Patch 6.86 Pushing Strategy

What do you think about putting Abaddon on lane with Nature's Prophet?

His Aphotic Shield can help absorbing damage when pushing, his Mist Coil can heal if needed and his Curse of Avernus debuffs a tower so you can destroy it quicker when pushing. Death Prophet is mid and can solo push towers. I guess I could go with something less greedy on the final lane, any suggestions?

Basically what I am trying to make is a viable pushing draft for this patch.

Abaddon is much better to be either put solo offlane or double offlane with an active hero, NP will not do. With a right hero you can even dive towers at level 2.

Actually, in theory KotL-Aba lane would just annihilate any duo on safelane and quickly mow down T1, so you might swap NP with KotL - he is less active before like minute 10, but if the lane goes well he can get a respectably fast Mek and help you push more than NP.

A pushing draft with Abaddon? I really fail to see the pushing potential of the hero. Curse of Avernus only increases pushing speed when it's maxed, it does pretty much nothing with only one point in it.

If you want a good dual offlane with Abaddon lane him with Weaver or something.

Core Abaddon nowadays goes like 0-4-2-1 now, and is a ***** to fight into under towers. Like, if the enemy line-up really doesn't gain an advantage fighting under tower because of Abaddon, it makes pushing so much easier as a result. The fact Curse works on towers is just a bonus. Oh and the fact he can crush a huge number of lanes by himself, and practically all of them in a dual lane is yet another bonus.

Since, heroes in a pushing strat don't need to be able to do building damage, they just need to support early aggresion, laning and 5 manning, which is what Abaddon as a hero does. As well as being a frontline tank, which is again something the strat needs.

It's the sort of thing getting really popular in NA recently.

Well Abaddon is great in any lane domination offlane that's for sure, and if you win the lane then yes you get the T1 tower...but this doesn't make him a deathball hero afterwards.

Also, dual laning with Abaddon without skilling Mist Coil? Ugh.

It's not even dual lane Abaddon, it's like solo offlane Abaddon against a Tri or dual lane. Why would you want Mist Coil when you can just run at people with Aphotic Shield and Curse and the enemy lane can't really stop you? You don't have the mana to support shield and coil in lane, and Mist Coil is an awful spell before you really invest into it.

I'll concede that dual lane support Abaddon should invest in Mist Coil over Curse of Avernus due to very different roles in-game. But the core one is more relevant to my argument.

And he fits into deathball afterwards, partially because of his early game focus, and partially because he fits a needed role; He sits at the front and yells 'Have at me' whilst right clicking the tower. Curse of Avernus sure is a minor buff, but when you consider against towers it's applied to up to 5 heroes and a whole creep wave, it adds up substantially. But in short, you are the front line; Nobody wants to initiate on an Abaddon, so you put the enemy into a catch-22. That is his job in deathball, he's the 'tank' for lack of a better word, because you need one.

Add in the fact he's a fantastic aura builder, and voila you have a hero suited to deathabll in a sense.

And yes, there are better 'tanks' for this kind of thing because they bring more damage out or like team-fight presence. But generally those either have worse laning presence, or require significantly more gold to do the role.

Yes, I was thinking precisely this. Seems pretty fundamental to have a frontline tank to absorb the damage in a megapush. Going for way too many squishy heroes to push with is just going to get them picked off one by one as they attempt to push the towers.

If you want a pushing support, go Visage. I would say he's fairly tanky especially in way of a Mek, and hes hard to initiate on since his shield is great vs. single instance damage. His farmiliars take down towers like nobodies business, and even better, hes almost never seen in lower level games.

I have been playing this pushing strategy for about a week and so far I have played 8 games and won all of them, except one game that I lost because of trolls. I made a few adjustments, so its basically the same draft but with a few changes, instead of Sven I put Bristleback and instead of Windranger I put another support to help buying wards, I chose Disruptor as his abilities are great in teamfights. So its basically the same draft but less greedy than the previous. In this replay I chose Omniknight instead of Disruptor because of his Guardian Angel ability being great for making his team mates stay alive when pushing.

Also, a few things I have noticed that my team was doing wrong previously.

a) We only had one support to buy the wards, so we didn't have proper vision, as previously mentioned. Its incredibly important to put up wards when you gain map control so you have vision while you are pushing.

b) We picked way too many pushers and went all in as a previous poster suggested, whichs was a bad idea, since its way too predictible for your opponents, and since most pushing heroes are squishy, they will get picked off one by one. A proper pushing draft should also be build around teamfights.

c) We kept split pushing after we had destroyed all six towers outside of our opponents base and got picked off individually in the process, to a point where we came too far behind and lost the game. It's best to group up and start deathballing after you destroy the tier 1 and 2 towers in order to get the tier 3 towers and raxes.


I'll continue to upload some replays once i play some more games, any comments are appriciated.

A great replay of a game I just played, we won the game in 30 minutes and didn't lose a single tower throughout the entire game. Same draft basically, except that I added Spectre as a hard carry in case the game should go late.