It’s been a while since her rework. I played her a few games and it was pretty fun.
Is she in an okay state now? Also, how do you counter heroes such as tracer, lunara, valla etc? (mobile ranged assassins seem to give me the biggest problems)
Her range sucks so she’s lost that niche, and survivability, and her AOE skill has an indicator on the ground to make it easy to dodge. But hey getting hit once from the fog or contested at objectives was toxic and anti-fun, small sacrifices must be made to keep Reddit whining at bay.
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First of all, just to point out, all my advice is based on the assumption that you take time trap talents.
Sticking together with your team and always having a defensive time trap near you, where you stand in such a way that the path that tracer would take would make her run into time trap. Similar case for Genji and his E, you really screw up his attack attempt if he swift strikes into a time trap. Same for tracer.
If you throw a combo on Tracer who steps into time trap, assuming you can land time trap combos, she will either have to eat the attack and take a bunch of damage or it’ll force her to use recall which means she wont be able to dive as aggressively for 26 seconds or however long the cd is nowdays…
In a similar way to can force out Genji’s deflect.
As for lunara and valla; sniping them effectively, lowering their health so they can’t go deep, and using time traps. They step into a time trap, you combo, they lose a lot of health and are forced to retreat. If your team is ready, it can mean a kill, if they’re out of position.
Ranged assassins like Li Ming give me trouble more than Tracer and Genji as well. Heck, I usually end up smacking the Genjis I face around, especially if they go Dragonblade. Just wait or force out deflect, then ult+time trap double combo and he’s dead.
Her current state is that she’s still able to pull of great stuff, but her skill floor has been raised, due to reduced range, visibility on W, reduced damage on spells that is put into Bronze Talons that you usually only really use when you’re already winning or similar.
I’ll just stop this here before this wall of text becomes too big. If you have other questions regarding Chromie, fire away. I’m a level 400 chromie… (just reached today, yaay)
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Skill floor was raised since she’s been crippled by nerfs with some points in a trash skill that was only really for laning. To play bad things at a passable level you have to be even better, for the same or worse result. The character was not improved or made more skillful by the nerfs, just nerfed. Telegraphing W doesn’t add anything but an advantage to the enemy, you would line that up skillfully exactly the same as before. Reduced range on Q means everyone else’s instakill buttons for squishies are now very viable.
Wow thanks for the detailed reply! Very helpful.
They are ranged assassins though, kinda hard to lure them into time trap sometimes. That is why I have more trouble with ranged diving assassins than melee diving assassins.
If lunara for example tries to walk in a funny way to avoid possible time traps there is nothing much I can do.
Any other chromie tips? Would love to learn from a level 400. I don’t mind wall of texts, I will read it all. Thanks!
Long as she’s not annoying, it’s a win in my book.
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FRESH GNOME
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Yeah because God forbid character bias doesn’t show when balancing a game. The only people who didn’t find Chromie frustrating were Chromie players…what a shock. 
I guessing they saw nothing wrong with the design of a hero blind firing spells into fog and getting 1-shot off screen.
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But Azmodan is fine.
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You’re welcome!
And if you don’t mind wall of texts so did I write a long guide for Chromie on icy veins comment section.
https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/20810-heroes-of-the-storm-chromie/
Just scroll down a bit. I haven’t updated it for post-changes Chromie, but there is still a lot of general advice and tricks and such for Chromie.
I do a whole lot more blind firing with new Chromie than I ever did with the old version. New Q is like hitting people with a wet bagel so I really don’t care if it doesn’t connect. All that matters now is that once the team fighting starts, occasionally throw your Q’s at the easiest to hit target (tank) and then riddle them with auto attacks. If the enemy pursues you, run a away a bit until they get bored chasing you, turn around and start again.
It’s not terribly satisfying for anyone involved but you do enough damage to be effective which is actually more depressing than anything because it means she probably isn’t going to see a rework again any time soon.
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Still that W indicator is so dumb what kind of player would get hit by that now?
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She overpowered and must be nerfed. Impossible kill her and you have zero chanche again her in 1vs1.
Almost nobody. That’s why Enveloping Assault is now the highest pick rate talent on that tier by far (over 51%). That talent had less than 10% pick rate before nerfs.
Blizzard, naturally, didn’t actually fix Chromie’s problem of balance. They just adjusted damage… again. I’m convinced none of the live team actually plays her at any competitive or high level.
Chromie’s range at 11 was likely too much in her first version, but they reworked her to have an infinite stack on Q, which was definitely ludicrous for a hero that can safely stack it, or have a single other hero on the team for stack setups.
