnis every night and my knowledge of her improves daily. also give me any feedback you have or suggestions for edits!! thanks! <3
I HAVE MORE BUILDS!! To find all of my builds just search for "Rey's" in the search bar and all of mine will show up!! I have over 15 diferent builds for a ton of diferent ways to play McGinnis! Go have fun with the variety of mcginnis!
Laning Strategy The two biggest difficulties you'll encounter in lane: rev up and mobility. Your rev up time will make trading damage a more complicated task. It is best to play your lane passively, not aggressively. Play around your guardian and keep your health up while slowly lowering your enemy's health by punishing them for playing aggressively. With mobility make sure you aren't pushing too far past the bridge without having an escape plan. you only have two stamina to start so don't be too risky.
Spectral Wall Your first ability should be Spectral Wall. (also see the paragraph about walling your minions) Use wall to wall off the enemy from their minions so you can farm them easily before falling back. Remember that the wall deals 65 damage so try to hit the enemy when you can for a good chunk of chip damage. When fighting two or more enemies, try to use the wall to cut one off from the others so you and your team can focus fire on them. Upgrading the wall once will add a 25% damage amplifier to the enemy when they get hit. This is really good in lane for getting a huge early damage advantage over them. At max level, your wall has a stun which is capable of canceling Ults like seven, haze, bebop, etc.
Medicinal Specter This should be your second ability. Use this ability in lane whenever you are missing more than 150 health. Always keep your health topped off and avoid risks to keep a large edge over your opponent. If you are laning with a teammate, watch their health and communicate to them when you are dropping a heal so you can heal them up too. The first upgrade of this is really strong with its fire rate boost for you and your team (and your turrets too). After you have maxed this ability, whenever you get into an encounter pop one of these down and stay inside it as best you can and you'll find yourself staying alive a bit longer. When taking objectives you should drop this down on you and your turrets for the extra fire rate.
Turrets <3 Do NOT rush turrets early in laning phase. Turrets are merciless monsters in late game, however they start out very weak. Your turret also gives souls to the enemy when destroyed, so in very early lane your turrets do nothing but mildly annoy the enemy while feeding them free souls. Your turrets scale a portion of your max health which makes them start super squishy. Once you unlock your turrets in lane, place them behind cover out of view from the enemy so that the enemy can't shoot them for souls. Your turrets will help you kill the minions as they push forward into the turrets range. I usually put my turrets behind the pillars of the bridge to punish the enemy from pushing past mid and to help attack minions. When you’re able to push their guardian you should spam turrets down on the top of the stairs to add dps against the guardian. Make sure to deny the souls when an enemy kills one of your turrets. The main utility i get from turrets in laning phase is to punish aggresive enemys trying to rush me down past my turrets.
Late Game Turrets You really start becoming a healing machine once your turret build goes online. The goal is to get your turrets with as low of a cooldown as possible to be able to spam them for any encounter. Your turrets will be constantly shooting the enemy with perfect accuracy while you shoot them with your minigun allowing you to have two sources of lifesteal healing. Whenever you get into an encounter place a turret down each time it's out of cooldown. Also spam them down when fighting any objective. You are very capable of taking out a shrine solo with your turrets, and when you destroy the second shrine with your team you should just focus on spamming turrets down in the pit in preparation for the weakened patron phase so you’ll be basically unkillable in the pit during the last phase (they can still shoot the patron in normal form from inside the pit)
Heavy Barrage McGinnis' ult can be very underwhelming (unless you focus your build around it). However, don't neglect it! You can use it to quickly take out a large group of minions or to take out large neutral camps(make sure to hit all three at once). When joining late into a teamfight from behind you can use this to deal some helpful backline damage to the distracted grouped enemies. It can also be used in early game to get chip damage in lane or to scare and pressure the enemy away from bridge. The best way to attack and apply pressure with the ult in the end of laning phase is to shoot it from the top of the bridge. Having the high ground while ulting will always give you a big advantage. Aiming with this ult can get really annoying and will take practice.
Minigun The minigun is one of the strongest guns in the game due to its large base ammo and ramped-up rate of fire. This comes with two major tradeoffs: long reload times, and needing to wind up the minigun to reach the full rate of fire. Tap-firing the gun is very effective at denying last hits, so use your ammo wisely in laning (you do not want to have to reload while creeps are still up). The turret T1 movement slow pairs very nicely with your minigun until you can get more slows (e.g. slowing bullets, mystic slow, or lucky shot) for helping lock down slippery heroes and melting them. Fleetfoot helps you both chase and offset the ammo cost of winding up the minigun (thus extending your ramped-up damage output, especially with intensifying mag). The minigun is arguably the most capable weapon in the game and is able to melt pretty much anyone and anything when used correctly.
Slowing+Debuffing This strategy is fun to play, and annoying to play against. Basically, you will be using plenty of different tools to apply slowdown and debuffs on the enemy to give you a MAJOR advantage in a 1v1 encounter. First the minigun, near the beginning of early game you buy slowing bullets which makes your bullets give a 25% slow and in late game you buy close combat which is an additional 25% slow down. If you want to invest further into slowdown with your minigun buy Inhibitor, which will add ANOTHER 25% slow down AND will make your enemy deal *35%* less damage which is pretty powerful. You can also buy Lucky Shot which with how fast you fire your weapon you will be always applying the 30% slowdown. Next tool is your turret. Your turret already gives a 25% slowdown, and with Mystic Slow giving another 30% slowdown your turrets alone will HALF the speed of whoever it's shooting at in addition to Mystic Slow applying a huge 40% fire rate slow too. And if you have the money and the motivation you can invest in Mystic Reverb for an additional 50% slow down from your turrets which effects all enemies in an 18m radius. Third you have Spectral Wall, on hit without upgrades your wall gives a 25% movement slow, after first upgrade it removes 1 stamina, and at fully upgraded it gives a stun for a second. Last tool you have is your Heavy Barrage which after the first upgrade gives a 35% movement slow (and it applies Mystic Slow for another 25% slow). And on top of all of this, Ricochet lets you spread all of these debuffs to multiple enemys at once. Toxic bullets lets you spread Mystic Slow with your gun too. Even just Ricochet+Inhibitor+toxicbullets is enough to win almost any teamfight.
