Johanna Build Guide “The Crusade marches on!”

Johanna is a low-mobility, extremely resilient Tank, capable of Blinding, Slowing, Stunning, and pulling enemies. She excels at creating chaos and disruption in the midst of the enemy team for extended periods of time while also peeling for her allies. Johanna is one of the handful of Heroes in the game with no direct counters, and is able to fit into nearly any team composition.

Strengths

• Extremely resilient
• Condemn provides you with one of the best waveclear abilities of any Tank in the game
• Laws of Hope provides a massive amount of health regeneration and healing
• Strong against Basic Attackers
• Iron Skin absorbs a significant amount of damage and provides with you 4 seconds of Unstoppable, preventing crowd control from affecting you

Weaknesses

• Very little burst damage
• Low mobility and no gap-closer
• Can be kited by most ranged Heroes

Iron Skin Build

Recommended

Level 1

Level 4 ? ?

Level 7

Level 10

Level 13

Level 16

Level 20 ? ?

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Johanna's Iron Skin Build gives more survivability against crowd control and burst damage thanks to the synergy between Hold Your Ground at Level 1 and Fanaticism at Level 16.

Shield Glare Build

Situational

Level 1 ? ?

Level 4 ? ?

Level 7

Level 10

Level 13

Level 16 ?

Level 20 ? ?

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Johanna's Shield Glare Build gives you more survivability against poke damage thanks to Laws of Hope at Level 1 and Holy Renewal at Level 16.

If you are not scared of crowd control and/or burst damage, you can choose this Build to help your Healer keeping your Health maxed out on Maps where the battle for the Objective takes a while (Braxis Holdout and Dragon Shire come to mind), something that is really useful when you are accompanied by a burst Healer (such as Rehgar) and not relevant when your team has a sustain Healer (for example Malfurion) or has two Healers.

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Johanna synergizes with

Johanna pairs extremely well with Heroes that can follow up her slow but powerful engage with any kind of area of effect Ability to deal burst damage to enemy Heroes and/or to crowd control them.

Due to her weak engage when her Heroic Ability is not available, Johanna greatly benefits from Heroes that can help her with that (such as Maiev).

Johanna is countered by

Johanna is one of the few Heroes in the game that has no natural counters. She cannot be bursted quickly by Assassins, or crowd controlled by Supports or Tanks, due to Iron Skin. However, this does not mean she is overpowered or always a good pick to have on your team. Johanna is instead countered by playstyle, such as ignoring her in team fights or targeting her while Iron Skin is on cooldown. Johanna also lacks good mobility and has no gap-closers, meaning that she can be kited very effectively and has difficulty keeping up with dive-heavy allies. The only Hero we would currently consider to be a "counter" to Johanna is Varian due to his Shattering Throw talent at Level 13, which allows him to shatter both Johanna's Iron Skin and her Indestructible talent at Level 20.

Johanna's stronger maps

Johanna's average maps

Johanna's weaker maps

Johanna is a decent pick on almost any map with the exception of Warhead Junction. She thrives on battlegrounds like Dragon Shire or Tomb of the Spider Queen that favor early game rotations with tons of waveclear.

• Damage and Slow adjacent enemies with Punish.
• Condemn can interrupt abilities like Muradin's Dwarf Toss or E.T.C.'s Mosh Pit.
• Shield Glare enemies that deal significant Basic Attack damage.
• Use Blessed Shield to engage, buy time to flee, or to interrupt enemies that are channelling abilities.
• Use Iron Skin just prior to an enemy using crowd control on you.

Johanna's survivability, disruption, waveclear, and crowd control make her a very solid Hero overall, and a good fit for nearly any team composition. She synergizes well with a wide variety of Heroes, especially the ones that provide additional waveclear. She has no natural Hero counters. Iron Skin, with its 4 seconds of Unstoppable also makes Johanna very effective versus teams made up of lots of crowd control, as she is mostly unaffected by it.

Although Johanna is able to play defensively, providing some peeling for her allies, she is more potent when played aggressively. Her disruptions, in the form of Blinds, damage, Slows, Stuns, and pulls, are all AoE and therefore more effective when used against multiple enemies. Additionally, Johanna's large amount of maximum health and relatively low damage output versus single targets (compared to Assassins) means that the enemy team is incentivized to ignore her, instead prioritizing more the vulnerable backline Heroes. Therefore, it is important to zone the enemy team's carries as much as possible, which can typically only be done with an aggressive playstyle.