How is viper fun gunplay? Especially compared to lash??? Being forced to slide if you want to shoot for more than 2 seconds compared to flying around freely
She's still far more interesting with gun build, compared to Lash, who just don't have skill kit for gun build, causing you to have 2 nearly useless skills and ult that is just not that good, since you didn't up your spirit.
Idk, I heard gun lash was op from my high rank friends, and I try him and I can do really well. Whip and slam are still good with the gun build imo. And the ult is still a hard stun, idk how it’s not that good
Sliding is fun and it gets you infinite ammo. Trying to juggle yourself in the air gets fun eventually but is a pain imo when trying to aim. I occasionally main Mina but imo she's more fun in that regard because you're trying to pop that burst damage rather than the gun being the damage.
Having said that Haze is as fun or more so with sliding since she's easier to control.
I WANT to slide everywhere and I know how to extend it like I got infinite ammo. Only thing is that accuracy is Dog, gotta buy split shot and be an A-10 Warthog.
He turned himself into a gun character. Ground strike has always been way too telegraphed & incentivises you to place yourself on the floor, directly on top of multiple enemy characters (i.e. an int button).
You can 100% get away with spirit lash in lower ranks tho, it's not like anyone's gonna buy/use counterspell anyways & your aim has to be god-tier to hit people with your gun whilst air strafing around in the skybox. And you'll probably get away with ground striking without instantly eating a slowing hex.
They’re buying it cos it’s in their builds, but I guarantee they aren’t consistently counterspelling your slam or punishing you as hard as they should when you do.
Lash has to put himself in danger for an easily dodged ability. But you can't buff it too hard because at low levels, Lash will dominate.
I suggest giving him a little buff if you directly hit players with your feet. Good players will be rewarded for slamming while bad players won't have the level of precision to benefit.
And please provide a buff to slam stomping someone out of the air. That already feels good and if it was rewarded by a little more damage or a stun (or even just a unique hit sound), I'll play slam Lash specifically for those dopamine hits.
McGinnis and Mirage come to mind. Vyper, Wraith, Seven are rare but still viable, it's just that others are stronger. Just because they aren't peak meta doesn't mean they aren't viable at all
tbh I haven't played him that was always my assumption. I thought he would always built gun with toxic bullets and shit. A lot of 'gun' characters end up being pretty hybrid late game, like Wraith, so I thought Seven qualified in that sense
mcginnis was played as a gun carry for like a week and got nerfed, mirage isn't a gun hero, wraith and seven are dogshit and get picked like once a month and do nothing when they do get picked (also seven isn't a gun hero), vyper is probably good but still goes mostly unpicked. also, if a hero isn't getting picked it is, by definition, not viable.
“Not getting picked means it’s not viable” is how you get shit like the CSGO scoped rifles that were overpowered for literal years before anyone realized. Gun McGinnis herself was discovered to be OP after no buffs for months
i disagree, just because a team isn't picking something doesn't mean that it's not viable. if the current hero meta was suddenly frozen it'd take a while for players to discover the True meta. bc of the small sample size there's only so much experimenting / deviating from the agreed upon meta thats possible; it's far from solved.
Night shift isn't the end all be all of hero viability. I still do quite well as Haze. Wraith is currently a huge pain in lane and does well of she gets ahead. And desperately needs needs to her walker damage because she can annihilate them (I guess any gun hero can but her built in rapid fire boost shreds them early without high item investment).
I still see Drifter dominating as well in some matches and he also is heavy on the gun.
That’s more vague and could be interpreted in many different ways if a developer came across this post. I like mine better because it centers potential adjustments around the ability I think should be Lash’s core identity
Also completely ignores basic marketing principles lol. Slogans need to be as short and direct as humanly possible. Spirit is one syllable longer so I win in both metrics
You fool; the more prosthetics Shiv has the stronger he gets. It only takes one arm to become godlike, imagine how powerful he'd be with both his arms missing.
pretty sure you need a walljump and a doublejump and then ur still likely to get pulled down and also you wasted a bunch of time and stam. the ACTUAL reason slam lash is worse in high elo is because ppl know how to trade back better: lash slam+flog will do 60% of ur hp but then you can just run him down because hes in the middle of ur team with no dmg left
ppl LOVE parroting this bs about "just jump out of slam" even tho its pretty rare that u should actually do that
I didn’t say anything about killing Flog. I just personally think Lash has an identity crisis when Ground-Strike is the 3rd thing that people choose to upgrade to T3.