Outhealing Here is where you can become an overpowered force. Once you get your full build running the only thing that will be able to kill you is a focused team fight against you or a huge burst of damage (and I have even outhealed a 1v4 long enough to solo both shrines). You will have three sources of healing to be able to outheal whatever comes at you. First you will have your bullet lifesteal which with applying plenty of debuffs and slowdowns you'll already be able to outpace an enemy in a direct bullet fight. Secondly you have your turrets which will heal you with consistent spirit lifesteal. Last tool you have is your Medicinal Specter. At max level Medicinal Specter will grant you 5% max health per second (6% with Healing Booster) for a time that scales with spirit power. With your full build it will last long enough until it is out of cooldown again meaning you will be receiving 5% max health every single second (and a 35% fire rate boost). Ontop of all of this, Ricochet lets you get up to 120% MORE lifesteal. Ricochet hitting 2 extra enemys for 60% dmg lets you get more than double the normal bullet lifesteal.
General Tips! Be a soul denying gremlin. The way to get a huge soul lead in the laning phase is by denying every soul you can. Not only does it give them less souls but it gives you more. The way I go about this is when I notice an enemy taking out minions I find a good sightline and instead of going for chip damage I instead snipe every soul. Once you have your turret build online you can afk small and medium neutral camps by throwing in a sentry or two and shooting one once to agro it. You can use your ult on large camps to hit all three at the same time and easily and quickly take them out. In mid to late game look on the map for empty lanes being pushed by a large minion group and farm that lane forward until it reaches the base guardians before finding a new empty lane while dropping turrets in small and medium camps. Try to look for easy 1v1 encounters in late game to get easy kills with your specialized build. *YOU CAN SOLO MIDBOSS!!* You can place all your turrets outside the pit than jump in and start shooting midboss and you will have enough dps. Keep putting turrets outside the pit whenever they cooldown and always be placing your heal. You MUST communicate with your team when you are soloing midboss. Make sure they are pushing lanes and protecting mid while you solo because it will take you about a minute to defeat midboss and since you will be alone you are very vulnerable to if the enemy tries to steal the rejuv
Wall Your Minions As soon as you reach your lane, the first thing you will want to do is place your wall in front of your minions. This will delay your minions so that the enemy wave will be in front of your bridge. This will give you an immediate advantage from the start because having the waves fight in front of the bridge makes it a lot easier for you to farm the souls and makes it a lot harder for your enemy to farm their souls. It forces your enemy to either have to aggressively push forward and make themselves very exposed or have to have a terrible angle to last hit and deny souls. Often this leads to the enemy playing way too aggressively and feeding you an easy kill or at least taking enough of their health to force them to retreat to spawn, giving you free time to farm even more of a lead.
Lane Ammo Ammo management in the laning phase is very very important. You should be letting your wave do most of the damage to the enemy minions and focus on just getting the last hits and denies. You don't wanna be in the middle of a reload while the enemy is getting souls that you'll be unable to deny. And you really don’t want to be in the middle of a reload and miss a last hit. You only want to be damaging creeps with ammo if you want to push their tower. Otherwise, either melee to finish off minions if your lane isn't aggressive, or tap fire to get the last hit.
Echo Shard Echo shard instantly refreshes the cooldown of the last-used ability. allowing it to be used again immediately. This grants a charge if used on the Mini Turret, allowing you to immediately drop two turrets down, or drop two Spectral Walls down on someone. The power to generate extra turret charges out of thin air and shorten the cycle time of turret charges lets it supplant other cooldown items and charge items very effectively, though because the cooldown of Echo Shard is affected by Superior Cooldown, it is still useful to build both (and Rapid Refresh) for even more turret spam. The power of Echo Shard also comes with using Spectral Wall to drop two walls in short sequence. This can be used to trap people in tight quarters, block off an entire lane, or simply to spam more walls for the useful stun and damage buff. It's also useful for correcting wall mistakes - like trying to stop someone from running away, but you drop the spectral wall short and so your target is on the far side of the wall. Removing Spectral walls is not possible if Spectral Wall is off cooldown, as pressing "3" will cast Spectral Wall, but Spectral walls will "travel" through other spectral walls, letting you drop a spectral wall on the other side of the stunned enemy to sandwich them, very useful for trapping people in buildings or subways.Another useful thing to remember is that you actually remove spectral walls one by one, starting from the oldest, letting you correct the trap by dropping the first wall and exposing the enemy to you, while leaving the second correct wall in place. Medicinal Specter buffs and healing do not stack, so there's no point on using Echo Shard on Medicinal Specter unless you need to reduce the CD or increase the effective area of effect. This has niche benefits in increasing turret/creep survivability while split pushing multiple lanes, but it's generally better to use Echo Shard to drop another turret down.
Discord Server!! I have created a discord server for all my builds!! Dm me for an invite or type in this link: https://discord.gg/DrKw2cWJSm I post whenever i update any of my builds and it is a place where you can ask any questions or leave feedback! I love hearing about games you've won with this build and any feedback. It will also have even more guides! Including a guide to turret placement in laning phase! Please come check out the discord server and say hi!