PeskyBerry's Anduin Guide!

General Discussion
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I promised about a week ago that I would post this, so here it is!
(yes, my name is only in the title for character limits :stuck_out_tongue:

Anduin is the character that I play the most in ranked, and I have experienced great success with him. While it is true that he has a lower skill floor compared to other healers like Tyrande and Whitemane, getting the most out of him is not as easy as people think.

Pros:

  • Pretty independent. Some other healers have very limited ways of defending themselves, escaping, or are otherwise reliant on their team to keep themselves safe.
  • Access to high burst healing or high sustain healing, depending on build
  • Works well in teamfights, as well in smaller skirmishes, and even blow up comps.
  • Leap of Faith is fantastic.
  • Strong Late game, with level 20 talents
  • Hard CC

Cons:

  • Limited PvE.
  • Delays on all abilities.
  • Very little talent diversity. You have little to no flexibility in deviating from your build, as certain talents are essential for your build.
  • Limited Utility outside of raw heals.

Key abilities and how to use them

  • Cast q early. Takes 0.75 seconds to go off. Every heal comes with that delay. Cast early, save lives.
  • Cast Q immediately after an aa for maximum aa uptime. Weapon fire interval for anduin is 0.83 seconds or 0.66 with inner fire. Cast q in between autos (or as close to it as you can)
  • W heals for 25% more for each person hit. It really makes a difference
  • Varian’s Legacy DoT ticks trigger your level 1 talents (which trigger lightwell). So if you have 3 enemy heroes marked this is 3 lvl 1 triggers per second, with additional 3 healing triggers from just the talent itself. This means that you get 6 seconds of CDR on lightwell, for every second you use Varian’s Legacy. (Hope that made sense)
  • Leap of Faith timing: Pull about a second or two early as there is a short travel time, and you don’t want people to die mid flight, or immediately after they land. So,on tanks and bruisers, pull at around 25-33% health. For squishies, closer to 50%. Make sure you are in a good position to pull your frontline if things start going south.

Alright, now for the biggest mistake I see people doing: Using ults too late.

Holy Word: Salvation is there to prevent damage! The 30% max health heal is nice, but that’s not the main point. The point is 3 seconds of AoE protect. Granted, you do have to be careful with timing, because there are 90+ ways to interrupt it (I counted), and it does have a half a second delay. But a well timed one pretty much means a won teamfight. A bad one will likely get you killed.

Lightbomb is an initiation tool, counter initiation tool, cc wombo combo, and an excellent source of shields. This is best used on tanks or bruisers, since they are generally near the most amount of enemies. Shield amount stacks with enemy heroes hit, so hit a lot of them! I do not recommend using it on retreating or super low health allies. This will generally just waste your cooldown and your ally will usually die anyways.

Level One talents:

I see pretty much everyone pick bold strategy all the time. Yes it is a good talent, but it isn’t mandatory. Here, I’m gonna use math to discuss the merits of each level 1 talent.

  • Renew heals for 50% of the base value of Q over 5 seconds, provided you autoattack first. (26 hps). Only requires you to auto once every 4 seconds for max value, which is easily doable.

  • Pursued By Grace heals for 35 each time you autoattack. You need 4 autoattacks in 5 seconds to equal the healing from renew. With Anduin’s attack period at 0.83, you can get 6 autos off in this five second period. So this makes pursued by grace better, right? Not necessarily. Casting any of your abilities, especially Q, takes up time. Repositioning to catch divine star takes up time. Putting yourself closer to constantly AA means that you are at more risk. PbG also has a bit of the Li Li problem, in that your healing from this goes to the lowest health person, who might not actually need it. So, in a vacuum, and if everything goes perfectly, PbG will offer far better value. But, if you are unable to be aa-ing constantly, renew is better value.

  • Bold Strategy. Probably the most common level 1 to pick that I see. It is important to note, the hps from this is exactly the same as PbG. Q cooldown is increased by 50%, but now each Q casts heals for an additional 50% as a heal over time. Bold strategy becomes slightly better than PbG once you hit 16 for lightwell. This is because the heal over time portion of Bold Strategy offers more cdr on lightwell than PbG does.

Builds

Anduin has two main builds, both of which are focused around a single thing, and really buffing the **** out of it. The two builds are I would consider viable are Inner Focus build and AA build.

