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Frustrating interaction: Abathur and Tracer

Tracer seems like a fun, high-skill hero, and I'm glad she was added to the game. However, I had the dubious pleasure of playing abathur in QM last night, and naturally there was a tracer on both teams.

Our tracer played fine, but it was almost impossible for me to support her as abathur. Every time she used her 'E', my symbiote would drop off her, and my symbiote would go on cooldown. This meant that in high-tension moments, I would try to symbiote her to help, only to have her immediately use E and drop it. Because this triggers the cooldown, I frequently was just doing nothing for 4-5 seconds in the middle of a tense teamfight because I had tried to back up the wrong ally.

Tracer and abathur should be a match made in heaven. Supporting high-mobility auto-attacking assassins is abathur's bread and butter. But because of her E, I can't take the risk of trying to help her only to lose my symbiote right when the team needs it most. This also nullifies the benefit of abathur's adrenal overload talent, which would normally be very helpful to a hero like tracer.

I see two possible fixes:

  1. Change tracer's E so that she keeps symbiote when she uses it.

  2. Have the cooldown for symbiote reset when it drops off tracer as a result of her E.

I recognize how tracer's E is supposed to work, but I also don't want to be punished for trying to play abathur exactly as he is supposed to be played.

Edit: So a lot of people are mentioning that all stasis effects drop the symbiote. That's a fair point. However, with both dehaka and tracer now having a relatively short-cd stasis effect, it should probably be reconsidered as a quality of life change for abathur. As it is, good abathur players will have to learn to avoid symbioting dehaka and tracer, which shortchanges everyone involved.


  • Centaurik

    Posted 8 years, 5 months ago (Source)

    Unfortunately this happens during all stasis effects, i.e. ice block and dehaka's burrow

    we're looking into this some more!




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