Playing Apollo against Holliday

What should I do right now?

Matchup overview

• Their structural weakness: Zero sustain and low durability — she cannot absorb a committed dive Why this is shown: Holliday's weaknesses. Strong evidence
• Their structural weakness: Damage is entirely aim-gated; a Holliday who is not hitting heads contributes very little Why this is shown: Holliday's weaknesses. Strong evidence
• Their structural weakness: Every one of her tools is telegraphed — a visible barrel, a visible pad, a targeted lasso Why this is shown: Holliday's weaknesses. Strong evidence

What they do against you

• Powder Keg knockup into a Crackshot headshot is her kill combo — while airborne you cannot strafe and the headshot is effectively guaranteed Why this is shown: Authored from Holliday's kit. Strong evidence
• Spirit Lasso pulls you out of your team and stuns you, and with a Bounce Pad she drags you even further before the stun ends Why this is shown: Authored from Holliday's kit. Strong evidence
• Crackshot ignores damage falloff, so distance does not actually protect you from her burst the way it does against other gun heroes Why this is shown: Authored from Holliday's kit. Strong evidence
• Bounce Pad tier 3 delivers her whole team onto your backline from above with a landing stun on arrival Why this is shown: Authored from Holliday's kit. Strong evidence
• Stacked overlapping barrels in a tight interior create a burn zone that punishes holding a chokepoint at all Why this is shown: Authored from Holliday's kit. Strong evidence
• Your mobility is a real advantage here, and Holliday's slows exist to delete it. Note that Debuff Resist barely helps against short hard slows because it only trims duration — spacing and cover do more than an item will. Why this is shown: Debuff Resist reduces duration only; short slows are largely unaffected. Strong evidence

How you counter them

• Hold Unstoppable for Spirit Lasso — it is a targeted stun-and-pull and Unstoppable simply negates it Why this is shown: Authored counterplay against Holliday. Strong evidence
• Shoot Powder Keg barrels to detonate them early, before you are inside the blast, and deny the knockup that sets up Crackshot Why this is shown: Authored counterplay against Holliday. Strong evidence
• Buy Knockdown for her Bounce Pad launch arcs and for her keg self-launches — she is fully committed in the air with no direction control Why this is shown: Authored counterplay against Holliday. Strong evidence
• Brawl her inside 10m: her roughly 2.1 shots per second and 10-round magazine lose badly to any SMG hero in close quarters Why this is shown: Authored counterplay against Holliday. Strong evidence
• Break her sightline immediately after she lands a Crackshot headshot — the bonus is on cooldown and she is a weak pistol hero for those seconds Why this is shown: Authored counterplay against Holliday. Strong evidence
• Stay grouped so that a lasso pull delivers you into your allies rather than into hers Why this is shown: Authored counterplay against Holliday. Strong evidence
• Against Holliday the item that changes the matchup is Slowing Hex, and not for the slow. It silences movement abilities and movement items — that is their dash, their blink, their Warp Stone and their Phantom Strike all turned off at once — and raises their gravity to 120% on top. At Tier II Spirit for 1,600 it is the cheapest way to convert a mobility advantage into a stationary target, and you deal the spirit damage needed to apply the follow-up. Why this is shown: Slowing Hex (T2 Spirit, 1,600) slows, applies 120% gravity, and silences movement abilities and movement items. Strong evidence
• Spirit Lasso is one cast aimed at one person and that person is likely you, which changes the shape of the answer. Effective health is the wrong axis — a hero who can pick you out of a fight will simply wait until the number is beatable. Counterspell negates a single ability outright, which against a one-cast threat is a hundred percent mitigation for 3,200, and the read is easier than it sounds because a single-target ultimate has to be aimed at you to work. Why this is shown: Counterspell negates one ability; enemy single-target ultimate against a hero with durability 0-1. Strategic

Trading

• The few seconds after any Crackshot headshot lands, while the bonus is on its own cooldown Why this is shown: Holliday's vulnerability windows. Strong evidence
• Her reload — 2.75 seconds with only 10 rounds is a long, frequent dead window Why this is shown: Holliday's vulnerability windows. Strong evidence
• Mid-air on Bounce Pad or a keg self-launch: she has no directional control and Knockdown ends the flight Why this is shown: Holliday's vulnerability windows. Strong evidence
• Immediately after Spirit Lasso resolves — the pulled target is now standing next to a low-durability hero with her ult spent Why this is shown: Holliday's vulnerability windows. Strong evidence
• Any close-quarters brawl she is forced into, where her fire rate and magazine size are her worst stats Why this is shown: Holliday's vulnerability windows. Strong evidence
• Holliday's pull is the whole matchup. Until it is on cooldown you are playing around it; once it misses you have a window that is worth committing into. Make it the first thing you bait — show a sliver of yourself from behind cover rather than walking a clean line they can lead. Why this is shown: Pull abilities gate the engage; baiting them opens a committed window. Strategic
• Being stunned by Holliday now pauses your reload rather than restarting it, as of 09-16-2026. That quietly changes when it is safe to reload in this matchup: a reload caught by their stun resumes where it left off instead of costing you the whole cycle, so the old rule of never reloading inside their engagement range is too conservative now. The compensating change is that parrying also pauses your reload, so a defensive parry no longer buys you free reload time. Why this is shown: 09-16-2026: being stunned pauses reload instead of restarting it; parrying also pauses reload. Verified
• Your weapon has travel time and Holliday is fast enough to make that matter. Lead into where their movement is constrained rather than where they are — the closer the fight, the less your projectile speed costs you. Why this is shown: Projectile weapon against a mobility 3 opponent. Strategic

