Level 1:
En Pointe:
Good for poking during the laning phase, and in general. This talent single highhandedly is the core of the Q build.
Growing Nightmare:
Bad. You only benefit if you land the eruption, only works when enemy heros are around, and is bound to E's relatively long cooldown.
Ancestral Strength:
Provides 20% damage boost to any combo started with an E, and is free damage if your team has silence/stun/slow effects.
Level 4:
Allegrissimo: Bad because you don't often benefit much from a faster Q, between using other abilities, auto attacking, and simply looking for a reliable Q shot.
The only situation where I would get this talent is in Q build IF the enemy team has heros with fat hit boxes (like chogall), and you've mastered the style of using Q on variable one second cooldown.
Backbiter: Niche pick, and requires practice as it changes the nature of your playstyle.
Backbiter gives you a second disengage while Shadow Waltz is on cooldown. Very importantly, the movement is a knockback, meaning
it works even if you are are rooted. The +10% maximum health is a respectable boost to survivability. Viable versus assassin characters and versus melee characters who have annoying gap closers (varian) or who you MUST get away from (sonya with leap).
Fright: If you picked
Ancestral Strength at level 1, this is the pick. In addition to damage, the slow is also very useful in enabling ganks and chases, which is why this is still a good pick for the Q build.
Level 7:
Insatiable:
Chomp is Orphea's most expensive spell at 60 mana. With no added mana reduction, I see mana being a problem. Later on in the game, perhaps mana is less of an issue. In a fight, combined with
Backbiter, this could substantially raise Orphea's dps. But Orphea has multiple safer and more flexible ways to ramp up her damage. Lastly, unlike the other two talents, this talent does not increase her PvE damage.
Ravenous Hunger:
I have not tried this build, but assuming you get 100 stacks, which is 200 damage. 200 damage from the E quest applies to both the wave and eruption. Also it's more likely that the E will safely hit multiple people.
The main reason I would take this is for it's out of combat self-sustain: e.g. in a QM game with no healers.
Mind Devourer:
A safe pick every time. A mind-blowingly good pick on maps that feature frequent team fights. With good E aim this build can help you chunk people. The cooldown reduction further fuels this. If you're still working on your aim or your opponents don't let you, it can take a while to finish, but the damage is still fine.
Level 10:
Crushing Jaws:
A decent pick, you can never go wrong with it. Orphea needs CC to be able to ambush, wombo-combo, or briefly interrupting huge threats.
Eternal Feast:
People, myself included, used to meme on this talent, but it's actually quite decent and can be stifling if used correctly. If you can land two shots it's good. Combos with mosh pit and roots. In terms of aiming,
Eternal Feast is easier to land than
Crushing Jaws.
Level 13:
Determination:
A solid pick every time. It has higher potential as you can hit your Q's. Versus mages it is an easy auto-pick. While the shield is lackluster vs DoT, it doesn't very high ability damage to be decent. The extra auto attack damage increases your healing and damage slightly without you having to worry about it.
Abyssal Symbiosis:
Bad. 2 extra chaos doesn't heal that much,
Chomp has a longer cooldown, and it's only two extra chaos if you started with 0 and follow with an auto attack immediately.
Invasive Miasma:
Good against melee assasins and melee heros
without ridiculous damage, as the ones that do you want to stay away from anyways. As a rule of thumb, you can pick this talent if you expect to be around melee heros a lot, whether be it from divers or diablo flipping you. If battles are likely happening at range, go with
Determination. This talent also provides manaless waveclear, which can be useful. It's 10 second cooldown allows you to fire-and-forget it multiple times during team fights.
Level 16:
Bond of Anguish:
The go-to talent. This will give you anywhere from 90-180 extra damage and 45-90 healing per Q, stacking in the off chance you hit multiple heros. Bit more damage and sustain, which is very much Orphea's game. Also this makes Orphea love hitting tanks even more: she can almost use them as healing fountains.
Dead Magic:
Niche pick, decent bonus in team fights against opponents who consistently have armor (cassia, garrosh). The rep is that this talent bad, since when you ever need aoe damage when you are aa'ing an enemy hero? Bypassing armor also causes you to heal more than you otherwise would, making
Dead Magic and
Bond of Anguish very similar talents.
It turns out the numbers actually compare favorably to Bonds of Anguish in a team fight situation, if the opponent has multiple sources of armor/block talents. Another thing is that this talent's value not being directly tied to you hitting your Q, you can weave basic attacks between both
Dread's wave and eruption, as well as possibly using
Invasive Miasma. The AOE damage is mostly an extra, though it could be impactful occasionally. The spell splash synergizes with
Eldritch Conduit while being anti-synergy with the
Engulfing Oblivion which reduces armor.
Lurking Terror:
This talent lets you use your
Chomps as part of your poke., making your poke potentially very scary. Only pick when you expect poke-wars, or you need to do your job from very far range.
Level 20:
Monster Within:
Bad. Conditional and unwieldy with only moderate pay off. The attack speed is hard to use while you are casting other spells, and you often have better things to be doing than auto attacking random targets during
Eternal Feast.
Engulfing Oblivion
Great. Makes your wombo combo hit 25% harder, while making it more forgiving with resets. Very good in bursty/squishy fights, as you can expect people to be dying (hopefully not you first). This talent is also good in cases where you are dying for cc, R can be used as a panic button to try and save yourself.
Eldritch Conduit
This is a win condition style talent. What this talent does is allow you to build up damage versus resilent compositions that can weather your burst damage. If the enemy team isn't bursty or if you don't feel seriously threatened, this is a great talent.
Eldritch Conduit has some serious synergy with
Invasive Miasma, as the spell power boost increases both the damage and heal. In turn,
Invasive Miasma can help you acquire chaos to build to 10 stacks quicker. With those two talents, you can survive some insane situations, only being vunerable to CC and concentrated burst damage.
Final Tocatta
Very mechanically challenging to use, but offers high mobility and quite high single-target burst damage, dependent on your Q aim. You have to be careful not to suicide yourself with all the constant dashing.
Theoretically you can get about 7 Q's in, but getting 2-4 while saving yourself from a missed Q is very nice already. Honestly it's pretty cool, though I have never seen it in use before. Pick it when with Q-build when you are a Q master and go full genji on your opponents.
Power spikes:
Level 1: Orphea is very a strong level 1 hero to begin with, even more so if you picked
En Pointe for pokes.
Level 4: The E standard build comes online, the slow giving orphea great gank potential as well as reliable extra damage.
Level 10: Orphea's heroic is a power spike, though
Crushing Jaws can be hard to land and is merely 'good' compared to other hero's ults. Most of Orphea's power comes from the rest of her kit.
Level 13 is where Orphea's kit pretty much finishes. She gets instance spell armor if she needs it, and her E quest is in full swing.
Level 20+: Orphea is a bit weaker lategame, as there are many things that can delete her. However if she can effectively survive or against comps that can't threaten her, she has two strong talents in Engulfing Oblvion and Eldritch Conduit. The latter lets her finally display the same absurd dps potential that other mages starting getting access to at levels 13-16.
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