#(6. Advanced Ability Overview)

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This section will contain ranging amount of general-purpose tips, tricks related to Support role as a whole, as well as specific Seris mechanics and her ability interactions.

I am not denying that the amount of information provided might be overwhelming for new Seris users. If you have never played Seris, you haven't bought her yet - I suggest you try her out first, and test her abilities and interactions on your own before reading those last 2 sections, as I doubt you will remember any of these if you struggle to grasp her kit.

Positioning



As with every Support, the goal for Seris is to keep everybody alive for as long as possible, while avoiding dying at the beginning of the fight. This can be achieved by having superior positioning and great game sense. If you die first on the battlefield as a Support, you're garbage and you failed your job.

As a Support, your positioning on the battlefield is quite easy to comprehend, but also very unforgiving for mistakes and must be held very strictly. Many people say, that Supports sit safely in backline, but that's just an immediate conclusion people take. As a Support, you want to be on opposite side of most of enemy team at all times, with the center pivot you're rotating around being your tanks location.

If most of enemy team is in front of you, and between you and them are your tanks, you're in good position. If most of the enemy goes right flank, you should be on the left flank, with tanks walling you off. If they are in your backline, you rotate closer to their base location, and so on. If you're on the frontline, or on the flank routes when enemy didn't push on the other side, you're an easy target to kill by their damage dealers. So make sure you follow this advice at all times.

This way, it is very easy mitigate the amounts of damage you take, thanks to damage fall-off enemy's weapons suffer from, thanks to the fact you have longer time to react to projectiles, and, in case of snipers, thanks to reliable cover. Mitigating damage you take is huge for Supports, as there's literally no one else to heal you other than yourself.

I said "most of enemy team" because there's very often 1 or 2 other enemies that try to hold in different areas of the map, usually from sides, but also sometimes from above. Those flankers are biggest danger to your well-being.

Fortunately, if you followed the advice above, you can use your positioning to your advantage when fighting flankers. In addition to being on opposite side of enemy team, if you're expecting ambush from specific left/right flank route, consider strafing a little bit to right/left respectively to create additional distance and force enemy flankers to use their precious movement abilities just to be able to move with their effective range to your location. This can be achieved by standing in hard to reach locations, such as higher grounds.

Most of the characters have only 1 movement ability, if they use it to get to you, they can't get out, simple as that. Meaning you have advantage of you using your movement ability, and then get away with no possibility of being chased by those flankers.

But what if Flanks didn't use their ability to close distance, or have multiple of them? Then you are forced into duel. Some of the Supports can duel very well, some leave much to desire. In case of Seris, she can use her self heal and easy to apply at close range damage to win her fights rather easily... for as long as high level of Cauterize don't appear. Once it does, you need to figure another way of protection.

Ideally, if your team has some sort of backline damage dealer, you should position yourself in a way that will make Flanker see the damage dealer first, and not you. This way you create 2v1 situation that Flanker just can't win. The best he can do is trade his life for life of Damage dealer on your team, but that still turns 5v5 into 4v4 with both supports alive.

Which is also why you don't want to sit in backline too far most of the time. You might have infinite range on your healing, and your F might have 100% increased movement speed, but in the end, against competent flanker, you will need help from your team, it is a team-based shooter after all.

If all of those tips were applied and flanker still managed to live even tho he was super aggressive and killed you, this is no longer only on your bars to survive. This is the moment when one of your tanks should apply more defensive position and continuously peel from you and your Damagers. Most of the tanks have ability to quickly reposition enemies or protect you in the moment of need. If they aren't doing that then it really is not your fault you die, it's theirs, as they left hole in their space-taking job. But their blame starts ONLY from this point onwards, all your other deaths are all your fault completely. Keep that in mind before you complain about your team not protecting you.

