Part of the tricky part of sylvanas is that she doesn’t really have any defensive talents. Some heroes have better evade, longer poke, self sustain and they get armor, heals or additional escapes by 13 – if not earlier.
So that puts a lot of pressure on sylvanas to either not take damage at all (avoid unnecessary skirmishes) need a hero to hide behind, or to have her burst ready and calculated to annihilate the target before they can respond.
Festering wounds tends to be her defacto 7 talent as it enables hero poke/aoe potential, but it also uses her escape, and it doesn’t function for scouting, so regardless of build a Sylv needs to be ready to stutter evade and avoid face-checking bushes.
On a similar note, a key part of Sylv is having the right talents that compliment how someone plays on a map; her lvl 1 quest gets a lot of attention, but tends to lead players to trading deaths for a few quest stacks that end up not paying off in the end. The attack speed talent or the slow on trait work just as fine, if not better, depending on other pve or pvp aspects of how she builds.
Possession tends to get bad rap by players that think it allows the enemy team to get more exp - it does not - and potentially better minion wave control capabilities than black arrow (converting creeps not only kills them, but flips them to your side. Doing so is fast and relatively safe and can even be used on catapults to stall a lane)
At 7, barbed shot is mostly a trap talent. While the effect does work on pve and pvp objects, a lot of players don’t get all 5 shots onto a target and since the effect only works at 5 shots, they effectively cripple themselves a powerful talent tier.
At 10, wailing tends to get all the hype (an aoe silence wins team fights!) because of it’s on-paper power, but functionally I don’t think it’s as good as others claim. Players tend to use abilities for the sake of using an ability, so while the silence is great, if nobody else follows-up on it, then the enemy team was just mildly inconvenienced for a few seconds. Mind Control isn’t as “zomg awesome” for aoe, but it helps sylvanas with dueling (more common in casual play) and it makes it easier to highlight a “focus this target” to it.
Basic word of advise there: don’t discount Mindcontrol just because it’s not wailing arrow. Arrow is good for breaking/preventing channeling from a distance, but MC is good up close. If a hero is hard diving you anyway, a silence doesn’t really stop it, where mc could help turn the dive, or at least stall long enough to run/wave away.
To try to summarize some tips:
a) Practice on stutter stepping. It’s not just attack and then move, it’s also where/how you move to keep attacking pressure going while also avoiding enemy skill shots.
b) it can be fine to avoid focusing on dealing pvp damage if you can do some pve instead. That doesn’t mean avoid teamfights, but it does mean don’t try to frontline and hope the enemy team will honor an imaginary 1v1 code
c) Try some talent combos on Try Me damage dummies; different players have different rotations and since a lot of sylv’s damage is conditional (spreading dagger, getting 5 barbed shots on 1 target, marking a target, etc etc) some talent choices may actually be undercutting how much damage a player could be doing instead.
By my book, there’s about 3 sylv styles:
- aa and dagger the tank (spread damage to the backline)
- Wave + Dagger aoe clusters (poke)
- Q + Wave bomb. Forego distance and be as on-top of a single target as you can be to ensure Q’s all land on that target.
aa is ‘safer’, dagger aoe spouts pretty numbers, and Q bombs get solo kills, but are super risky as a result.
She tends to see some play in organized/‘pro’ games, so looking up some replays or looking up some streamers that play her can help identify how they stutter, when they engage, how they combo or how they escape fights.