Laning

• What they want in lane: Powder Keg clears the wave quickly and pokes the enemy laner in the same cast Why this is shown: Holliday's laning strengths. Strong evidence
• What they want in lane: Crackshot ignores falloff, so she can harass from ranges where her opponent cannot answer Why this is shown: Holliday's laning strengths. Strong evidence
• What you can take from them in lane: 10-round magazine at roughly 2.1 shots per second means whiffed shots are very expensive Why this is shown: Holliday's laning weaknesses. Strong evidence
• What you can take from them in lane: No self-heal or sustain of any kind — chip damage accumulates on her with nothing to offset it Why this is shown: Holliday's laning weaknesses. Strong evidence
• Your lever: The no-falloff-to-25m weapon means he wins medium-range trades against heroes whose damage is already degrading at that distance Why this is shown: Apollo's laning strengths. Strong evidence
• Confirming and denying a soul orb is a hit-check, not a damage-check — one bullet or one pellet takes it regardless of how much damage it does. That is good news for you in the abstract and bad news against Holliday specifically, because your projectile has travel time and their hitscan does not. On the contested floating orb you have to pre-fire: start the shot before the trooper dies and lead the orb's spawn point, because if you both react at the same instant they win every time. Why this is shown: Soul confirm/deny resolves on hit rather than damage; projectile travel time versus a hitscan opponent. Strong evidence
• Your escape route is vertical and the 09-16-2026 patch aimed at exactly that: slows now affect air drag at 35% of their value, where previously they mostly did not bite in the air. Going airborne to break Holliday's slow no longer restores your full movement — you carry a fraction of it into the air with you, at the moment you are also a stationary silhouette. The slow cut of ~20% partly offsets it, but the net is that air-escaping a slow is worse this patch than last. Why this is shown: 09-16-2026: slows now apply to air drag at 35% of their value, alongside the ~20% global slow reduction. Verified
• You get value from moving around the map and Holliday does not, but the 09-16-2026 patch made that harder to convert early: tunnel breakables now spawn and respawn on 5 minutes rather than 3. The off-lane income that used to make a rotation pay for itself is roughly 40% less frequent, so before 6:00 a rotation has to be justified by pressure on Holliday or on the Guardian, not by the breakables you pick up on the way. Why this is shown: 09-16-2026: underground tunnel breakable initial spawn and respawn both raised 3 → 5 minutes. Verified

Mid game

• Their spike — ult unlock: Spirit Lasso gives her a guaranteed pick and the ability to remove one enemy from a fight entirely Why this is shown: Holliday's power spike timeline. Strong evidence
• Their spike — Bounce Pad tier 3: The roughly +0.7s landing stun turns her mobility tool into a genuine engage Why this is shown: Holliday's power spike timeline. Strong evidence
• Their spike — Crackshot tier 2: About +49.5 damage plus a bullet-resist shred makes each headshot a real burst window Why this is shown: Holliday's power spike timeline. Strong evidence
• Their spike — mid 20-35min: Keg-launch plus Bounce Pad plus lasso is the window where her kidnap plays dictate objective fights Why this is shown: Holliday's power spike timeline. Strong evidence
• Your spike — Flawless Advance T2 (roughly 4-6k souls): -12s cooldown plus 60% bullet resistance during the lunges makes his primary damage tool repeatable and safe to use into gunfire Why this is shown: Apollo's power spike timeline. Strong evidence
• Your spike — ult unlock: Itani Lo Sahn gives him an anti-heal execute he otherwise completely lacks Why this is shown: Apollo's power spike timeline. Strong evidence
• Holliday will be their Urn runner and you are the one who can stop it. The Urn cannot be voluntarily dropped — it comes loose only on melee, a stun, or death — so chip damage and slows do not deny a delivery, your hard CC does. Hold it for the carry rather than spending it on the approach fight, and note the favoured team gets +50% Bullet and Spirit Resist in a 60m bubble while carrying and depositing, which is why trying to burst the runner down usually fails. Why this is shown: Urn cannot be voluntarily dropped, only knocked loose by melee, stun or death; +50% resist aura in 60m for the favoured team. Verified

