Li-Ming Patch Day - 6 Tips To Help You Rock It

Hey there lads! Today our HotS boost team has big news: the latest patch brings many changes to the game, and we want to discuss them. A new hero, Li-Ming, has been released, and Nova, who used to have an incredible win rate, has been totally reworked: we can expect a total change of the meta in the next days. So hype up and listen to the changes while you're waiting for our Li-Ming Guide & Build.

Everyone Will Play Li-Ming

This was kinda expected, because every time a new hero is released, everyone wants to try it for the first time. It’s not strange, but hear me out: Li-Ming has an incredible burst and is capable of making pretty cool plays, having a high skill cap. In other words, she is fun to play and very rewarding. Every player who thinks to have decent mechanics will try her.

She has the potential to be at the top of our HotS tier list, but don’t worry, she can be easily countered because she is really squishy: pick Zeratul, Illidan or Greymane and make her cry. It takes some practice to learn her ranges and to adjust your positioning, so you can punish Li Ming quite easily. For example you can make her useless with Illidan and his The Hunt, placing a giant target on top of her.

As a final note, remember that Li Ming can destroy buildings very easily, since she out ranges tower shots. Don’t let her free to hit your structures!

Structures Are More Important

This new patch comes with an increase to the tower damage. If you aren’t playing Li Ming, don’t underestimate this change. Roaming and ganking will be harder now, since the towers will provide extra safety and damage, so as long as your target is not totally out of position, you can’t bruteforce dives. Don’t forget that now towers are immune to vulnerability debuffs, indirectly nerfing our loved Jaina and the reworked Nova.

According to our Heroes of the Storm boost team, this means that heroes able to nuke towers quickly will become more important in the new meta, so we can expect more Sylvanas picks. On the other hand, tower divers like Cho’Gall, Diablo, Muradin, Johanna and especially Diablo won’t be as effective and won’t be picked a lot.

Nova Will Stick With The Team More

As you know, Nova hasn't been very dominant on our Heroes of the Storm tier list, and as a result of her difference from the rest of the meta, she has been reworked: to be effective, now she really needs to group with her allies in order to secure kills, taking advantage of her Pinning Shot talents.

Now Nova’s burst isn’t so high, and her dueling power has diminished. This means that she should focus on her Pinnacle Shots. With the proper talents choice, having two shots with extra range and make the enemy vulnerable can make the difference in a team fight.

We Will See More Zeratul With Shadow Assault

Goodbye, Void Prison, Shadow Assault is our new talent of choice. Not only it’s a great counter to Li Ming, but it has a reduced cool down of only 45 seconds. Void Prison is still a solid choice, but Shadow Assault is simply better, especially in the Hero League.

Teams with bad coordination (so every team in the hero league) have a really hard time dealing with Shadow Assault, especially given the popularity of Li Ming. You simply can’t escape from this heroic in a 1vs1 scenario, and your only chance is to out damage Zeratul before he bursts you.. but don’t expect great results. During our duo queue boost sessions, we always recommend to inexperienced players to stick with their team to counter this heroic, since it’s not as effective in a team fight. Just don’t walk alone in the woods.

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Gazlowe and Abathur will be threats.

We already thought that Abathur was pretty strong since he was buffed by the scaling changes, even tho he was pushed out by the meta. But now he is really a force to recognize. The old build featured Toxic Mine, but now you should consider the Symbiote talents. Just try the new build and see the results for yourself: Abathur was already strong, and now he can be again at the top of our Heroes of the Storm tier list.

Gazlowe has been buffed too. He wasn’t really in a good spot during the last patch, but now his Death Lazor at level 4 makes him pretty scary. If he can maximize the damage of the AoE hitting several targets, the damage will be incredible.

At level 16, he can charge his spell twice as fast, doubling his damage output versus stacked enemies. He can be a beast in late game team fights, so just try to split up and dance around him.

Rehgar’s burst. Oh boy.

Finally, we can scream together. Rehgar’s damage has been buffed tremendously in both early and late game, because now Feral Lunge is a base ability. If you add to the picture the incredible area of effect damage provided by Lightning Shield at lv 16, he can deal an immense burst of damage and still be an effective healer. Yes, we know that his burst of healing with Healing Wave has been nerfed, but we still have Ancestral Healing. Overall, the damage buffs compensate the small nerfs and we can expect him to be at the top of our HotS tier list.

We got a blue post from Blizzard about these changes: “Rehgar was usually brought to teams as a main support, which meant players were heavily incentivized to pick every healing option available to him. We tried to rectify this by placing healing Talents against each other on the same Talent tier. Of course, this removes some of his healing power as players cannot stack each Talent, so we also increased his base power to compensate. Our hope is that these changes will allow Rehgar players to be a more aggressive while supporting their team, which was always his design intent. "

TL;DR: if you are playing a fragile hero, don’t even come close to Rehgar if you have only half health points, or you will be disintegrated. Our favourite shaman is bloodthirsty.

We will release a Li-Ming guide shortly and our Heroes of the Storm Tier List will be updated shortly.