Alarak advices for everyone

General Discussion
1

Hi, yesterday I reached level 90 with Alarak, so, I almost reach my goal of become a level 100 Alarak player.

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Recently I’ve seen a lot of people asking for some tips about Alarak, so I’ll use my experience that I’ve gained in 751 games with Alarak to help you to use or fight with and against the highlord.
When you are playing as Alarak:

One important aspect of playing Alarak is not to die. His trait allows him to become stronger with every kill, but this is lost when he dies so is important to never die.
Just by reaching 130% Sadism you power higly increse. As an example, at level 16 with 100% of Sadism your Q > W > E does 607, 166 and 215 damage to heroes respecticely. However, at 130% Sadism your Q > W > E does 698, 191 and 247, wich means an increase of 138 damage.
Of course, you can increase your Sadism with some talents, so you can increase the damage you dealt to heroes. Since Alarak is a burst hero, you’ll get more value just by not dying and act in the right fights, rather than just keep fighting all the time, since the damage you dealt in meaningless fights will archive nothing.

Don’t be a nuisance to your team and don’t charge alone, it’s the job of your team to help you, but that doesn’t mean you can dive to far and expect your teammates will dive with you. So, be aware of the fights you are picking.

Alarak has good sustaing in long fights, but he is pretty much useless if he got caught by burst heroes.

Alarak’s Auto Attack does a lot of damage, and if he is left alone, he can do a lot of damage to Immortal, Triglav Protector and structures, so, when you’re playing Alarak, always try to hit your AA in something.

Ruthless Momentum is by far a better option than Sustaining power, when you are solo laning you can do amazing plays with a six second cooldown Telekinesis. With that you can steal regenglobes, move away or near enemy mercenaries, escape constantly of skill shoots and of course, use your W > Q > E combo every 8 seconds.
It’s important to make emphasize in the fact that Sustaining power doesn’t help your teammates or help you with future talents, contrary to Ruthless momentum that allows you and your team to make very interesting plays. Even without a healer or a tank, Ruthless momentum provides more value during the whole match.

A lot of people thinks that Alarak is all about his combo but that is a misconception. Alarak’s combo is usually just an option when you are solo laning, when you are with your team is more common to use your abilities in conjution of your allies abilities. Your Telekinesis has more value when you use it to help your teammates, your Discod Strike often is used just like a skill shoot that can land on CC’d opponents and both, your healer or your tank can help you with that.

Keep informing all the time to your allies about the CD of your Telekinesis. Also don’t waste it, try to save it all the time, once you wast it your opponenst will attack, so use it with responsability.

Never, under absolutely no scenario, pick Lightning Barrage with out picking first Negatively Charged and Extended Lightning. If you aren’t going for E build, you should pick the other level 16 talents, since those talents makes Alarak a monster capable of fight against most of the roster.

The decision of what heroic to choose must be done by analyzing one factor: Is there someone who can take me out of danger?
If you have reliable partners you can choose Deadly Charge, so you can be more proactive, but if you doubt that your partners can help you to not die, then use Counter Strike to help yourself.

Alarak’s build’s are made to deal with specific scenarios and picking the wrong one can doomed you and your team. The different builds that I use are the following:
E build
This build is all about hiting a lot of heroes with the center of your E. The right scenario to pick this build is when you know the enemy team will be really close in lane formation mostly of the time. This build does a lot of damage, but not meaningful damage so you’ll not be able to perform the finishing touch or archive something. You need someone in your team capable of use the slows you provide and capable of deal sustaining or burst damage enough to finish your opponents.

Extended Lightning > Negatively Charged > Applied Force > Counter Strike > Pure malice/Rite of Rak’Shir > Lightning Barrage > Last laugh/Hasty Bargain.

Q build
The right occasion to pick this build, is when your team needs someone to provide either, the last hit or deal great damage to CC’d squishes. However to pick this build you need also the help of your team to ensure you can hit at least 2 heroes with your Q, so you’ll need a team with a lot of roots or slows.