It is your job as a Support to capture the objective once your team won the fight. This allows your tank to push forward and prevent any enemy from getting to point, allowing for an easier capture. If enemy breaks through your tanks back onto the point, however, it is time for you to fall back and let tank contest/finish capping the point. Similar logic should be treated with payload. If there's no enemy on payload, let your tank push forward while you escort it, earning precious credits along the way. When enemies get on the payload, you simply retreat. As payload gets close to end, the section that payload needs to be pushed here is usually very open and dangerous for a Support character - this is where one of your tanks should start pushing it no matter where enemies are.

The last thing you need to remember about Support positioning is whether your location allows you to heal your allies well or not. A good position allows you to heal people that are around the point and at least 1 flank route. If it covers all flanks and point, that's amazing, but covering only point, or only one flank, just isn't good of a position and you need to find another place as soon as possible.

Soul Orbs

Moving from general positioning guide into ability specific tips and mechanics, let's start with Seris' primary fire.

I will start with this first, because I feel like this is the worst habit I see among Seris players: use your orbs. If you're not low on health, if you're not escaping, just shoot and hit someone. Too many Serises don't use her weapon and this is a huge mistake on their part. Couple matches ago I had Seris with ~200k heals, which is preeettty good, but literally 0 damage. She literally never used her left click, nor her ult, she was healbotting all the way through.

I said it multiple times, and I will say it once more. Supports gain a lot more ult charge by damaging in comparison to healing.

In case of Seris, she gains 1% ult charge per 200 damage she deals. For comparison, she gains 1% ult charge per 500 healing she does.

Seris orbs literally give her 1.05% ult charge per enemy hit, without Soul Collector. 1 Orb can give you up to 5.25% ult charge if you cleave through all enemies. Supports' Ultimates are their moments of power (as well as utilities but Seris doesn't have any), they are specifically designed to be their "carry" moment, especially compared to every other class. Which is why you have to do damage to work to your full potential.

I am not talking about chasing kills, because that's not what you want to do as support, it's flanker's job to finish low health targets, but at least use your orbs on that Inara on point to gain that 5% additional ult charge in between your heals.

On the topic of chasing kills, remember this: Never, EVER, chase low health targets running away behind corners if the fight is not already won. If you die chasing enemy, or even trade with that low health damage, that's still a fight for your team without a support. You're not running damage build, don't chase people that will put you in danger, easy as that.

Seris LMB is definitely a completely different skill check compared to other characters. At close range, it's ridiculously easy to hit people in their faces with your balls. At medium to long range, however, you need to become a freaking god walking amongst mere mortals just to apply consistent damage, as it moves at speed that is half of Pip's LMB, and 1/4 of Cassie's, sitting at comfortable 150 ft/sec. I love when people complain about how "skilless" her primary fire is to use, only to see them missing every shot on jumping maeve 50 ft. away from them.

Getting used to her Left Click is something that is achieved by playing her for longer periods of time. But there are some tricks that allow you to damage ranged enemies.

If enemy is escaping, try to shoot orbs into their nearest escape route, randomizing the landing spots of your orbs. While you can use jump to let the game randomize orbs for you, since you have midair inaccuracy, it is best to have full control yourself. It almost guarantees hitting people at least a couple of times.

The orbs actually don't disappear until the middle centre of the orbs hit a wall, allowing them to cleave through walls slightly and hitting enemies behind a corner. All those chokepoints and specific locations are something that you learn if you invest some time into Seris, but one prime example I can give is when you push payload on Brightmarsh. At the start of the payload push, there's this little wooden fence in the middle of the map that is like your head level at best, it has some signs above it. You can actually shoot over that fence to damage everyone hiding behind this cover, giving you easiest ultimate charges of your life.

At longer ranges, Seris LMB become more of a zoning tool rather than a damaging tool. You can prevent people from passing certain open sightlines, as well as stop enemies from moving through corners to finish that low health ally. The effectiveness and limitations of this tactic lie in your heavy brain, but dare I say that too many Seris players don't use this to their advantages.

I mentioned previously that movement speed affects Seris' burst potential. It might be quite difficult to relate those 2 thing together at first, but here's an explanation.

