Literally the most braindead and broken damage right now. You get the quest talent at one, and take festering wounds at 7, and then use your e, w and q and you will never lose any duel vs anyone. It’s fking broken as hell. You outtrade SO MUCH DAMage. and there’s no counterplay to it! you get hit by e, w and q and you’re dead within 2 seconds. two seconds. jesus christ. The worst part about it is it’s so hard to mess up. It’s literally braindead how much damage you get to be able to do, and with the infinitely stacking quest, she scales so well.
“most braindead damage”
requires abilities in some way
Pick one. Sylv has some impressive burst, but she has to take a ton of risk to actually get it because she has to be constantly in attack range. That Quest stacks too slowly against one target to be valuable in solo lane, and getting it to be useful in a team fight to get the stacks going requires her to be in attack range. Which means most sources of ranged damage will be able to hit her.
The big problem really is the range, because Sylvanas has no self sustain. As for no counterplay? If you can avoid the Festering Wounds and have a way to engage, she’s screwed. It’s extremely all or nothing. Try playing Alarak or Thrall, or some other character who can relentlessly punish her burning her escape on damage while having decent self-sustain.
Yes, her burst is massive, but her total lack of self sustain means that any damage she takes is going to stick, while damn near every other character who wants to duel will punish hard and be able to recover from the damage, provided you avoid outright dying. Which is surprisingly easy, downright trivial for some characters (mostly Bruisers).
It’s actually a remarkably horrible setup for trades because you have to put yourself in some danger to land it with no recovery option for a whiff or counterattack (and god help you if you’re dealing with Counterstrike Alarak). Whenever you think something is wildly overpowered, go get the character and actually play some Quick Match games to see the basics of how it actually works out in real gameplay.
No self-sustain?
…Have you seen her level 16 talent???
Requires Banshee’s Curse, meaning the combo has to land, and is at level 16, while this is complaining about something that’s online at level 7. Every character you’d be able to duel in a competent match at that point laughs at Sylvanas’s output, because any roamers that late in the game are going to have reliable escapes, Protects, massive self-sustain of some kind or some other way to wreck Sylvanas or her combo.
And it competes with Will of the Forsaken, a 4 second Unstoppable with 40% movement speed, so it’s not nearly as often going to be grabbed as it seems, because it lets her actually use her combo in the first place! The combo also uses up her escape, meaning that she’s going to be stuck in range of whoever she’s attacking. Bad idea at level 16, where everyone’s deathballing hard or laughs at the burst before killing her anyways.
Importantly, it only heals her for health she’s lost. Survive the burst, she has no tools to output damage for healing for the next few seconds, meaning it’s largely only relevant to topping her off at the start of the fight and keeping her from being poked into oblivion… At level 16. If she’s out on her own at that point, she’s doing her job wrong, because too many things can blow her up without her being able to escape, especially when she opens with using her escape to engage.
Do you not have tanks on your teams? I feel like you don’t understand Sylvanas at all. I’m reluctant to agree with the OP (she’s not that scary), but you seem to massively underestimate her.
It’s less underestimating and more realizing just how little this complaint actually takes effect. Because the complaint is that she’s too good in 1v1, by using a build necessitating teamfights to scale off of. The inherent flaw in the argument is that if she’s 1v1 at the point your addition is relevant, she’s not doing her job effectively because so much of the damage is AoE and most of her possible targets at that point laugh at this in one way or another.
If she is teamfighting, then her lack of escape means she’s going to be very, very easy to get rid of if the fight goes poorly. Which, given she has to be flanking for the damage to be focused on anyone other than tanks and bruisers, means things going wrong puts her on the chopping block first, due to being less accessable to healers.
This kind of burst is exceptionally hard to make work. Yes, it’s crazy high in output, but actually sticking the landing against those with decent understanding of how to counterplay makes it vastly less effective. Literally just adjusting team spacing splits huge chunks of the damage. The fact she has to stay in attack range to get the AoE working makes it a lot less useful, because again, she burns her escape to set it up.
She puts herself at massive risk for this, since her level 16 isn’t actually keeping up all that well with the boost of many other level 16s, so she’ll often need Will of the Forsaken as a replacement escape because she can’t survive all that many counter-bursts, removing her potential for self-sustain.
Maybe you should watch NotParadox’s video on why it’s okay to focus tanks. Then play a few games with Tychus if you don’t believe him. Why you would screw around flanking the back line with her, where your risk-reward ratio goes through the roof, is beyond me.
Tychus is literally designed to ignore the problems of focusing a high-health target. His entire gimmick is “practically ignores armor and numeric health”. He essentially has an automatic 20% damage bonus vs. Cho’gall thanks to the %HP damage ignoring armor.
The big key NotParadox brought up was that tanks aren’t that much harder for teams to burst away, virtually no character can solo burst a tank to death, and Sylvanas is no exception.
Because you’re otherwise unlikely to actually kill anyone off the burst alone, and landing the burst on the backline is rendered quite difficult with Sylvanas’s limited range on triggering AoE functionality. She has to take rather large risks to use this burst, especially outside 1v1 or hitting a tank with ti, ones that are best resolved by not taking the self-sustain talent at 16 and instead grabbing a replacement escape ability.
The particular problem being whined about isn’t actually much of a problem, competitively. Casually? There’s far more egregious things than Sylvanas around, in terms of reliable burst damage. Practically the entire build has to be dedicated to this burst, while many others can get away with just a couple key talents to improve their damage output on much more reliable things.
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