A Weird Longboat use I found

I was experimenting with the Viking’s longboat ultimate recently basically the situation was is I went to Q and got all 3 vikings entombed with longboat off CD, I used longboat while selecting the viking in the very back of the entomb while the other two vikings were directly infront of them and the boat spawned outside of the entomb letting me escape. I don’t know if that’s enough of a reason to go for longboat on a viking map versus leoric but y’know I guess it’s something?

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That’s just how unit spawning works in sc2 engine. The new one will be “pushed” when there is something in the way of regular pathing. I don’t know if it is still the case but that is what allowed Genji to travel larger than intended distances. The game wouldn’t want him stuck inside of a wall so it gave a little boost. Nowadays I believe you hit your nose against the wall if you misjusdge the area of no mans land.

If your production building kept spawning units and you don’t move them eventually they would form several rings around the object and new units would start appearing further from the center after each lap. There’s no limit to when the game breaks down other than the population cap set in the editor.

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Not really, it’s just too specific.

I think in the scenario you point out, if the Leo goes lvl 20 Buried Alive, you are in trouble when getting all 3 viks caught in the entomb. If one is outside the silence, you could probably pop the boat. Still not enough value in my book to ever go this over Play Again.

Longboat was a ton of fun back in the day, but too many nerfs has made it a tough choice to pick.

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There is actually a maximum range to it but it is set pretty big by default (something like 5 units if i recall correctly), after that point if a unit were to finish it would simply just have a full blue bar on the queue and wait until there is room before immediately spawning the unit. I have no idea if they used all the same aspects of the editor to code heroes of the storm and if so if boat did count as a “train” ability by the editor in the data but in that case there may be a theoretical scenario where boat is incapable of spawning which would certainly be interesting to find out what the game does (eg wait for open spawn location put it on cd or just not respond to the order at all).

To cast longboat raid all vikings need to be in range and alive, B can be anywhere in mid but there is a max distance between A and C if you place them in a line (it can be a triangle with two even sides).

You can longboat as well if one of the vikings is dead, but you can never pilot it alone. My knowledge is limited by I believe that if you can’t manually pick the spawn position out of which individual vikings.

If all three are alive, boat always spawns on top of mid guy.
If two are alive one of which is the mid guy, he is always the captain.
If small guy and big guy are the only two alive, it spawns on top of small guy.

This won’t probably mean anything to you outside of highest levels of play and I guaranteed you’ll always forget it, but it can be learned and mastered

As with Chen’s storm earth and fire, someone might notice that you aren’t spamming abilities but casting in a specific order on purpose to get the most out of the combo.

You can pilot the boat with 1 viking it just doesnt have that much hp so it tends to be pretty weak outside of level 20

You can, there are a total of 7 spawn positions you can choose from when there are 3 vikings alive, if you select 1 viking it places the boat on said viking, selecting two places the boat between the two vikings and selecting all three vikings places the boat between the three vikings, I tend to select Eric when using the boat due to his faster movement speed enabling more controlled placement of the boat.

However I think boat still has a lot more opportunities for niche use that I don’t know about such as escaping leoric’s entomb

Can’t be too bad if it has invincibility frames, but not sure how it would work against Pyroblast for example, would the fireball fizzle out or correct trajectory if one of the vikings simply vanished into the longboat?

I believe the fireball would go to the place the targeted viking was and then blow up though I rarely don’t pick jump even if I pick boat when im fighting a kt and so I haven’t gotten pyro’d very often in that matchup especially when jump is on cd

True, Pyro on vikings seem like a waste, but there are other spells which fixate on the target such as Triple Trap.

Admittedly I haven’t picked Vikings more than 5 times in the last year, but I don’t think Longboat in it’s current state ever warrants a pick over instantly respawning. The damage it deals is negligible after so many nerfs.

(When I first started playing HotS, Longboat was one of the highest damage heroics in the game!)

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