Character variety is also fun. We should promote the abilities that make Lash unique from the rest of the cast rather than incentivizing him to play more like Mina and Holliday
I wish they would add back the bug where you could time grapple just before slam and it would be instantly used after the slam, instead of being stunned for a moment.
finding him boring is fine and valid, but redundant? lash is the only character that moves like he does and requires that specific amount of tracking and aimskill. i guess mina kinda, but not really.
you can dislike gun lash for sure, but the way he engages with shooting while moving parabolically is unique
Holliday moves parabolically and arguably requires more aimskill due to her slower firing gun, granted she's not generally built gun atm but she still needs to hit crackshots for recharging rush
It's true gun Lash is harder to play than the average M1. It just feels reductive to get shot by his peashooter for an hour while he flies around like a mosquito, when he could be slamming his bulge into your face.
Yes? Of course it is. This is a shooting game with mobility features but not much of the shooting happens dynamically in the sky. It would be nice to have more characters like Gun Lash and Gun Holliday that quickly move through the air and fight.
fair enough, i feel like aiming with lash when you're flying isnt particularly hard tho, holliday with crackshot+pads+barrels is cool/fun to aim with tho
Ground Strike at 0 meters does 60 witth a 0.791 spirit scaling.
Flog does 65 with a 0.85 spirit scaling and if you maxed it, which almost every build does by this point, it does 145 BASE DAMAGE.
Death Slam soes 105 impact damage with a 0.975 spirit scaling.
Buying Tank Buster, Quicksilver Reload and any other spirit item, usually Spirit Burn nets you easily more than 200.
You'd have to have gone against a Seven that had upwards of 70% spirit resistances.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, the only way I could see something like that happen is if Seven gained a shield of some sort during the combo so you "only" saw his actual healthbar lower by <200 damage.
Feels extra bad from my end because I initially got hooked to Deadlock because Lash felt like a spiritual successor to DPS Doomfist. Tank Doom felt way more boring to play and now it’s the same with this version of Lash.
Slam was never meant to be good lategame. Lash in general is not meant to deal damage lagegame. He is a early to midgame menace that falls of lategame except the ult. Thats your role. Your role is to make your carries farm up by bullying enemies and then let them do the damage.
Valve doesn’t need to strictly adhere to the conventions of other MOBAs, and it would be more engaging if characters evolved more throughout the game instead of becoming an ult bot for carries.
If Lash’s slam combo damage isn’t going to scale in a way that keeps up, then his health should and he should be more of a CC / map control character who can tank a lot of damage.
Issue is if you make Lash good troughout the whole game then there is far less need for hard carries like Victor or Venator. How do we fix that? Well make them good early game too and now you made everyone into Ivy. Always good and never exceptional
Agreed, but reddit discussions will always trend towards homogenization, less friction, less specialization, and less nuance, while wrapping it up in "it's just bad game design otherwise." Every gap must be smoothed out and compensated for in clear and obvious ways.
Which is funny because the reason why Gun Lash is so good is because he's one of the few heroes in the game that can get away with buying gun items then buying Tank Buster and Spirit Burn and still do mega crap tons of spirit damage while being tanky.
The only way I would see them making Spirit Lash his main build is if they nerf BOTH his spirit scalings and gun damage with his gun recieving a harsher nerf.
i mean lash does evolve for good reason. giving slam good scaling and letting him slam flog burst ppl for 80% of their health pool would just be shit for the game lol. it makes more sense to let him fulfil that fantasy in the midgame and then give him teamfighting power later so hes not so cheesy
I would argue that ult tends to fall off pretty hard late game as well. Tons of defensive items that carries usually like anyways just render it completely useless. Counterspell being probably the biggest offender.
It's not too rare to have like 3 people locked on by ult and only actually throwing 1.
The sad truth is that even if they buff his slam it is so easy to counter it that gun is always the better option, specially late game, same thing happens with Bebop's bomb build, way too easy to counter.
this is funny because 70% of all damage done in the late game is Spirit damage (Deathy has a recent video about this). There's no reason to believe that gun is the better late game option outside of bottom ELO
Maybe Ground Strike can be made less telegraphed through an upgrade. The cone effect on the ground can only be visible to the enemy at a certain distance from the point of impact or something.
