Heroes of the Storm Jaina

[Damien 1,512]

This thread is for comments about our Jaina build guide for Heroes of the Storm.

[Fransoa 25]

I've got more of a general question which also applies to Jaina.

If u kill the minions with DoT effects while not being near them , do u get the xp?

Also at what range do u need to be in order to gain the xp?

[Srey 1]

I've got more of a general question which also applies to Jaina.

If u kill the minions with DoT effects while not being near them , do u get the xp?

Also at what range do u need to be in order to gain the xp?

 

You get experience if you deal the killing blow with any ability, including DoTs.

 

I'd say the range for experience is a little larger than the range on Jaina's Frostbolt, but that's just an approximation.

 

Thanks for checking out the guide!

[Guest TC]

Love the guides, but it looks like a lot of the reasoning behind the talent choices still refers to the old choices.  For example, Arcane Intellect at level 4 is not recommended because the mana is unneeded with Conjurer's Pursuit, but you are no longer recommending Conjurer's Pursuit or Envenom.

 

Likewise Frost Shards is not recommended because Envenom helps kill single targets, but Envenom is no longer recommended so that reason is no longer applicable.

[Srey 1]

Love the guides, but it looks like a lot of the reasoning behind the talent choices still refers to the old choices.  For example, Arcane Intellect at level 4 is not recommended because the mana is unneeded with Conjurer's Pursuit, but you are no longer recommending Conjurer's Pursuit or Envenom.

 

Likewise Frost Shards is not recommended because Envenom helps kill single targets, but Envenom is no longer recommended so that reason is no longer applicable.

You're absolutely right, I'm actually in the middle of changing it as I read your comment. Thanks for pointing that out.

[Guest Soma Cruz]

I have a question. So, the last time I checked your guide, you were recommending Conjurer Pursuit. And, after a patch when it wasn't changed, you moved it to Not Recommended.

What changed? What made the "We need this extra mana, as Jaina is really mana hungry" become a "Nah, we don't need the extra mana. Just use better your abilities"? I don't get it.

[Srey 1]

I have a question. So, the last time I checked your guide, you were recommending Conjurer Pursuit. And, after a patch when it wasn't changed, you moved it to Not Recommended.

What changed? What made the "We need this extra mana, as Jaina is really mana hungry" become a "Nah, we don't need the extra mana. Just use better your abilities"? I don't get it.

My opinion of it changed, as did my playstyle for Jaina :)

[Guest Brainth]

In my opinion, you should add Johanna to the heroes Jaina synergyizes with, because with her crowd control skills she can group all enemies into one of Jaina's blizzard, as well as not letting them out.

I'm also of the opinion that blizzard and cone of cold make Jaina a very powerful hero in the new battleground, Infernal Shrines. Jaina + Leoric are capable of instakilling basically every minion that appears under a shrine once they are activated.

 

Love the build, keep it up!

[Guest Halbird]

Since water elemental no longer chills, you reordered your combo. But the suggestions still say to follow the 6 steps, when there are only 5.

Also, is the basic attack at step 2 so that your water elemental has the chance to attack and chill someone? That could be mentioned.

[Srey 1]

Since water elemental no longer chills, you reordered your combo. But the suggestions still say to follow the 6 steps, when there are only 5.

Also, is the basic attack at step 2 so that your water elemental has the chance to attack and chill someone? That could be mentioned.

Thanks for the correct. The Basic Attack at step 2 is basically just a reminder to always be using your Basic Attacks. I find people lose out on a lot of damage because they think a mage is purely ability-based.

[Guest Guest]

Not really specific to this guide as it is across the board, even for ones you didn't write. But the quick references don't exactly line up with the recommended and situational choices on the talent build pages. For example, on this one has several frost bolt related abilites on the reference but neither are even situational on the talent build section.

[Srey 1]

Not really specific to this guide as it is across the board, even for ones you didn't write. But the quick references don't exactly line up with the recommended and situational choices on the talent build pages. For example, on this one has several frost bolt related abilites on the reference but neither are even situational on the talent build section.

Thanks for letting me know. Blizzard sometimes switches the talents around for whatever reason.

[Guest Guest]

Thanks for making this guide, it's been really helpful just one query, though - I feel like the level 16 talent description for Northern Exposure is worded a little weirdly? It seems to imply that the only value worth considering there is Jaina's increased damage against her targets, when the Vulnerability appears to affect all friendly characters' damage. Not really disagreeing with the choice in most cases, to be honest, just interested in a more clear explanation of why your teammates getting extra damage is still worse than the root.

