Leoric Abathur abuse - Page 2

On July 29 2015 10:54 SC2John wrote:
So I've been playing quite a bit the past week with the Heroes Writers, and we've been looking at different ways of playing Leoric and against him. I've run into this and similar strategies a lot, so I just wanted to put my own experience out there. Disclaimer: these are all quick matches around ~3000-3400 MMR, so it's not super high quality. Also, I apologize for linking dropbox, but hotslogs hates me right now.

---

We played against a dumber version of the strategy you laid out. Essentially Leoric went straight to one of our forts and began to take it out at lvl 1. This wasn't a huge problem early on and gave us a huge experience lead, so we were fine with him just dying over and over to the fort and just started ignoring him. However, then the ammo ran out and he was able to just hit it for free and we weren't getting experience for killing him. Luckily, I was playing The Lost Vikings, so I just split up 2 of them to follow him around for the rest of the game while our team 4.5 vs 3 all of the other objectives, eventually netting us a crazy 4-5 level lead.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ik5oqw57qzuco7g/Garden of Terror (146).StormReplay?dl=0


This was a more normal game. Leoric played pretty standard in the early and mid parts of the game, but then became an absolute powerhouse in the late game when we were down to one or two forts and still had to secure both shrines for the Dragon. By 30:00, he was literally respawning every 20-30 seconds AT an objective, so his respawn timer was essentially 0. On top his ability to threaten objectives relentlessly, Azmodan's continual pressure on the map just choked us out and killed us in the super scrappy late game.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ak6xypqndoe2ncv/Dragon Shire (143).StormReplay?dl=0

---

My opinion is not that the Abathur/Leoric combo is an issue, but that Leoric as a whole is an issue. Based on some research, if he has a decent amount of regen globes and has all of his abilities up including Ossein Renewal, he comes back to life on average around 20-30 seconds from Lvl 10 (~6:00-6:30) onwards. This means that in the late game, especially past lvl 16, Leoric's death timer is around 20-30 seconds compared to the 60+ second death timers of other heroes. On top of that, he can spawn right at the objective -- essentially his death is the same time it would take to hearth back to base and walk to the objective. If the game gets past 20:00, it's almost impossible to capitalize on a won team fight because he can almost always threaten objectives, especially if your keeps or core are exposed and/or weak.

They really need to remove the Reanimation talent at Lvl 1 or weaken his entire kit to compensate for having basically no respawn timer in the late game. Ossein Renewal is also not a very interesting talent, especially since it is the clear pick in that talent category, and would probably do better at lvl 13 or 16 instead (or removed). In general, the idea that Leoric can do things to make himself revive SIGNIFICANTLY sooner than he should have to wait is just ridiculous; the fact that he doesn't even need to walk to an objective from base when he respawns is enough of a unique strength.