Seris' primary fire is made of slow moving projectiles. In fact, they are so slow, that you can manipulate them by your own movement. By moving in a straight line forward, you can tighten the distance between each orb shoot, and on static enemy, this reduced distance between orbs means each orb will hit that enemy slightly faster than normal. The more speed you have, the tighter the gap is of the orbs you spawn.

Similarly, going backwards will enlarge the gap between orbs and slow your time to kill. The time to kill added is not really great even with highest movement speeds, but it does add a bit. In fact, the time to kill is faster/slower by the same amount of time it required you to go towards your enemy from your original location.

Here are 3 gifs at highest movement speed available for Seris, that start shooting at the same time and from the same spot, notice how moving forward kills enemy fastest, and backwards slowest.

So if you want kill your opponent faster, running quickly in straight line towards them is the best possible way to reduce your ttk, however, all at cost of you moving in a predictable way, and therefore being much easier target to shoot.

The last thing those orbs can do is work as a signal flare for your allies. If your ally is sitting behind the corner, low health, waiting for out of combat regeneration and you just can't force yourself out of position to reach him/her, what I usually do is throw some orbs in his line of sight. Many people just snap out of that "waiting zzzz" game they play and quickly peak you for a heal.

You can also use this tactic to warn enemy flankers you know they're coming. This alone might actually prevent them from flanking in the first place, as they know they can ambush only when they're unnoticed.

Reload Cancel

Seris reload is rather fast, as it only takes you exactly 1 second to reload her magazine, but there is a way to improve it just by a slight margin.

I call this animation cancel, because what I think is happening is that reload animation completely replaces animation of you throwing an orb, while still reloading, but from a programmer's perspective, this might actually be classified as a bug. This is a disclaimer of some sort, as I don't want to be a person that just encourages people to use bugs. But I want to be a person that encourages people to use animation cancels, so....

There are 2 ways of doing this cancel technique:

First one requires to you to use any ability, except your Shadow Travel. It's faster and easier to do compared to the second option.

While holding your LMB, use any ability except your F (in the gif I used my Q), while you still have at least 1 ammo in the magazine. Keep holding LMB all the time, and either press your reload right after your ability ends, or just mash reload and hope it does it for you.

As you can see, at the end of reload you have 11/12, which might actually classify it as a bug.

The second way to do is is harder to do, but simpler to write. While you're holding your LMB, release it and then quickly press LMB + Reload. This allows you to do similar cancel, but there's an obvious delay in your shoots, which is perhaps why it's "weaker".

Both of those cancels benefit from Deft Hands. At Deft Hands 3 it seems almost as if you had no reload at all, although the second version has even more delay with it purchased.

Is this cancel any good? I don't think so. It might have some uses and niche scenarios where it helps, but honestly, I keep forgetting this thing exists. This in no way puts Seris at higher place in the Meta. It's unimpactful, I still stand strong about Deft Hands and it's uselessness.

Perhaps it was just a cool way of showing off that I have a lot of experience with the character.

Restore Soul

You better like this ability, as you will use it a lot.

As I said earlier, this ability has fairly long reach, having range of 120 ft. It requires line of sight initially, but not when channeling heal, so most obvious and safest way to use this ability is to peek for a split second and then hide behind wall until it's duration ends. It's not worth peeking your head out while channeling this ability, you can't do much while healing, can't attack or use other abilities, only move.

A good way to make your positioning unpredictable for flankers, is to use 2 sightline points that you constantly rotate around in between heals, for as long as those vintage points qualify as "good positioning". You can't do it anywhere you want, but such simple idea can yield into great results.

Your heal has visuals that work like a shining yellow arrow pointing to your location, you better use anything that will make flanker guess your location.

Don't forget you can cancel your healing ability. The moment someone reaches full health, it is not worth to continue healing them unless you want to gain bonuses your loadout cards bring. It is never worth precasting either. Even if they start taking damage again while your ability is on cooldown, the chance of them dying within those 1.5 sec are still fairly low, because, fortunately for us, Time To Kill in this game didn't crash through the floor yet. As you continue playing Seris you will eventually get a feeling when people will gain full health from your RMB without even looking at their healthpool, canceling your heal, dare I say, accidentally, right when they get their HP full.

