Introduction Top
Hello , my nick name is Thiau and i will try to write a guide for Warchief of the Horde Thrall.
This is first time i am writing a guide and English is not my native language , don't expect anything fancy .
Most of people want to know how good a player is B4 looking at the guide .
I have about 1200 games played , about 700 HL games more than half of them in rank 1 . Thrall is not even lvl 9 and i have about 40-50 games on him . I am not an expert with him and i am not some kind of a pro player . If you really like Thrall and want to play him and make most of what he can give , This guide will be different view about this hero and every Thrall player should try and look how to make him work . Maybe this is the way , maybe it is not , i leave the answer to you after you give this a try .
I will tell a short story why i decided to make a Thrall guide .
As of now Thrall is one of the least played hero and is considered low tier . I was one of the people who considered Thrall pretty much useless almost in all team compositions . For hundreds of Hero league games at rank 1 i considered Thrall as free kill and even now most of the games he is just a walking meat . It turned out that when i tried him for free week , i won a lot of games and found different way to play him . I think this could be a way to rise Thrall from low tier to at least mid to high .
New play style Top
Lets face it Thrall is not the best assassin . We tried to make him work and play him as other melee assassin , but simply there are better choices .
So i found him a new role , A support . Not the healing support , more like Tyrande , Tassadar.
So this is the new way of playing him , imagine that you are a support - Tassadar or Tyrande .
Stay in the back line and help out other assassins . Help comes in all kinds of different ways , for example get tanks attention away from your ranged assassin .
You will no longer rush in front line and try to do what Illidan does , instead you will destroy everyone who gets too close to your back line and that includes tanks .
This is very important , you can not play him as another assassin , your new role is support for your back line .
Talents Top
Quick look at talents and what it achieves before we look at team fight situations .
LvL 1 - Thrall is all AA dmg , so farm AA dmg .
LvL 4 - this makes your Q into full heal . Makes your line phase much better . Now you can sit in line almost all game and never need to back so more marksman stacks for you . 6 sec 660 self heal at lvl 20 .
LvL 7 - Most of the dmg and healing will come from E with this build , so we want E as much as possible .
LvL 10 - This heroic is rly strong . The radius is huge , it will block the way between both teams . Slows by 70% that is rly close to root enemy hardly can walk in it , only thing that will let them wall away is :
It pulses 3 times , first pulse as soon as you use heroic , slow lasts for 3 second then enemy has 1 sec break and then it pulses again . 3 sec slow - 1 sec break - 3 sec slow - 1 sec break - 3 sec slow . More about it later .
LvL 13 and 17 - Both of them combined at 20 adds to 1678 dmg , 1320 healing in 3 hits and thats without marksman.
LvL 20 - This upgrade will give everyone in the circle 15% shield , 3 times in 8 seconds . Too bad it does not stack ;D Quite alot of shield for one talent . Best case you can get 225% of shield , ofc that probably wont happen , but your tank most likely will get max shield amount 45% and quite some of the dmg will be absorbed from each of your team mate .
Why and How it works Top
Now you have huge slow and 3 hit burst dmg/heal this is how you will control the battle .
Use your heroic in the middle of fight and now you made a line where if enemy decides to engage they will have restricted movement allowing you and your team walk freely while whole enemy team is at turtles speed . Add a lvl 20 upgrade and you have huge aoe "heal" that helps your team with extra health . Now you are like Muhammad Ali , running in the ring like a butterfly while enemy is trying to catch up to you . Add a kael or hammer in the mix and you will sting like a bee while enemy is trying to escape this zone of Turtle walking .
While the heroic is up , any melee hero that is trying to get to your back line is struggling to catch them , there you come with your 3 hit burst and good AA dmg , on top of that if tank or melee assassin tries to hit you , you simply heal up .
This way you start to mitigate the dmg and healing . You will be running around hitting your 3 hit combo and healing all the dmg that they throw at you . You will make enemy team waste dmg on you and your job will be to support Main assassins with dmg and CC while keeping yourself alive .
There you are , a hero who runs around eats all this dmg and heals it in the matter of second and you cant ignore Thrall or the burst will get you sooner or later while the ultimate is blocking the possibility of jumping on one target .
6 sec Q CD - 660 healing
8 sec E CD - 1320 healing
In 18 secs you can heal up 4600 dmg and deal up to 6350 dmg .
Your job is taking dmg instead of others while self healing and supporting with dmg , all that and keep the fight under control with your great CC .
Only looking at healing numbers you can absorb more dmg than a Tassadar or tyrande could and you have more CC while keeping DMG numbers close to them . No vision tho ;D
Counters and Maps Top
One thing is clear , Thrall is still not Must pick . He has team compositions like most of other heroes and sometimes its better not to pick him against some heroes .
First Maps :
All maps are fine except haunted mines .
In all maps there hardly is any place bigger than your heroic , it always blocks the passage and you can freely run around .
Haunted - cant really farm marksman , you can pick block but still its hard to put good heroic while golem is in the way . So while pushing or defending its not that great . Still can work .
Heroes that gives you a hard time :
Heroes that work good with you :
You Are good against :
All melee heroes , heavy enemy melee teams are just best for you . Assassins with no escape will walk into your heroic and never leave it .
Kael , jaina , tychus will have a good time attacking targets with 70% slow . Hard to miss skills when target can barely move .
Ending words Top
Well i hope i did not miss much , will be updating what i missed and trying to make all the flashy things that other guides have .
Try this play style for thrall , look if it is achieving enough to be viable and HF .
Quick Comment (2) View Comments
You need to log in before commenting.