How to More Easily Survive with Your Abilities Negated (Guide)!
Hi community,
This is a guide, where I provide tips for having an easier time surviving while your abilities are negated. During certain aspects of the game, such as holding the Gnome Bomb, Battery (Turning Point, only for Plants), Bomb (Loggy Acres, only for Zombies) and the Crystal Dog (in the free-roam regions, not the Power Team Vanquish weekly event), your abilities will be negated. There are quite a few other instances, but these are the main times. This is most notably useful if you enjoy and play Gnome Bomb or Turf Takeover quite a lot, as your abilities will be negated if you hold a Gnome Bomb or another item, or need help bringing the Crystal Dog to the Strange Well in a free-roam region, as your abilities are also negated while you possess it.
As you may be aware, if you hold an item such as the Gnome Bomb, you lose access to your abilities until you place it or are vanquished, and in many of these instances, you will also not be able to sprint or use shields. For this reason, you become a really easy target and can easily be tracked down and vanquished. Also, in many of these instances, you will have an indicator over your head that your team and also the enemy team can see, even through blocks and walls, so you can be easily found by your opponents.
This guide aims to make it that bit easier for you to survive while your abilities are negated, you generally get rewards by holding and placing these items as necessary, such as XP, and sometimes the whole objective revolves around this, so it is a good idea to try and perform these. Here, I am going to provide tips to help you survive these situations when you are locked out of your abilities. For the purpose of this guide, I am also going to assume that you are unable to sprint. Check out these tips and hopefully you will have an easier time in surviving while holding an item!
SURVIVING WITH YOUR ABILITIES NEGATED
Sticking with Allies
This is probably one of the most important tips to follow, if not the most important one. Your allies can defend and protect you, watch your back for enemies, fight and vanquish enemies, and take the item from you if you get vanquished (and hopefully revive you as well). Always try to wait for your team before you go to collect the item. They will be able to use their abilities and sprint, so they will have an easier time defending then you. Just try to go for the objective, however if an enemy appears to the front of you or near you, you can use your primary weapon to shoot at the enemy. Your allies can catch up with you by sprinting and with mobility abilites, but you will not be able to, so just keep going for that objective. Your allies should be able to get to you quickly, but remember, so can your enemies!
Activating Abilities before Collecting Items
Once you collect the item, you will not be able to use your abilities. However, you can use an ability just before you collect the item. This means you will effectively still be able to use the ability, however you will be forced to use it before you collect the item. If you do this, you will give your ability time to cool down while you hold the item. Pea Suped (Peashooter) and Space Force (Space Station) do not get cancelled when you hold the Gnome Bomb, so you can activate these abilities before you carry the item to keep the speed boosts and other boosts that they provide for a short time. Abilities that involve transformations, such as Invoke Oak (Acorn to Oak), Station Inflation (Space Cadet to Space Station) and Robo Call (Imp to Z-Mech) can be kept if you transform before collecting the item, and you can keep the increased health you get, and as you are most likely unable to sprint anyway, it does not harm you to do this, however just bear in mind that you are a bigger target. Some other abilities, such as ZPG (Foot Soldier), Shuck Shot (Kernel Corn) and so on, can be used, in order to attempt to get vanquishes or to try and achieve something else this way before you get locked out of your abilities.
Have Lots of Health
As it states, if you use a character with a lot of health, you are more likely to survive with the item, due to enemies needing to deal a higher amount of damage to you before you get vanquished. That said, you are generally a larger target with more health, so bear that in mind. For this reason, Team-Up characters are useful for this, especially if you have allies riding you with the item, as they are still able to use their abilities to protect you as you take the item to the objective. Simply having lots of health though increases your survivability straight up. Keep in mind that when you collect an item, you tend to gain most or all of your health back, so being at low health when you go to pick up an item is not particularly harmful for your survivability, in fact it can potentially save you if you were about to be vanquished, so keep that strategy in mind if you find it helpful. If you can regenerate quickly as well, all the better!
Constantly Move Around
While you have an item, you may be shot at frequently, maybe even to the point of being targeted, because that is what the enemies are supposed to do. As well as hopefully being protected by your team, if you keep moving around unpredictably and erratically, your enemies will find it harder to hit you. Instead of just simply moving forward in a straight line, try and continuously and randomly move around so you are less likely to be hit. You should take less damage this way because you should not be hit as often.
Jump Frequently
Similar to the erratic moving, try and continue jumping. Jumping gives you a very minor burst of speed, but again makes it harder for you to be hit. If you combine this with moving unpredictably, you will find that you should get hit a lot less often. Your enemies will find it harder to tell what you are doing and exactly where you are going if you are jumping all around the place. It is even possible that they will lose sights of you for a short time if you are crazy enough.
Use Walls and Cover to Your Advantage
As you are more vulnerable, try to use walls and other forms of cover around the map to your advantage to block incoming fire. But, remember, you will have an icon above your character's head so your enemies will still know where you are. However, this is still really useful, because your enemies may need to get closer to you before they can start shooting you, or they may have a harder time in general in shooting you down. Whenever you see cover, make use of it. This will make it significantly easier for you to survive.
Use Character Upgrades Wisely
If you intend to do a lot of item collecting, this one is very important! Make sure to use your character upgrades wisely! These upgrades can actually really help you once you have collected an item! For instance, the Speedy upgrade is available for all characters and is unlocked from the start. It increases your base movement speed by over 10%, which is excellent for travelling to the objective faster. For Support characters, you could try and use Hard Target, as you move faster for a short time after taking damage, useful for getting to the objective more quickly if you get hit. For Defend characters, you could try and use Health Regeneration Delay so that you begin to regenerate faster after taking damage, which is especially useful if you can get to cover. For Attack characters, you could try and use Vampiric so you gain health if you manage to vanquish an enemy. Those are just some examples: there are many more you can use to help you with bringing items to the objective once your abilities are negated. Heck, you could even make a build on some of your characters designed especially for when your abilities are negated!
VIDEO GAMEPLAY
I made a video of bringing the Gnome Bomb to the objective with negated abilities, I provided as much tips as possible. I used Oak and use the Hardened, Health Regeneration and Health Regeneration Delay upgrades (my tanky build) in order to improve my survivability. Just note that this was in a match of Gnome Bomb on Private Play, on Easy Difficulty. It gets much harder than this if you battle harder Al or other players.
CONCLUSION
While your abilities are negated, you are in a much tougher spot. You can really easily be found, you can only defend yourself with your primary (and most secondary) weapons and you generally cannot sprint. By using at least some of these tips, you should find it significantly easier to take your respective items to the objective without being vanquished by your enemies. Also, you get rewards for it like XP and help your team win games, so take advantage of these tips when you can!
Thanks for reading, have a great week everyone!
Peace
