Beware of Nova's trap talents!

General Discussion
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Recently I’ve been watching some streamers play Nova (which happens to be my highest level hero), and most of them fell for the trap talent. And since Nova has some bad fame, I thought I could educate people about which talents NOT to take.

The trap talent they fell for was Longshot on level 1.
What it does is “increase your W’s range, and after casting W, your next basic attack also has increased range”. It’s useful for finishing off fleeing enemies, provided your W isn’t on cooldown.
However, your W should be used as an opener, and not so often as a finisher. And Longshot provides you with no value whatsoever when you use your W as an opener.
You engage from a longer range, sure, but you need to walk closer to the enemies after opening anyways, so any value you might have gotten from the talent is lost.

Covert Ops is the default Nova talent on level 1. Not only is the 15% extra slow quite insane, but it also removes the mana cost of your W when you use it as an opener (which is how you should be using it 90% of the time).
I usually take this talent and have no mana problems whatsoever. But few times I decided to give the benefit of doubt to Longshot and took it, and hell, Nova felt TERRIBLE. Had to hearth back for mana WAY MORE OFTEN. Pinning Shot costs ~10% of Nova’s mana, which is not an insignificant amount.

Another thing I have seen is people taking Anti-Armor Shells on 7 and Crippling Shot on 16. This is insanely stupid. One should be taking AAS only if their team has heroes who rely on basic attacks, such as Butcher, Zul’Jin, Raynor, etc.
These heroes benefit from the physical armor reduction you provide with AAS. Yet, since armor doesn’t stack, taking Crippling Shot on 16 is obsolete. You waste a whole talent, just for a 4,3% damage increase.
If you’ve gone for AAS on 7, Lethal Decoy is the way to go. It increases your damage by 30-60%! Increased to up to 120% on level 20, with Rewind.

If you want to take Crippling Shot on 16, you are much better off with One in the Chamber on level 7 instead. Not only is there no anti-synergy, but there are benefits!
If you have basic attacking allies, they will need to wait a bit longer till they can benefit from your armor reduction, but it’s WAY more efficient this way.

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I like longshot a lot and even seen GMs take it and people who played in tournaments. The reason to take this talent is because it helps your tank engage on someone after you slow them from far away. This is a team talent. The main reason covert ops is not picked that much is because it is a “me” talent and it is only really useful once. After the fight starts, you won’t get that slow anymore. Sure it is good to catch someone in rotations, but that’s not what really decides the game in the end.

Edited: If we look at winrates in heroes profile, longshot has way more popularity, but both talents have around the same winrate (47-50%), even when looking at diamond/master ranks. I think they are both viable and good talents depending on your comp.

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Enemy moving at 45% speed is 25% slower than one moving at 60% speed. I’d say that covert ops is also a team talent, as it makes it a lot easier for your team to follow up on your CC (as it’s much better).
True that you need to get a bit closer to initiate, but if you are used to the untalented Pinning Shot, I’d say that this is not a problem whatsoever.

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Oh no, I know that, I’m just saying that after your first W, that’s it. You have no level 1 for the rest of the fight, so if you really don’t get that kill, well, too bad. With longshot you get a great talent that boosts your teamfighting power a lot, and if you don’t get that first kill, you get more chances of doing something with your W while still AAing/Q and doing stuff in fights, while with covert ops you do need to stay stealth for 4 seconds, which means that’s 4 seconds of your team in a 4 v 5.

But I do think that if you make a comp for just quick fights/picks, covert can work really well. Let’s say you go Muradin, Nova, Illidan, Raynor and Kharazim/Rehgar, you can just keep looking for picks and win the game with that. But you do wanna avoid long fights if you go this talent.

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Doesn’t Longshot have good synergy with AAS and the other crippling shot talents? You probably know better than I, but when I play Nova is usually go for Longshot + AAS

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Covert ops is for ganking, not team fights. You should usually not be initiating team fights as Nova, so much as applying the coup de grâce and killing runners trying to exit the fight.

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Pinning Shot has quite long cooldown for you to be able to get value out of it more than 2-ce per TF. Even with Double Tap (or especially with Double Tap).
And having extra max range doesn’t necessarily mean you will always need to shoot enemies who would’ve been out of your regular range.
If you are in a TF, basic attacking enemies and somebody decides to retreat. If they were in your basic attack range, it basically means they are also in your Pinning Shot range. So you can easily stop them from fleeing even without Longshot’s extra range.
It does require some stutterstepping, but Diamond+ players should have this skill.

Well, yes and no. With AAS, it doesn’t have the anti-synergy it has with OitC. But all it allows you to do is poke enemies from a safer distance. Yet with Nova you want to all-in on an enemy so you can 100-0 them. If you want to poke, then you should go Snipe build. I still find Covert Ops to be better, as it still gives you the mana sustain, and it also gives you more time to drop all of your illusions, so you can kill the enemy, as they will be moving more slowly than they would otherwise.

It doesn’t sound like you are playing Nova. Or at least not playing her right.
Her job is actually to gank enemies and to punish ones out of position. She can 100-0 most of the squishy heroes 1 v 1. And she can easily setup a gank with Pinning Shot for her solo laner.

