Hi, I'm mafoo5, a master Chen player who quit the game a year and a half ago and came back after a short hiatus. Here I'm going to try and explain why I think Chen is good and how to play him. I'm also going to address some weaknesses and general teamfighting strategy with Chen.

Chen is really good at a couple things. He is good at solo laning and stopping splitpushers. He also has a lot of sustain and can absorb a lot of free poke damage. Most games you lock Chen will be when you need a solo lane on maps like Braxis Holdout and Dragon Shire, or big maps where you need to counter splitpushing like Warhead Junction, Cursed Hollow, or Garden of Terror. You will mostly clear waves and try to limit and counter macro play on the part of their specialist. You are at your weakest teamfighting. Do it as little as your team can manage.

Chen is very, very good at lane solo kills. He is very mobile, does reasonable damage, and wins most trades. If you can get a kill in solo lane it is a pretty big deal for your team.

Chen is good at solo laning, 1v1 duels, sustained fights, chasing, and getting picks. Keep this in mind when trying to optimize your utility in game.

Chen is bad at full on teamfighting, taking camps*, absorbing Crowd Control effects, and Main Tanking. You should never be playing Chen as a main tank. Chen is a bad main tank because he has no hard cc for his team to engage on or to peel for teammates.

*Chen is bad for getting camps compared to other camp clearing heroes because he is slower than most. Even with ring of fire, he can't really compare to Greymane or Illidan. He doesn't take any damage though, so do it if you want.

I mentioned that Chen isn't a good solo tank. In the off chence that you get forced into solo tanking with Chen, take Storm, Earth, Fire instead of Wandering Keg. This is because you need the extra HP to fight for longer against the whole enemy frontline. Against heavy cc try and cast it a little before the fight or immediately after jumping a backline member to try and get it off before you get cc'ed. The former method is more reliable but wastes a bit of the utility, so use your best judgement. Also, take the W talent at 4, 13, and 16, that way you have a little more cc to work with.

As I mentioned earlier, Chen is not good at teamfighting compared to the other bruisers. He doesn't have the damage, tankiness, or cc that other bruisers have. However, you can still teamfight if you do everything correctly.

Try and keg a pick using your wandering keg. After you succeed in that, start killing all of the enemy team since you are one of the better chasers in the game. If you fail to kill the initial target retreat and go back to soaking or something, you're just a dud for the rest of the fight.

There are three things that you should use your Wandering Keg on. If you use it on anything else, you're using it wrong.

1. Getting picks on the enemy team

Mostly against less skilled players that don't know Chen's Q range, press Q to go on the other side of them and cast R to start pushing them towards your team. The physics for this ult are very weird so sometimes they bounce in an unexpected direction and its harder to capitalize on the keg. In that case, you can take a short loop around and try to reposition yourself in a way that you can still keg the enemy in the direction you want, but the duration isn't very long so you can't do this more than a couple times per keg.

2. Pushing off dangerous enemies

Against things like Genji Dragonblade, a diving Greymane or Thrall, a Blaze with the damage-over-time ult, and a variety of other things, you can use keg to protect priority targets in your backline. I often find myself reacting too late for this to actually save them, however, so I prefer the other two uses for Wandering Keg.

3. Stealing/Securing boss

If the enemy has no long-duration unstoppable effects like Johanna's trait, you can use Wandering keg to knock enemies off of the boss. This takes practice and you can expect to fail some of the time, but you can get some glorious highlight plays this way.

I hope you enjoyed the guide, I'll put pictures and **** in later. If you want to see me play, then you can find me on the ranked ladder grinding like everyone else.


I'll pull clips and stuff later, I'm not sure if anyone's even going to read this so no point in putting in the effort yet.