I hate it. Absolutely think is is complete and utter garbage. Alas, I am in the minority since the vast majority of other Sylvanas players I see use it and occasionally find some success with it. Let me explain why I think W build is rubbish.
Firstly and probably most obviously, the main way I see people apply the 3 stacks of Black Arrows is with their E. The issue is that if you are using your only escape for damage, you become an extremely delicious target for your enemies. I’ve seen many games lost because Sylvanas’s suicide for stacks.
Also if you are saving your W for heroes, especially in lane, you aren’t killing the minion wave as fast and you are wasting time.
The enemy team can also counter your entire build simply by not stacking up and not letting you stack up.
Without taking hyper mobility talents, you are limited by how much you can chase down kills, effectively becoming a turret like other low mobility mages.
Idk, I don’t like the build and when I try it, I feel like Sylvanas becomes a neutered hero. She simply isn’t as good. How does everyone else feel about her W build? What’s the highest number of stacks you’ve ever gotten since mine is around like… 80…
I also don’t like W-build, but it’s a very good build, provided you have a minimum of 100 stacks at level 16. The number of stacks is influenced by your skills and the skills of other players. The matter is simple: if you can and want, then choose W-build, if not choose another build. Personally, I really liked the build that Cris used, it’s a hybrid of AA and W
About 160
In my case, a lot depends on the composition of the enemies. Sometimes I play W-build, sometimes Q-build.
I will mention that I am not a big fan of Sylvanas.
If you can get around 200 stacks of it, which is reasonable in a 20 minute game you will start doing absurd amounts of damage.
At that point I have seen E+W alone do half the hp of some of the more squishy assassins like junkrat or ming.
However most of the Sylv I see who pick it can’t stack it and end up at around 50 or so at the level 16 mark and then it makes for a pretty trash choice.
In fact i remember a particularly atrocious game I had with a certain Sylv who managed to get 4 stacks in the total course of a game and this was about 30 seconds before we lost (at about level 16). I was dumbfounded.
I hate it, im sure its a finer nuance in how i play, but once i got the hang of it, i felt like if i can win with this stupid build i could win harder/faster with any other part of her kit.
Mine was 290’s
Its not a bad build, many people actually love it, if for nothing else the endless dings. Just not my brand of energy drink. shrug
thats worthless. however, i will say that if your worried about having banshee’s for escape, then dont throw it an the enemy. Festering wounds is a really powerful talent for sylv’s kit, but it isn’t necessary to get stacks. your team should either be frontlining for you (so throw banshee’s into the enemy) or if you’ve routed them and the enemy is on the run, your throwing banshee’s towards them to keep up/cut them off anyways.
if neither of the 2 are happening, your using banshee’s to early in the fight and giving the enemy a dive target.
Sylvanas has three good playstyles and fits both the AA or Mage slot.
There are videos and guides on stacking. Best way is to throw W on a minion from max range and activate it with your wave, hitting an enemy hero at the same time and causing it to spread to everything. This lets you get maximum stacks every cooldown from max range while also clearing the wave. This can be done pretty much every skill rotation.
If you don’t have 80 stacks by level 13 (minimum) you have no clue what you are doing
lvl 1 - Q attack speed
lvl 4 - depends on map. Usually Merc queen, you can solo ANY non elite camp.
lvl 7 - Q burst dmg
lvl 10 - Arrow. Burst aoe silence
lvl 13 - Remorseless - raynor’s attack range AND allows to attack both tank AND the guy behind him
lvl 16 - Life Drain - this comboed with Remorseless makes you a long range sustain monster
lvl 20 - Withering barrage - even higher dps/sustain
I like this build a lot because you can have a macro impact very early(D + Merc Queen) at the same time become a TF monster post 13.
This is assuming your teammates understand soaking and that you should be grabbing camps and roam until 13.
Most somewhere around 310+ side. On average somewhere between 120-180. Lowest ever I’ve gotten was 70 something which is just terrible.
By hyper mobility do you mean Will of Forsaken and bolt, both of which are no-brainer talents due to their versatility and safety? In case enemy doesn’t have dive you could even forego WoF for huge heals, but realistically WoF is just too good.
So enjoy the free win then. If they are forced to position poorly, never go through chokes, never stack, etc then you are almost guaranteed to get multiple times the value from the talent compared to games where people know how to play and understand risk-reward analysis.
On lane you shouldn’t really have that much trouble clearing. We are talking about hero who is always in the 4 man or 3 man and Sylv herself has decent clear even without. On top of that possession clears half the wave by itself(OW maps being exception with merc queen since only other map to pick it was HM which is perma outed). Besides you always make risk-reward analysis on every hero about how much time, health, mana and abilities/CDs you go through for X thing, be that clear, gank, jungle, push, delay or whatever. Sylv is no different in that regard.
The rework made Sylv viable and actually high tier hero. She sat in the dark for longest time with never being situation where she would get picked. It’s not that she was utter trash even before but she just didn’t bring enough to the table compared to alternatives.
Dagger build (with E on 7) is absurd to levels I honestly can’t really explain.
Once you reach level 13, you top all the damage dealt by an additional 25% on top of the damage increased on dagger on top of the banshee’s curse you will be throwing insane numbers, she can literally burst down anyone in seconds and accumalte about 4k~ damage if Wailing Arrow was added and of course, your quest is stacked.
Ok, I had to update this. I just had a ranked game where due to people being on the phone and panic-picking heroes during the draft, my team consisted of Tyrande, Stukov, Johana, Malganis, and me Sylvanas. Single target hyper mobile build didn’t feel like it would be as impactful since most of the time it would just be 5 people facesmashing eachother so I tried a modified W build.
It was actually a roflstomp of a game for us and there was little the other team could do to stop us with their traditional team comp. I think I had around 75k damage dealt and 150 or so stacks and it felt pretty good. The game was only 15 minutes long.
So yeah, I amend my initial statement that W build is rubbish though I still can’t see a reason to take anything other than Windrunner at 13.