Johanna Build Guide “The Crusade marches on!”
Welcome to our guide for Johanna, a Tank in Heroes of the Storm. Within these pages, you will find everything required to understand how best to play this hero, in both different map styles and team compositions.
Johanna's Overview
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.
Johanna's Strengths and Weaknesses
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
Very little burst damage
Low mobility and no gap-closer
Can be kited by most ranged Heroes
Johanna's Talent Build Cheatsheet
Iron Skin Build
RecommendedJohanna'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
SituationalJohanna'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.
Johanna's Synergies and Counters
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 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 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.
Johanna's Tips and Tricks
- 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 Role in the Current Meta
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.
Changelog
- 10 Nov. 2020 (this page): Synergies updated.
- 09 Nov. 2020 (abilities page): Ability descriptions fixed.
- 16 Jul. 2020 (talents page): Guide reviewed for the latest Balance Update.
- 16 Jul. 2020 (abilities page): Guide reviewed for the latest Balance Update.
- 16 Jul. 2020 (this page): Guide reviewed for the latest Balance Update.
- 10 Jul. 2020 (talents page): Builds and Descriptions modified to reflect the current metagame.
- 10 Jul. 2020 (abilities page): Ability Descriptions modified to better explain how to use Abilities effectively.
- 10 Jul. 2020 (this page): Builds and Descriptions modified to reflect the current metagame.
- 15 Apr. 2020 (talents page): Talent Build partially revised to match new standards.
- Talent Build and Talent Build Cheatsheet modified to reflect the current metagame.
- Talent Descriptions modified to better describe when to pick them.
- 15 Apr. 2020 (this page): Introduction partially revised to match new standards.
- Talent Build Cheatsheet updated to reflect the current metagame.
- Role in the Current Meta modified to remove the unnecessary part about the now fixed Experience Globes.
- 12 Dec. 2019 (this page): Added an entry about the current Anomaly to the guide.
- 11 Jun. 2019 (talents page): Updated Johanna's guide to align it more with the current state of the game.
- 16 Oct. 2018 (talents page): Changed Sins Exposed from Situational to Recommended.
- 29 Jan. 2018 (abilities page): Added Falling Sword to the page.
- 02 Nov. 2017 (talents page): Changed Subdue from Not Recommended to Recommended.
- 29 Sep. 2017 (talents page): Updated Johanna's talents for Ana's patch.
- 04 May 2017 (talents page): Updated Heaven's Fury's talent description and recommendation.
- 17 Mar. 2017 (this page): Guide updated for Probius' patch and moved to the new format.
- 29 Jan. 2017 (talents page): Changed Blessed Hammer from Not Recommended to Recommended and updated Johanna's Builds.
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Elitesparkle is a multiple times Master player in Europe who plays Heroes of the Storm since its release. He is an active member of the community — especially on Reddit — who likes to teach new and veteran players all he knows about his favorite game.
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