Kael’thas: he seems good

General Discussion
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WARNING: a rather long and pointless monologue follows. I’m really just sharing my excitement at learning a new hero.

So having had a rough time with ranked I moved over to playing a bunch of QM because I just… can’t… stop… playing… HotS! So with the newly buffed up twin spheres looking all fun I thought now was a good time to really learn Kael’thas. I had dabbled with him before, but now I tried to actually learn him for realsies.

And my experience was… wow he is strong. Kael’thas often gets a reputation for being a noob slayer, bad outside of low level play. And to be honest, many of the Kael’thas players I’ve encountered have performed decently but I haven’t been particularly impressed. Granted half of them take convection so that’s bad right from the start. But having now taken him for a couple spins myself, I’m starting to form some new opinions of him.

So firstly there’s his stun engine. Already at baseline it’s a long ranged, extra wide skill shot that resultingly is quite easy to land. And with the trait applied it even pierces the first TWO targets and stuns for even longer. Plus, you can take energy roil at 4 to reduce the cooldown to a mere 5 seconds, and heck if you really want you can take pyromaniac and now you’re down to a mere 3.4 second cooldown on a 1.5 second stun. It’s enough to make Uther blush.

So what can he do with this stun? Quite a lot. His combo is over 700 damage at level 1, and if you get caught by the aforementioned stun then you basically are certain to take the full blast. And that’s not to mention his waveclear. Kael can toast entire minion waves in 3 seconds flat.

And of course, no Kael’thas rambling would be complete without pyroblast. If you take sunfury enchantment at 7 you can get some really good uptime on a 15% spell power boost. Already 15% spellpower is pretty good but when pyroblast is on the table, that’s when things just get a tad absurd. The point and click hero deletion is just so very strong, that when I’m taking that spellpower boost I’d better have a pretty good reason before I’ll not go pyroblast. (And that reason will probably be named Medivh, or possibly infernal shrines). And the best part is, you’re not even missing out on the other 2 talents in the long run because you’ll get both of them at 16 for free. So that’s cool.

So in summary: Kael’thas has good burst damage, a shocking amount of stuns, really good finishers, a bazillion hp shield along with infinite mana (never even got to mentioning that), instant deletion of huge minion hordes, and to top it off the enemy team is forced to scatter in all directions just to avoid spreading living bomb everywhere. Was Kael’thas always this strong? I know I’ve played only QM so far but up to this point I have been very impressed with the fire mage.

So in summary, try the trait talents at 7 and 16. They are… quite good.

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BBQ MEAT

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ever since I learned how to stun them with vortex after the charge lands, butchers charging me as kaelthas is my favorite thing in the game. alt-q step away from the butcher d w e as I get stunned, w & walk away having traded butcher for every ability I have & taken basically no damage for it & set his charge on CD
made even better by me taking convection every time, too. Picturing the butcher player getting madder & madder every time he tries to wombo the stupid nub mage who didn’t even take the shield talent bc the kaelthas is out-1v1’ing him gives me life-energy

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Sure, KT has potential, I don’t quite understand why people generally fail with him.
Unless 1) he doesn’t scale well with rank and 2) people actually don’t get to play him, because he is pretty much always banned, and thus those who try anyway are out of practice.

The good thing is, there are some good alternatives so by having him fixed in the autoban slot, I can play some of those other mages reliably, even as double mage due to me being more a map player. Tass, Orphea, Jaina deliver the same thing.

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people take the build that’s useless if the enemy doesn’t spread living bomb against enemies who don’t spread it, and then blame the character for their own starry-eyed blindedness. If you go convection, trait trait pyroblast, ignite pyromania & flamethrower you become an Azmodan with a 1 second cooldown on your artillery who can follow up any landed Q on an enemy mage from outside their sightrange with a pyroblast to guarentee a kill

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This topic is very wholesome. I’m not a good KT but I appreciate your excitement, friend.

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The upper the KT player goes up the ladder the less people spread Living Bomb, which is a large part of his power budget.

He also completely lacks mobility after Bolt of the Storm was removed from his lv20 tier, making him a fragile glass cannon like Kel’thuzad (who, however, has Shifting Malice on 20, despite how bad or low pick rate it is, and he has considerably more damage potential after the Blight quest is finished).

He isn’t necessarily bad in higher games, but it’s harder to spread Living Bomb or get any value out of Flamestrike against good dodgers. Pyroblast is often negated by healers or armor/shield effects in higher play too.

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KT as far as I know tends to pad damage stats thanks to his tremendous poking power. He’s the most excellent at keeping enemy team at bay but when the going gets tough and a team fight comes off, thats when the good KTs shine. Unfortunately a lot of heroes counter his burst. Like tychus with neosteel coating, his pyroblast barely does any damage with that thing on. I’ve angered a lot of KT players this way. But I might not have faced the really good ones yet so I wouldn’t know.

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I suspect a good Kael’thas would force the entire enemy back line to take spell armour, and then never use that spell armour because they have to be ready for pyro, and then he would pyroblast the one guy who didn’t have spell armour in their talent tree.

True, but isn’t a large part of that power the zoning potential? When in lanes you can for example place living bomb on minion waves to force enemies to not stand in their minion wave. Or better (and this especially is on infernal shrines) you place living bomb on a non-heroic target with a sliver of health and suddenly it spreads within 1 second instead of 3, or even faster if you can follow the living bomb up with an AA. It is true though that non-CC’d enemies will very rarely spread living bomb at higher levels.

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As your title states, yeah, Kael’thas is a hero who is in a good spot.

I, and others think he could use a visual indicator on living bomb, but that is not here of there.

He is a hero with mostly balanced talents, that mostly all have their time and place of be picked. And his damage is balanced generally, so developers don’t need to mess with it up or down.

I do appreciate them looking to push lesser picked talents with small buffs. I would be okay with low pick rate talents getting changed to experiment also.

Oh yeah, and trait build for life. Most fun build to play on KT. :smiley:

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Its called mind games. I had that too vs a premade were the enemy Auriel did not pick her ult before i took mine but i baited her to use her ult first before i used mine later on that then killed her crystal target off and 3 others from the lvl 20 reset.

Its all about mind games.

But if you dont like mind games you could always try and get KT down or stun him when he tries to cast it. It still has a cast time and it goes on a 10 sec cd if interrupted or he gets stunned mid cast.

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Oh for sure, I have admit I’m still not very good at casting Pyroblast from a safe distance and often have to bail on the channel.

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I’d say he’s almost to Jaina levels of “build to suit the order of how you combo your spells” on his build variety. I did like trait build before the lvl 16 bump, but I also tend to play a more aggressive mage and just look to trade up takedowns anyway, and thats generally frowned on in HotS.

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Pretty much yeah. WC mages tend to be well done I think. I have to admit, my build has somewhat evolved into being basically a gravity lapse uptime build, using the trait talents. Cdr at 4, pyromaniac at 13, and at that point you need twin spheres to keep up with the 3 second cooldown on gravity lapse.

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