Stukov: Pls tell me more

General Discussion
1

In your eyes where is he?

I like him as a healer and peeler, kit is good but I feel when the group is not tightly grouped, he lacks healing (which is a con).

Healing pathogen is nice when I see it jump but the players don’t know and shouldn’t really be focusing on “hey I got the pathogen on me, I need to go to X player to pass it around”.

I think there should be a talent that the pathogen radius is increased, so a player doesn’t need to be so close?

He’s one of my favourite healers but can be fustrating to heal a team when there’s 1 or 2 around. Then I get blamed “you’re NOT HEALING!!”…

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2

Oh, that’s a usual thing. Stukov has enough burst heal, but not enough heal in general. And people should understand it, or something

3

Thing is, I can only activate it every 16 seconds. That’s a long CD and if a team is low on health, to spread the pathogen around THEN activate it. A good stukov will have great timing to get a mass instant burst heal.

my favourite talent is the ‘universal carrier’ as the pathogen keeps jumping from player to player

4

In that case yes, it’s good.

5

That’s on his team to work with stukov to get good healing, not the kit. Now alexstraza is in a worse state

6

Never blamed his kit, i like his kit. I never expect the team to always group but it’s just fustrating that you will get blamed all the time for not healing and it just comes down to if they know how stukov works.

I can give you a healing pathogen, but it’s not burst, it’s healing over time and if my trait D is up, I may use it one 1 or wait until the pathogen spreads to use it.

7

Stukov does an extremely high amount of healing. It’s just mostly stained healing like lucio and its not easy to quickly react to burst damage sense you gotta spread your Q around.

I recommend mostly putting healing pathogen on your self so that you have the most control over where your healing goes. Unless someone needs healing right away.

3 Likes
8

When someone complains tell them that you can’t heal them from stupidity.

9

One of the trickiest aspects of stukov is that he probably changes the most compared to all other healers. From what I’ve how he gets played, it’s not uncommon to either see:

  • players not pick the talents that support how they want to play him,
  • they get too caught up in his offensive potential that they neglect healing their allies
  • they wait until allies are taking damage to then try to spread healing pathogen and try to catch up when it’s then too late.

Since pathogen is a heal over time effect, it can be spread almost continually and be up and ready for bio-kill burst once it’s needed rather than trying to do the ‘catch up’ thing,

The ‘easy’ mode build for Stukov is Spine Launcher, Once Good Spread, Growing Infestation, Hungers/Spines and then Superstrain.

Having the ranged attack allows stukov to constantly stutter step and move around the battlefield, so he spreads pathogen. With the cdr talent at 4, he wants to always get it to at least 2 other allies (himself for 3rd bounce) so Pathogen is always up and even has a burst proc on root/stun come later game. The chosen E talents are to apply some pressure, but otherwise prevent stukov from just channeling too long and missing chances to keep spreading pathogen or hitting enemies with basic attacks.

W build is a burst variation on that that builds around Targeting Excision instead. If one enemy is afflicted with a Weighted Pustule when kill-switch is used, that then triggers cdr for his bio-kill switch and basic abilities. With the W quest removing the mana cost, that becomes a substitute for ranged spines and stukov can almost always have 1 target hit with a weight pustul (unless they group too closely) which ties in well with the lurking arm + root combo so you build around turning some aggression into opportunistic healing.

I do prefer to pair that set up with the block talent at 4 and Pox populi at 16 so the bio-kill adds armor to allies, and then the armor lingers longer.

Overall, he is probably my least played healer, so I tend to play more defensive than not, but I have seen some really solid aggressive stukov’s and those I think are the envy of most healers. Having the ability to peel for backline allies while also have some wombo/combo potential is pretty much living the dream for teamside contribution.

Being somewhat reliant on allies to spread pathogen (esp when it can be too dangerous to approach in person) is frustrating, and some cite his later game talents as being pretty lackluster, but I think that that’s understable given he’s a lot like Maiev and his basekit is threatening enough he doesn’t need huge powerspikes so long as the other talents are actually used correctly and he doesn’t spend too much time sitting in E channel.

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10

His basic attack damage is really high because of his low attack speed. And low attack speed isn’t so bad

11

Believe it or not, his aa dps is about as high as thralls. Makes him a fairly decent pick on the immortals map.

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12

Stukov out-damage Alarak and you can challenge heroes like Malthael to short fights.

I see Stukov as angry healer. He does good heals but his real potential is how he deals damage. Well played he does a ton of damage without having to chose dmg talents or builds just because 70% of Stukov talents are about deal more damage or optimize them.
Right now he is my healer and there is no bad comp from him but I admit he is not the best healer right now,he’s good but not the best.

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13

It’s higher actually, Thrall’s AA DPS is ~157, Stukov’s is 175. Alarak (180) and Tychus (200) are the only heroes I know of who have a higher baseline AA DPS.

14

Na, Stukov’s AA is over 200, acording to wiki is 261.

15

That’s damage, not DPS. His attack speed is very slow (0.67 attacks per second), bringing his AA DPS down. 261 x 0.67 = 174.87, which rounds to 175.

That’s why I listed Alarak’s as 180 rather than 150 (his AA damage is 150 but his attack speed is 1.2/sec) and Tychus’ as 200 rather than 50 (AA damage is 50 but attack speed is 4/sec).

But you are correct in that Stukov’s AA damage is really high. In fact, 261 is the highest baseline basic attack damage in the game. As far as I can tell, he’s also third for basic attack DPS as well, with only Tychus and Alarak having higher baseline AA DPS.

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16

It’s better to have a lower attack speed if you have a higher attack damage to compensate as you’re not gonna stand still in fights, so stukovs realistic damage is higher

17

I always think that healers should have a voiceline that activates kinda like Abathur’s symbiote when he first hats you. Something like “You are healed!” or “Spread my Healing!” (Stukov), “Abundance/Preservation has been bestowed upon you, Heal!” (Alex), or “Group up!” (Lucio)

18

I had a similar idea. Don’t know if you played stukov but when he heals you, there’s a green plus symbol on top of them with a countdown timer. I think that should be visible to players too.

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19

Weak. Overdid it with nerfs, and I find most of his current talents to be pointless or weak for a support.

20

He lacks single target healing. His actual group healing is pretty high tier, especially given he is a damage power house when needed as well.

Personally I rate him as one of the high tier healers in ARAM. Constant 5 person spreads can easily rack up insane healing numbers.

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