Dante

Dante is close combat strider and can grill most units close in few secs. It' s not univesral strider who can be built in any situation. Most games dante is used just one time. It also better works in small teams.
Dante is not good woth flea or d bag screen because its grilling unit. Every eskor just got burned.
There is several tactics which can be used.
1. You go all in with dante in enemy base/units. You retreat it when hp is low if its possible.
2. You play almost around napalm missile salvo. One salvo and retreat. And so and so. Its more works like 'look i have moving grill' - now rush counters for it.
3. You make suddent surprise for enemy using cloaker. Get closer dat unit ball and then unleash grilling power on them. Dats is popular from experienced player who know that enemy can disable or kill dante fast.
4. Troll play when you throw dante from transport or with lobster. It's 99% one way trip.
5. You don't know what to do in game so you build dante..
More then 80% dante is one way trip and most of it becomes metal donation.
Dante (especially alone) is perfect target for ultimatum because ultis can kill it with one shoot and retreat. Even scorpion is in better position. Same with lance. Vs porc dante is almost useless.
I would like to see buff for dante. 3,5k metalz is too much for strider who can be so easy countered. I think it should cost 3k metal like scorpion. However if there is no long range counter then dante just melt through everything.

I have trouble with Dante too. It has a lot of different weaponry on a single unit, which is nice I guess, but it's most noteable heatray and flamethrower don't 'wow' me as a riot. For having over 10,000 hitpoints, it sure doesn't feel like a lot, and I generallyy find my dantes often make an uninspiring jourly into valhala, not thinking they've made cost. When I try and mix other units with dante, they can suffer friendly fire damage easily, and obstruct Dante's weapons frequently. When I fight a dante, I can even overwhelm it with a bunch of rovers on flat ground if I can manage a proper surround and bait out a bad d-missile barage.

Speaking of the d-gun, I feel like that's the real main draw of a Dante. it's quick burst can deal thousands of HP from the missiles themselves(especially close-range), and anything set on fire will take almost 500 damage over 30 seconds. Dante can outrange a lot of skirmishers by spraying and praying that d gun at max range, and successfully dgun splitting a salvo.(What I mean is changeing dgun target mid-burst to spread rockets out even more) If you're dying to phantoms, sprat the misile salveo in the general direction and a stray shot may outright kill the phantom.

But I do want to hear from Sigero and some other Mumble Clan members what they think of Dante, cause they do claim good use. And Fealthas used to say that 1v1s escalate into Dantes a lot, forming a minor part of his meta(like on Vitra).

I rarely use dante because I don't build many big things, but they seem effective when used against me. Like most heavies the're very powerful against an unprepared enemy, but lose a lot of usefulness if the enemy is prepared.

If your dantes get insta-gibbed by anti-heavies, you're deploying them in bad situations for them, I'd say. Dante is probably one of the worst heavies against anti-heavies because it specifically needs to get close to be good, and most anti-heavies are either long range and can kite, or short range and insta-gib.

Cool so my list of things to try is:

- dante + lob I never tried that
- dante + cloak
- make a dante when faced with sniper spam
- instead try retreat like I do just go all in and see if can make cost in one go
- if all fails cry for a buff

I would say Dante plays like really tanky Firewalker with Pyro/Scorcher sidearm with its rocket salvo, but the salvo itself is much more potent as it will burn down all targets with 550 or less health with its burn damage. though the rockets themselves are likely to do enough damage to burn most targets with 800 health.

Jumpbots aren't screwed by Dante because they usually field too many anti-heavy units that work on striders. They have placeholders, skuttles, and moderators. They also have Jugglenaut to act as a damage sponge and a trapper.

I usually use Dante when I can't figure out how to end a siege.