Your heal does not put you in combat mode, allowing you to contribute to fight while still restoring your health without any risk. Use this technique if you don't have any healing cards, and your Q is on cooldown.

Probably the biggest cause of Seris players' deaths, me included, is chasing allies that constantly get out of position to heal them, and thus getting Seris out of position as well.

Don't do it. It's not worth it. Don't heal people that are overextending way out there in enemy backline. If healing person requires you to drop from your high ground, requires you to peek snipers' line of sight for way too long, there's no other way to get into their line of sight, then don't do it. Don't heal them, mute them if they spam VHS after dying, they probably didn't use they VGS system for good anyway, focus your healing on people who will win your fight instead.

I know that in times like this one would want to play Jenos instead, and sometimes line of sight requirement truly feels like a burden, but this is the character you choose. Fortunately, we can get our ways around that.

Many people don't know this, but if you hold your heal button when noone is in your Line Of Sight (LoS for short), Seris will attempt to heal at the earliest possible moment when an ally actually does get into her LoS. This almost completely makes the "perhaps I pressed my right click too late" issue pretty irrelevant when trying to get into LoS of your allies.

Do keep in mind, however, that her autolock is really forgiving, and this technique can actually make you heal someone that you didn't even notice running in the corner of your camera. What is even worse, her autolock is so generous, it can actually target person that is in close proximity behind the Seris, as ridiculous as that is. Watch out for it.

Another great tech that might help and that is never used by anyone, is to use Superjumps to achieve desired LoS. As you might have already realized, if you jump close to a wall, or at least an obstacle that is on about your chest level, your character actually jumps twice as high compared to normal jump.

What that means is that you can jump while looking at nearest wall, then rotate your camera 180 degrees, and while in air you can target an ally that would otherwise be impossible to target without moving away from your position.

I use it all the time, and almost every fight it has its uses. It is jarring to see that no one ever does that to help themselves. There are a lot of interesting spots for Seris superjumps that you will learn over time, for example, while capping point in the Frozen Temple map, you can use nearest wall to achieve line of sight with people in the cave that is covered by the wooden palisade.

If you want to gain bonuses from your cards (for example, maybe you were caught in an ult that didn't kill you and the only thing you care about is self healing from your Blood Pact card), then hold your right click and spin your mouse 360 degrees. Autolock will do the job for you.

When it comes to heal target prioritization, there are 3 rules, 2 of them make you a nice person, and third one wins you games.

If Tank and squishy are both high HP, heal squishy, as tank has higher chance to survive upcoming damage. If tank and squishy next to each other are low, heal tank, as he is more important role to keep alive. If someone carries your game more than rest, no matter what role, focus his healing on him more than others.

In addition, almost every Tank in the game has an ability that allows them to counter effects of Cauterize, a shield, or things like Inara's increased healing. This is their way of saying "I need your heal focus right now", and you should adjust accordingly.

Almost every Flank has access to a short duration cleanse ability. This is the only moment in the entire fight where you should try your best to use your heal on them. That's not to say that's the only moment you should heal them, but that's the only one you should consider moving into a little bit riskier position to do so.

Now about healing under effect of Cauterize... this is very situation-specific.

While most of the times it's probably better to just damage instead, you will probably still try to heal your allies with a view to them lose the effect of Caut for even a brief moment, mainly due to muscle memory.

But you definitely want to heal people during caut in those circumstances:

Flanker diving onto a bursty character. With caut 3, you heal for enough to achieve a health breakpoint for your squishy Flank that will let them survive all this burst, even if at 30 hp.

Your ally has Rejuvenate 3 and is not taking too much damage. With reju 3, you heal for about 530 health/sec even when they have caut 3. It is still good healing amount. Note how some Tanks have in-built Rejuvenate effect in their loadout cards, makes sure to check if they have it.

Probably the best tip I can give you that will boost your healing capabilities by reducing your tunnel vision is to turn on your Team Bar UI in the Options menu. This is the part of UI in the upper left corner that shows their Champion icons, names, ult charge %, but most importantly for you, their current health.