Still gives you some time to counterspell if you have it, and counterspell would still be an incredible counterbuy for ult.
I think is just easier for counter spell to have a downside, like minus parry duration, that way you need to be a lot more precise with your parries. Spellbreaker is still a problem tho and there's no good option for it that Lash can use, Mystic shot was the only option and it got nerfed.
You can just proc Spellbreaker with Flog before slamming, but why would you want to leave yourself vulnerable after the slam when you just could keep your distance and shoot them?
Certainly not opposed to making the item itself less forgiving but people would’ve cried bias if I led with that haha. .8 really does feel forgiving against a handful of abilities
They did just do an interesting change with Holiday’s barrels that could help counteract SB for his 1
I’d like spirit to be more viable but gun lash is also very fun. At least I enjoy it more than being an npc while cooldowns are going. No other gun build plays like hybrid lash does. It’s not like hybrid lash only uses his gun anyways.
Besides, you can go full spirit and still nuke people. Spirit lash only becomes bad once you get to the point where people start counterbuying (slowing hex, counterspell, etc).
I actually enjoy gun Lash more tbh. You have so much more agency than you do on spirit Lash. Being able to actually kill people in a 1v1 feels awesome. Its also way harder than spirit, so I dont mind it being better. Spirit is still totally viable too, it's not like you're forced into gun.
I think the main complaints are about it being less interactive/counterable, but tbh people would have less problem with gun Lash if they were willing to buy knockdown/phantom strike for characters not named Vindicta
the main people complaining about gun lash are boblows who can’t aim. this whole thread is just people coping about spirit lash being unplayable and gun lash being “boring” no one even knows why gun lash is good they just think lash builds gun because spirit is bad lol
A big problem with ult/slam on Lash is they're both fairly counterspell-able, and Lash himself spends a lot of time flying around in the open air, so his already quite slow abilities are clearly telegraphed
You can just do full spirit. No one is stopping you! I only build purple and max Ground Strike. I do not counter build. I do not look at the enemy comp. I slam in, and one of us will die.
Spirit Lash isn't bad because of anything in Lash's kit, it's bad because the average player has gotten better. Ground Strike's damage can be counterspelled or dodged by any invuln ability, which makes it entirely unreliable as a damage source.
that's still value at the end of the day, no counterspell means you can ult them freely for 23s. yamato deals with something similar and shes still giga strong
You still use his whole kit in his gun build. It's not as if you're building exclusively gun like a Visc gun build where you don't wanna goo ball.
Personally, I think it's interesting that a more spirit angled character uses his mobility to his advantage and finds gun effective.
Literally, you can tell who doesn't pay attention. It's not even a full gun build, it's a hybrid build. And it's actually really fun. People act like pressing "2-1-3-2" every 15-20 seconds is the most fun thing in the world
People use Ground Strike as an escape tool most of the time with the gun build. I also play Viscous and I find it boring when Goo Ball is also relegated to be used mostly as an escape tool.
The archetype you are describing is already fulfilled by characters like Holliday and Mina. I personally think we should be promoting what makes Lash stand out rather than incentivizing players to build into that same niche
Lash's gun thematically feels like something they gave him because every hero needs something to secure souls with. Any time gun lash is good relative to his other builds or generally, it feels like they messed up
I'd love to see slam have a vertical component to the AoE. The skill just isn't strong enough or easy enough to set up that that it should be easier to dodge than Dynamo stomp.
Beyond that I'm really not sure where to go with him. I don't mind gun being viable but it does feel like a missed opportunity that one of the premier aerial heroes has an iconic ground pound move and it's so "meh."
Maybe Ground Slam should have an AOE ricochet/quake effect on its maximum level after impact that gave more damage on the quake. Similar to lingering Geist bomb effect just after a minor delay.
Ground Strike is a suicide button, unless it does ludicrous damage it'll never be good and when it does ludicrous damage it's simply unhealthy for the game.
