For a melee assassin is seems frightfully fragile. On top of that, her skills are hard to combo due to global cooldowns and spell timers. Was she a sacrifice by Blizzard to justify other heroes whom can truly menace in a fight?
Stack her trait before engaging, cast W before E to time the combo. Go into Try Mode to get a better feel for the correct placement of W and E so you arenât overshooting the pull.
Oh, and did I mention stacking her trait before diving in?
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She is just like Illidan. Why pick her when other heroes does her job alot better. She only works in the right comp just like Illidan and is heavly punished for jumping in without support.
Shield stacking only works if she have something to attack which is not something you can get to do for free everytime.
Her combo is very much telegrafed so being able to be one step ahead is needed to land one. I have before done a combo on mages that keep walking in circles with me just for me to land it on them and have them killed for thier arrogance.
She can be good, but is just straight up outclassed by Alarak (Best hero in the game BY FAR)
I feel like she is melee Nazeebo.
At least thatâs how I play her with the stacking 4.
Shoo, everyone, go away, Iâm laning.
5-10 minutes later, hello everyone, Iâm now online.
I generally feel the same (too squishy) about melee assassins. I assume their concept dates back to an era when we had slightly less CC, generally expecting a healer, and healers were more powerful, keeping stuff alive.
Unironically my favorite melee assassin (outside Qhira maybe) is Murky.
By the way, same is true about Orphea among the ranged squad.
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Sheâs âhardâ to play. Compared to too many mindless faceroll damager heroes, it takes some practice to use her, so if players donât have that, it greatly diminishes her fear-factor.
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She has a tendency to sit atop the Nexus. Despite her shortcomings and occasional nerfs, she has cycles of being one of the winning-most heroes played. So devs try to be cautious about making changes to her â for good or not â and time and again select players seem to make her work.
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For the most part, "melee assassinsâ were thrown under the bus. Granted, they arenât the only ones in that case, but what time HotS had, had a transition where heroes were âgood enoughâ in success or talent variety or pickrate, or niche context that priority and passion would go elsewhere.
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Her kit was changed to be less combo-reliant and her damage was adjusted from burst to over time.
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Power creep.
For a more elaborate explanation, Iâd say this genre has about 8 effectual traits that are combined across 4 different ranges to then create a particular âroleâ.
âMelee assassinsâ donât tend to work as sustained damage dealers due to the risk of their engagement: they lack bulk to withstand damage, and they lack safety to deal damage. So that narrows what niche they hold in large skirmishes, and they tend to either âharassâ or be regulated to a âfinisherâ hero. Much like the stealth assassins, itâs not âfunâ for players to have a character âappear out of nowhereâ and stun and kill them in a short span, so some of that ability to âfinishâ a hero has been reduced over the years. When the devs experimented with heroes lacking their own sustain, their power of their kit trading-off other opportunity costs made select heroes better at a particular âroleâ so ranged heroes, like genji and greymane, have been capable of doing a better job than âriskierâ heroes and effectively undermining some of their balance/design.
Kerrigan isnât really balanced around being a âtankâ or a âbruiserâ, so when healers were nerfed and self-sustain became more abundant for front-line heroes, she lost out on some opportunity there. She used to have a niche for the amount of cc she could bring and act as a compliment for other âtanksâ (like tyrael) but many bruisers have comparable, if not more, cc than she does while also having more poke, sustain, and mobility.
Kerrigan had a âreworkâ a few years back to try to give her better talent variety, and itâs arguably made her more stagnant due to a lack of âcorrectâ numbers to balance out her choices. So thatâs generally regulated her to the âgood enoughâ bin where a select group of players are keeping her winrate relatively high with a particular build.
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She is scary, but not in untrained hands.
The post rework build stagnation isnât true at all.
Before the rework she had one, exactly ONE build of choice to choose from while the rest do nothing to supplement her in combat (12 seconds trait duration???, why did she need block?) she had choices where if Ravage kills something it refunds sub optimal mana and increases the next one by 25%, no time gap so it needs pin point accuracy or things like overdrive, 25% spell damage increase but increases your mana costs 40% just lol lmao even.
Back then she had one build focused upon increasing her pure DPS on part (her W) with itâs radius by 7 and range of her being dangerous by 13 and then spell nuking potential by 16/20, she was extremely generic with so many generic items.
Currently where she stands she has 2 optimal builds with her 13, the bad talente are solely her 7s and the W at 4 while the rest is optimal allow her to diverse.
Iâd argue that painful spikes is the only choice on 16 but some people seem to disagree with this.
And also letâs not forget they made her ultralisk from a meme to pickable with the charge.
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Kerriganâs talent balance is not great, but her overall balance is ideal for a melee assassin with a relatively low pick rate but high win rate. This is complemented by the fact that Kerrigan is sometimes picked even at the highest ranks unlike some other melee assassins like Butcher.
Kerrigan may just be one of those heroes whom you either just click with or you donât. Personally I have done relatively well on Kerrigan while for some reason being absolute dog excrement as Alarak, itâs just the way it goes.
If you play both QM and ranked, you would likely notice that the QM Kerrigans are pretty hit or miss with players either doing absolutely nothing or destroying everyone, with little in between. The ranked Kerrigans should be dominant a lot more often though they should still get counter picked or out played from time to time, which Kerrigan players all have to deal with, even the best ones.
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Her dominate talents are also her most successful and she gets some like 65 - 80% pickrate on those. 2020 patchnotes pointed out she had stagnate picks and did slight number bumps to try to address that, but I donât think thatâs addressed the core issues of her stagnation and sheâs essentially âsettledâ into one particular build doing most of the work.
Some of her metrics show less variety than medivh.
She has the potential for variety, but itâs not really showing up compared to other heroes.
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Most of high MMR is very stubborn and would rather set comfortably into 1 build specifically catered to many people which is ok, whatever, but she has 2 builds very flexible talents and many viable choices, I speak from experience with a hero who clicks with me while at the same time Alarak doesnât.
For a melee asssassin?
Most melee assassins not named samuro have a hard time.
I donât know about that, I tend to do pretty decently with Zeratul, who is quite good at poke too once you get Wormhole at 7.
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Yeah Zeratul is another exception.
Kerrigan isnât very strong without Painful Spikes. She is very susceptible to both spell damage and attack speed reductions, including silences and blinds.
Main main problem with her is you canât really afford to drag stun only a single player but if you wait too long, it is likely you will die without even casting your combo (further synwrgy with Fury of Swarm aoe).
I think Alarak is a better hero in every way since the increase to his self telekinesis push distance. Kerrigan has an alternative playstyle where you outsoak and outsustain the enemy, but that is mostly for low coordination game.
The only advantage she has over Alarak is that the pull-in effect is a pseudo silence, during which the victim canât even press a defensive ability. Telekinesis is the opposite, similar movement but without restriction to casting and a few more uses in synergy with terrain and neutral NPC ground effects.