Teamfights

• Holliday brings enough lockdown that stun sequencing matters. Community reporting describes stun diminishing returns of roughly 10% then 30% inside an 8-second window, applying to stuns only and not to silences, slows, disarms or hexes — so their follow-up chain may be shorter than the first one felt. Treat this as unconfirmed, but it is worth knowing before you burn a cleanse on the opening stun. Why this is shown: Stun diminishing returns reported by community sources; not confirmed in official notes. Uncertain

Positioning

• Your habit of taking the fight vertical to reset spacing against Holliday is weaker on 09-16-2026 than it was. Slows now apply to air drag at 35% of their value, so the air is no longer a slow-free zone, and 2026 has been a steady closing of exactly these loopholes — wall jumping costs 25% stamina regeneration for 5 seconds, and knockups came under debuff reduction in May. Going up is still correct against their ground CC; it is no longer a way to ignore their slows. Why this is shown: 09-16-2026: slows affect air drag at 35% of value; 05-22-2026 added the wall-jump stamina penalty and brought knockups under debuff reduction. Verified
• Holliday decides where you stand, not you. The practical rule is to never hold a position whose failure case is being moved — stand so that being yanked or knocked puts you somewhere survivable rather than inside their whole team. Cover at your back is worth more than cover in front. Why this is shown: Displacement kits convert bad positioning into a kill; failure-case positioning mitigates it. Strong evidence
• Fight Holliday under cover — indoors, under walkways, inside stairwells. Taking away the vertical axis removes most of their kit's value before you spend a single item slot on it. Why this is shown: Reasoned from air-mobility kits requiring open vertical space. Strategic
• Being knocked up against Holliday is worse than being slowed because it removes your inputs and, since 09-16-2026, slows now bite in the air at 35% value so even the landing is compromised. Your mobility is your defence, so position with the airborne failure case in mind: stand where being launched leaves you above your own team rather than above theirs, and keep a dash in reserve for the landing rather than spending both on the approach. Why this is shown: 09-16-2026 slows apply to air drag at 35% of value; mobile low-durability hero versus an enemy knockup. Strategic

Build adjustments

• Holliday fights from the air, which is exactly what Knockdown exists for: it applies +100% gravity to an airborne target (raised from +50% in March 2026) and its stun scales with altitude, up to about +1.5s at 30m. The higher they commit, the harder the punish — and Debuff Resist will not shorten that stun for them. Why this is shown: Knockdown airborne gravity and altitude-scaled stun, 6 March 2026 change. Verified
• Against Holliday's crowd control, understand what Debuff Resist actually buys you: it shortens duration, never magnitude. It is excellent against long disables and close to worthless against a short hard slow. Two things it explicitly does not shorten at all are the parry stun and the Knockdown item's stun. Why this is shown: Debuff Resist reduces duration only; parry stun and Knockdown stun are documented exclusions. Verified
• Slowing Hex (spirit T2) — Holliday gives this team real gap closers and escapes. The community-standard answer to escape artists: buy it when an enemy repeatedly dashes, blinks or flies out of your kill window. Why this is shown: Answers: enemy-mobility, enemy-air-mobility, enemy-dive, enemy-backline-threat. Verified
• Knockdown (spirit T3) — Holliday gives this team real air mobility. The consensus answer to flying and airborne heroes and to channelled aerial ultimates — buy it whenever an enemy fights from the sky. Why this is shown: Answers: enemy-air-mobility, enemy-mobility, enemy-long-range-poke, enemy-backline-threat. Verified
• Phantom Strike (vitality T4) — Holliday gives this team real air mobility. Buy to catch flying or long-range heroes who otherwise never enter your range, and to disarm a gun carry mid-burst. Why this is shown: Answers: enemy-air-mobility, enemy-mobility, enemy-backline-threat, enemy-long-range-poke. Verified

Common mistakes

• Players buy Dispel Magic for Holliday and then discover it does nothing about Spirit Lasso. Dispel Magic purges non-ultimate negative effects only — anything sourced from an ultimate is outside its scope entirely. Work out which of Holliday's disables come off abilities and which come off the ult before you spend 3,200: the ability-sourced ones are purgeable, the ult is not, and for the ult you need either Unstoppable pre-cast or the discipline not to be there. Why this is shown: Dispel Magic cannot purge ultimate-sourced debuffs; enemy cc 3 with a hard disable tag. Verified

Analyse this against your whole enemy team

A single matchup only tells you part of the story — which enemy to actually focus, and what to buy, depends on the other five. Open the tool with this matchup pre-loaded and add the rest.