I really enjoyed the Kerrigan rework since it made a melee assassin viable. And you can’t say that for many heroes in that category.
The first nerf was ok but the second one pushed to hero back into the 48% winrate region and you can only pick her in very specific scenarios. Very bad design decision making.
She is still amazing at killing Backliners and has amazing sustain.
I think she can be good against most mages and has a pretty good stun and great mobility.
she’s pretty fine
Yeah I mean she is ok but not more. You don’t see her very often again which somehow is a waste of reworking time.
I can understand that it feels unfair for Hanzo players to get nearly oneshooted, but heroes like her kill or get killed since she only has an unreliable escape.
Assimilation Mastery y’all. Helps keep her alive a lot more than you’d think in the middle of a team fight. I think she’s in a decent place, but with all the nerfs to her W focused build, there’s been little to no buffs to her other talents to bring them up to par. She could use a few tweaks, but nothing major in my opinion.
I do think that the most recent Kerrigan nerf was unnecessary but in what world is melee assassins not viable?
Samuro, Zeratul, Malthael, Maiev, Thrall, Alarak. All of them are perfectly viable (in high ranking)
The ones that are unviable is basically Butcher, Valeera and Illidan.
Kerrigan is a bit on the iffy side now. Even before the nerf it was clear who was a good Kerrigan and who was just feeding endlessly. I think this one can be reverted and Kerrigan is viable just like the other mentioned melee assassins. Now she’s more or less back to square one with only very good Kerrigan players able to make use of her and everyone else a liability.
Loads of CC spam. It sucks to be melee and die during the CC chain and never get to move.
Also I think healers are just a tad bit too good.
They buffed her Ravage q quest so its my go to lvl 4 talent now and with the 3 leaps on a hero she can kill pretty well.
Though with the nerf, her combos are a lot more punishing with mana increase. so she still a one trick pony
I haven’t tried the q quest after it was buffed yet, but that’s nice to hear. I’ve always liked her lvl 7 q talent given in the rework. It was my go to until I inevitably went for cooldown reduction. Seriously try assimilation mastery sometime. Mana becomes a non issue and you essentially have a regen globe every time your shields are up, which is almost always. The added shields from actual regen globes is just a bonus.
There is a core design flaw with Kerrigan right now in that Fury of the Swarm is basically mandatory otherwise her wave clear is non-existent and thus making her stacking quest at 4 that much harder to complete than it already is. Assimilation Mastery isn’t needed even after the mana nerfs, shes fine in that regard. Blizzard thought that by increasing her mana costs it might incentivise the use of this talent, terrible choice.
Blizzard keeps failing to figure out what they want to do with Kerrigan thus the constant changing around of her kit. W build is still the way to go and it’s sad.
Just tried out the Q build, you’re right. Mana isn’t an issue for her anymore and FotS was 100% necessary to reliably stack that quest. Didn’t feel as nice as the W build, but it got the job done. I feel like FotS should be made baseline.
Point-n-click Q build though.
There’s a pattern I’ve noticed over the years with regards to how they handle Kerrigan:
The difference is all of these listed above have either reliable poke, escapes, or both. Kerrigan doesn’t have much in the way of safe poke and no reliable escape. I think it will always make her hard to balance, but the constant nerfs were not needed.
As LCD pointed out in another thread the rework also failed to accomplish the devs goal of creating more diversity in her builds. They keep nerfing her W build, but it’s still the most effective build and Fury of the Swarm feels like a must pick talent, so much for talent diversity.
They tried giving her an escape with the Q charges, but it’s so rare you can actually leap back to safety. Got rid of her friendly leap forever ago. Once she’s in the fight, it’s hard to get out. Had a great Garrosh an hour or so ago, though. Was my own personal catapult into safety.
Given the apparent HotS design philosophy, I don’t see them addressing her issues until a year or so from now. They’re so focused on reworking outdated heroes (which is great, don’t get me wrong) that they don’t take the time to do much after the initial changes before moving on to the next two or three receiving changes.
Yeah I’m aware, which is why I think the nerfs should be reverted. Kerrigan has a full all-in playstyle which means she has to be able to nuke opponents on her own to be a worthwhile pick otherwise she’s not much different than Butcher.
The rework failed because Blizzard is unaware of how their own characters works as evidenced by them not understanding why Blaze is better as an offlaner and not a maintank. This was highlighted during the September AMA if my memory serves right.
Kerrigan should not have talents such as Bladed Momentum. This is the greatest issue with the rework in my mind as a talent such as this means it’s a must-pick since her overall CD’s are obviously taken into account with this as an option. What they should’ve done imo is baking this in somewhere in her kit. For example the explosion on her E could’ve had a CDR component, each new target she uses Q on or the amount of enemies stunned/pulled could reduce CD’s.
Another one is the huge difference in usefulness of the W and Q talents. Kerrigan is a burst oriented assassin with no poke and mediocre durability. Having a talent like Kinetic Fulminaton compete against Sharpened Blades doesn’t really work. Even when simple math could figure out that a ST oriented DPS talent wouldn’t be as good as an AoE burst talent for a burst oriented character.
Another smaller point is actually her level 13 offering Volatile Power and Psionic Barrier which has identical problems as Artanis current Shield Surge compared to Psionic Synergy. This raises alarm for me personally as it may mean Artanis level 4 will remain as lopsided as it is when they rework other heroes and introduce just as poor options.
As far as Fury of the Swarm is concerned it’s yet another example of pairing a utility+damage talent vs utility or damage only talents. The exact same thing I talked about with Mal’ganis’s Will of Tichondrius when he was released - if you give players the option to take either a utility/damage only talent vs a talent that does both players will pick the latter each time because it doesn’t make sense to use the other ones.
In Mal’ganis’s case Will of Tichondrius remains his most picked by a large margin and it’s nerf is the only significant nerf Mal’ganis has received since his introduction but it tanked his winrate by 5% so far. It goes to show how lopsided talent picks affects performance just because so many talents are traps from the start.
well if you play her against a.i, yeah she is fine, against heroes used by people with hands and a brain is probably useless
But it’s not. Assimilation Mastery was already decent before they buffed it, and now I take it every game. FotS is simply unnecessary for wave clear, unless you’re talking about zerg waves on Braxxis or something. E + spam Q kills an entire wave anyway. FotS is good when you get good mileage out of it in team fights. If your opponents are more prone to being split up, it’s a wasted talent.
The recent rebalance hasn’t changed Kerrigan a whole lot. The main difference is that her power shifted a bit from early game (combo damage) to late game (level 16 power spike with Q build). I preferred the Q talents anyway so I like it.
The sad reality with Kerri, she is very hard too balance( always has been) she is either busted strong or just busted. Been playing her since alpha, seen the ups and downs.
Her ‘rework’ was a sad completely utter waste of time. Shes in the exact same spot she was before with no talent diversity, no solid design direction and only played on 2 maps.
I will give credit where credit is due though because they somehow made Ultralisk viable.
I would not call it viable, just less bad.