I was mostly just pointing out that you can’t be a terrible duelist (aka bottom 50% of the roster) when you have enough sticking power, damage, and tankiness to slap most heroes into the dirt.
EDIT: Also 45 seconds is like, less than the amount of time it takes for two minion waves to spawn, so if a Deathwing is injured too bad they can back for the healing from warping back (since the B counts as self healing as part of the active) and then use their Z to heal the rest as they warp back.
Making Dehaka or Falstad use their Z for sustain also isn’t really winning, not any more than making say Fenix back off and shield up for a bit. You stop them from warping globally for a minute and unless the person on the other end is foolish and decides to do that right before an objective, and then warps to the opposite side of the map, it shouldn’t be too big of a deal for the Falstad or Dehaka.
DW has to use his flight to heal. It gets be interrupted if he takes damage, and there is a delay to it. He can’t just fly up and heal in the middle of a fight.
Ranged heroes can just stutter step. Zul Jin doesn’t have mobility, be he’ll never have to go in range since he can stack his W quest on DW all day.
Falstad can Q from out of range.
Gul Dan never need to be in range
Hanzo will never be in range
Junkrat never needs to be in range
Orphea
Li Ming
Stutter stepping slows you down, and Deathwing himself can Stutter step. Also if you don’t kill him by the time he reaches a gate he’ll be back in less time than a minion wave with basically full health.
Also none of the heroes you listed are characters that’d ever attempt to duel Deathwing, and if he ever gets close to them with his dash to W they’re gonna eat a lot more damage than he is.
Again, I never said he was a great solo laner, but his sustain makes him passable and it’s not like you can kill him before he kills you ever unless he overcommits.
While he seems selfish in concept much like medivh i doubt you’ll get to suceed ignoring your team.
Plus the ennemy team will have to make use of their 5 man unity to bring DW down like Cho’Gall does force you to work as a team to beat them.
While it’s true that Deathwing doesn’t benefit from allied abilities, I think you’ll find that he still relies on his team to be effective. We made a lot of design decisions to ensure that he doesn’t go too far in the direction of being completely self-reliant.
As one example, while he can’t be healed by allies, he very much designed around excelling during big teamfight engagements.
Because his abilities have such long wind-ups, he combos very well with his allies when it comes to receiving help in setting up a good Molten Flame, which can simply win engagements when done correctly. He also helps allied CC chains happen due to having fairly good follow-up CC, particularly when in Worldbreaker form.
When played optimally, I think Deathwing is absolutely at his best when fighting alongside his team. In 1v1 settings he isn’t nearly as potent due to his abilities being easily dodged due to their long wind-ups.
However, like many have said in this thread, you never know what’s going to happen until the hero’s released into the wild. What I will say though is that this was definitely considered during his design, and we’ve made a lot of changes over his development to ensure that he is still very much a team player.
Deathwing’s best match ups would be with heroes who rely on cc to deal damage or to keep themselves save, while being relatively immobile, i.e. Sgt. hammer and Valeera.
The best counters would be heroes who deal large amounts of damage from range, while being able to keep that range, while also having excess to percentage damage as well, i.e. Greymane and Tracer.
Counters are generally what you would expect. Percent based damage is great against him, so things like Malthael and Tychus give him a hard time.
A more surprising one in my experience are fast-moving, auto-attack based heroes like Valla and Lunara. Because Deathwing has long wind-ups, when he’s fighting out in the open against these kinds of heroes they run circles around him and have an easy time dodging his stuff while killing him. His best bet in those scenarios is to run away a bit then suddenly turn around and catch them with an Onslaught > Auto Attack combination.
He’s also a little weak to poke, things like Hanzo and Chromie can whittle him down.
He’s great against teams with lots of Melee, since his abilities all pierce and generally do damage in wide areas. He’s also uniquely good against heroes like Garrosh and ETC since he doesn’t have to respect their normal areas of threat that they control.
More than excelling against certain heroes I feel he excels on certain maps. Maps with lots of choke points like Infernal Shrines are great for him because of how much area he can deny with his various abilities.
Tychus is as good as ricardo milos that’s why he was the first hero to think of when i saw deathwing. he’ll be his living nightmare just like ricardo milos! he melts anybody so easily.
wrote it for you on a notepad!