I actually enjoy watching this combo go off. Up, down, up, down, up. I kid you not, I even enjoy getting hit by it. It’s a wonderfully calculated setup.
However, the Montana typically opens this with knock-up Dash or Mansformation. Dash will whiff often on speed-jacked melee, and Mansformation always will, unless the player gets stuck in a corner or with a body block. It’s another one of those situations where if any CC in the chain is dropped into the network ether, it’s bad news.
Plus, Montana gets heavily bullied from the start of the round by melee, even when hanging back. His defense should be close-range minigun fire, but if the hits don’t register, he’s early-round fodder.
This is certainly a solid counter, provided the ISIC and Benedict don’t try for direct hits and shoot at feet. As I said, splash damage seems to be the most reliable thing to stop cheap melee advance at the moment, besides a mirror match. It shouldn’t be the only thing, though, in my opinion. It also has to be executed very fast, before a melee retreat skill is fired. Seems to work best in confined spaces, like the sniper nest on Overgrowth.
However, I find lock-on skills tragically fail at the worst times in a typical online game. I play a lot of Reyna, and used to play a lot of Benedict. Even aiming upward to arc the shots results in situations where the homing effect just seems to give up mid-flight, probably when line-of-sight was reported lost server-side.
ISIC/Orendi is a similar, solid combo I like. Gnosis means pillars are usually ready to slam damage if a CC lands, and Nullify + Fire Walk + Let’s Bounce lets you drop all the fire DoT right on a stunned player’s position. One time I did all this perfectly, dropped a Dragón to 1/4 life, then watched as my dead-perfect Paradigm Shift inexplicably missed as he clotheslined away. I was… upset.
It’s very, very rare to see a Hook/Trap combo land any more, at least on PC. All a player has to do is duck behind some map geometry when they hear the noise, and chances are they’ll only be pulled half the distance at most.
Now, it’s important to note that while I rarely see it land, that doesn’t it’s not working for certain players. What I mean is, I’ve seen a Ghalt with red connection bars fire the Hook at me and seemingly miss, right as I duck around a corner. Then, when I’m not remotely near him, I will die to the tune of around 3000 damage.
The damage reports for such KOs are always vague, usually showing around half of the damage dealt as coming from Ghalt’s shotgun, and not accounting for the other half at all. Occasionally I can see my character teleport through the map to the Ghalt’s position, right at the moment of death. I swear, I’m not making this stuff up.
Anyone else ever had a damage report that doesn’t add up to the total damage dealt? I have–on just about every KO.
I’ve seen the Toby vacuum work once, and I’ve played quite a bit. It actually feels like a very fair kill when he sets it up. It also requires a great deal of precision in shots and mine placement. It can catch that one melee player, but then you have to seal the deal with railgun, which is just another projectile prone to laggy misses.
It also usually requires Toby to bait the melee player into a close-range engagement. Most melee I’ve seen just avoids Toby until late round, much like they avoid Marquis or any other sniper. They can get XP elsewhere.
I have to totally disagree with this one. I’ve been the Deande, and I’ve been the team. The ult does very sad damage to players that are a higher level than Deande, and ends on a very predictable timer. If you can’t secure the kill during the ult, the target will escape the second they are out of stun, or worse, have fuel remaining to turn on you and end you. If you save Holotwin, you still might have a chance, but getting the drop on the super-melee probably required you to Holotwin early to get the position required in the first place.
I’ve also had her ultimate miss, when the cone was clearly centered on the target on my screen. Not hitting the target on the server, I suppose. Landing Ire’s Echo improves one’s chances, but then you have to trick the target into actually engaging your Holotwin. Most players can tell the difference, and just hang back and wait for the real Deande to decloak.
I’m not saying any of these combos aren’t good–they’re great examples of stuff that can work, if all goes well. I could give you just as many of my personal favorites. But it’s like I said in my first post: In sub-par network conditions, the tactics required to counter these melee strategies do not work. They’re too precise, in positioning and timing, while the melee approach is lazy and reliable.
When I play, I find myself spending most of the round trying to protect whomever the aggressive melee has decided to bully and feed from, and unless I succeed almost every time, I’m prolonging the inevitable. It requires too much attention to maintain while simultaneously denying minion XP and defending all the map objectives. It doesn’t even matter if I hold these players to a reasonable K/D. Something else will give, and the game will be frustratingly lost.
Even when I restrict an early steamroll, I’ve seen better-than-average melee players respond by hanging back and working buildables until Lv.5 to 7, activating a legendary or two, and then resuming their simple approach of picking on the weakest link, backed by extra statistical firepower.
It really depends on the quality of the signal and the wireless card. I don’t trust console Wi-Fi hardware (the Xbox 360, for instance, has terrible built-in Wi-Fi), but on PC, you can have Wi-Fi setups that aren’t much different than wired for a gaming scenario. You just need a good router, the knowledge to set it up properly, and the ability to test for interference. If there is too much interference, though, then yeah, the inconsistent connection that results is terrible for gaming.
That said, I’m running wired gigabit ethernet. Pointless overkill for gaming, but it’s nice to have the overhead when I have to download games from Steam or GOG. 