  • Inner Focus
    • Renew at 1, Moral Compass at 4, Binding Heal or Blessed recovery at 7, Either at 10. Speed of the pious at 13, Inner Focus at 16, desperate prayer or extra trait at 20!
    • This build is a lot safer than the AA build, so if you are not able to constantly land AA’s then take this build. It also puts out a lot more burst healing than the other build. Overall, a solid choice to start out with.
    • Inner focus
      • Resets cooldown of Q and makes next heal 40% bigger. So base heal is 270, 40% bigger is 378.
    • Key talents!
      • Inner Focus resets with enemies hit by divine star. So speed of the pious is essential for the cooldown reduction per ally healed with divine star. Binding heal makes sure you also get healed every time you q-spam so that is my preferred choice. 20 doesn’t matter much, pick what you need, but if you choose Varian’s Legacy, you should have gone AA build.
  • AA Build
    • This build focuses on sustain healing through hitting people with AA’s. It puts out a decent amount of damage, and you pretty much never run out of mana. The downside is that if you cannot land AA’s constantly your healing output is incredibly limited compared to the other build.
    • Bold Strategy at 1 (pursued by grace is also ok, but Bold strategy is a little better). Inner Fire at 4, Blessed recovery at 7, Either at 10. Push Forward at 13. Lightwell at 16, Varian’s Legacy at 20
    • Key talents
      • If you pick anything other than Renew and don’t go inner fire, lightwell and Varian’s Legacy, what are you doing?

Trap talents (AKA, everything else on the tier is better)

  • Enchant boots Lions Speed. Sure, provides a passive 20% speed increase. As long as you don’t use trait. Value gets lost whenever trait is on cooldown, which is a lot.
  • Evenhanded blessings. Take inner focus instead. Less conditional on what target you heal, and does more burst healing.
  • Holy Nova. It’s healing is just eh. Holy Reach at 4 provides nearly the same AoE healing. It is also centered on anduin, which doesn’t usually hit the people it needs to due to short range. “But what if my team is too mobile for effective lightwells?” Then you should have gone inner focus.
  • Light of Stormwind. Invulnerability for all your allies affected is nice if the enemy team has a ton of cc. But tons of cc means you are gonna get interrupted. Only works if the enemy team drafts tons of roots and slows. If they have low cc, this isn’t worth it.

Thanks for reading all of that! Hopefully something was useful. I would also be happy to answer any and all questions. Thanks again for reading! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Perhaps the most wholesome thing on the forums.

But the WoW forums have a cookie man.

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good post/guide. But you wrote the part below this text twice. I doubt this is intentional.

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I went up against a Leap Sonya/Lightbomb Anduin this morning, and it was completely disgusting. Blizz, nurf plox.

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Ok hot take here so prepare yourselves

Holy nova is really really strong and ever since they gave w cdr on 13 i almost always pick it. Yes radius is low, but anduin is encouraged to be in the thick of things anyways. Light bomb in solo que is quite ridiculous so putting it on yourself is not always a bad idea. You can lightbomb then throw down a w, then use extra mobement speed to run into fight. You get cdr on your w for hitting heroes and then it explodes and heals you for each enemy hit (if you took bold strategy if you didn’t this talent is meh). It also gives you good sustained healing like the well.

There were fights when i was stunned or silenced by enemy team and it didnt matter bc i had thrown out a w before.

In any case great guide this is more of a me thing.

I also really hate it when not paradox talks about anduin. He has some good advice but he was also telling people to go renew which was just objectively wrong.

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Thanks you made me remember that deadly charge lightbomb combo and im just too afraid to start the game again.

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Fixed thank you!

I would definitely consider taking holy nova if its healing stacked with the cooldown reduction of speed of the pious. Sadly it does not. I really like inner focus cause it basically has no cooldown if you can land your W.

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Can you convince shadowmere to not pick holy nova again? :kissing_smiling_eyes:

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meh. I like enchant boots lion speed. it’s not like I have it on cooldown constantly. and the extra heal they added in is nice :expressionless:

also it synergizes well with the extra charge talent at 20

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This is a hill i intend to die on bc this talent has never failed me

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It only failed your teammates dont worry :face_with_monocle:

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But i haven’t lost an anduin game this season.

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If it works for you - I don’t complain.

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I do, git gud

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Look at her doubling the enemy’s heal

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Come on fight back more :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Im also going to throw harb under the bus here for that one death. We had taken and won a 2v4 in that game but he pushed it with a 2v5 because sylvanas was making him tilt hard with her nonsense.

There was one point in that game where we got a 1-1 trade but lost harb. I just sat in core bc i had 0 intention of attempting a teamfight without him. So i cannot say that i alone carried. Was a good anduin game though.

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You’ve already lost me.
I can’t think of very many other healers who are worse off.

Lightbomb, on 60 seconds, enemy must be within a short distance of the ally you use it on. I’m not sure it’s that reliable, except as follow up CC or anti-dive.
Chastise. It moves slow, and only hits one enemy hero. Compared to a lot of other healer’s CC, I think it’s a lot less effective, and probably partly why I don’t like playing as him.
Auriel’s shove is quicker, knocks back, and is a stun rather than a root.
Morale’s Displacement Grenade is a larger area (and aoe) and interrupts more abilities.
Ana Sleep Dart can hit two heroes in stance, and sleep lasts longer if uninterrupted.

I’m not saying Chastise is bad, but it doesn’t shine and stand out above these, so having it as a pro just seems weird to me.

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Apparently BW heals more than Uther. But she (Pesky) still outhealed her.
Also, there seems to be a history of awesome Leorics involved :slight_smile:

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