Hey this is a lot to read, but I bolded most stuff to get the gist of it. If you don't wanna read but want to leave your thoughts on Anduin, please, leave some comments. I've had a lot of fun with him, even though i find that he feels weak.
For the last week, I’ve played around as nobody but Anduin. I got 41 games in.
I honestly love the idea of this hero. I think his balance between aoe and single target healing is great, but there are a few things which I think are lacking as a recent Anduin main. I’ve fallen from my 4-day 68-73% win rate grace to 53% over the last 2 days, and I gotta say, I’m heartbroken. Not to be that guy, but an uncoordinated/hard countered team can only go so far (QM). I don’t think I’m playing any worse, aside from the two or three games where I knew full well I was making bad decisions, but I felt almost useless in losing games as Anduin. Although I’d have great stats, saves, and would get on the leaderboard for whatever title, we would still lose badly.
First, pros and con:
Pros:
- Pretty good sustained healer. Although he has mana problems in the very beginning of the game, I hardly find myself having to hearth back due to low mana later on. He can sustain himself through many of his talents and skills, like healing well, divine star, his ults, and through picking up the talent which allows him to heal himself a portion of what he heals an ally. Because of this, he can provide pretty good healing in small increments over medium lengths of time. His talents allow him to focus one person’s health and then jump to another’s, which makes healing much more efficient.
- Great talent tree options. Anduin can take two main paths in his talent tree, both offering him a lot of self-sustain as well. One path focuses on passive healing via basic attacks and the other focuses on balancing skills to actively heal your allies. Both are very interesting sides. Overall, his talent tree is pretty good. It gives him a good amount of versatility and a higher skill ceiling given you use his synergies well.
- Tempting Ultimates. Both of Anduin’s ultimates are great, in my opinion. Not only does Anduin have the option to restore 25% of his team’s HP while disallowing for them to die, but he also gets a great situational ultimate to use if their team has a lot of CC whereas yours has initiation. I’ve found both ults to be amazingly useful no matter which I took, though I’ve been picking lightbomb more often given the amount of CC teams I’ve been up against. It seems like he can always get usefulness out of his ultimate, no matter which is picked up. This is great, as it gives him a lot of global utility.
- Cool skill kit. Anduin is given a single-target heal, a wave dmg + aoe heal, a moving root, a babysitter passive ability, and two great ults. Even by themselves, these skills are all appealing for a dedicated healer. Used right, Anduin can create the focus target in a team fight, bait, turn the tables completely, and so on. He provides great pure healing utility, given the user has very good positioning. Anduin’s abilities, paired up with a user’s game sense and map/team awareness, makes for a great combo.
- His neo-president Anduin skin is hilarious
Cons
- He’s weak. Really weak. Anduin can hardly hurt a fly. Even when specced into basic attack/damage builds, Anduin lacks any noticeable difference. In a 1v1 fight, the only thing keeping Anduin alive would be his ability to out-sustain the opposition, though this isn’t wise, given that he lacks the mobility to make a great escape if the other team gets backup. In a team fight, the user would want to attack the opponents as much as possible to as to heal the lowest target (granted the user takes the talent), but the payoff seems minimal. To heal the lowest target, Anduin must: get into a position where he is far away enough from the target to make an escape/cannot be cornered from two or more heroes, close enough to basic attack the enemy without being hit back, close enough to heal whichever ally is in the midst of the fight, have enough room to reposition, yet be far away enough to be able to pull your initiator/ganked teammate into safety. Positioning with Anduin takes so much precise movement for it to really pay off. Because he casts his heals and needs to position to be behind the people he heals, it makes the duration of time to heal an ally with basic attacks minimal. Additionally, there is no threat to him basic attacking anybody, ever. He’s slow and weak. Having him in team fights basic attacking can prove to be a liability, as he hardly contributes to the damage while he is leaves himself within range, as a priority target, to get stomped on. His damage in team fights is similar to dropping raindrops on somebody who can just wipe them off or let them dry. For a hero to spec into damage, there, to me, seems like a great lack of damage potential considering his constantly-moving playstyle.
