Locust is mostly for siege damage and very situational , you can’t just always go that build. the mines and the gland support build plus ultimate evolution are way better .
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Perceived free value without doing anything. I recently saw an aba that needed 1 minute to hat anything, and mostly hatted pve. He died 6 times that game…
Same reason they always go aoe shield instead of MULE. HOTS players generally choose whatever seems simpler to use, even if it’s ineffective.
They’ll see enemies have a lot of waveclear and then go locust. If their team is losing a few towers before 16, they’ll pick the triple locust instead of speed hat, dive a few times at enemy towers, and maybe even destroy some structures. In the meantime, the lanes without aba are autopushing due to enemy team already winning early, and allied heroes are 4 vs 5, meaning aba’s allies are dead all the time. The average abathur is insta loss or in a gimmick party, hoping his tracer/illidan/samuro/valeera can carry despite abathur suboptimally roleplaying Yuumi from League of Legends.
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Yeah, sadly it’s an easy low effort way for certain types of lazy players to be perceived as contributors, while they practically AFK.
I do miss the old school assault Abathur build where he would go all-in with the deleted Locust damage/duration talents, burrow deep in enemy territory with a mine, and spawn a ton of them to rapidly take down keeps and forts post lv16. Now those Abas were fun to play with. They often managed to get out alive.
His late game damage with that build was actually enough to solo kill the enemy core. Made him a really scary opponent.
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Abathur is the cutest video game character I have ever seen
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Old school Aba still think he is like he was 7 years ago.
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I might be foolish, but I usually go full symbiote in QM since it seems to be able to lane just as good and tip team fights in our favor.
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Queuing solo in QM is always a gamble with Aba. More often then not, you don’t even get a worthy teammate to hat, which would be a right click hero (you can always queue with one).
In the case that all dps heroes on your team are are magic dps based, your only option is going locust, mine build or a hybrid of the two.
AOE shield is pretty effective though. Mindless pushers probably value it for its soft push power, but it’s also useful in team fights. And it’s the latter that makes it at least a more valuable talent on that tier for me, especially because its flexibility in its use because the other two talents have almost no value in team fights.
And it’s not like mule is hard to use.
Not really, hat build works great on any hero. You just don’t pick the AA talent. There are so many hat talents, better AOE, faster movement, more stab, healing. That’s all useful. If you have a spell caster that is being dove on, you can make it really annoying for the enemy team by making your hat target slippery, tanky, and painful to dive on.
The problem with locust and mines build is that they have very limited to almost no value in combat. One or two talents in the whole tree, sure, but when you have whole abilities and huge portions of the talent tree dedicated to a very narrow use/ being a bad teammate, that’s just antithetical to the spirit of the game. He desperately needs a redesign to open up his spec viability and to incentivize actual playing with your team.
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Bcs is QM dude, that kind of players usually plays just for have fun and not bcs they want to learn how to play.
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I find any melee hero to be a good hat candidate especially tanks. If my best option on the team is muradin then i dont go the inc attack speed talnt at 4 and choose something else.
True, except that it can potentially turn a fight into 4v4 because you’ve forced at least one enemy player to hearth back and depush.
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Would disagree. Most magic dps are trying to hang out back line and not get picked on in the first place, which makes the usefulness of all those abilities quite diminished.
Agree, most melee will benefit.
Top S tier hat heroes: Tracer, Illidan
There are quite a few A tier heroes as well, many just dependent on talent pics.
Some fun ones are: Leo, Artanis, Raynor, kharazim, murky, twin blade varian, zul jin… quite a few more as well.
Well of course you disagree, you’re complaining. There’s no doubt that the synergy between a good AA hero with Abathur is pretty insane. But if you only know Abathur as the AA enhancing hero, which is only ONE talent, then you’ve got huge blinders on. Picking arguably worse performing talents because you just don’t know how to use the other ones is a pretty poor strategy.
