Abaddon the Rat

I think you guys are forgetting about just poking the guy to death. Sure he may do okay if you suddenly rush him and throw everything but what about a steady stream of veno wards, liquid fire, march of the machines, burning spears, whatever? eventually he will be forced to use his ult, and then he has to give up ratting until its back up.

Stop theorycrafting, go play rat abaddon in some pubs and post the replays you lazy scrubs :)

Hopefully you aren't agaisnt a lucky PA (or someone else who can easily remove 400+ because of crits) because they will force you to mannually use your ult pretty early or get yourself get killed (or this was a bug I had because I got critted to death with an ult up against PA)

I finally took a moment to test the Ratting Abaddon against humans. Good opportunities did not arise until very recently.

http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/1657930321

Basically, since the enemy picked Pudge early, I grabbed Abaddon, since I figured it would be an easy mid lane, so it was as good a time as any. I ended up against Gyrocopter, and did pretty bad, as I died twice in lane. With a late Maelstrom, I was not that impactful, however, once I managed to get my maelstrom and blink, I was not that much of a threat to buildings, but they always rotated to try to kill me. So what I was was a space creator once I caught up, and I split the enemy team so my Slark, Axe, and Disruptor could get them picked off.

The blink, bottle, and maelstrom gave me enough sustain and waveclear to be a threat to lanes. I avoided death after my first 3 early game deaths. There were two times afterwards I was caught. Once when Borrowed Time was on CD and we were about to take rax, but enemy Gyro bought back, and once when I was ratting, the enemy Meepo came, I ulted and blinked out, but he netted me before my escape tp finished, so I awkwardly was chased into the trees for like 15 seconds before I died. However, as an exception among rat heroes, Techies was completely useless at defending his towers against me as I chipped them away slowly.

Overall, decently effective, not as much as I'd like. I'll have to play more games to get a larger sample size and determine a more confident result.

I have one more test game.

http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/1660786861

In this case, I managed to get much easier matchups. I was dual offlaning against a safelane brood and AA (I was queuing with my lower bracket friend). As this team had a lot less CC and didn't let their Tiny get farmed, since Brood rushed Radiance, because I fed them first blood. Once the Maelstrom was picked up, Brood was not a threat to any of my towers.

Without a means to stop me, due to their much easier to counter crowd control this game, I terrorized the map by splitting their team up and got consistent farm off the Brood who was convinced she could break high ground against me and my team. I rat pushed to a tower like 4-5 time, and none of those times did the enemies kill me. My deaths were once in lane, and once after getting ice blasted after my ult was used.

In this particular case, it was quite effective. I may play a few more and see how it goes.