- His passive ability. His passive is hard to balance. It makes an ally unstoppable, pulling them towards you near-instantly. However, there’s no talent to buff his passive, even though its potential can change Anduin for the better. What if Anduin could also protect his target? What if its range could be increased? What if the target could get a speed boost from the leap? What if he could jump to an ally as an option, such as Garrosh’s flip? For such a useful skill, it’s a downer that it cannot be upgraded through levels. Additionally, my biggest gripe with the ability is how punishing it is to not get a target in time. Going back to the part where it doesn’t protect coupled with Anduin’s necessity to position well, Anduin lacks the movement to get to a stray ally in time quite often. He has not Lucio’s movement nor Tassadar’s invuln + speed, so finding an ally to pull out of danger puts him into imminent danger most of the time. However, this isn’t a big deal. What is a big deal is that Anduin has a full skill cooldown of 80 seconds for casting the ability on an ally who dies the moment you use it. This is insane to me, as other heroes are granted a reduced time for skills that don’t go through, such as from stuns (although maybe this is changed?). If the cooldown was reduced from an unsuccessful save, it wouldn’t be so bad, but the skill requires such good positioning to keep both Anduin and the ally safe before, during, and after the save, that landing a good save requires him, more than anyone, to know the skill cooldowns of enemy heroes you might not have been near for the whole duration of the fight. The point of the skill is to save an ally from being ganked, but the failure is so punishing and only makes Anduin more susceptible to being ganked from its lack of skill tree enhancements and punishing cooldown.
- He can’t outheal a lot of healers, especially when the team is at lower health. Maybe it’s because I’m not the best player, but only 2-3/41 times I played as him did I get over 100k healing. According to Hotslogs, I average 70k healing. With him, I find it hard to break 100k, but I don’t know. Maybe it is just me. Sometimes his healing feels really weak, especially when my allies have low health. Anduin prospers when everybody is at medium-high health, but is quite weak when allies are at medium-low health. He has not the ability to quickly heal a lot of people, as other healers usually have. Because he has longer healing cooldowns and generally lower heal potencies, Anduin certainly cannot flourish really at all against damage heavy teams. He can only rely on his ultimate to restore 25%, assuming he doesn’t get CC’d out of it. His ultimates provide great utility, but his healing potency suffers at lower health. Because of this, I wish he had more abilities to enhance the healing done to lower health heroes – or, at least, make that which does more viable/reliable. Unfortunately, if a team composition just features a burst-heavy composition, Anduin’s heals can be almost useless, aside from his ultimate. This causes for him and his team to need to give nearly all objectives on bursty teams – this shouldn’t happen. Anduin’s lack of strong passive or active healing makes more quick and bursty team fights to be a loss far more often than not.
- I hate cc I hate it so much please remove it please I hate it im sick of hammer + garrosh + diablo in every game and it really sucks a lot and I have an awful time because im useless then ☹
Firstly, I think Anduin's damage is unbelievably low. However, I find that it is possible that his current kit almost requires him to have this low dps because his healing can be buffed from it. It’s a double edged sword. That being said, it is really sad that he has so many skills surrounded around basic attacking. However, his basic attacks are not only very slow, but they hardly deal any damage at all. Even though one can get a lot of utility out of his basic attack talents, the payoff feels minimal and underpowered.
Overall, I think that Anduin is pretty underpowered, especially until whenever he can get lv 16 talents, as all (but maybe one – really situational) those skills are great (but also make choosing one of them a let down because they’re all so good for him).
I honestly see a lot of potential in Anduin. I do really think he needs a buff because he’s kind of a jack of all, ace of none situation at this point of time. There’s a lot of talent suggestions I hope can come into play. I think he can be a lot better if his passive is altered. He truly does require great positioning, but being out of position is so unforgiving, especially with how inefficient it can be to synergize his attack builds to be effective.
________________________i also wish i didn’t lose so much so often now. ![:frowning:](https://d3rakab8gpdsa3.cloudfront.net/en/heroes/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
morales is really the only hero I’ve played enough of to be like “wow I really cannot do anything to help this team win no matter how well I am playing”. not sure if it is just me who feels like anduin is just trash against bursty/cc comps to the point of it being a “give” situation every objective or not. I don’t feel like I am tilting, but the sudden stream of losses is insane. obviously some games I am just doing poorly, but the majority of my losses makes me think that anduin just cannot help to carry an okay team to victory, whereas other heroes can really do that. it’s like anduin can get in one good save + heal per team fight, maybe, and then a good ult. His regular abilities don’t seem to be enough to survive and add to a heated team fight, though, especially against burst. just sucks, idk. really like him tho