In Pokémon UNITE, ranked games are quicker than most other MOBAs, letting early game characters who make an impact from the start, like Absol, powerful. Let’s examine how to get the most out of the Disaster Pokémon.
As an early-game jungler, Absol fits into a rather small category on Pokémon UNITE’s roster. At the time of this writing, Absol is only one of two characters (the other being Zeraora) that play almost solely from the central area and do not evolve. As such, it fills a very necessary role in a game as experience dependent as UNITE, punishing those who try to forfeit the early game in favor of hard scaling. Absol moves quickly and utilizes critical hits to deal massive damage as a Melee Speedster right from the get-go. This early strength helps it stay ahead of the game’s power curve and secure early advantages to allow space for its team to operate, while quelling opponents’ attempts to sit back and play for late.
Right out of the gate, Absol’s abilities cater to its offensive prowess. Absol’s basic attacks are melee range, and every third one is boosted as with other Pokémon. In Absol’s case, its boosted attacks deal damage and decrease the Defense stat of any Pokémon that it hits, with the damage increasing if it only hits a single enemy. Its passive ability, Super Luck, is much more straightforward, simply raising Absol’s Critical Hit rate. Critical hits are the core of this Dark-type Pokémon’s damage output, and with Super Luck they are more likely to occur when attacking.
At Level 1, Absol gets to choose between the moves Feint and Slash, gaining the other upon reaching level three. Using Feint causes Absol to dash in an arc towards the indicated direction, attacking any opponents that it touches in the process. While doing so, this attack ignores any defense or shields the opponent may have. Slash is a simple, aimed melee attack, scratching in the indicated direction to deal damage and increase Absol’s Critical Hit Rate briefly. Feint and Slash remain until Absol reaches Levels 5 and 7, respectively.
Upon reaching Level 5, the player is given a choice between two replacements for Feint: Pursuit and Night Slash. Pursuit is a one-time lunge when activated, dealing damage with a standard attack to a target when hit. If the target is struck from behind, then Pursuit’s cooldown is significantly reduced and its damage is increased. At Level 11, Pursuit is upgraded to increase Absol’s Movement Speed at the conclusion of this move. Alternatively, Night Slash maintains Feints arced dash in the given direction, dealing damage to any enemies hit just as Feint does.
However, if Night Slash successfully connects with an enemy, be it a Wild Pokémon or one from the opposing team, Night Slash gains a second charge, able to be reactivated as a straight-line lunge in any direction. This second attack briefly increases Absol’s Critical Hit Rate for a varied amount based on a hit target’s missing health, allowing for increased damage to wounded opponents. When upgraded at Level 11, Night Slash’s secondary lunging strike restores some of Absol’s HP when landed.
On the other side, Slash is replaced when Absol reaches Level 7, leaving it with the choice of Sucker Punch and Psycho Cut. Sucker Punch, when activated, targets a single enemy, slowing both it and Absol before lashing out at the target to deal damage. However, if the target enters an attack command during this channeling period, Absol will dash behind them immediately, stunning them in the process. This move upgrades at Level 13, upon which it increases the speed at which Absol attacks for a brief period when Sucker Punch lands.
The other option, Psycho Cut, instead shoots a wave of energy out in a straight line as an aimed projectile. Any enemies touched by the wave are briefly slowed and visibly marked, taking greatly increased damage from Absol’s next three standard attacks before the mark wears off. Upon being upgraded at Level 13, Psycho Cut raises Absol’s Movement Speed toward any opponent that has been marked in this way.
Finally, we have Absol’s Unite Move, Midnight Slash, which unlocks upon reaching Level 9. This large area-of-effect move allows the Dark-type Pokémon to launch a series of rapid attacks at enemies in a stationary cone. While doing so, Absol becomes completely untargetable, and at the move’s conclusion a large shockwave is unleashed along the cone to deal damage and knockback any opposing Pokémon hit by it. After the shockwave is released, Absol becomes targetable again, returning to the spot from which the move was activated and (as with other Unite Moves) is granted greatly increased Movement Speed for a short time.
As one can imagine from seeing its kit, Absol is designed to leap in and deal significant damage over a short period of time. Unfortunately, the mobility granted by Feint, Pursuit, and Night Slash are Absol’s only real form of survivability, and it has very little way to sustain itself when damaged. This results in a rather sharp learning curve for Absol players, reliant on knowing the right moment to swoop in, dish out the pain, and get out unpunished.
