Heroes of the Storm Tyrande Guide

Heroes of the Storm Tyrande Guide by GoldenH

Tyrande is a support hero, but while she has healing talents, her main focus should be on zoning enemies and disrupting focus attempts. She has poor health, dps and escape abilities, but she is ranged and can use her disable to get away – assuming she is not disabled first.

Early game, you will be mainly using Light of Elune and Lunar Flare. Her Sentinel skillshot can give vision of enemies early game to prevent ganks, and Hunter’s Mark has gives minion pushing an edge early game. Prioritize healing allies over yourself, as if the early game is aggressive you will find yourself OOM very quickly and have to return to the home base anyway. To avoid going OOM, do not use your sentinel ability, and encourage friendlies to heal from the well before you heal them (but don’t let them die obviously!). If you have to heal yourself, try to target a friendly creep over yourself, as you will not increase the healing done to yourself by targeting yourself.

Your first talent pick depends on the map. If you are newbie, get Path of the Wizard, as it will allow you to use your abilities more freely and be more aggressive, which will keep you and your allies alive. Otherwise, decide between Pierce and Healing Ward. Healing Ward is best for early teamfights, while Pierce can be useful for skillshotting retreating enemies and ensuring you have full vision of an area. Currently, I am favoring Healing Ward, as Sentinel rarely does enough damage to finish off an enemy. However, if you are up against a lot of assassins, then healing won’t help as much and Pierce will help pick off enemies in the middle of groups.

For the next talent I pick Shield Ally. Shield is not very useful early game, because of mana constraints, but late game when mana becomes a non-issue, it becomes very important. I prefer it over shroud, as shroud does not actually aid in escapes, and it is very easy to dispel cloaking. Quickening Blessing is useful for chasing down enemies as well as escaping, but usually there are better ways of chasing and you don’t want to waste a heal to initiate. Enemies attacking you will slow them down as well, and the shield allows your allies to go all-in on attacking, so it is my favorite. If I am in a game with too many heals (Tassadar + Uther/Malfurion + Tyrande), then I will get Searing Arrows as well, to help with the DPS, but in general I find I don’t have the mana for it even late game. You will usually be spamming abilities and kiting, so you won’t be able to right click very often.

Your third talent is a bit controversial – Trueshot Aura or Overflowing Light. I tend to get Overflowing light, because I can stay in the back and keep my allies healed. Sustainability in long fights is more important to me than how quickly those fights are over. However, if your enemies are targeting you, get Trueshot Aura instead. You are not a primary healer, and Overflowing light can make you a very powerful one, but if you aren’t at full health the talent does nothing.

For your Heroic ability, choose Starfall. 8 seconds of invisibility isn’t long enough to accomplish anything without exceptional teamwork, while Starfall is almost as good at zoning as forcefield, plus does DPS. Starfall can prevent an enemy from taking the Dragon or turning in coins, it reveals cloak and prevents mounting in addition to the slow, it trashes creep waves and buildings, and because most objectives in HOTS are location based, they usually won’t be able to stay out of it. Don’t be afraid to use it to gank runners or cover escapes – while it doesn’t do enough DPS to win teamfights, it can still turn the tide.

The level 5 talent offers Shrink Ray, which is exceedingly tempting. Shrink Ray is possibly the best ability in the game, great at nullifying the burst DPS of assassins and ensuring that even Uther can’t escape this time. On the other hand, the Lunar Blaze talent is incredibly good, to the point where you can mini stun an entire teamfight if you aim it right. Ultimately this will depend on the enemies you are facing as well as your team. Do you have a lot of disablers on your team? You probably won’t need Shrink Ray, and can contribute to the chain disables better with Lunar Blaze.
Are there few teamfights but lots of 2v2? Then Shrink Ray is what the doctor calls for.

Next talent is a synergstic level, where you should choose the path you are going on earlier. If you got Searing Arrows, you must get Berserk. If you got Lunar Blaze, you need Shooting Star. If you got Pierce, Ranger is what you’re looking for. In that order – so if you’ve been collecting all the upgrades, look no farther! Ranger is quite nice for those skillshots, so I’d like to recommend it fullheartedly, unfortunately it really needs Pierce to do anything. 1188 damage per hit from an off screen skillshot – vs 1404 per hit from an nearly instant skillshot.

For your final talent, I recommend Storm Shield. This is a little situational, but consider. With Storm Shield you’re likely to run in to try and get in between all your allies, and get yourself killed. But if your opponents were targeting you, you also would have bought Searing Arrows and Berserk, and your DPS is insane. If that were the case, I can see Fury of the Storm being possibly better. But usually, you got Shield Ally, which you can use on yourself, so you’ll be fine. Bolt of the Storm isn’t very important, as you’re unlikely to get ganked anyway, and Celestial Wrath is just a DPS effect, not very important, and its range is also not important since you’re support and should be sticking with the team for a teamfight. If you for some reason picked up Shadowstalk though… then yeah, get that upgrade here, but I won’t recommend it.

So that’s my summary of Tyrande… for suggested changes to the character:

Pierce really needs to be built into the character. If you put Empower here, it would be more correct to the skill level. It’d also make Mark of Elune more interesting too, in cases where you don’t feel you need Healing Ward.

Shroud is a wasted talent imo, so merging it with Quickening Blessing or making it a level 1 talent makes more sense. Keeping an ally alive early game, when it’s hard to deal with cloak, would be worth it. A passive regeneration for Tyrande would make the most sense, to synergize with Overflowing Light later on, and to deal with her low overall health totals. Perhaps regenerating her for 2% over a few seconds whenever she uses her heal.

Trueshot Aura needs to have some lifesteal to compete with Overflowing Light in my opinion, and Battle Momentum would hardly ever be worth it. Calldown Mule needs to have a much reduced cooldown or grant a shield or something.. as it is, the talent isn’t competitive with buffing heroes.

Shadowstalk needs to be a MUCH longer duration, I could see getting it for 20 seconds for example. Then the level 20 could add just another 10 seconds. As it is, it’s only useful for chasing opponents. Maybe if you could attack from cloak, it’d be worth it, but even then… it’s so hard to use. It’d probably be more viable as an alternate ult for Abathur.

If you change nothing else, Lunar Blaze and Shooting Star should be swapped, because increased radius on Lunar Blaze is more important imo. If you do make Pierce natural, then don’t do this, so you can have upgrade for both abilities. Empower is just bad, and Sprint is not needed for Tyrande to survive. Remove Empower and let Sprint be used on other people, and it becomes tempting. Some new ability here would be great, I would like to see what a level 13 upgrade to Hunter’s Mark would be like!

Everything at tier 6 is fine, but at 7, I would like to see a nice boost to Starfall so it can better match the Hyperion. Tyrande doesn’t need teleport, but if I could target a friendly hero and swap places with them, that’d be very tempting. I also still don’t understand the conservatism with Hunter’s Prey.