That’s why I said if they’re being dove on. But even then, not all casters play the same, and I’d argue the ones that are playing too safe on the far edges are bad players because they’re often missing out on a lot of potential damage and not using their body to ease the distribution of damage.
Some of my favorite games on Abathur are speed boosting an Azmodan that is lazering people or a Kael’Thas that will bomb and get them in range for an offensive stun. Sure, I don’t hat Chromie as much, but it’s still useful when they get dove on. And once they’re safe again, you switch your hat to a more appropriate target. If you’re just hatting the same hero the whole game, that’s generally not good. There are 5 heroes on a team, not all of them will be playing like Artillery mages. And even if you did, one of em would still be focused, and you can hat them.
You obviously choose the target that is closest to the fight. And you can always change hat targets. But even ones that are in mid range are decent targets to hat, especially with the extra ranged talents. Stab’s baseline is already further than auto attack range, but with the range talent, it more than matches most spell ranges too.
Because when you don’t know what you’re doing, you might as well pick a build that doesn’t require you to do anything
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Just cause I disagree, doesn’t mean I am complaining. What world do you live on? I’m trying to have a discussion with you on a video game forum.
The global cd on switching hats is longer than the time it takes for a squishy to get dove on and die, especially late game. If you are just sitting on the same full health magic dps hero with your hat, there is a good possibility that you are ineffective with your abilities and not even in range to do anything. If you are constantly switching hats, you are up against that global cd i’m talking about.
Again, there can be some fun builds if you team up with someone with hat in mind, even a very rare Magic DPS (for example auto attack chromie). but this has to be planned out with someone you are friends with and not just QM pick-up games, going back to the OP’s original comment.
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Discussion, complaint, whatever makes you feel better.
I almost exclusively play QM. Getting weird comps is just par for the course. I almost never get attack speed because I often pick Monstrosity which it doesn’t synergize well with. Putting that aside, if there’s one way I want to decrease my win rate, it’s to pick locust or mines build just because there are spell casters on the team. That makes zero sense.
The question I ask is why are you sitting on any hero as Abathur. The point of Abathur is to be able to go in and out of hat. You should be able to pick and choose if anyone even needs a hat, and which hero benefits from the hat the most. And yes, that includes the spell casters too.
Even here, your hypothetical is about only thinking about auto attack for a caster. Don’t pick the auto attack talent, get stab range, and you’ll be able to add a considerable amount of damage, and even more so if they are dove on and are more aggressive. My whole point is that you actually don’t have to plan anything because hat build is incredibly flexible. You always know that team fights are important, and you know that someone is always going to take damage. So smart hatting will always be useful to some degree, while more locusts or mines that will be healed up have very limited uses.
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Abba main here.
It’s actually the highest skill cap you can play, as Abba. You can get armor shred, slow/CC, just everything in mines/locust build. Also, if you dare to try to hats in QM, you risk suffering bad/noob team mates. While you, are in the solo unique position, of being able to do absolutely nothing to influence the outcome of the game, once your entire team is dead. You get to…sit in base camp, bored, angry, frustrated. If you go locusts & mines, you at least can impact the board. Otherwise, prepare to have real, real bad games.
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Exactly my point from my original post on this thread. This is why many go locust.
What? Attack speed hat on a fully stack monstrosity with a level 20 symbiote in a team fight is insane. Especially if your 2nd hat is on a right click hero that will really benefit. Monstrosity isn’t just about dropping and pushing an open lane. The reason not to go hat and attack speed is because you got a wonky comp where nobody will really benefit from it.
You don’t. You do stuff and pre-hat right before a fight starts. In your Magic DPS Hat scenario, your going to be too late switching hats to a target that gets dove on, due to global cd. When you prehat a reliable right-click hero, you stay there through the entire team fight. Right click heroes are always in/next to the fight and not back line.
Stab range isn’t worth it and still doesn’t guarantee you’ll be in range to hit anything. It gives a little bit extra distance.
For me it all depends on the map and team comp…or just what I personally feel will be the best as that is what it’s about.