Absol is inherently a duelist by nature, seeking to identify a weak member of the opposing team and single them out for a quick and easy assassination, using its high mobility and massive burst damage to secure the takedown. As such, positioning is key to the Disaster Pokémon’s success, and utilizing nearby brush for stealth purposes is extremely useful in setting up a dive onto unsuspecting enemies. For that reason, Absol is usually best-suited for the central area’s jungle role, clearing away Wild Pokémon quickly before emerging from the shadows to catch enemies out of position.
As Absol doesn’t evolve, its stats are significantly higher than many others in the earliest levels. This is one of Absol’s greatest strengths, as through its rapid jungle-clearing speed it can easily reach Level 5 before many other Pokémon in the lanes reach their evolutions. This allows for a window of opportunity to leverage your early strength against the enemy team, either bullying them out of their lanes or even taking them down if they’re pushed too far forward. With Absol’s Level 5 upgrade of either Pursuit or Night Slash, it can utilize multiple dashes to close the distance, even beyond any enemy Eject Buttons. The early pressure these early maneuvers generate is a great boon to the team, allowing them (and you) to move up and score early points and/or steal some resources from the opponents’ side—be it Wild Pokémon or Sitrus Berries. From there, Absol seeks to stay ahead of the experience curve, consistently taking advantage of its own resources while securing small victories around the map to maintain a level lead and keep the opponents on the back foot heading into the midgame.
Ideally, all of this pressure placed onto the opponents would result in advantageous positions for your team heading into the midgame. Where this often materializes itself is in securing Rotom and Drednaw early on, although the latter is often more powerful than the former. If Absol has maintained a significant early lead heading up to this point, it can often manage to learn its Unite Move before many of the enemy Pokémon, which can be leveraged in an early teamfight or scare enemies off from contesting an objective. Due to Absol’s heavy damage output, it can take care of Drednaw and Rotom quite quickly if given the chance, so look to do so if your enemies are giving you the adequate space necessary.
In the later stages of the game, Absol’s power relative to the other Pokémon tends to taper off a bit, assuming your team hasn’t blown the game wide open with your early pressure. In this case, Absol’s role shifts from that of an intimidator to an assassin, utilizing brush to set up flanks or dives against the opposing team’s vulnerable carries. Ideally, this is done in one of two ways: picking someone off in transition or assassinating them at the beginning of a teamfight. The former is relatively simple when possible; keep an eye out for objectives that spawn and position yourself in a place where you can eye up the opponents making their way over. If anyone lags behind or a vulnerable member gets too close, burst them down in one fell swoop, forcing the enemy team into a numbers disadvantage for the upcoming objective. Teamfights, however, are where Absol’s difficulty in execution can show itself most.
As mentioned previously, the Disaster Pokémon has little in the way of defensive stats and sustain, and so getting stunned up and locked down in a fight is often a death sentence when in the face of multiple opponents. As such, skirting around the outskirts of the battle and choosing your moment to strike is key to success in chaotic fights. Look for vulnerable enemies that get separated from their team, and remember that Midnight Slash is both an offensive tool as well as an evasive one. Dashing in then using it to become untargetable when the opponent tries to retaliate is a great way to avoid taking damage in a duel, and if aimed well it can dish out significant damage to anyone in front of you. Just remember that Absol’s offensive capabilities are often centered around critical hits, meaning that the exact damage numbers involved will often vary based on your Critical Hit Rate. Fortunately, these numbers can be skewed in your favor by a few helpful items to aid you along the way.
As far as items are concerned, Absol is rather straightforward—both with Held Items and with Battle Items. Absol mostly prefers to stay in the jungle and build for offense even in experimental builds, and its somewhat unique reliance on critical hits to maintain its damage output makes its choices somewhat limited to be effective. This means that the two offensive critical-based Held Items—Scope Lens and Razor Claw—are largely staples for dishing out damage. Muscle Band can help round out offensive builds, as it works quite well with Absol’s melee attacks and aids its inherent desire for bursting opponents down quickly. Defensively, standard builds can utilize Focus Band for survivability to supplement Absol’s lack of sustain and defensive stats, but be aware that you do sacrifice a bit of damage in the process.
