Hypercharge, and when it is worth building for

A hypercharge is not a stat upgrade you switch on and forget about. It is a second meter, filled on top of the Super you were already charging, that pays out as one short window: a stronger version of the Super, plus a temporary boost to how hard you hit, how fast you move and how much you can absorb while it lasts. The entire question is whether that window turns up while it still matters.

That is a timing question, and timing questions get different answers on different brawlers. If your Super is the thing that wins fights — the engage, the wall, the heal that saves a push — then a hypercharged version of it upgrades the plan you already had. If your Super is what you press at the end of a fight that was already decided, the hypercharge arrives on top of a decided fight and you spent a whole extra meter buying a better replay.

The question is not how strong a hypercharge is. It is what fraction of your matches you will actually get to use it in.

Five questions before you build around one

1. Does your Super decide fights or finish them? A Super that opens a fight is worth hypercharging. One that closes a fight already going your way is not, however impressive the animation.
2. How long do your rounds last? A meter you have to build from nothing inside a round that can end in half a minute is a plan for the last round of a match rather than for the match.
3. Can the loadout feed it? Anything that speeds up Super charge — the Super Charge gear, a star power that pays out on hits — is what turns a hypercharge from an occasional surprise into something you can plan around arriving.
4. Does it help the team or only you? Some hypercharges convert into space everybody can use: a wider area, a longer disruption, a bigger wall. Others make you individually hard to kill for a few seconds. Around an objective the first kind is worth considerably more.
5. Do you actually play this brawler? Unlocking one is slow, so the honest test is which brawler you have played most in the modes you play most, not which effect looks best in a clip.

How it changes the way you play

Owning one changes your decisions before it has even charged. The Super you would ordinarily spend on a small advantage becomes a choice: use it now, or hold it a few seconds so that the hypercharged version lands on something worth the window. Holding is not free — a Super sitting unused is a Super doing nothing, and players who fall in love with holding lose fights they had already won — but the habit of asking the question is most of the improvement on its own.

The commonest waste is spending the hypercharged Super to escape. It is the strongest thing you have and it lasts seconds, so pressing it while retreating converts your best window of the match into a slightly safer walk backwards. When you are in a position where you need to escape, the mistake is upstream in the position rather than in the button, and the button will not fix it twice.

It is also loud. Opponents can see a hypercharged brawler coming and competent ones back off for the duration, which means the window often produces ground rather than kills. That is not a failure. In an objective mode ground is the entire point, and a hypercharge that pushes a team off a zone for a few seconds has done its job even if the kill feed stays empty and nobody watching is impressed.

TaraHer hypercharge, gadgets, star powers and current numbers, in one place.→

Not every brawler has one, and which brawlers do changes over time, so the catalog on each brawler page is the answer rather than anything written here. Where a brawler has none, none of this applies and the build question goes back to a gadget, a star power and two gears, which is a smaller decision with the same shape: pick the thing that answers how you lose.

KnockoutShort elimination rounds: the hardest place in the game to rely on a second meter arriving.→

Build around a hypercharge when the Super is already the reason you play the brawler, the mode gives you time to charge it more than once, and the rest of the loadout is pointed at charging faster. Otherwise treat it as what it is most of the time: a good thing that happens occasionally, somewhere after the two-minute mark, in the matches that last long enough to have one.