So I realized that my only real tank is Jo and when she’s banned/taken and I need to fill tank I’m kinda screwed. I used to be a good Arthas 2 years ago but now my winrate with him is like 35% when I’m lucky. Wanted to give ETC a shot. So here are some questions:
What’s the best build in general?
Block party decent vs 2+ AA heroes of I should stick with Prog rock?
Can never go wrong with Death mosh?
Silly question but how do you use your abilities? When to keep Q for evade and when to use it aggressively?
Typicals ETC mistakes you see that I should avoid?
You don’t go mosh when you see too much potential interrupts in ennemy team, right? how many? 3+ ?
Pinball Wizard
Ult: Mosh if the enemy has little CC and stage dive if its a big map and you cant mosh.
Mic Check
Depend on the enemy comp and which healer you have
Usually ult upgrade, but all are pretty reasonable
Anytime you would pick block on a hero is when you should pick Block party, But 95 % of the time i go Prog.
if you are getting focused down hard and want to punish enemies for that then yes, but Death mosh IMO is the worst level 20 and i rarely pick it
Use you Combo of Q wait like 1 second then W them into your team but only do this to punish an overextend hero (even a tank)
Other than that use your ability to protect the backline
Diving in and using all your peel willy nilly
And it’s ok to save your mosh pit for a long time, enemies will save their certain interrupts till you use mosh so its kinda like a stand off of abilities
Patience is Key for ETC
It also depends on the range of the stuns, Malganis and Diablo are easy to get into a mosh so i usually don’t worry about those “cc” but if it’s like a valla or KTZ , like a very easy to land stun on a ranged hero, about 2 of those maybe 3 its kinda bad for mosh but still possibly.
First off he is the god of rock not cows
And remember if you take Mosh pit, you have the most powerful ult in the game, and let the enemies know that
Prog rock ->Loud speaker -> Echo Pedal -> Mosh -> Mic Check -> Show Stopper/Aggressive Shredding -> Situational.
Block party is good vs heavy aa comps, would consider more than 1 aa hero. Stage dive is good on large maps. All lvl 16 talents are good. If you don’t get focussed in team fights, you can consider getting Storm Shield or ult upgrade instead of Death Metal.
Block Party is arguably the best block talent in the game. Don’t pick aggressive shredding if you don’t go prog rock though.
See answer #1
4 and 5. Don’t waste Q for waveclear. Use W and E once you get Echo Pedal. Mic Check really helps at 13+.
A lot of ETC go pinball wizard and try to always engage with Q immediately followed by W. In a lot of cases this is a mistake. A lot of times, especially when you gank. You wanna just run in, W the enemy into your team, bodyblock and then use Q once the try to walk past you.
Be mindful where you W people. Don’t push the tank into your team unless you’re sure you can focus him down.
If you engage with Q, don’t use W immediately after. Powerslide stun lasts 1.25s Your teammates need that window to land their skillshots on the enemy. There are too many ETCs out there who make it hard for their teammates to land skillshots because they W too soon.
If enemy has a lot of interrupts, you can still go Mosh, but it will be nearly impossible to engage with it. Hold it as long as you can and use it to peel or cut off their escape. A good mosh doesnt have to last the full duration, sometimes 1 second is enough.
More tips: your autos hurt. Use them.
Your W is very useful to deny health globes for the enemy team. Push back their tanks when he goes for it. This matters a lot.
Against Garrosh: Don’t use Slide aggressively before Garrosh uses throw. If he throws you, slide back into your team while stunning as many as possible. If he throws a teammate: slide in to help them.
I probably forgot a lot, but that’s mainly how I play the cowman; he’s my favorite tank and I’ve had quite a bit of success with him.
I forgot an important tip: ETC has rather low health for a tank. You wanna space out your abilities to keep the armor buff from your trait up for as long as possible.
This is also a good argument in favor of Mic Check at 13, although the heavy slow from Face Smelt can seem tempting.
very interesting since when you dance you look like you’re about to cast it just without sound. imagine it working and people using their ult on you? despite no sound going on? lmao
ETC is at like 95% ban rate on KR, so my advice is to play him whenever possible!
Otherwise, all the above is good info. I would further suggest that teleport is more useful than upgraded mosh because it is actually more reliable for getting the stun you want than the power slide gives.
Finally, you have so much self-healing that you should be always trying to minimize how much your healer needs to heal you. Only take poke damage you can heal yourself, and body blocking is far more important than using your abilities. Abilities are to reposition and secure kills or prevent kills.
“only looking for 4 ~ 5 men mosh”
If you can secure a kill by using mosh, it isn’t wasted. Especially, a kill before obj or during obj.
I have one man mosh a Zeratul when he dives on my back-line. It leads us to win the obj due to a number advantage.
More important than talents is the mindset. ETC is not a tank. Not in the sense heroes like Muradin or Johanna are. He cannot take nearly that much damage and is heal is mediocre.
ETC is more like Garrosh or Anub’arak, he’s defined by the sheer power of his crowd control.
Your main “Combo” is to use your dash to get into the middle of the enemy team and then knock them all over the place with a loud-speaker boosted Face Melt. It’s a huge aoe and scatters the enemy, setting them up for picks. You can recast it fairly quickly afterwards too as long as you hit 2 heroes (Remember how big the Aoe is with Loud Speakers? Yeah.)