[Guest Kroshak]

Thanks for making this guide, it's been really helpful just one query, though - I feel like the level 16 talent description for Northern Exposure is worded a little weirdly? It seems to imply that the only value worth considering there is Jaina's increased damage against her targets, when the Vulnerability appears to affect all friendly characters' damage. Not really disagreeing with the choice in most cases, to be honest, just interested in a more clear explanation of why your teammates getting extra damage is still worse than the root.

The reason why the root is more recommended is because of the strength yet weakness of jaina, that is her snowstorm, you can burst someone IF they take the 2 waves but usually people, at least the good players, run away making 1 wave of damage go to waste, usually the burst jaina does is enough to vaporize the enemy or at least bring them low enough for the rest of your team to clean up and its not necessary to get the damage boost

 

the reason why in the ring of frost combo the northern exposure is recommended insted of the root is because the ring roots meaning that the enemy will take all your abilities

[Guest Guest]

 Northern Exposure is a good talent, but  Numbing Blast is more effective. Vulnerable does not amplify the damage from  Cone of Cold itself. Therefore, even if both waves of  Blizzard hit, which is unlikely without the root from Numbing Blast, the 25% increased damage from Jaina

 

Just to clear thing up;

The tooltip doesn't say "only from Jaina", if the tooltip is not wrong, and enemies take %25 more damage from all sources, then this talent is the best, thats why ı've been using it since always.

[Srey 1]

 Northern Exposure is a good talent, but  Numbing Blast is more effective. Vulnerable does not amplify the damage from  Cone of Cold itself. Therefore, even if both waves of  Blizzard hit, which is unlikely without the root from Numbing Blast, the 25% increased damage from Jaina

 

Just to clear thing up;

The tooltip doesn't say "only from Jaina", if the tooltip is not wrong, and enemies take %25 more damage from all sources, then this talent is the best, thats why ı've been using it since always.

Yes, it is from all sources, but rooting enemies usually leads to more damage anyway since they will be unable to move.

[Guest Pars Pro Toto]

 

 Northern Exposure is a good talent, but  Numbing Blast is more effective. Vulnerable does not amplify the damage from  Cone of Cold itself. Therefore, even if both waves of  Blizzard hit, which is unlikely without the root from Numbing Blast, the 25% increased damage from Jaina

 

Just to clear thing up;

The tooltip doesn't say "only from Jaina", if the tooltip is not wrong, and enemies take %25 more damage from all sources, then this talent is the best, thats why ı've been using it since always.

Yes, it is from all sources, but rooting enemies usually leads to more damage anyway since they will be unable to move.

 

 

Many seem to forget that northern exposure has advantages of numbing blast vs bosses and buildings. Applying it only once deals a good bonus damage (since you are likely not alone). Furthermore, unstoppable heroes would not be rooted, but still be vulnerable.

[ghostdeini 12]

I wanted to ask an opinion on the Jaina talents.  I started playing her using your builds, and it worked great.  As with all of the guides here it gave me a great start to learn how to play the character.  The way I play Jaina now, given that Li-Ming and KT are top damage mages in the meta, is more for her roots and general wave clear.  Recently I started picking Frost Armor at lvl 7 instead of Frostbitten.  Now I know it lowers my damage output a bit, but I honestly feel that it is a fair trade-off.  I like the fact that if I get attacked (especially if I was ambushed) it automatically chills the enemy hero.  When I couple that with Numbing Blast at 16 it greatly increases my escape potential since Jaina lost Bolt of the Storm at 20.  Again, even though she can still do good damage, I play her for the utility she can bring to team fights.  Given all of that, I wanted to see what your thoughts were.

[Oxygen 446]

On 1/9/2016 at 5:13 PM, Guest Pars Pro Toto said:

 

Many seem to forget that northern exposure has advantages of numbing blast vs bosses and buildings. Applying it only once deals a good bonus damage (since you are likely not alone). Furthermore, unstoppable heroes would not be rooted, but still be vulnerable.

I find the vulnerability effect to be too short (and on a long cooldown to boot) to really impact boss/structure killing speed. 25% more damage for 2 seconds, assuming that 5 heroes are attacking the same target, is probably equivalent to ~2k more damage.

On 7/5/2016 at 10:31 AM, ghostdeini said:

I wanted to ask an opinion on the Jaina talents.  I started playing her using your builds, and it worked great.  As with all of the guides here it gave me a great start to learn how to play the character.  The way I play Jaina now, given that Li-Ming and KT are top damage mages in the meta, is more for her roots and general wave clear.  Recently I started picking Frost Armor at lvl 7 instead of Frostbitten.  Now I know it lowers my damage output a bit, but I honestly feel that it is a fair trade-off.  I like the fact that if I get attacked (especially if I was ambushed) it automatically chills the enemy hero.  When I couple that with Numbing Blast at 16 it greatly increases my escape potential since Jaina lost Bolt of the Storm at 20.  Again, even though she can still do good damage, I play her for the utility she can bring to team fights.  Given all of that, I wanted to see what your thoughts were.

