Games26

Abaddon

• You can deny yourself using Mist Coil.
• The self-damage on Mist Coil can be absorbed by Aphotic Shield and can heal you during Borrowed Time.
• Mist Coil can heal and damage siege creeps.
• You can put Aphotic Shield on siege creeps.
• Aphotic Shield will always detonate for the full damage regardless of damage absorbed. This means that you can replace a shield on an ally to detonate it on demand for the damage.
• Abaddon's cast animations are long and the cast range on Aphotic Shield is garbage. If you're pushing/defending with your team and you're worried about enemy initiation, try casting and canceling Aphotic Shield on your team's highest priority hero. Not only will this constantly keep you in range to cast the shield, but if you've got beastly reactions you can almost instantly wipe off any disable.
• If you get attacked by a hero while you have Aphotic Shield on, the game still acts like you've taken damage from that hero. This means that Healing Salve, Clarities, Bottle, Urn of Shadows, Blink Dagger, Recall, and sleeps all get canceled.
• You don't need to actually complete an attack to get the  Curse of Avernus buff. During chases or escapes, you can animation cancel an attack on a neutral or a creep to give yourself a free 15% move speed bonus without having to wait through Abaddon's full attack animation. If you have Tranquils this is doubly important since it allows you to get the move speed buff without breaking your boots.
• Curse of Avernus works on towers. Why doesn't Caustic Finale work on towers? That'd be sweet.
• Aphotic Shield doesn't absorb any damage during Borrowed Time, all of it goes to healing.
• There are very few situations in which you want to manually activate  Borrowed Time pre-Agh, but it can be useful if you need to disjoint a projectile like a stun.
• The self-damage taken from Armlet of Mordiggian can heal you under  Borrowed Time. This is a bug.
• Abaddon's a great aura slut since most teams rarely want to waste the time necessary to kill him in a fight.

Versus

• The burst damage radius on Aphotic Shield is pretty huge (675).
• If you have a nuke that does >400 damage, you can instakill Abaddon without Borrowed Time ever triggering.
• If you don't trust your team, Eul's Scepter's is a great Abaddon counter since it can waste 2.5s of Borrowed Time.
• Ancient Apparition Ice Blast prevents Abaddon from healing during  Borrowed Time.

Lone Druid

If offlane pull the enemys first wave of creeps through their jungle up infront of your tier 1 to intercept your second creep wave

Your first creep wave will have quickly died under the enemy tier 1 and thus will push towards you. At the start of the game quickly ask for a set of wards from a support so you can go block the pull camp and provide you vision incase they have a killing lane.

• Use your Spirit Bear to tank enemy creeps if they are pushing too hard with its Stout Shield as you don't want the creep wave going under your tower and thus pushing back in their favor. This is extremely useful if you are playing mid and pretty much no other hero can do this.
• Use your superior combined base damage of both the Lone Druid and the Spirit Bear to out last hit and deny any enemys. This is particularly strong against enemy solo's and you should abuse it as much as possible especially against ranged heros.
• Use the Spirit Bear to pick up runes or deny them while staying in the lane to get xp and last hits. The Spirit Bear can use every rune except DD and illusions. If you pick up an invis instantly Return the Spirit Bear to you during the fade time to set up some easy kills on mid if you have entangle up. Haste is just as good if not better.

Visage can work in a lot of situations. He gets a lot of kills in 3v3, but he is perfectly fine in a standard trilane and is good for occasional roams (provided you have enough damage to charge him up).

His main weakness is cross-map movement. If you do not have re-summon, your Familiars are left in one lane while you rotate. That isn't always a bad thing because you can use them to apply pressure elsewhere (especially with a Drow Ranger on your team) while you rotate and spam Soul Assumption in fights.