The problem with the second iteration Chromie in particular is that it brought in an extremely exploitable Time Trap talent build. And guess what? They didn’t even touch that in this third iteration. Chromie became almost unkillable with a Time Trap build using Timely Surprise, Bye Bye, and Andorhal Anomaly.
All they had to do was cap her Q stacking, maybe nerf Shifting Sands a little, and remove Timely Surprise’s skill reset. I mean, it reaches the point where Chromie can use Temporal Loop and Timely Surprise to actually hit you four times in rapid succession. Afterwards, you can even take the Temporal Loop upgrade to do this again.
Chromie’s third iteration completely missed the abuse case that made previous rework such a problem for countering.
TL;DR: Blizzard didn’t understand what was wrong with a hero, and changed the wrong things again.
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No you can’t. Time trap has a CD. You wont even be able to cast an extra sand blast as by the time you’ve thrown your combo from the time trap, there is 0.5-1second left until the second loop proc.
And if you go time trap talents and do not take Anderhol Anomaly, then you have faiiled Chromie and she’ll be mad.
Please don’t infer that this is something easy to do or has no counter, as you seem to imply. All you have to do is destroy the time trap afterall. Try it out yourself and see how often you can get that combo off.
You can’t destroy the Time Trap if you’re already locked into this combo. I’ve watched Chromies do this time after time. Anyone that initiates this already knows the timing, and it’s certain death. Time Traps are infamously hard to kill for an external skill as it is.
While, you’re right in that you should always take Andorhal Anomaly, that and Timely Surprise together were the serious problem with Chromie 2.0, and continue to exist in Chromie 3.0.
They can be easily killed by AAs by most AA heroes. They get taken down by one hit from a lot of spells, like flamestrike.
You have about 1.7 seconds to destroy the trap.
I’ve thrown this combo a looooot over the time and it’s EXTREMELY rare that anyone tries to destroy it. They either run away or attack Chromie, ignoring the trap. I can count the number of people who’ve attacked it intentionally with one hand. It gets taken out much more frequently by coincidence from random AoE during a fight.
No, it is not. For some heroes, it is, those that have absolutely no way to prevent any of it. A hero that has no stun, no spellarmor, or stasis and also is alone and not aided by his team, who could either block sandblasts or interfere with Chromie.
Also it’s not that you just need to know the timing and then it’s 100% hit every time. You are way oversimplifying it. It’s very delicate and in order to even use the combo, you need to get much closer than normal as Time Trap has a much shorter range than Chromies damage spells, which means she puts herself in danger and in range of the enemy when doing it (unless they run away when ulted which is just bronze level stuff)
If you mess up the timing a little bit you may end up putting trap a bit too early, making it procc instantly as ult rewinds the enemy so one of the combo doesn’t go through at all. Place trap a bit too late and enemy can run or teleport out. Throw combo a bit too late and he’ll be trapped before being hit.
There are also cleanses in this game or heroes like Brightwing, Tyrande or Morales who can bring armor/spellarmor.
It is a different expect of Chromie that has it’s own strengths and weaknesses. Chromie sacrifices pure damage in exchange for resets. Bronze Talons upgrade and the damage upgrade for W on lvl 5 is sacrificed for time traps, for instance. Piercing Q’s at 18, relatively.
Some heroes are way stronger against Time Traps than others too. Big reveal heroes like Tassadar can show where all the time traps are, which can make the time traps lose a lot of the usefulness. Consider this: Time traps ONLY bring any usefulness if stepped into (or when using ult), as compared to other damage talents that’ll always be useful (assuming you can actually aim). Li ming comes to mind. She already has a spellarmor talent and she can dodge 100% of all time trap combos assuming she had her Teleport ready when she was trapped. She can also interrupt Sand blasts at range with her WoF.
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You don’t NEED raw damage, when you fix the biggest weakness of a mage and still do top tier mage damage.
You’re completely missing the point of why this is broken: Chromie still deals absurd damage on top of being one of, if not, the hardest hero to kill in a teamfight because of her own kit. That’s why Chromie 1.0 wasn’t such a problem.
And you completely ignored my post since you didn’t address a single thing I said and just respond by saying that I’m wrong, you’re right, with no argument behind your statements.
I already know that you don’t actually know much about Chromie when you claim that she can do a triple combo by upgrading ult at level 18, doing the time trap thing twice… Something that you have never ever ever ever ever seen, you claim is possible and a problem.
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