I have been experimenting with Kerrigan
I’m not a good ravage Kerrigan, so I thought impaling blades would be more my style however I’m too much of a wuss to try it in pvp
the talents are
Assimilation Mastery- I’m constantly out of mana so this helps significantly
Kinetic fulmination
Bladed momentum- the 0.6 cooldown is very handy in the long run and I found I’ve been pulling off more abilities
Maelstrom- to proc assimilation mastery
Chrysalis
Painful spikes- not too sure if I should switch this one
Psionic shift
so far against ai’s I’ve been having a blast, but I know how notoriously easy to exploit them and me being the oblivious numbskull I am, I want to make sure that I’m not inadvertently exploiting them
is it viable? is there anything that doesn’t make sense/would be better if x was switched to y?
lvl 1: Trait talent
lvl 4 Spike talent
lvl 7 bonus dmg on minions and mercs
lvl 10 is mostly Ultralisk but Storm talent works well if againts multiple melee.
lvl 13 Iceblock
lvl 16 Spike talent for bonus dmg
lvl 20 bolt of the storm talent for both aggresive or defensive messures.
I would say just pick what you think work best for you. Both W and Q build works fine if you know what to do and there is nothing wrong in picking talents out of the ordinay if you can make it work.
Whether you go AA build at 7 and 20 or 7 - Boundless Fury and 20 - Psionic Shift is up to you, though I would typically recommend the latter in most situations as it gives some extra mobility/survivability.
It is fantastic for wave-clear and camps and also less reliant on the combo to deal damage to players (also deals damage/grants shields while CC’d due to second pulse), making it a very forgiving yet still effective route.
Build is pretty reasonable for a pull combo build. Psionic Pulse can be taken instead of Kinetic Fulmination for better macro play as the double pulse quickly thins out minion waves.
Assimilation Blades at 20 can allow for more damage (burst) as it gives her high tier auto attack damage as well spell damage. Psionic Shift is a good safe alternative though, but will average significantly lower damage.
Especially in that case you must take 1 - Fury of the Swarm (it’s basically a must-pick for all builds, actually). This is also a mana-efficient choice (to address your original concern) because it’s free damage.
this was why I changed before I was going for fury of the swarm but I couldn’t engage half as much when with assimilation mastery
yes free damage but when I’m not focusing ravage it just feels… off? I guess?
Assimilation Mastery is for when you are stuck in the off-lane (which shouldn’t happen often), and maybe some other super-niche situations. Whereas Fury of the Swarm allows you to clear waves faster, and more importantly it damn near insta-stacks Kinetic Fulmination. The splash damage from Fury of the Swarm also counts towards Assimilation Blades. It’s like an AoE debuff for free.
At the end of the day you clearly have to talent for your comfort and play-style, of course.
The main benefit of Assimilation Mastery that Globes build up and help maintain the duration of your shield, not increased mana regen. Knowing you’re free to move for 11 seconds at a time without the need to interweave attacks to keep it up is amazing. The talent helps slightly against annoying 1v1 matchups who would otherwise poke you to death and massive pre-built shields are nothing to laugh at. It depends how much wave-clear your team has and if you’re playing against a stacked ranged opponents, it should be the go-to choice.
Usually, you wouldn’t be able to reach most of the camps next to a lane to contest the point before the shield decays. This talent enables you to walk into the enemy team with a huge damage sponge attached to your body. A must pick if you’re going for Volatile Power because it offers “some” freedom of movement (very circumstantial, duration from 3 to 8 seconds with a Globe, it is assumed that you’ll be entering fights with a big shield, generating twice the amount during active battle isn’t enough to warrant picking over Chrysalis).
The reason why I love the talent is because it enables Kerrigan to momentarily hide out of enemy vision and allows you to flank without losing trait value (build up on Boss and walk behind the enemy if they happen to interfere with capture).
Bladed Momentum? Might work against targets such as DVA, Malthael, Chen… those that can’t get away easily or don’t have any kind of crowd control to either debuff you or prevent you from attacking. It’s a useful talent but in my opinion slightly undertuned because you will never be allowed to keep attacking enemy heroes for THAT long to gain extreme benefit from it. You wait for your allies, jump in and finish the job in 5-10 seconds, or you end up dead. It might work extremely well under extreme circumstances with lvl 20 attack speed increase.
Kinetic Fulmination works if you are very consistent, which I doubt so. You use it against heavy melee teams where you wouldn’t have the chance to cast several Ravages at a clump of enemies with disrupt potential (talent stacked Ravage generally outperforms). Might work in aram, but you won’t find enemy teams that enable this talent in QM or ranked.
Painful Spikes is the default choice, because the bonus damage works on non-heroic targets, including structures. Frankly, there are no bad talents, just less than ideal ones for specific situations.