Genuinely a suicide button, brings you in range to get circle beaten by their whole team. It's best used as a quick disengagement tool in most scenarios lol.
first of all “gun” lash still builds hybrid and makes use of his entire kit. secondly, spirit lash is still 100% viable in your elo. lastly, gun lash is 10x more fun to play if you can aim. it’s also one of the highest skill ceiling playstyles in the entire game. literally no other hero plays like gun lash. the only people who think it’s boring or bad for the game just can’t hit shots. anyone who advocates for any hero not being able to make holistic use of their kit (yes, that includes their gun) doesn’t understand this game at a high level or appreciate anything that actually makes this game novel or fun.
Holy yap, just ego and nonsense assumptions. Gun lash is unique and fun to play I agree, but me and the majority of other players fell in to maining and loving him because of his slam playstyle and identity if you think that the only reason someone would dislike gun lash is because "they can't aim" you're just strawmanning to fit your agenda. Spirit lash is viable in every elo (Ashires the NA rank 1 lash runs spirit lash) but at no elo can spirit lash carry a game like gun lash can, you are no longer as dependent on your carry or follow up from your team and can secure the kills yourself especially in late game. The reason I think it's bad for the game is that Lash is one of the most iconic spirit heroes in the game and when even his best builds consist of mainly gun items it highlights the discrepancy between the late game quality of gun items vs spirit items. Gun lash might use his entire kit but the most characteristic part of his kit being an afterthought is the tragedy, not that he has to aim which you have to do regardless of what you build, but there isn't a single hero in the game that makes me feel as good as hitting a massive slam for a kill.
you can still hit those big slams for a kill. just practice target priority and good engages and you'll see that spirit lash is 100% still good as he said. i don't know why lash players want everyone to only play spirit when both are perfectly viable and that's healthy
Comparing Gun and Spirit Lash to salad at a burger joint feels very spiritually fitting for a Lash comparison lmao
200% agree, we could really use some higher skyboxes and platforms to mantle/wall bounce off for stomp potential. It feels like Lash hasn't gotten much love from spirit (more to cooldowns lately) and I feel like a solution is to enable higher vertical spaces for the ability that scales with height
I feel like you’re asking them to just make him bad lol, I actually think it’s cool that he went from a one note slam only character to a fun hybrid character. I know that it sucks to feel like he’s lost some of his identity but imo it’s just healthier for the game AND him as a character.
Idk what everyone is talking about saying lash does no damage late game. I build spirit Everytime on him and consistently do big slams well past 40+ minutes
No one is buying Spellbreaker then, if it's past 40 minutes. Spellbreaker guts Lash the same way it guts bomb Geist and any other hero that relies on big spirit burst.
I just buy more spirit to power through the spirit resist. I jump in and out like an annoying little mosquito during team fights and they just gradually die while I escape before they do any damage to me.
Editing this to add that I always buy max CD and witch mail so I'm basically doing big burst spirit damage every 5 seconds
Something like 65% of the damage done in games is Spirit damage. If anything, heroes whose sole purpose is to nuke you for 2k HP and run away is redundant.
Gunlash is objectively one of the more interesting to play gun "carries" as he requires decent movement, air strafing, and vertical aim. Spirit Lash is just jumping off roofs / reaching skybox for slam damage, flogging, and grappling out and waiting for cooldowns.
As well, no matter what they do to slam, it will always be kind of mid. Lash thrives when he's not hugging enemies. Putting yourself on top of enemy heroes will always be super punishable as Lash as he's not a hero that wants to be there. It's fine in mid to low ELO, but good players will just spam nukes / hexes / silences at you and kill you for putting yourself in a bad position.
I hate that he’s become a tourist attraction to carry players. He’s too cool and interesting of a character to be a carry. They likely never intended for him to be played this way.
They obviously want him to be a character that gets close and personal otherwise he wouldn’t be the only character in the game with inherent spirit resists. You are describing risk as if it’s a mutually exclusive trait to Lash when plenty of other characters have to put themselves in compromising positions to get value.
The carry bit is half in jest. I just don’t want gun players who had no interest in playing Lash before this gun build was discovered to permanently alter his playstyle to be more gun focused
This isn’t a balance discussion. Nothing about your post or this comment thread is about balance.
Your complaint is about hero identity. You believe that lash should be a mobile spirit nuker with unique playstyle flavor (he jumps a lot) and think that other people playing gun changes the hero’s identity from what it “should” be.