For builds based around early scoring, Scope Lens is still a necessity but Razor Claw’s critical hit synergy is replaced by Attack Weight for damage purposes. This allows Absol to stay ahead of the power curve by gaining a greater reward for its inherent strength in leveraging early points before the enemy Pokémon hit their power spikes. As for the third item, Score Shield helps protect you while doing so, as getting taken down while scoring can severely limit your momentum and subsequent effectiveness. As a side note, while it’s largely outclassed by other options in most builds, Float Stone is an interesting option in Absol’s scoring builds due to the mobility it provides. For those confident in their ability to survive diving in for early scores, this can provide a significant amount of Movement Speed for getting into scoring position. Score Shield is certainly the safer and more standard option, however, as it makes your scoring much harder to punish if enemies are around.
Pivoting over to Battle Items, various options are available but only a select few offer significant value to Absol’s kit and playstyle. Of course, the reigning king Eject Button is the gold standard—being able to instantly blink in a given direction every seventy seconds is a unique and coveted ability, and its dominance should not go unstated. However, one can argue that on a Speedster with multiple available dashes like Absol, Eject Button is not the only option available. Down this line of thinking, however, it’s hard to find more than a couple that truly offer an equivalent amount of value.
Potion and Full Heal are nice in a vacuum, but dodging damage altogether is more ideal due to Absol’s fragile defenses. The same argument can eliminate Slow Smoke and X Speed, as Eject Button is more ideal for mobility purposes and Absol’s innate mobility with its kit renders these options largely moot to begin with. Normally Goal-Getter can work for a Pokémon’s scoring builds, but Absol focuses on scoring often with low amounts of quickly scored points anyway, therefore not getting much value out of the doubled scoring speed.
This leads us to two remaining options: X Attack and Fluffy Tail. As for the former, X Attack has a noticeable, marketable effect for Absol: more damage more quickly for a Pokémon that loves to get in and burst enemies down. There’s certainly an argument to be made for this, but in the case of Absol it tends to be a bit of overkill. The ideal situation for Absol is getting ahead early and leveraging this momentum to snowball games to victory while instantly cutting down those who oppose you in the process. When this significant early lead is achieved successfully, you often make quick work of most enemies anyway, meaning that X Attack’s extra burst holds significantly less value.
It can be useful for dealing with tank-heavy enemy compositions, but this is impossible to determine while selecting your Battle Item, as enemy Pokémon are not revealed until after everyone locks in their builds. That means that the two main uses for X Attack on Absol result from disadvantageous situations, which is helpful but not the most ideal for a build path. As a result, X Attack somewhat falls into the category of either a “win more” or a “catch up” item for Absol, with some niche effective uses but largely inferior average impact when compared to Eject Button’s immense flexibility.
Finally, we reach Fluffy Tail, a low-cooldown option that helps quicken jungle clearing and pathing while also adding a bit of speed to securing Rotom, Drednaw, and Zapdos. The objective-secure speed is certainly nice, but quicker jungle clearing is something Absol can truly get behind as a legitimate utility option. Its miniscule twenty-five second cooldown means that you can utilize it multiple times in the early game, allowing you to fly through the jungle early on and avoid damage taken by Ludicolo and Bouffalant in the process, making early ganks occur just a bit quicker and just a bit more safely. For a Pokémon like Absol that relies on getting experience quickly and using it to leverage advantages right from the first couple minutes of the game, this can offer a small yet very legitimate impact. The early game is surely where Fluffy Tail aids Absol the most, but it’s far from useless later on, as it helps secure Rotom and Drednaw quickly (and even alone, if necessary) throughout the midgame.
Compared to the previous option in X Attack, Fluffy Tail’s benefits are perhaps less immediately noticeable, but unlike X Attack it can be utilized to its full potential in a majority of games, whereas X Attack’s effectiveness fluctuates heavily depending on the game state at hand. Overall, Eject Button remains as the gold standard in Battle Item selection even for the high-mobility Absol, but Fluffy Tail can be a legitimate alternative option, while X Attack offers some niche value for the fast-paced Melee Speedster.
As Absol is rather consistent with its gameplay patterns, build paths are a bit less flexible for it compared to other Pokémon. As noted earlier this is especially true with items, as Absol is largely dependent on critical hits to maintain its damage output. While Absol’s rather steadfast playstyle limits its flexibility a bit, that doesn’t mean that you have no options whatsoever. That said, let’s take a look at some available build paths for taking advantage of Absol’s mobile, high-burst hunting patterns.
