Amber

Amber’s attacks are easy to hit on targets in mid range and are auto-aimable on targets at half her full range, as well as enemies moving directly towards her. Her ideal playstyle varies significantly depending on the map and matchup, since she’s a kind of a generalist - more so than other brawlers.

Normally against long range brawlers, she should focus on dodging attacks, bobbing in and out of their range to seize the chance to take them out. She should use her good range to her advantage on enemies with shorter range than her to chip away at their health in small bursts when they play slow, and unload it all to take them out when they’re running it down.

Gem Grab and Hot Zone are great modes for Amber because her easy to hit attack enables her to contest a certain point of the map easily. She’s also strong in Heist because she can hold control effectively for longer ranged teammates to damage the safe on maps where she struggles to hit the safe herself, but with her gadget, she becomes one of the fastest base racers in the game. She can be strong in Hunters due to being able to steal kills quite effectively, and she can be strong in Takedown and Bot Drop for dealing lots of damage at once against bots with her Dancing Flames gadget.

She can be viable on all kinds of maps, typically shines on maps that have open spaces because she won’t need to rely heavily on predicting enemy movement in the bushes, but can struggle when cover is too sparse.

Amber’s ability to consistently hold control suffers when enemies obtain their hypercharges. Due to the oppressive nature of hypercharges, her better builds tend to help her bounce back after a big push.

Speed: Ineffective, it fell off because Piper’s damage buff and the Gear’s nerf, enabling Amber to be 2 shot. Pretty much only used on Snake Prairie now, it’s almost useless on the wrong maps.

Health: Situational, helpful when having damage is no concern. She’s by no means a tanky brawler, but it helps her sustain position. Longer range brawlers can struggle a little more in control based modes if she pairs this with shield Gear.

Damage: Situational/Effective, good to pair with shield or reload when facing tanks on an open map, decent as a replacement for reload against 3 squishies, as it turns her super into a nuke, letting her get them with minimal prior damage.

Vision: Effective, thanks to her being able to cover space with ammo efficiently, Amber’s one of the better brawlers to run vision on to support teammates. Can be helpful on medium bushy maps, though it’s prone to losing value quickly on said maps if the bushes get destroyed. Its utility varies depending on how likely teammates will capitalize on scouted enemies, typically pairs well with snipers.

Shield: Effective, synergizes extremely well with her Dancing Flames gadget and helps with lots of otherwise really difficult matchups against snipers. Most importantly, it breaks Colette’s 2 hit super kill combo, Piper can’t 2 shot, Brock can’t 3 shot, Squeak can’t 3 shot with chain reaction, Gray can’t 3 shot, Nani can’t kill with 4 projectiles, and Charlie can’t 4 shot. The gadget might stop assassins from cycling off your spawn, and shield Gear makes that entry smoother too.

Extra Gadget: Ineffective/Situational, even though Dancing Flames is one of the best gadgets in the game, its duration is sufficiently long enough to where worrying about wasting a gadget isn’t a big deal. It can be a strong aggressive alternative to heath Gear with Fire Starters though, trying to leave as little to chance with her speed boosts as possible.

Reload: Effective, it makes approaching Amber as a tank or a mid range brawler much more difficult because of its obvious damage boost to one of the brawlers with the longest reloads in the game. It’s also effectively a miniature vision Gear, but with more focus on supporting yourself than teammates.

Sticky Oil: Situational, it’s main use is supporting long range who can hit the safe in heist while she herself can’t do much beyond controlling the center of the map, such as on Kaboom Canyon.

Fast auto aim: She has a small delay before holding the auto aim button and firing, about 300 milliseconds or 3 flames. If you can button mash auto aim and fire close to 9 times per second, it’s absolutely worth it to do so, as usually you don’t want to continuously auto aim for longer than 3 seconds - after that point holding becomes more effective once again. Firing that much sooner also makes a big difference up close, when most brawlers unload ammo quickly.

Auto aim switch: Alternatively, if you’re switching from manual aim to auto aim, you can drag the joystick back to the center to instantly start auto aiming at 10 flames per second without having that 300ms firing delay.

Ammo superiority: Amber has 40 ammo that reload quickly individually, while most other brawlers have a very limited amount of shots. When you duel a brawler with the same range as her in an open space and find yourself getting hit, switch up your movement pattern - the enemy missing a hit or two makes a drastic difference, while you can simply cook them up with auto aim.

supering over a wall: When you try to hit someone with Amber’s fire fluid who’s outside of her main attack range, such as over a wall or with a distant puddle, keep in mind the speed the puddle burns up is half the speed of her main attack, so compensate by burning the puddle when they’re about 3 tiles deep into her super from far away or when they’re hugging the wall.

