I've been interested in him for a while but everypost on reddit makes him seem neutered and not fun compared to the Butcher. I usually play QM with my brother and rarely do five man. Is thrall fun to play in QM or is he going to get stomped and just frustrate me?
I usually play Uther (lvl9) Raynor (lvl 8) or Valla (lvl 8) so melee assassin is uncharted territory.
Posted Oct 7, 2015, 10:47 PM UTC
Thrall is good, not God tier 1 good but good enough to QM.
In maps with close enough lanes like spider queen, garden of terror and dragon Knight go seasoned marksman and ask for a teammate to roam with you and help to gather stacks for it.
With a good ganker teammate you can stack really fast in this maps and get some early kills too. Get as close as possible, Envenom, feral root them, aa, windfury, aa, lightning and them aa again. This plus your ganker ally plus the hero into the lane is enough to kill a squishy or force them into retreat and lose experience in lane. The aa between the skills is to get value from follow through. It's probably the best talent if you're going for SM at lvl 1.
In other maps where you'll not have time enough to get value from SM you probably should go with block and build accordingly to your needs into the match.
Sundering is an amazing initiator or finisher. Let the team start the tf and them sunder the back line away from peelers and erase a squishy. It have such a small cooldown that you shouldn't be afraid to use it to secure a kill or escape from a bad situation out of a tf.
That sounds like a fun play style and I think you just convinced me to pony up the cash for him. Really appreciate the advice.
thrall is well rounded, works well in a squad, and building his talents to cater to his lighting and wind fury covers opponents in melee range and when they are retreating with low health
Thrall is good, but he is overshadowed by better assassins like Valla, Raynor, Jaina, KT. I like him though, he's the only melee assassin i like, besides Kerrigan.
If you're looking for melee assassins then Thrall is definitely good pickup... plays really well in soloQ too as he is fairly self sufficient and sundering is one of the best heroics around...
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Thrall is actually better than Butcher, because he doesn't need an entire team built around him in order to work.
Thrall has almost similar ad scaling to butcher, however, he stacks better due to his passive. However, Thrall has the capability to stack much more ad if the game drags along due to seasoned marksman stacks, assuming that you can take it. Also, he has the best dueling potential, even better than butcher due to the lack of need to be on the target for a long amount of time.
He's just a decent character, slightly above average, but no more than that. And it still cannot compete with the rest of the heroes over the balance curve. Only buff he needs is changing his base aspd to 1.0 instead of 0.88.
So yes, get thrall if you like his playstyle and general use, however, if you want to compete for the win every single game, his value is not above safe and valuable picks like Raynor, Valla, Jaina or K'T to a degree.
Appreciate the feedback. The point about his self sufficiency relative to the butchers is a really good point especially since I play solo que so much.
that would make him super OP.... and for soloq wins hes much better than Butcher... only melee assassin that can compete with Thrall from a perspective of soloqer is Kerrigan, rest require too much of a setup to work decently
I'd say he's good, not underpowered, but... "above average"? There are what, 42 heroes in the game now, and you think Thrall is better than 21 of them?
You are assuming that the average linear curve of balance is in the middle, however, it's near the bottom.
Characters like Tychus, Hammer, Sylvanas, TLV, Nova, Gazlowe, BW sits far below the tolerated average.
Heroes such as Butcher also remain in the below average tier due to his inflexibility and team dependency, both with and against, however, due to his niche, he can be still picked with certain comps to abuse his innate strength.
Or BW can be abused against late game burst heroes, where she gets the capability to shut down a target for a long time and prevent anyone from taking severe burst damage.
Or Tychus get's the early game advantage due to his overpowered burst damage from level 1, and scales decently into mid game with odin, or incredibly into late game with Drill.
There are many complex reasons why seemingly strong heroes are on the bottom tier. The reason why I normally rate Thrall so highly, is due to his flexibility and the lack of any requirement to have a team built around him and yet still being effective at what he does, a melee dps that has high burst damage and scaling and the best non-void prison disengage. Thrall, Valla, Jaina, Raynor, Zagara and Uther are the prime contenders for this spot. They can fit in almost any comp and still work.
However, in the current competitive format, heroes like Uther, Jaina, Leoric and Sonya are the first picks/bans, they are so out of the balance curve that you have to pick them otherwise your team is at a disadvantage. Just being average or above average is very mediocre and the power level continue to shift till the heroes get some changes.
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easily, look at his win rates... consistently above 50% for couple of weeks now...
Wow you're right. Interesting.