Locust I can push lanes as a decent way to get an enemy to pull away to try and take care of it if it’s a catch 22 style situation. I also like doing locust so I can more easily take camps depending on the map and team comp. If it’s a situation where I dont think we need me 100% in a fight or my team cant win it but can delay it I will premine some camps and get in, take camp and leave so we have another thing that can fully push a lane if the enemy does not split off.
But mostly it’s about fun and what I think it will best even if I call it wrong. Sometimes people dont play like you think or dont build how you expected so games can go badly no matter the talents picked.
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Saying that there’s high skill cap for abilities that require little input from enemies where things auto release from you or lay down and forget and can’t control after is pretty hilarious.
The only thing skilled about locust build is how aggressive you are with your positioning and timing with your Z to get out. Beyond that, it’s just release and go. For mines build, you sort of have to know the most common hero pathing, but there’s little that’s “skilled” about it. The CD refreshes faster so you can technically click faster, but that’s usually at the expense of not really caring about what your allies doing because your hat is so bad. In fact, once you know the paths, your mine placement rarely changes, unlike in combat where skill shots and abilities need to be constantly used on moving targets while interacting with your allies. Mines build can be semi useful in non healer games, but almost beyond worthless after early game when people start grouping, so the bulkier heroes eat the mines.
If anything you sound like someone who has very little skill because you can’t adapt to challenges. I can’t imagine taking your attitude as a healer main. I’m just going to concentrate on my damage or soaking because maybe one of the assassins is bad.
They changed this awhile ago. It no longer works with monstrosity. Attack Speed only affects hero targets which Monster is not. It’s even in the tooltip. “Heroic Symbiotic Hosts”
You’re just not a really good Abathur then. You hat the target that will get the most value, you don’t just hat the Magic DPS, if that’s the magic DPS that will get the best value, then you hat the Magic DPS. The best target can and often does change, and there are 4 other targets. If you can’t find a good one, you’re being lazy or playing the game static. That’s why hat build is flexible unlike locust or mines. Not only are in combat abilities just more generally useful, you can choose who to target.
Early to mid game you can switch pretty easily even with the CD. Groups are smaller, and talent synergy hasn’t ramped up which makes damage quite manageable. By end game, and they have a blow up comp, switching will be hard, yes. But by the time you get to end game, you sort of know who is going to be target. I had a game where I was hatting a Zeratul mostly in the beginning and we were winning most fights. The enemy started hard diving the Kael and winning a lot once they got ults. By about 17, I saw it was stupid to keep hatting Zeratul if Kael kept dying. Once I switched, he was surviving and running away long enough for our team to get kills to make it really painful for the divers to overextend for so long. From then on, we won pretty easily.
Huh? Nothing is a “guarantee”. But if stab range is longer than most base AA range and is as long if not longer than a lot of spell abilities, in what world beyond like Chromie or an orb Ming are you not getting range. Using your logic, you could say the same about those same spell casters then. It’s not a guarantee they’ll hit anything either.
Just for some context, Nova snipe range is 10.8725, Flamestrike range (without flamethrower) is 10, talented Stab range is 10.5. I’ve gotten so many kills from spell casters just chasing. Ming’s Magic Missiles is 12. It’s a lot longer than people think.
Most spell casters will also have abilities that have a mix of different range abilities to maximize damage. Abathur works great on players who don’t nerf their own damage by only hanging in the back and only using their long range spells. And if they’re being dove on, it doesn’t matter you’re still giving them health, speed, and doing damage.
Fun facts, if you look at QM data, you’ll find that Needlespine and Networked Carapace actually have the higher win rates on their tiers.
Pretty high skill floor too, so to say; getting value out of mine build (not just meaningless damage) and getting structure damage out of locust (not just using them so you don’t have to waveclear with hat) is not too easy; but it feels like it’s situational too.
I think locusts are pretty bad if team’s really bad too; stronger waves counter aba’s pushing capabilities.
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