I think some of her talents or skills are a bit overnerfed and half of her kit is quite useless. These are my thoughts from my experience so feel free to debate them.
Talents:
Level 1: Vigor and Subtlety are useless if you manage your energy, Block is too niche nowadays.
Level 4: Hemorrhage goes against Valeera 's kit since you are not going to constantly AA someone without being punished, Initiate is garbage becouse you do the damage with Sinister Strike so you cap your combo points and either waste 1 or overextend, Wound Poison is too niche and you sacrifice Relentless Strikes which is huge.
Level 7: Slice and Dice has the same problem than Emorrhage and incentivizes you to overextend for 3 sec to get the full value, Fatal Finesse makes no sense.
Level 16: Thistle Tea is a trap, Assassinate is pretty easy to counter for a 16 talent powerspike.
Level 20: Adrenaline Rush is useless unless the enemy team likes to stay in the bomb, Enveloping Shadows is niche.
Abilities:
Ambush: i mean sure you can sometimes initiate with it, but with all the mobility, escapes and burst in this game, theres little incentive to loose all the utility from the other openers for an unrewarding damage increase.
Kidney shot: since you can Garrote with Crippling Poision to prevent escapes, the insignificant stun duration isnt generally worth over a 2.5 sec silence + extra damage unless you are securing a friendly aoe.
Blade Flurry: the combo point per hero hit is a trap since Valeera’s damage comes from single target burst, not aoe. Huge energy cost so just for minion waves.
Vanish: considering it has an 8 second cooldown, the extra 3 second to use the tp are overkill. Its just too much, should be something like 2.25 or 2.5
She is in my opinion one of the worst implemented heroes in terms of build diversity and abilities. Just seeing at heroesprofile, you can see the viable talents have a pick rate in master from 61 to almost 89%.
Id love a Dva sized rework as her base kit needs serious attention. Talent buffs / nerfs just aren’t going to cut it.
Energy talents are interesting because they make her feel different to play. Sadly her base kit lets these talents down. Miss just one SS and you physically have no way to burn excess energy.
Fun story: On release, garrot used to be the bad opener. In a mini rework they nerfed the duration of KS’s stun and also the damage of Amb. Additionally they buffed the duration of garrottes silence making it the go to opener for all situations.
All in all I’d like to see her opener CC nerfed baseline but you have the potential to build back up through talents making players choose if they want more CC or more damage.
BF is a bit of an odd duck. Definite rework potential there
Agreed. Personally I’d like to see her have 5 combos baseline. Adjust (nerf) her numbers of course to make this mechanic work. Think about it, 5 combos takes a while to build (without the right talents) giving the enemy time to react before valeera is able to implement her true damage.
I miss the cold blood level 20 talent, it felt better than a passive movement speed. They could have changed the damage, there was no reason to delete it and even then, there are current 20 upgrades on other heroes that are even worse than a single target crit.
Back when she was being built, heroes generally had maybe 3 ‘builds’ with a lot of talents put into one ability or combo set. Since then, the devs have reworked talents to be less all-in on a build, boosted baseline abilities to generally be more useful without talents, and try to encourage combinations that work with multiple talents, and not essentially have a lvl 1 or 7 talent be the crux of all other choices from that point.
Not only has Valeera not gotten that treatment, it’s made even worse that despite having so many ability ‘options’ it undercuts her power to try to use abilities that she didn’t talent into using, so all those extra abilities are just wasted design space atm.
Even before the last time she was touched, she has pretty much been a one-build wonder and had better min/max stats for either one ability set or another with the train largely being her Q build now, whereas is was aa before that. But as is, most of her openers aren’t worth the variety, her talents don’t benefit from the slapped-on blind she was given to try to retouch kidney shot, and energy put into using her finisher iirc has less value than just using more talented Q, so her kit falls apart based on how she’s built, rather than all-around getting better as most other heroes usually get.
There’s a number of reworks that have been posted on the forums as suggestions for how to change her in the hopes of both improving her play style (both for and against) and possibly opening up more design space for other heroes.
It’s been awhile since I’ve looked over the ones I’ve posted, but I supposed if I were to do another, I think I’d just play up the heathstone aspects and turn her into a HotS version of Yami Yugi where she’s throwing cards and quipping about games and winning all the time.
And that is why 90% of all Valeera players are now one button rogues that dont know what Cheap Shot or Ambush is and ends up with 120 sec silence time on mvp screen.
I would bet Valeera and Nova reworks will be published at around the same time. I would even go further and say that Samuro was being reworked at the same time as them but because he is the dev favorite he was finished earlier and the devs changed their plans of releasing all the stealth reworks together (like the last time) and instead released Samuro early because of the content drought. The other 2, Nova and Valeera have been absolutely irrelevant for the longest time in literally all contexts.
It was only recently that Valeera began to be seen by the high mmr players as a valuable hero because of how uninteractive she is (we are so far already that people are interrupting Diablo’s Q in mid air). Abilities that can be dodged havent been competitive against undodgeable ones for a long time in high mmr. This phenomenon began with Uther raising into tank. There have been some other phenomenons raising, yes, just like the brokenness that Chromie used to be. But unmissable abilities are simply inevitably on a constant rise in value with respect to time because people are better at dodging every day.
Sorry i went off topic there.
In reference to the OP, honestly Valeera feels exactly the same to play against no matter the build she takes, it may just be that more than 70% of people take the same build–as Whitemane’s case has always been–in my opinion her talent tree is a zero to the left and the main thing to address here is the lack of counterplay in her base kit.
On a side note, i am of the opinion that her as it is today is an absolute failure at embodying the fantasy of being a rogue in wow, which is the one reason she exists in hots. She never has to use her brain to predict the future, she never uses long and easy to break CC, she never uses offensive cooldowns and she can get a restealth like it’s free right next to your face, which is exactly the contrary of what happens in wow.
Hots Valeera is probably the worst rogue that has ever existed. Even a low level classic player had a skill to detect traps while here you have to do mental gymnastics to predict were the aba mines are
Imagine Hots Valeera could detect Aba mines and Time Traps from Chromie and had the ability to remove them on a low cd in stealth. She would become nr 1 counter to those heroes. No more mine field kills cause Valeera already removed all his mines. No more Time Trap combos cause Valeera already removed them.
The clocks are ok since they have an active component that relies on the skill of the Chromie player. Aba mines just passively mess rotations and reach half the map without having to expose himself and worry about timings like Chromie does. And as a rogue, you didnt need to deactivate the traps since it was a long cast that also exposed you, you just avoided them with vission.
Stealth has 8 sec cd and enables your openers so unless you rotate with somebody else its not worth giving your location on the map + loosing stealth just to break the mines which are actually quite spammable.
Pref Cloak of Shadows, but Smokebomb is MustHave vs many melees
Pref Death From Above, Q Ambush, but all three are good.
Thistle Tea (Instant 100 Energy)
Elusiveness (More Movementspeed in Stealth)
10 and 13 depend on the situation.
With that build, you’re never out of energy and you can just spam all your abilities and you don’t really need the stealth anymore.
EDIT: This forum is weird. If I edit my post, it shows the numbers 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16 and 20, for my talents… but in my post its 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7… wtf?
The forum software is interpreting a number with a point and a space as an entry for an enumeration.
Every enumeration in the forum is consecutive so it doesn’t care what number you have written.
To display the correct numbers just write Level in front of them and it should be working fine