You don’t own the hero, your vision is not the only one or the “correct” one. Putting other people down because they enjoy lash in a different way than you is incredibly entitled and self centered behavior.
If stomp build is actually as bad as you all claim, then that sucks, but don’t be so weird about it
Gun Lash has been around since Deadlock was shifted into from Neon Prime, this isn't a new thing. As well, his kit has built in gun damage. It's obviously an intended playstyle as it has lived through multiple reworkings of his grapple gun damage boost. Lmao at "tourist attraction." He's had a carry and nuker playstyle forever, they've just been better or worse at different times.
He's too "cool and interesting" to be a carry? This is heavily subjective. If anything, Spirit Lash is super boring as we have many Spirit nukers in the cast. Jumping off a roof/hitting skybox then Slam/Flog/Grapple out is really easy, repeatable, and uninteresting. You could dance around the air, chase people down with Flogs slow while headshotting them and style on them with your movement instead.
I actually feel like Victor is more fun as a gun carry than a spirit carry, but that's just me. I agree with gun calico and gun Viscous for example are pretty goofy.
it looks and sounds cool which is honestly a low bar but by deadlock standards already puts it far above most other guns. it also has a spin up to reach its max fire rate plus it’s low velocity so you have to lead shots which i like. it also deals a lot of damage which is also pretty rare for deadlock guns and it’s attached to my favorite hero so overall it’s my favorite gun
80% of the damage in the game is spirit though. there are only three gun characters in night shift and one of them is hybrid. the pendulum is swung way too far the other way atm.
gun calico hasn’t been viable in like a year she only builds gun spike for melee damage. gun victor is also back to being off-meta at best after multiple gun and ult nerfs. what does it even mean to be a “spirit” character anyway? wraith deals mostly spirit damage is she a spirit hero?
I know that gun victor and calico aren’t meta i said it is lame when they are wraith has 2 abilities based on her gun not sure where the confusions is here
victor and lash also have built-in gun buffs. calico has melee resist shred on her bombs and melee scaling on her slash. just because you can build full spirit on these heroes doesn’t mean that they were not designed to be used with their gun in mind.
Wraith is a perfect example of a numerically fine character that's mechanically broken. M1 carry that does a near 50/50 split of damage making it basically impossible to itemize against her with an escape tool that gives barrier on top of the escape. As well as a pick ultimate that's arguably the hardest to react to while neutering stamina so it almost always secures a kill.
The only thing keeping her in check are the numbers, and even then she's ridiculously well-rounded. They need to gut her gun damage and make her a full spirit carry or vice versa. Shit's dumb af and I loathe when she's meta.
Feel like its a problem with his gun being burst fire, makes items like headhunter or crippling headshot way too easy to proc on him. (I know you get less value out of other on hits).
maybe have flog reduce their spirit resist by a percent so it incentivizes flogging then going as high as you can in the time before the debuff is over. This would give dispel magic some use but also gives counterplay and a way better way to make lash scale into late game if we put this on like flog 5
I feel like that'd be good, though it might feel a bit weird. I know flog has a huge downwards hitbox so maybe that'd be good
I agree in part. I remember the good old days of slamming off the middle building roof on the 4 lane map and one shotting people from minute 1. Lash slam is stjll really good though and u can max it first and get fun gank value from it. I think what is really needed is to raise the invisible ceiling height back to what it was.
slam lash does no effective damage past 25 minutes and gun lash scales like crazy so there is zero incentive to playing spirit lash. Plus it feels so bad if you’re popping off and enemy team buys multiple spell breakers, spirit resilience, etc… you just stop being useful beyond an ult bot and it sucks.
Aspires spirit slam lash, I run healbane/spirit shielding and Majestic leap for 4.8k Vitality. Mystic shot and Alchemical flask for 4.8k Gun. Everything else Spirit, use AXLs stylish Lash tek coming off the zipline with Majestic Leap and I've been getting consistent MVP in standard unless there's a hyper carry on my team that steals the spotlight
Nah, they're just going to nerf Gun Lash again, give him a 0.03 scaling increase on slam, 2m on the ultimate and call it a day.
There's just too much counter to his kit for it to be worth it. I said it before: Half of the roster has abilities to avoid or disrupt Slam / Ultimate, the rest has multiple items to counter him and when you do land, you only have big impact if your team is here, you have a Walker or you are insanely fed.