Getting the most out of the area of her fluid: Amber's fire fluid area is tile based, meaning sometimes it reaches a little further or a little less far than most attacks. However, it’s easier to tell the exact area you’re covering with it as a result. The area of effect of tiles occupied by her fire fluid is a little larger than the aiming reticle of the super; that just shows where the oil will be placed. She drops fire fluid where her position is when she supers and makes a trail to where she aimed her super, which can be useful to hit multiple enemies if one of them is right on top of you. Her fluid can hit someone or a heist safe trapped on a tile horizontally or vertically adjacent to a puddle tile, just not on a tile diagonally adjacent to a puddle tile. It can hit someone pressed up against the wall opposite of her too if the puddle tile is on the wall they’re hugging!

Fire Starters timing: Time her fire starters gadget so the trail of fire fluid ends where you’re going to start fighting, preferably ending near cover.

General super usage: Her super can be used for blocking off part of the map for control or dealing extra damage on her target.

Delaying kills: Because of her fast reload, Amber can sometimes benefit from holding back her ammo on a kill that can be safely confirmed. For example, if she’s facing a triple tank team composition and a lower health opposing Bibi or El Primo tries to get Amber to waste as much ammo as possible by juking, she can fire off as much ammo needed to just block their natural healing. Sometimes it’s just better to kill them, but that will put more strain on your ammo when they respawn and push forward.

In some control based modes and maps, when you already have control, you can super enemy brawlers and leave them with just enough health to survive her super with a sliver of HP. If they don’t push in and die, they’ll be put out of commission for longer than if they just died and respawned. This works best when the enemy needs to expose themselves to Amber to push forwards, like if they enter the hook-shaped areas on the sides of Dueling Beetles!

Control super usage: When using a super to control a large portion of the map, use it in a way that does the best job at protecting the objective or mid control. Generally, you want to have a good way to shoot at the enemies around the puddle as well. A very straightforward example would be throwing the super where the gems spawn close to the enemy team in a close gem grab game when your team gets control.

Avoiding wasted control supers: The closest you want to shoot an enemy without burning your puddle is half a tile towards a puddle, so aim towards the far half of the tile. You can seriously fake out an enemy and briefly jerk your aim towards the puddle in some situations, but the last thing you want is for someone to bait you into burning a puddle when you’re using it for control.

Control super usage example: In a theoretical example, on Ring of Fire, the mid lane is 7 tiles wide. Throwing her puddle right in the center part of the mid lane to deny the zone is inefficient because you’re almost forced to burn the puddle to shoot back, and people will play towards the side of the puddle making the effective area the enemies need to push through only 3 tiles long; it’s difficult to fight back against them if they shoot you from behind the puddle. Baiting it is easy because the area they’re avoiding is 3 tiles long. However, if you throw her super 1 tile to the side of the very center of the map, the area they need to avoid on the puddle side is 5 tiles wide. Even if the enemies stick to the far side of the puddle, they can still get hit on all 5 vertical tiles because they’re horizontally trapped against the side of the mid lane. They’ll be forced to fight back from one direction, the side away from the puddle, as opposed to the left and right, and you’ll easily be able to shoot back at them if they push your half.

Amber’s fire fluid will still apply the damage over time effect on a brawler with a yellow immunity shield, like Lou or Max, so she won’t need to worry about them fully negating the effect of a super with their gadget. They can still negate a tick of damage if they activate it while it’s burning though.

Any extremely fast dashing brawler, such as a Fang super, holds an extremely small chance to go through a burning puddle without receiving damage over time.

Because Dancing Flames gadget has virtually no cooldown, she can use a gadget to anticipate a fang super chaining towards you.

Amber's dancing flames gadget is bigger than Melodie's note until Melodie uses her expand gadget. Dancing flames can be used behind a 2x2 to deal damage, but can't be used to easily create openings on Jacky and Doug matchups in particular since they can hit her too. Bibi can just knock Amber back as well - beware!

Invisibility support: In control modes, lots of Amber’s problem matchups rely on being able to hit her when she can’t hit them back. When those matchups are forced to speculate where she is, that advantage is gone - especially in hot zone. Amber also does great against Tara’s shadows, which could otherwise be a problem for Leon teammates. Her damage also makes it less likely for Sandy to be overwhelmed by tanks.

Strong reach brawlers: Brawlers who excel at taking out brawlers in places she can’t reach, such as Brock or Piper on open maps, or Squeak and high damage throwers on enclosed maps can focus down where Amber's range falls a little short.

Bulky control, Healers, and Max: Amber doesn’t have the best HP and speed for her range, so brawlers that can help safely get her onto an objective can work wonders. Don’t use these in Bounty or Knockout though, since her poor survivability will be her downfall - Amber can’t shred a safe if she can’t get there to begin with.