Ruthless momentum > Chaos Reigns > Dissonance (For more dmg)/Applied Force(For more range) > Deadly Charge > Blade of the Highlord/Rite of Rak’Shir > Mocking strikes > Counter Strike/Hasty Bargain.

AA build
When you need to solo lane, is hard to get decent stacks with both Chaos Reigns or Negatively Charged. However there exist a perfect build for loners, I’m talking about AA build. The key of this build is to get the maximum Sadism you can get in order to do brutal damage with the help of Lethal Onslaught. With the help of Show of Force and by the fact that you’ll fight usually 1 or 2 enemies, you can get a lot of sadism to become almost unbetable at 16 in 1 vs 1 scenarios, however your power won’t be less impactful in team fights.

Ruthless Momentum > Show of Force > Dissonance/Hindered motion > Counter Strike > Blade of the Highlord/rite of Rak’Shire > Lethal Onslaught > Deadly Chanrge/Last laugh.

This are the builds that I often use but you can experiment with yours.

When you are playing with an Alarak:

Perhaps you don’t have interest in play the high lord, but you eventually will have an Alarak in your team so better be prepare and learn how to play alongside him.

If you are a support or a healer, be sure that your priority is to help Alarak to survive. Even if you need to decide wich is more important, if Alarak or Convection Kael’thas, always ensure to help the highlord first, since he need to stay alive to gain and not lose Sadism.

If you are the tank don’t waste your abilities once you spot the enemy. They will try to kill Alarak at all cost so use your CC to protect him. Try not to use your displacement abilities without the order of Alarak.

If you are a solo laner then pick the solo lane job, If Alarak can be part of the 3-4 man team, he’ll do a better job.

Never send the opponents in front of Alarak, he’ll aproach when he consider is the time to do it, so, try not to force fights unless you are well cordinate with him.

Don’t expect a lot of damage from him in the early game, his power scalates by his trait and talents, so don’t be to agressive at the early game.

If you are a brusier, always be in front of him and don’t expect him to take the lead. An Alarak player feels more secure if he isn’t in the front.

If you need help then ping, Alarak’s Telekinesis is a good tool to help the team.

Don’t tell Alarak to be part of the boss camp unless there is a tank or a bruiser in the team at that moment, he is pretty squishie againts boss and elite merc camps.

If you are a range assassin then don’t wait for Alarak to start the aggresions, always be the first in attack and Alarak will follow you.

When you are playing against Alarak:

This is something that i’ve seen a lot and is the most important thing to remember. Every, every single time you are facing Alarak, never do a sigle point click to move. Once Alarak notice that you are moving following a vector, he’ll combo you to your death, so, please, always move by holding the right key of the mouse, so you can walk in a erratic way, ensuring that Alarak will never know the direction you are following and his confidence in the use of Telekinesis will drop to less of 50%.

If Alarak catches you with his Telekinesis, then keep moving. Telekinsis cancels every move command so remember the previous advice and keep holding the right key of the mouse so you’ll keep walking after have being dragged. Discord Strike has a 0.5 seconds of delay and is hard to land it correctly so if you keep walking you’ll be safe.

If you are going to solo lane against Alarak then pick the ranged slimmest hero in your team to do that job. Alarak hates Slim heroes and he can’t do well against ranged heroes, but never try to kill him, just hold the lane until your minions advance then you’ll have the chance to do some damage to structures.

The best counter against Alarak besides Abathur are AA heroes, any AA hero have the potential to kill Alarak, specially Raynor and Zul’jin, since they simply out damage Alarak.

Always wait for him to waste his W or Q, with out those he is almost useless so once he fails his combo you’ve at least 8 seconds to bully him.

Displacements abilities are amazing against Alarak, since them force Alarak to use Telekinesis to save himself, giving you around 12 seconds to aproach him without the fear of being dragged.

Ironically, silences are a good counter against Alarak since he need to plan with time what he is going to do, and if he can’t do that in the right moment he’ll perish with ease.

