This shows me that he needs a rework, because if can run rampant with support early and lategame even harder that means there is something wrong in this kit and talents. A Hero shouldn’t have a weak early for a oppressive late game… it looks balanced, but feels like a bad design.
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if they play properly together. I had a quick match yesterday with an abathur/zeratul combo, which couldn’t do much to win the match against an excellent playing random group.
Or it also means abathur is to be looked at because it applies to a vast array of heroes.
A fifth rework ? Someone has to contend with tassadar in the title of the most reworked hero i guess.
I came here just as I came across posts like this before to answer against all people who claim that Zeratul is overpowered.
First I am level 128 with Zeratul having 50.5% win rate with him, my rank is diamond 4, and my account level is 1578 so I think I am experienced enough to tackle this so here’s my list of counters that you can play with some different strategies and play styles that render him either vulnerable or useless:
Hard counters:
Taunt varian
Uther
The Butcher
Valeera
illidan ( if you are good with him)
Brightwing
Garrosh
Maieve
Murky (octo grab)
Soft counters:
Diablo
Arthas
ETC
Johana
Muradin
Tassadar
Lili
Medivh
Twin blades & colossus smash Varian
Qhira
Not easy preys:
Anduin
Rehgar
Kharazim
All buisers
Alarak
Tracer
Tychus
Robogobo Gazlowe
Skilled Nova, Lunara, orphea & sylvanas ( to your surprise noobs)
If you are truly skilled you can force him to run away with other healers & ranged assassins who has decent dueling or decent defensive capabilities like the following:
Whitemane
Liming
Kaelthas
Kaelthuzad
Raynor ( depends on your build and skill )
Greymane (early & mid game only)
According to my level of dedication amd winrate with him compared to my other favourite heroes , he is slightly undertuned number wise due to several nerfs , for example I have the butcher level 88 with 61.8% winrate , illidan level 50 with 54.7% winrate … etc. While Zeratul my most played hero at level 128 with only 50.5% winrate, and says something about his actual power and viability in a lot of situations
You are Diamond and you say this? I don’t understand…
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Zeratul can’t really outtrade the butcher, it does have some sense in a 1v1 basis.
Of course teamplay changes a lot of things but since people complain mostly about the 1v1 aspect…
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Of course you don’t , Butcher can chase zeratul with his E no matter how many blinks he has , and Butcher’s team should have aggressive tank and healer who can follow him to protect him after he kills the running Zeratul , and if you have enough experience with the Butcher you would know that sometimes you can and must play him as a protective pseudo tank.
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I was actually having quite a bit of fun against a Zeratul in QM as Junkrat the other night. Granted, he wasn’t a very good Zeratul (and I am definitely not a very good Junkrat!), but between Concussion Mines making it difficult for him to stick, traps to give him fewer pathing options, Dirty Trickster, and just general Junkrat nonsense, he wasn’t really enjoying himself.
Zeratul actually needs a competent team to shine. He has burst but he cannot 100 to 0 many heroes. I think that he has the strongest ulti in the game but maybe that is just me. He has almost no staying power in fights after his burst so if you have a team that pays attention to have some peel for the vulnerable heroes he is easy to counter.
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The fact you mention freaking Butcher as a hard counter and Qhira as a soft
Can’t take you seriously good day
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I agree, the few % that can play Butcher correctly, I have seen tanking and peeling for their team. They aren’t just waiting for charge openings. It opened my eyes to the correct playstyle of this hero.
He can be so much more than just a one trick pony melee assassin if played right.
I admit it, I was one of those who just farmed meat then waited for perfect E openings, without really protecting my teammates or acting as a body blocker.
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I didn’t expect you to understand but I tried to explain regardless , listen I will give you a tip to see it in action , search on youtube for Fan Heroes of the Storm , you will find a very skilled chinese player, you will find among his uploaded matches a ranked game in which he did pick butcher to counter zeratul and he managed to shut him down completely. You will not understand my vast experience with the two heroes but you can see a live example yourself if you sought what I told you
Butcher will indeed out trade zera. He can also force zera into playing a more hit and run approach if he plays as peels in team fights. Which drasticly reduces hia damage. Lambs is also a thing.
Have you guys even read the text of his ults? That is by definition condtional.
No he can’t. Ruthless Onslaught has a maximum duration. If you teleport over a wall he has to run all the way around that wall to get to you, and that usually means traveling further than the max range of RO.