This build seeks to take full advantage of (and rely on) Absol’s inherent obsession with critical hits. To that effect, Night Slash helps to gap-close as well as to increase Absol’s Critical Hit Rate, while Psycho Cut allows for devastating amounts of damage from your next few attacks. Since fishing for critical hits—and maximizing their damage as well—is the name of the game, Scope Lens and Razor Claw are the gold standard in helping you achieve this goal.
To maximize this build’s impact, landing a Psycho Cut on an enemy and using Night Slash to pounce on them just after will allow you to dish out massive damage in one large burst. The second charge of Night Slash will then hopefully allow you to either execute the target if they attempt to run, or to run away yourself if necessary. As for the third Held Item, using Muscle Band will allow for higher burst damage, while Focus Band can give you a nice defensive alternative to make up for Absol’s lack of survivability. If you find yourself scoring often early, Attack Weight can help you take advantage of this trend to snowball games in your team’s favor. Finally, Eject Button is the standard Battle Item of choice, but Fluffy Tail is acceptable to help increase your jungle-clearing and objective-taking speed.
With the same items as the previous build, this one is very similar in gameplay but utilizes Pursuit and Sucker Punch rather than Night Slash and Psycho Cut. As a result, despite Absol itself maintaining dependence on critical hits for damage, this build focuses more on singling out and hunting down individual weak and/or fleeing targets. Pursuit is very useful for the latter, as its cooldown is reduced if used from behind your target. While your method of attack is still largely the same—lunging in and doing a large amount of damage at once—this option seeks to prioritize mobility and persistence, its multiple aggressive dashes allowing you to stick to more evasive targets. Held Items are exactly the same as the previous build, with Scope Lens and Razor Claw as staples and the third slot being largely flexible between Muscle Band, Focus Band, and Attack Weight. The same goes for Battle Items, where Eject Button maintains its elite status for repositioning purposes, but Fluffy Tail allows for faster clearing of Wild Pokémon for those confident in their positioning.
While Absol’s ideal fighting style is largely stagnant regardless of build path, that doesn’t eliminate every option for variety. This build is a nice example, continuing to utilize Absol critical-reliant and mobile tendencies for damage but adding an alternative focus on early scoring to make an impact. As such, your focus should stray (only slightly) away from early fighting, and instead primarily prioritize Absol’s early threat to leverage small scoring plays with your teammates in both lanes. This will help maximize the effectiveness of Attack Weight, allowing for large boosts in attack power early in the game that can help snowball early advantages. As far as moveset is concerned, I recommend using the Night Slash and Psycho Cut combination. If you manage to score multiple times early on, then this burst-heavy option will more effectively be able to take over the game with your Attack Weight’s attack bonus. Finally, while pursuit focuses solely on targeting opponents, Night Slash can be used more variably, allowing for quick in-and-out scoring opportunities, with a second dash available if there’s a Wild Pokémon conveniently in your path.
Scope Lens is still a staple item due to its intense synergy with Absol’s kit, but for the third Held Item multiple options are available. Score Shield allows for more aggressive scoring early by providing a shield with which to survive doing so, while Float Stone can allow for increased Movement Speed to capitalize on gaps in your opponents’ defensive lines. Focus Band can allow for a solid defensive option, however, so consider using it instead if you find yourself falling too quickly. Finally, as with the other builds Battle Items are largely stagnant, with Eject Button allowing for quick changes in position during scoring opportunities while Fluffy Tail can allow you to more quickly gather points for scoring. Overall, this build is more team-play focused, seeking to leverage early advantages at the cost of some of Absol’s solo-dueling power. Consider using it if your opponents have troublesome Defenders that are difficult to duel with in the first place.
All in all, Absol is a highly mobile, highly lethal Speedster that focuses on creating early pressure to leverage out advantages. Its high burst damage alongside its multiple dashes allows it to dispatch vulnerable foes with ease, making it an excellent duelist and assassin both in and out of fights. While build paths and playstyles for the Disaster Pokémon tend to lack a bit of variety due to its inherent reliance on critical hits and lack of survivability, these deficiencies are more than made up for by its high skill reliance and offensive prowess. Both within fights and around objectives, Absol provides a fun and interactive experience fit for any aggressive player looking for some challenging yet rewarding gameplay.