Take a look at health of your team every now and then. There's so much information you would miss otherwise.

But all in all, as you gain experience with Seris, healing with her becomes as natural as breathing, nothing more than formality. In fact, I sometimes forget I am healing someone, it's all tied to my muscle memory at this point. As I said, it becomes your second nature, person that plays Seris really well looks like a some sort of damage dealer that simply heals during his downtime, as if he knew he is going to lose LoS with enemy or reposition himself at the same exact moment his teammates need healing, always doing something impactful and never having any downtime. Sometimes even I amaze myself when I have this gut feeling and do some sort of crazy flick shot with my healing ability in general direction without even stopping looking at enemy for a moment, only to heal my drogoz who was retreating back into the most unguessable position.

This image I described is definitely your playstyle goal eventually, but for now, just make sure you don't hear VHS spam too often.

If you're wondering what kind of healing numbers you should consider "good", there's a recipe for that. Take your match time, remove all ":" symbols and add "0" twice. For example, if your match lasted for 14:37, the healing you should aim for should be around 143 700.

This obviously depends on things like how many tanks you had, how much damage your team took, etc. But it should be a good approximation for your personal assessment.

Rend Soul

While everyone else on the Support roster have access to amazing healing abilities or incredible utilities on their first ability, Seris preferred to go the selfish route and decided to put there a self healing ability instead.

Most obvious way to use this ability is to recover health from any damage you take during the fight. Usually, detonating 3 stacks is already enough to fill your health to full as it heals you for 45%, so considering how early you tend to press this button, it is more than enough. If you're low on health and have 1 or 2 stacks, it's usually better to try to shoot once or twice to get better amount of healing before the detonation, but if you're caught in awkward place don't hesitate to press it.

This ability is amazing early game, but once enemy team starts stacking higher levels of Cauterize, even detonating 20 stacks is not enough to heal through all the damage they do. In that case what you have to do is go behind cover for 1.5 seconds and then press this ability. Some people try to time it, but it's easier to simply look at the Cauterize timer in the middle of the screen, instead of guessing whether they applied Caut again within that 1.5 second window or not.

While dueling, find a pillar or any cover that will allow you to strip Cauterize even for a brief moment, if possible. What I like to do is use wall superjump to mess with people's aim, which hopefully will allow me to remove Caut for additional split second and gain a little bit of additional healing before I get Cauted again. Note that the more stacks you have, the longer it takes your Q to self heal you, so adjust your time accordingly.

Obviously, this ability has far more uses than that. Excluding the obvious uses of this ability offered through your Talents and cards, Rend Soul can be used to burst enemies fairly well.

When on offense, the perfect scenario to detonate this ability is when you catch enemy in a current of your Soul Orbs. The ideal moment happens when one of your orbs manages to drop enemy's health below 610 (673 with SC), and if you time it correctly, enemy will experience the instantaneous 400 damage your Q deals, and then be hit with one orb that has already been fired that he just can't avoid, dealing lethal damage in a way that he will never predict. Essentially you're turning 400 damage burst into 610 (673 with SC) unavoidable damage, and this is not something people expect Seris to do, especially if you moved towards the enemy in a straight line, like I explained in Soul Orbs section, speeding up time-to-kill even more. This tactic provides most kills of all strategies I use. If you don't need the self-heal, then time it this way, instead of using it as soon as enemy gets stacked 4 times.

This ability can also be used to finish enemies behind a corner. It's kind of obvious, but it seems that too many Serises prefer to chase enemy into their base instead of pressing Q...

Last but not least, this ability can show you location of stacked enemies. Not only damage numbers that pop up give you general direction of their location, the character silhouette actually flashes revealed as they get damaged for a split second. It is very useful when you noticed enemy that retreats, but has multiple paths of escaping the situation. If you're on mic you can even use this to inform your Flankers where their easy kill is.