To face against Alarak, fist you need to check what talents he choosed, then you can make a strategy of how will you approach to him.
If he picks Extended Lightning, you must avoid being caught in the center of his E, this is hard since it requires map awareness, but one you got it, is easy to not let him to get stacks in the game.
If he picks Chaos Reigns just don’t stack with your team too much and try to spread the most you can.
If he picks Ruthless momentum just try to keep him at 50% of his total heal, that way he’ll lack a level 1 talent, even if he is being healing constantly.
If he picks Show of force just imagine he is a Kael’thas who picked Convection and focus in kill him.

Don’t be scare of fight him if you are a Bruiser. Before 16 you’ll beat him and with enough CC you’ll be able to defeat him, even after 20.

Alarak isn’t the monster that a lot of people clamis he is. Is really hard to be good with him and he has a lot of weakness, he is just passing for a moment in the HotS’ history just like many others like Azmo, Kael, Diablo, Garrosh and Abathur. Once the player base get used to him he’ll return to the bottom from where he came originally. If you don’t believe me just look at Fenix, he is now forgotten, which is weird, considering he is argubly stronger, but whatever. Please try to follow some of my advices and you’ll undestand better the Highlord, See you next time when I’m a level 100 Alarak player.

16 Likes
2

interesting ideas. i actually 1v1ed him as tyrande then again as valla and you know how squishy they’re compared to him but i won both ways AA valla build and tyrande at +16 with her Archery passive which means increase dmg on AA and yes alarak got melted as i dodge his silence since it would melt me down as a squishy.

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Those girls are good options against him, just don’t get caught in his Q. You can destroy the highlord in the early game with Lili, Alarak just can’t do enough damage to the panda.

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Li Li can just keep running around spam abilities without even looking at you… just not my type of hero to consider playing but she’s cute!

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5

Did someone mention the queen of the master race?

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i skimmed it since it was so long. I would say there’s good points in this but the never take lightning barrage wihtout e build i gotta disagree with. In my opinion there is only 1 alarak build atm and it makes him an S tier hero. Ruthless Momentum > Show of Force> applied force > counterstrike > rite of rakshir > lightning barrage > 20 is preference and game dependent. Lightning barrage makes it easier to prock show of force while saving a cd which you wont do often but has its situations where thats good. also my preference at 20 is last laught and you can pretty much guarantee hitting 3 heroes with basic abilites using just you’re e if you whiff combo.

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I personally prefer the other level 16 options since with them you become less team dependant and less afraid of fighting against bruisers or tanks.

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But lightning barrage has to be cast on different hero. You mean if hero is caught in center and then clicked on with E , counts as 2? even though the first E was clicked on different target previously?

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Alarak’s auto attack is moderate to low damage at most. It only does a lot of damage against heroes because it benefits from Sadisim. Wave clear and killing non heroes is one of Alarak’s weaknesses.

As such it will not deal a lot of damage to Immortal as that is not a hero. However it will deal a lot of damage to the Triglav Protector because that is a hero.

10

Excuse but what? That’s not how his trait works.

11

Well if it does not effect his auto attacks then his auto attacks are even worse…

Here are some examples.

  • Alarak level 0 DPS → 150
  • Leoric level 0 DPS (with trait) → 111 (50% cleaving)
  • Tychus level 0 DPS (no trait) → 200
  • Stukov level 0 DPS → 174
12

Don’t alarak have like one of the best AAs of the game?

2 Likes
13

You forgot about attack speed, in ten seconds, using only their AA, the mentioned heroes does the following quantity of damage:

  • Alarak 1872.
  • Leoric 1234.
  • Tychus 2080.
  • Stukov 1900.
    And I’ll add some melee assassins to the list.
  • Zeratul 1441.
  • Kerrigan 1554
  • Illidan 1460.

So, it doesn’t seems like Alarak has a poor DPS using only his AA.

Yes.

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I factored in attack speed to convert the level 0 numbers into DPS. However I am pulling the numbers off some fan wiki so they might not reflect current game balance.