I like both frost armor and numbing blast. Numbing blast should be recommended and frost armor situational (and if they aren't as such in the guide, my mistake!) so they definitely have my seal of approval.

[Guest Me!]

Good guide but I feel the ult information is outdated. There is very little information on Ring of Frost, it is missing from the abilities page.

It's way more viable these days, but it's unfortunate that there's no advice on its usage in your guide. For example, it excels when combo'd with other ults, like Mosh Pit, or Maw, or Grav-o-Bomb. Also, if cast directly on yourself, you occupy a lot of the safe center ground making it hard for others to dodge. 

[Oxygen 446]

22 hours ago, Guest Me! said:

Good guide but I feel the ult information is outdated. There is very little information on Ring of Frost, it is missing from the abilities page.

It's way more viable these days, but it's unfortunate that there's no advice on its usage in your guide. For example, it excels when combo'd with other ults, like Mosh Pit, or Maw, or Grav-o-Bomb. Also, if cast directly on yourself, you occupy a lot of the safe center ground making it hard for others to dodge. 

I won't disagree with that. The guide is due for a small update, especially for, as you've mentioned, RoF. Thanks for the comment.

[Guest SomeGuy]

Jaina is my waifu, have her level 10+ complete with Master skin-where she looks awesomeeeee <3 on 2 accs (long before she dropped to 4k and more recently, became available for free). However, she is in a terrible spot atm imho, and she needs love :( 

Currently, you have no reason to pick her over Li Ming/Chromie (so many buffs...Blizz pls)/Kael'thas or even Gul'dan after his buffs. She lacks range, radius, cooldowns (everyone else has much shorter than her overall). Plus, her combos and therefore, her damage, are very predictable. And with the balance changes, they keep ruining her. They do one good thing (snow crush baseline) but infinite more bad things. Like, Frost Armor became kinda useless for its purpose (1 attack every 8 seconds and at 50% not even 75%). You come out weaker at level 16 than before (you could have Snow Storm and either Northern Exposure/Numbing Blast, now you must pick 1 of the three) and moving Improved Ice Block to level 20 (for the love of God) makes much more team reliant than pretty much any other Hero in the game imho (not just the other mages) to stay alive. I believe that recently seeing her picked in pro play sometimes (towers of doom mostly) and the player ALWAYS going q (frostbolt) build shows how much of a bad spot she is. She could use a Talent Tree rework and some unique questing talents like many others before her imho.

P.S. Ring of Frost was given quite some love (reduced cd, etc) compared to Water Elemental which was on the contrary nerfed yet in the talents section, the latter is desctribed as 99% of the time the better choice, which I don't think is like that. Water Elemental is nice in cases where there are many enemy heroes who want to jump on you and kill you 1v1/alone, away from team (Butcher, Zeratul, Illidan etc) I believe but Ring can pay off big time if you land it.

[Guest who is nameless]

I think frost armor is good if you are being chased or against a valla/raynor

[Oxygen 446]

19 hours ago, Guest who is nameless said:

I think frost armor is good if you are being chased or against a valla/raynor

Frost bolt reliably slows chasing enemies, so I wouldn't really say so. I also feel that if ranged assassins are hitting you reliably for FA to make a difference, you may be mispositioned or bound to lose the fight

[Guest Gwinty]

I like Jaina very much and she is a hero i enjoy very much.

So first of all thanks for your Guide and the effort to make it. It was realy helpful and it gave me an idea what skills to take and why.

I was just wondering: Is there an update planed for your guides? Because the changelogs read that the Ability guid was updated at Jule16, the Strategy guid was updated April16 and the synergy and counter guide was updated Jule16. There where many heroes added to the game and many changes and I would love to hear your opinions on those Heroes and changes.

Also I was wondering about the Talent guide: The Build Guide talks about three builds, while the Talent page only refers to one specific build. I don't think its fitting to have the build guide advice Talents that the Talent guid turned down.
Also as another use already mentiont the Q-Build is very popular right now and that made me wonder: Why is it? Is it just popular or is it more effective?

As said at first: I enjoy your guides and take them into account quiet often. So please considere an update on the Jaina guides, as there has been some change and they are a little bit outdated.
But...well, if I`m wrong and they are not outdated and nothing changed that much, then just ignore the most part of the comment and only take the praise. Xp

Thanks,
Gwinty

 

P.S.: However I must point out, that I disagree with the statment that there is no reason to pick Jaina over Chromie and Li Ming. Jaina still got a better winrate (~58%) than Li Ming and Chromie and the fact that the Frost Bolt build is the most popular says nothing about her performing bad.