If you use the abomination that is Agony talent, and proc stun successfully on a flank, then move behind him to force him to rotate his camera before he can shoot you. As he tries to do so, jump to his right or left, depending which direction he rotated his camera (you want to jump opposite direction). If there's a wall nearby, you can even consider using it to jump over him. All of it while still dealing damage to that target. There's no way he's living through that. You reminded him why he should buy Resilience in a more appropriate way.

Shadow Travel

On paper, this should be the best escape ability in the entire game. In reality, competent players listen to loud sound effects that will let them locate you super easily, not to mention the first thing you do after your F is RMB 99% of the time, which works as an arrow pointing enemies into your location. And if everything fails for them, people can buy Illuminate, completely shutting this ability down. I swear, buying Illuminate is so efficient and crazy good against Seris. If every flanker in the game actually bothered to buy cheapest item in the game, Seris winrate would drop even lower than it already is. Of these reasons alone, I actually don't bother in making this ability any good via cards.

Then there's this issue of people who tend to sit in this ability for way longer than they should. If you have crossed that dangerous sightline, if flanker forgot about your existence after your pressed F, if positioning is good enough and there's nothing that can hurt you easily - then you should cancel this ability as soon as possible. Too many Serises let their team die while they hold onto this ability. As I said previously, you can cancel it by pressing it again, or pressing LMB.

You can actually decloak yourself by using your Spray button as well. This way of decloaking only breaks stealth and not the ability itself - which means you are visible, but still immune to all damage and CC. It can be used as a bait in niche scenarios.

This ability has huge skill ceiling, contrary to popular belief. There's a lot of nuances and tricks that can make your escapes more successful.

You need to think about 2 positions constantly whole match. The position you are in, and position you want to end in when you use your F. The second position should still follow the advices of good positioning, but where that position actually is depends on map, composition of both teams, enemy position and their movement, as well as movement speed in your F. If your movement speed is rather low, consider moving closer to your tanks. This also can work as a psychological benefit. If your tank manage to see low health Seris that is using her F to reposition, there's a big chance they will turn back and peel the danger away from your team.

Best tip for this ability that no ones makes use of for some reason: Use wall superjumps to preserve your momentum. Seris is more "slippy" than other characters, it takes her longer to accelerate after standing still, or strafing left to right. This is also true when you bump into a wall. If there's a platform that you want to jump on, then instead of bumping into it, losing all your speed and acceleration, use nearest wall to jump over it instead. This is especially useful at higher levels of Dark Whisper. Here's comparison in distance:

This distance might look small, but it often is the difference between hiding behind a corner, surviving successfully, and between dying. Many other characters waste 2-3 levels of their cards to gain such distance advantage. Use your escape smartly.

Don't forget that it takes exactly 4 seconds for a champion to start regenerating out of combat, which is the exact duration of this ability. You will start regenerating after fully leaving this ability, so consider healing over shooting right after it to make sure you gain full benefits from that regen. A higher IQ strat is to delay your escape as long as possible even if being chased, in order to activate regen while you are in this ability. Do you see why Nether Siphon is put in "bad category" now?

A tip to enter your escape successfully without dying midcast more often, is to use wall jumps to do a more unpredictable movement that will throw enemy aim off. If a person is a flanker and is very close to you, you can even try to jump over their head and guarantee going into the shadow dimension.

Your Shadow Travel cleanses all harmful effects when you enter it successfully, including Cauterize. I saw someone suggesting you can use it to cleanse cauterize for your Q ability. Personally, I don't think it is a good combo. If you're in a situation that forces you to press Q after leaving shadow realm, that means you left your F in a position in which you shouldn't be leaving in the first place. Doing this combo makes both of your survivability tools go into a cooldown, which is something you want to avoid at almost all times of playing.

Someone would counterargument that if I left early and pressed that Q to self heal in an awkward spot, that would let me heal a person that would otherwise die if I were to reposition, right? Well not really. Your Q has 1 second cast time, so you might as well hold onto that Shadow Travel for 1 second longer, being in better position, and then uncloak. Doesn't that make more sense? Your decloak has also 0.5 long animation were you can't do anything, so canceling your F to heal a person 1.5 second late in total doesn't sound like the most profitable way of using those abilities to me.

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