Do you ever just want to punish yourself? Maybe you just enjoy the challenge of fighting an uphill battle. If so, look no further! I’m here to give you all the insider info on the best Heroes to do poorly with. Using these five Heroes exclusively in soloQ, you’re guaranteed to lower your chances of winning and drop in MMR, and there’s nothing you or your teammates will be able to do to stop it.
1. Abathur
No one knows how to play with an Abathur on their team. The correct thing to do: give up the first few early objectives but delay them for as long as possible with pokes and safe play so that Abathur can snowball an xp lead to Level 10. What you’re team will do: fight 4v5 over and over and over, lose every objective, feed the enemy team kills, and completely negate your split soak. Fortunately, once you fall behind, Abathur offers basically no comeback mechanics.
This strategy is particularly weak on small maps like Tomb of the Spider Queen and Dragon Shire. Your team will also suffer greviously if they have poor waveclear compared to the other team, as the lack of a 5th body will mean that at least one lane is shoved in at all times. Pick Monstrosity as your Heroic if you want an additional challenge.
2. Illidan
Illidan is unique. He’s a great Hero, super strong right now, but I guarantee you that your team will lose. He requires a pretty specific composition and some babying from the Support, which is pretty easy to achieve in coordinated team. But soloQ is like the wild west: every man for himself. In fact, it’s probably better if you just pretend you don’t have teammates at all. They won’t be able to keep up with you anyway. I mean, it’s better than having to yell “team?!” after you die in every fight; you only died because the enemy Hero was broken.
Try to lend a helping voice in drafting. If you’re unlucky enough, your Hero League team won’t draft a Support at all, because God knows, we needed that Gazlowe “support” more.
The best way to lose with Illidan is to make sure you’re way at the front ready to dive into the back line. The closer you can get to Heroes with stuns like Muradin or E.T.C., the more quickly you will die. Try soloing a Sonya or Thrall for fun; you can win, trust me ;).
3. Sgt. Hammer
Hammer’s low mobility is a huge liability, but she makes up for it with huge damage in siege mode. You’ll probably start up a cool siege in lane—you’ll be doing tank things and damaging towers and everything will be going great. But then you’ll look at your minimap and notice some enemies just went missing in the fog of war. “Oh, I should probably back up some and be careful.” But before you can move—surprise, it’s a gank! As is standard, avoid unsieging at all costs because that’s the honorable way to die.
Hammer is especially weak on large maps like Sky Temple because of her atrocious movement speed and setup time. When you can’t get to teamfights on time, just keep plowing forward into their base and don’t stop for anything.
If you do happen to make it to teamfights, your allies will probably dive incredibly deep, fight outside of your siege radius, and die. That’s okay. As long as you stay sieged, no one can touch you…except for Kerrigan, Illidan, Tyrael, Artanis, Kharazim, Muradin, Sonya, Tracer, Thrall, The Lost Vikings, Zeratul, Xul, The Butcher, Greymane—you get the idea.
4. Nazeebo
Nazeebo is a bad Hero.
Nazeebo is always the wrong choice.
5. Lt. Morales
If you want to be useless in every single way except for healing, Lt. Morales is the right Hero for you. She can’t clear waves, she does no damage, she’s immobile, and she gets walked all over. You’ll spend most of your time running around in circles trying not to die as the enemy team furiously dives you while your teammates do nothing to help and then yell at you for dying.
Let’s be honest, the talents you take on the Medic don’t matter. All of the defensive options keep her kind of safe before she dies. All of her grenade options make her slightly more disruptive before she dies. And all of her healing talents let her die. So it’s kind of like those games where there’s no wrong answer, and the consolation prize is a perpetual death timer.
At least you’ve got healing, though, right? Yeah, definitely—until you run out of mana (or you die). Then you’re actually the most useless Hero in the game (especially if you die). The good news is that Caduceus Reactor 2.0 at Level 20 fixes this issue; the bad news is that you will lose the game before then. If you want to get oom faster, spamming Safeguard on cooldown is the way to go.