If you do manage to get him with RO, you’d better hope you’re already fed as hell, or he’ll just teleport away from you before you can do any real damage as soon as that stun wears off.
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Blink has a short range and can’t blink over about half of the walls of any map , furthermore when he is trying to reach your backline he won’t have a wall nearby and Butcher will reach him before he gets near a wall to use blink, then if he had to use Blink & Might of the Nerazim Blink then congratulations he just burned all his cooldowns for nothing and has to wait again while you wait for Ruthless onslaught and poke their tank with your Q
This is incorrect.
Blink has a range of 7.15. That’s way further than the thickness of most walls.
There are probably only a small handful of walls he cannot Blink directly over in the entire game.
That is very heavily map dependent. On maps like Cursed Hollow, there are walls everywhere for him to blink over. It’s only on the most wide-open maps, basically limited to Hanamura and Volskaya, where he usually doesn’t have walls nearby or that are long enough to break RO that Butcher could possibly catch a good Zeratul.
Meanwhile, your Butcher is now out of position, potentially in the middle of the enemy team, and has to wait 15 seconds for RO to come off cooldown. Meanwhile, Zeratul has to wait 20 seconds, only 5 seconds longer, for MotN to come off cooldown so he can do it all again.
Seriously, if you get caught out by Butcher as Zeratul without a Brightwing or Uther CCing you first, it’s because you screwed up.
As someone who has played a good bit of both Zeratul and Butcher, they do not counter each other unless one of them is bad. Butcher is too beefy and threatening for Zeratul to chunk him, but Zeratul is too zippy and elusive for Butcher to do the same to him.
Butcher is not a hard counter to Zeratul.
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Butcher can cancel his E before going into that , and if you read well what I wrote that Butcher’s team should have an aggressive tank and healer if he is going to complete that chase
I introduced my experience to avoid these types of discussions but I think I played them more than you did
He is , it’s just a matter of strategy.
Which means he doesn’t catch him and has to wait another 15 seconds before he can try again. At which point Zeratul may still have as many as 4 teleports available in his kit still, and will only have to wait 5 seconds longer than Butcher for access to all 6 of them again.
There is no way a solo Butcher is catching Zeratul without the Zeratul making a huge blunder. Either Butcher did everything right and the Zeratul screwed up, or Butcher does not catch Zeratul.
So Butcher has to rely on his team to help him handle a lone Zeratul, and even then there’s a good chance they all fail to catch him. Doesn’t sound like much of a “hard counter” to me.
And you do realize Zeratul has another 4 teammates of his own, right? While your team’s frontline and support are gallivanting off to catch that pesky DT, the rest of his team his now running over the rest of your backline. Meaning that even if you manage to catch him and win that skirmish, he still wins the battle.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve played a lot more Zeratul, especially post-rework, but I’ll need to know your Butcher level before I’ll believe that.
He literally is not.
Uther is the only real hard counter Zeratul has. He has a point-click stun with a decent duration, 1 second. However, he can follow that up with another stun if need be, and then another stun. This is incredibly reliable, to the point where if a Zeratul comes within range of Uther in the middle of a teamfight, he’s almost a guaranteed kill. Those 6 teleports won’t do you too much good if you can’t use them.
Brightwing, probably the next best counter, barely qualifies as a hard counter to Zeratul, and she’s only in the running because Polymorph is point-click, has decent range, and is applied instantly. It also lasts solid length of time, 1.5 seconds, but it is not a full stun. It’s good, but not great.
Butcher’s Ruthless Onslaught is also point-click, even longer range, and has a decently long duration CC, 1 second. However, this is all heavily mitigated by its delay. Ruthless Onslaught has, at minimum, almost a full second delay before he begins charging and can stun anyone. Add to that any travel time, and suddenly that becomes a lot of extra time for Zeratul to react and Blink away. Ruthless Onslaught lacks reliability, which is the crucial part of countering heroes who spend as little time actually engaging the enemy as Zeratul does.
Hell, Xul is a better counter to Zeratul than Butcher, and even then he won’t do much because of the delay on Bone Prison’s root. Zeratul can just Blink away and force you to waste most or all of the root’s duration trying to catch up to him.
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Excuse my ignorance, what is 100-0?
It means to drop someone from full health to 0. Full health to dead.
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