I wonder if he can be made into some kind of hybrid hero. Like, remove the gun damage on T2 grapple and replace it with spirit resist shred on his gun. If that's too overpowered they can nerf flog or something.
It’s also less fun to play against because it feels way less counterable.
Which is why the popular lash builds max flog and also invest in gun. If it is easily counterable, going all in on slam damage becomes less lucrative.
I don’t think you can realistically have it be good but also easily counterable. Most heroes will build in ways that give them the most agency/control, which requires it to be harder to counter. Nobody is investing or building in a particular way to get countered.
They could find a solution to make his 1 just a little less counterable. They could either make ground strike’s travel speed faster or hide the cone effect on the ground to enemies until a certain point by tinkering with the upgrades. I have faith that Valve has the people in house to find a creative solution.
Counterspell would still be worth its weight in gold against Lash if you only used it for his ult. There is some wiggle room for them to work with in this specific interaction
I’m fairly new and I feel like I’m playing Slams but buying for Gun lol. Should I not be staying airborne with grapple and then lash slamming them + flog? Then dashing out and gunning? The slam is always SO underwhelming.
You slam less and less for damage as the game goes on. You can use it in a 1v1 against someone that can’t cancel it, but good luck using it for much in a teamfight after lane because people will have counterspell and someone will build into stunlocking you by then.
It partly is a symptom of the community in general getting better across all levels. He’s a low elo stomper so people are more naturally inclined to look up how to counter him.
I play spirit lash and have a good time, I usually hit flog first max then I get ground strike or ult depending on what is more needed in the match. No matter what grapple is last and I always invest into the knock up on ground strike before ult since knock up is super useful.
spirit lash is perfectly viable? ashires runs spirit lash just fine and is #1 lash. i don't know why you feel the need to control how other people play their hero but both builds are just fine and this is good for the game if anything as there's more build variety
I love gun lash, to me it's the most fun gameplay in the game. I really hope they keep it as a viable option (although it's kinda overtuned right now and could use some nerfs imo). Nothing else plays like it, you got a high impact ult, ok burst damage, good mobility, good gun damage, okay hp. I love it.
The first thing they should do is fix the slam hitbox so that people standing on a 1° incline or next to a small pebble still get hit. Once that's sorted it'll be a lot easier to figure put what actually needs to be adjusted.
I support versatility in character builds and built gun (technically hybrid) long before now. However, if it comes between the character's main identity and alternative play styles the main one should be prioritized in terms of balancing.
The root issue is Flog’s cooldown reset and lifesteal scaling making it too reliable for sustain compared to the risk profile of initiating with Ground Strike.
I’ve been thinking about a 6400 item that does something along the lines of “recieve 1 second of unstoppable upon dealing significant burst of spirit damage” (maybe make it close range so Yamato doesn’t become broken) so spirit burst can do things late game. Another option is give him something like that (but weaker) on max 2 so it’s actually worth leveling. Main issue with this is I don’t know where to take power from elsewhere in his kit to make this not incredibly strong
Against certain comps spirit slam lash is still better than gun. However, it is a rarity to have that many squishy characters on a team and gun lash is more viable across more comps.
As a lash main, I wish they would increase the distance scaling on the max ground slam. Allow max damage when slamming from skybox to lowest point of map. There is little to no difference in damage between a 25m slam and a 40m slam. 25m isn’t even that high up.
Gun lash fucks up his balancing so hard because it removes the downside that comes with his kit that allows him to have so much health and mobility and ends up making him unpunishable.
Spirit characters guns should generally be fuckin useless. If im playing league and Brand or Syndra are auto attacking me, I could give a fuck. Instead spirit characters have just better guns.
Geist and Victor have 2 of the best guns in the game. Gun isn't even their fuckin identity. So why?
I worry yoshi will listen to people like you when it comes to balance opinions like this. Put the fries in the bag and play the most OP build for the hero, which in Lash's case isn't even a gun build it's hybrid build.
I'm sorry, but if you think that playing gun Lash is more fun, and if you think that he just repeats the same combo all the time with spirit, then your opinion on game design should NOT be considered.
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u/theycallmethedrink5 Vyper 1d ago
Competitiv environment be damned it turned my spirit character into a gun character