I recently decided to hop on HotS to play my favorite hero. And just can’t stomach how incredibly weak Nova is right now. So I’ve decided to really take some time explaining what’s wrong with Nova from a talent and ability perspective.
Level 1 Talents:
Longshot: Fine - This talent suffers from Nova’s overall kit being weak.
Covert Ops: The best talent in the tier by far. Allows you to secure a lot of early game kills from out of position players in team fights or when you float lanes during the early xp grind phase.
Advanced Cloaking: This is an absolutely garbage talent. Replace with Apollo Suit (lvl 20 talent) which is incredibly underpowered at lvl 20.
Level 4 Talents: This tier over all is weak from a talent strength perspective and game play perspective. At this point, EVERY choice you have selected is passive. There are no quests, no real change in damage output, and decoys have several problems like strange pathing and often not attacking.
Rapid Projection: This talent is intended to be paired with One in the Chamber. The biggest problem with Rapid Projections is that even with the Mana Cost reduction, it doesnt provide enough benefit to pick over the other talents in the tier which is saying a lot. Replace with lethal decoy (and damage buff reduced). If you select this talent, the decoy becomes a targeted ability and locks on to a hero and attacks until dead. I would also suggest changing the attacks the decoy does with this talent. Decoy misses snipe ALL the time.
Halo Stability: This talent is almost there. I would also suggest slightly increasing the sight range of the decoy.
Covert Mission: This talent is almost there. I would also add a small 10-15% damage buff against minions, camps, and bosses with this talent.
Lvl 10 Talents:
Triple Tap: This talent is incredibly underpowered. The “counter” to this ability’s damage is that the team or structures can absorb the damage by stepping in the path of the bullets. By splitting the damage into thirds, it is very easy to heal through this damage OR interrupt the bullet path. I’d suggest keeping the bullet speed the same and changing the ability to “Headshot”. It would deal the same amount of damage as triple tap does now if it hits its target with one bullet, HOWEVER if it hits anything other than its intended target, it only does 66% of its damage. This would make Nova more of a “Sniper” putting pressure on healers to top off teammates or teammates to take the shot.
Precision Strike: Fine
Level 13 Talents:
Psionic Efficiency: Fine
Double Tap: Fine
Ionic Force Field: This is another trash talent. It’s intended to make Nova more durable, but sadly it’s just not enough. Also…we’ve gotten this far with most of the talents being passive (that’s not fun). How about an active one? What about changing this to an ability you activate. Nova will glow bright blue and for 1 second after activation, absorb all damage taken as health.
Level 16 Talents:
Explosive Round: Fine
Crippling Shot: Fine
Lethal Decoy (Moved to Level 4 talents tier): Replace with Triple Tap. Triple tap now fires 3 rapid auto attacks that each deal 45% of Nova’s Auto Attack damage to her snipe target after a snipe with no range restrictions.
Level 20 Talents:
Fast Reload: Change to reduces cooldown by 90% if Headshot kills an enemy hero.
Precision Barrage: Fine
Apollo Suit: Move to Level 1 Talents
Rewind: I think this talent alone hamstrings the devs ability to give Nova meaningful buffs to her kit. Let’s replace with Psionic Mastery: Nova exerts her will upon an enemy hero causing them to auto attack their team for 3 seconds.