If you can land one, go for a Mosh pit. Keep in mind. Miracle moshes do happen but they’re not your goal. If you moshed 3 people for 2s, that’s a total 3sish aoe stun on 3 heroes if you count Powerslide. It’s Massive. But it’s more art than science. The only thing I can tell you is no two ETC players will mosh in all the same situations.
I see a lot of bad ETCs taking Echo Pedal, which is a trap. Your goal is to disrupt the enemy team and stay with yours. Not to go off stat padding your siege damage. Only take Echo Pedal if you intend to go Stage Dive, and only take Stage dive if you aren’t confident with your mosh.
Pinball wizard gives you good burst damage and Hammer-on is good in less organized gameplay where you have to fight your own fights more often.
If the enemy is, for some godforsaken reason, diving you and focusing you, take Death Metal and win the entire game then and there. Otherwise, Tour Bus, or Bolt of the Storm are both good picks.
i totally agree. you shouldn’t save your ult just for “that moment” where you’re looking for the “perfect 4 / 5man mosh” while you could turn the game to your team’s favor by getting 1 or 2 man mosh people that try to dive your team like zeratul etc… it isn’t a waste of mosh if it get’s a kill and saves your team too! use it whenever you find an opportunity to kill even a single target
In the early game look for rotation picks. ETC is totally capable of body blocking people out from getting into their gate. You have enough health to soak a few tower shots too. Always watch the other lanes to make sure you aren’t collapsed on, but his early game pick potential is very high compared to similar tanks.
Be healing yourself all the time. Save your other abilities, but spam your healing if you aren’t full. It uses very little mana and is great to allow you to have slightly more aggressive positioning against poke.
Power slide is more for defense than offense unless you have an advantage. The advice given about sliding in and then pushing everyone is terrible advice. Never do that. Offensive slide is only used for picks or to execute a well-timed mosh. Always keep your slide available to stay alive if your approach ends up looking bad. Sliding into the enemy and the pushing them all away is about the #1 most useless thing you could do on him.
Maybe I’ll drum up some replays later. I regularly Maintain a 75-80% wr in SL on KR. I’d have tons of games on him if he wasn’t banned almost all of the time.
Except that’s the thing. By breaking your enemy apart, you are enabling a pick.
ETC is not a defensive character. He does not have the durability to stand and hold the way some other tanks can. Powerslide is not an escape and using it as such is wasting the one of the strongest stuns in the game. That’s the thing you need to do. Think of Powerslide as a stun first, and a mobility skill second.
Your goal with a tank like ETC is to divide the enemy team in such a way yours can defeat them in detail. You cannot walk-in a competent team. They have a frontline too, and any competent frontline will punish an attmpted walk-in with extreme prejudice. And you cannot stand toe to toe and zone the enemy against an enemy tank with greater durability than you. You have to play to ETC’s strengths, and those are his crowd control.
The goal with Tour Bus is not to make your mosh more capable of catching. It is to enable your mosh to adapt. Often the goal with a Tour Bus slide is to dash slightly to the right or left and towards a new target, to pre-empt their attempt at CCing you, or adjust after you have already landed a Mosh.
Bolt is good at performing a Dota-style blink-initiation, yes, but those only work if you can manage a successful 5-man mosh or atleast all potential interupts are taken care of, since the enemy will have all their CC up and have no other immediate goals besides interupting you.
Not true at all. You are burning two cooldowns to get a minimal knockback and putting yourself in a compromising position without having your abilities up again in time to save yourself from dying. ETC is not a dive tank and you shouldn’t be telling people to play him like that.
What skill level and win rate do you have with him?
The net distance you achieve between your opponent’s backline and their frontline with Loud Speakers is quite substantial. That’s your goal here. To divide the enemy team so they have to waste multiple mobility skills to simply recover or otherwise enable your team to beat on the enemy’s frontline with all they’ve got (especially if their bruiser is someone relatively vulnerable to such antics or you caught a melee assassin that got a bit too greedy).
As for the risk of dying. Yes, that is part of Initiation. Another part is accepting that taking risks and putting your respawn timer on the line is part of being the Frontline. being too afraid to use your single strongest tool, your Q, because you want to pretend you’re Johanna, won’t end well.
ETC is not capable of facetanking damage the way a “Main tank” can. He also has the best AoE stun in the game and one of the best knockbacks. Wasting his Q purely to escape ignores the entire point of his kit.
My main issue with Pinball Wizard is that it encourages using W after Q whereas using those 2 skills in the opposite order is often the right choice. I tried to give an example of such a situation in my original post.
Echo Pedal doesn’t punish you for using a particular skill order and allows ETC to clear waves and do camps much more efficiently (and yes it happens every game even if that’s not his job) without using is movement tool.
Your goal as ETC isn’t to dash in and scatter enemies in whatever direction every game. Sometimes it’s the right play, but more often it’s a death sentence.
Also the reason why you pick stage dive isn’t that “you’re not confident with your mosh”. It’s sometimes the better heroic choice in heavy dive comps and large maps like Warhead and Dragon Shire.
I hate to break it to you, but ETC is the very definition of a dive tank. He’s one of the most mobile tanks out there. BOTH of his Heroics are for dive. As DarthWalrus has said, his Q+W combo is designed to hit the center of the enemy team then separate them. This disrupts the enemy team and hopefully isolates your Q target for your team to focus them.