by JR Cook - 7 years ago     show comments

At the 2017 Spring Heroes Summit Blizzard gave us the opportunity to check out the newest Hero to enter the Nexus, the Amazon Cassia! A new ranged assassin being brought to the field of battle she provides some big damaging abilities alongside some series blinding abilities and a passive that, when played correctly, makes her very difficult to take down.

Cassia’s passive will be bringing stutter stepping to the forefront as avoidance will be active when she is moving while not mounted and bring her an 65 armor against heroes basic attacks, a great counter to high burst auto attackers like Tracer, Valla, and Raynor. To maximize its value players will want to constantly be moving while getting attacks in during movements.

Her Q ability, Lightning Surge harkens to the lightning Javelin so fondly remembered by Diablo 2 players. This hits the first target in its path and then splits vertically dealing damage all along their path. With Thunderstroke at level one, a quest talent is enabled for her allowing the damage to be increased, as well as carrying two charges of this ability.

With the W ability, Blinding Light, Cassia blinds targets in an area furthering her effectiveness against auto attackers. This also comes with the passive benefit allowing the Amazon to do increased damage against targets that are blinded! This effect can also be activated by your teammates, so stacking your lineup with heroes such as Johanna and Lili will greatly improve the efficiency of the increased damage from Blinding Light. Depending on her effectiveness in the meta and how she stacks up against other assassins, we could see some compositions focusing on the blind mechanic. A focused build on this looks to take True Sight at level one, allowing her to increase the damage to blinding targets even further, and take up a quest to make it last longer. At level four is Inner Light, increasing the radius and having Blinding Light be cast around her when she is rooted or stunned.

With limited mobility options and a fairly short range for being a ranged assassin, she is given tools to close the gap with her E in Fend. This ability dashes her forward causing her to stab her javelin rapidly attacking targets in a cone for 1.5 seconds every 0.25 seconds (this ends up being six attacks for the duration). While it comes with the cost of reduced damage against non-Heroes in the pinch in our playtests it can be used to help clear out minion waves as well. This can be talented to increase damage against heroes with low health, increasing duration and area of effect, and finally enemies taking increased damage for each consecutive hit they take from Fend.

Not the fun part, the Heroics! Lightning Ball is her first Heroic and Throw a ball of lightning at an enemy Hero that bounces up to 6 times between nearby enemy Heroes and Cassia, damaging enemies hit. This can be upgraded through her storm talents at twenty, making the ball bounce indefinitely! Valkyrie summons a Valkyrie that rushes to Cassia after 0.75 seconds, pulling and damaging the first enemy Hero hit, and stunning them for 0.5 seconds at the end of her path additionally, the Valkyrie knocks back all other enemy Heroes in her path. The storm talent upgrades to do additional damage to other heroes in the path and roots them for four seconds.

While playing games at the summit and watching others play Cassia the go to heroic initially seems to be Lightning Ball. While the value on paper of Valkyrie is absolutely there for isolating a specific target, we saw that execution of this heroic was fairly challenging. It’s possible this could be effective against targets that cannot get out of its path during the 0.75 casting of the ability.

Overall Cassia looks to be a wonderful addition to the Nexus lineup and should fine her niche in compositions heavily relying on blind abilities. You can look for her on the Nexus in the PTR now, or on live in the coming weeks where she will be coming before Heroes of the Storm 2.0, which you can read all about our first impressions about.