For example Tychus attacks every 0.25 seconds (0.2 seconds with quest talent) and a damage of 50 resulting in the above 200 DPS at level 0 and potentially 250 DPS when quest is complete (if was possible at level 0). Stukov attacks every 1.5 seconds for 261 damage at level 0 resulting in the above mentioned 174 DPS. Alarak attacks for 150 damage every second and hence 150 DPS. Leoric is special because he attacks twice with cleave and then for double damage which is more tricky to calculate (sum damage of cycle over total cycle time).

What confused me with my earlier statement is the Lethal Onslaught talent. While that is active his auto attack damage is high end, especially with good Sadism stacks. However this only applies while fighting heroes as it requires heroes to proc and keep procced. Hence my statement is kind of true, since with Lethal Onslaught proced one is easily looking at a 70%+ (assuming good play) increase to auto attack damage against heroics. This would push his effective level 0 auto attack DPS from 150 to over 250 which is on par with a completed quest Tychus.

The reason I use level 0 DPS is because that is the most readily available damage values for the heroes. With very few exceptions (I do not know of any of the top of my head), all hero base auto attack damage scales by 4% per level, like most ability damage and hero health. For this reason effective level 0 damage is valid for comparing damage between heroes since the scaling factor between levels is the same between them and so the percentage difference between them remains the same. The only exception is with abilities such as Probius’s unstable warp rift and Tracer’s Pulse Bomb which have higher than 4% damage scaling and hence require level 20 comparisons. A minor issue with such comparison is that the ratios do not remain exactly the same with levels due to rounding error with damage amounts however the error should be small enough that the general idea of level 0 auto attack damage comparisons is still valid. In this case Tychus and Stukov both deal more auto attack DPS to a single non-hero target than Alarak and by a significant amount.

Hence outside of Alarak with Lethal Onslaught proced his auto attack damage is very mediocre and honestly not worth mentioning. Yes you should still auto attack with him as damage is damage, but this logic applies to all heroes even ones on the low end of auto attack DPS. To give perspective to it all, his average auto attack damage is as good as equal to that of untalented Artanis who uses Twin Blades on cooldown.

For anyone interested on what a high end melee auto attack does. Greymane in Worgan form with Inner Beast active (but no other talents) deals ~310 DPS. This is over twice as much as Alarak. Many of the other high end auto attack heroes hit similar numbers but they rely on difficult to compare or situational mechanics.

Alarak does have good stutter step I admit. This combined with a 1 second attack rate makes his auto attacks reasonable and able to push good weight in the mid-tier. However in the end one must remember he is an anti-hero caster at his core, not a power house for killing non-heroic targets.

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This sounds like something that a scientist would say. Perhaps you need to try the things by yourself rather that read about it in some wikis.
Alarak isn’t a one trick pony, he has a lot of potential beyond plain numbers. I’ve discovered that throught hundreds of games. Many times I’ve taked merc camps and attacked the immortal, that’s how I noticed that his AA is really good.
It’s true that there are better heroes to do that job, but that doesn’t mean that Alarak can’t do it. The true value of Alarak resides in the fact he can do almost anything, perhaps he isn’t the best at it, but the fact that you can do whatever your team told you to do, is the true streng for Alarak, being a reliable hero.

2 Likes
16

I just want to further reiterate a point.

Even though he’s not great at killing non heroes, he’s still a melee assassin, with melee assassin auto attacks. Single target his DPS is ok, not as good as most other assassins with abilities factored in but better than non assassins.

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17

You’re going to have to challenge Cain through a rite.

18

There’s a reason I’m plat and only have a 53% winrate on Alarak, I suck.

Level 162 with 955 games if anyone cared.

19

I have a 0% win rate with Alarak :slight_smile:

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First I need to get out of plat to do that. I mean, I know how good I’m but I need a prove of my skills. First, get the level 100 with Alarak, then get in Diamond or Masters and just then I’ll challenge him for the title of the best Alarak.