Remember when I told you repeatedly that, despite now being out of beta, Dota 2 wasn’t actually anywhere close to being complete? Welp, it’s just been patched to add a new hero: Abaddon, the Lord of Avernus, who you might describe as a ghostly warrior. Or a Death Knight, if you wanted to risk a lawsuit.
Abaddon is a melee strength chap with four abilities. The first, Mist Coil, hits one target and either heals friendly units or hurts enemies, at the cost of some of Abaddon’s own life (and yes, this can apparently be used to deny himself). Aphotic Shield can be self-cast or thrown onto allies; it absorbs a certain amount of damage before exploding, dealing out the damage it absorbed to nearby enemies, and casting it on someone removes certain negative buffs and stuns. Curse of Avernus is a passive debuff that’s put on enemies when Abaddon hits them, slowing them down and causing all units attacking them to get increased movement speed and attack speed for a little while. Finally, his ultimate is Borrowed Time, a self-cast spell that removes most negative buffs and causes all damage Abaddon takes to heal him instead. Best of all, though, is that if the ability isn’t on cooldown, it will autocast once his HP drops below a certain threshold.
In short: he seems like a support-y, tank-y, semi-carry. I’ll doubtless be trying him out a bit later tonight.
Of course, that’s not all! There are a load of new features and bugfixes, too. There’s a hotkey option for Select All Units, a hotkey for the flying courier’s speed boost, a removal to the limit of heroes you can set as Favourite, a Smeevil Crab Mount for stamping complete teams in the Compendium, the ability to opt out of Limited Hero mode in the training matchmaking…
So yes, lots of stuff to keep me occupied for the next 300 hours of my life.
