Talk To The Hand [Debuff Melee Build] [WIP]

Rush the first four items.

Won't hurt your enemies, but lets you get away.

Build Sustain for health, build Debuffs to buy time, build Damage to be the GOAT. Buy what you need, otherwise grab in order.

Deny damage, abilities, and more.

If you feel like your build is fully online, consider one of these as a capstone.

Items I can't recommend but might be interesting to try.

Use Heavy Melee attacks to kill minions at half health. Your gun is mostly a tool for pressuring the enemy and taking souls, and until you get Melee Charge you can't fire it often. Remember: Most characters aren't equipped to fight in Melee, so you can dominate the lane up to their guardian pretty easily. Make judicious use of cover, and heal with Melee Lifesteal or your flag minion to keep pressure up. Your Ult can score kills that the enemy can't react to, consider using it if you see them at low health. If the enemy does try to engage in a fight, stay behind cover so they have to move into your territory (melee range), and take advantage of your abilities to score a kill. Be mindful of the enemy guardian, it can deal a lot of damage, especially if you're going in for a kill. Parry it for a bit of breathing room if you can manage it.

Once you're finished laning, feel free to help out your teammates and farm neutral camps to accelerate your build. You can handle all tiers with Torment Pulse, but Tier 3's will take awhile to clear. Generally, try to keep your lanes pushed to the middle. Keep track of where the enemy is. If you don't know where they are, assume you'll get killed by them if you push up too much. Go up to a Walker if you see 4+ enemies pushing another lane, and farm otherwise. You can get kills by ambushing solo enemies, but be careful to make sure that they're actually alone. A lot of easy kills are from ganking enemies fighting your teammates. Abrams is tanky, but pretty vulnerable to focus fire since he doesn't have strong escape options, so go for 1v1s or have help from your team to take the aggro off of you.

Siphon Life deals damage with lifesteal and applies pressure with the blue aura. Kind of like Warden's Binding Word, it can make for a decent retreat option if you don't want to engage but have your other abilities on cooldown. Siphon Life also cancels out your Melee, but not your Shoulder Charge, so pop it during a Charge but before/after a Heavy Melee attack. Shoulder Charge stuns but also disorients enemies during the movement, so you can sometimes (depends on the MMR) get a free punch out of it even if you don't slam into a wall. Also a half-decent retreat option. Infernal Resilience is passive healing, you can pretty much ignore it outside of the extra regen. Seismic Impact can be used to engage or escape from fights, and sometimes double down in the middle of a fight. Doesn't deal much damage, so you need to rely on the stun and follow up with a punch or Shoulder Charge.

You must bait out the parries, little one. There's a few ways of doing it, but if your opponent knows to parry, purposefully miss a Heavy Melee (while keeping it close to them!) so they parry to respond. Then punish them with a second punch. Alternatively, your Siphon Life cancels Melee attacks, so you can throw out a punch beelining for them and press 1 to deny the parry. If your Shoulder Charge gets you parried, try buffering a punch by holding Q (or your Melee button) during the charge. Sometimes you'll end up too far away to cross the gap in time, but usually you'll land the hit (unless they got Debuff Reducer).