Nova is pretty bad in TFs in general. She can either go behind the enemy team and kill a squishy hero there (such as KTZ), risking dying herself. But it’s a good trade even if you die, since you bring little to no TF value, where you can really screw up the enemy team if you kill a key player.
Or you can protect your backline from dive heroes.
You can also contribute with damage if your team is focusing an enemy.
But no, your job is NOT to finish off fleeing enemies.
Although you can block off their retreat path with Precision Strike.

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Longshot is good to initiate from afar, especially when you have a tank that can jump in on the target. Longer range also means you can pressure the backline if your team wants to go in hard on them. It also means you don’t need to be directly in AA range to initiate on someone when they get out of position. In a lot of situations you will want to initiate on someone that is a bit far away, and if you don’t have longer range, the moment is gone now.

Even if all that is bad, this talent is still better for teamfights than covert ops, since you won’t be having a level 1 talent in longer fights because you won’t just leave your team 4 v 5 for 4 seconds to get stealth.

Covert ops is definitely good if you are going for a gank squad team though.

Edited: Before I forget, you don’t take longshot to kill fleeing enemies, you take it for the longer range on your initiation tool, which means more opportunities being created. (kind like the old dibbles taking range on Q at 4, it gives way more opportunities to initiate if you want).

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I’m not sure I’d agree with it being a trap talent. If you’re really concerned with getting dove on or taking excess damage in a trade, the extra range let’s you get a pinning shot, auto and snipe in from a safer distance. At level 7 with a 5 stack of Precision Sniper and AAS, that 3 hit combo is 998 damage.

Covert Ops may still be better, but I don’t think it’s correct to consider Longshot a trap talent.

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You start the fight with 65 more mana, which basically means you can be useful in the TF for longer period of time.
In some situations you will be starting with 100% mana instead of 90%. But most of the time you will be starting with 50% instead of 40%, as you don’t start every single fight at 100% mana. Especially if you have taken Longshot.

Yeah… you get some poke damage, and that’s about it. If you want to poke, you are much better off taking Snipe build instead :stuck_out_tongue:
If you can’t finish off the enemy, then you shouldn’t be engaging at all with OitC/AAS builds.

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Never ever I had mana problems with Nova tbh. I don’t spam E and post 7 Q refunds mana, so not really a problem.

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I see it more as a finisher playstyle. Snipe build you can poke with but you really get punished if you miss. Longshot, AAS auto, Snipe is a lot more consistent and does a higher amount of burst in a short window. Some ranged backliner gets chipped down by the rest of your team and then you pop them like a balloon in a blink and then pull back to safety.

At the end of the day, I think it’s a preference thing. Covert Ops is probably the better talent a lot of the time, but trap talents are typically ones that are pretty universally bad or require very niche, edge cases to be good that average out to being worse than other options. For whatever HOTSLogs is worth these days, the win percentages between Longshot and Covert Ops are pretty close.

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This tbh. You may say longshot is not your playstyle, but it is just as viable as covert ops. Calling it a trap talent was not a good call.

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I almost always go Longshot + AAS.

OitC has overall higher damage output, but you have to stick around for longer.
Snipe build can also do higher damage, but if the enemy has any mobility, or you’re on a map where objective minions will be in the way, or you want to shoot something besides the enemy tank…

Longshot + AAS is just most reliable in my experience.
Add in Crippling Shot and Triple Tap and 100-0 is practically braindead easy.

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OitC’s burst damage isn’t that much lower than AAS’ than you think. You need 1 second to deal 320% basic attack damage, compared to the 287,5% instant basic attack damage from AAS.

If you have Crippling Shot, it’s 384% basic attack damage over 1 seconds, compared to 300% instant damage (if you are stupid enough to take Crippling Shot when you have gone AAS).
OitC’s instant damage is 160%, or 192% with Crippling Shot.

So you basically need to stay just a second longer to get MORE damage than with AAS.
However, OitC has an anti-synergy with Longshot, so you indeed can’t get as much “safe poke damage”, as you still need to get closer after the initial shot.

Unless enemy has interruptions that is.

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Nova was a hair’s breadth away from being my first max-level hero (pre-progression 2.0). The only talent she’s got that I really think is bad (or so niche as to not be worth considering, at least for me) is Anti-Armor Shells.

Longshot puts both your W and one auto attack at the about the same range as your Q. There are situations where this is useful, though many factors (including personal play style) may affect how often these come up in a match. If you’re planning to build into auto-attacks, Longshot isn’t a bad choice. (Arguments about the value of this build would not be productive.)

For me, it’s a bit of a non-issue anyway, since I go Advanced Cloaking.

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Hahaha. Hahahahahah.
Okay lol.

I’ll leave the debating/arguing to Darak and others.

But I’m level 55, I think, on Nova, maybe a little lower/higher… I think longshot is the worst talent choice more often than the other two. But not a trap.

I don’t even know how to respond to this.

It’s a shame Nova is unable to cast abilities on multiple heroes.

This is a pitfall. Go Mekkah! Fire Emblem Heroes of the Storm Pitfalls!

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I’m level 54 Nova, what of it?

The rest of your quotes kind a make no sense. Since you don’t know how to respond, I don’t know what you think. Do you agree with such people or disagree?
And I have no knowledge of Fire Emblem to understand your reference.

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I have high winrate Nova, because long shot. So no, T.Hanks. No CO.

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Because of Longshot or in spite of Longshot?
I have 59,1% win rate on my Nova, and I almost never take Longshot.