Nova Talents

Level	Choices
1	✓ ? ?
4	? ? ✓
7	? ? ✓
10	? ✓
13	? ✓ ?
16	? ✓ ?
20	✘︎ ✓ ? ?

Longshot improves the reliability of Pinning Shot, which in turn improves the reliability of your other Abilities and Basic Attacks. The increased Basic Attack range clause of the Talent synergizes particularly well with Anti-Armor Shells.

Covert Ops's effect is reasonably powerful, but must compete with other Talents we feel better complement Nova's playstyle. For players who may struggle with accuracy, however, the powerful Slowing effect can help land Snipe and Precision Strike hits.

Advanced Cloaking provides a reasonable amount of Mana regeneration, allowing Nova to roam with Health as her only true limiting factor. The Talent also enables the use of Abilities in PvE situations, where Mana would otherwise be a major concern. The added mobility is also welcomed in combat, as it allows you to reposition quickly between bursts. You should still, however, see to remain Mounted while generally traveling, as your Mount still proves to be faster than walking.

Rapid Projection improves Holo Decoy by allowing it to be cast more often. This allows you to absorb skillshots and generally confuse opponents more often. If you have this Talent, remember that you can exit from Stealth and then use Holo Decoy to distract enemy Minions so that allied Minions take less damage. Rapid Projection is recommended along One in the Chamber.

Holo Stability improves Holo Decoy by increasing its range and generally increasing its damage output. The range increase is particularly useful for threatning Heroes that would otherwise be positioned out of your effective range. Holo Stability synergizes particularly well with Lethal Decoy and Rewind, as it essentially doubles your damage output against isolated targets.

Covert Mission gives Nova the ability to instantly kill a non-Elite Mercenary with each Charge accumulated by killing Minions and Heroes during the game. Mercenary Camps entirely captured this way will respawn in half the time.

Keep in mind that you cannot use Bribe effects on Elite Mercenaries (the Sentinel from the Sentinel Camp on Hanamura Temple and the Support Camp on Volskaya Foundry, and all Bosses from any Boss Camp on Battlegrounds featuring them).

Being able to capture Mercenary Camps helps to compensate for Nova's lack of macro. The faster respawn allows your team to use a given Mercenary Camp more often, something that is especially useful for the non-Elite ones dropping Items (the Fortification Camps on Volskaya Foundry and Hanamura Temple).

Perfect Shot essentially amounts to a 66% damage increase for Snipe. Out of all the Talents available at this Tier, Perfect Shot provides the highest damage output, provided you can reliably hit Heroes. The added Mana is also helpful for resource management, especially due to the cooldown reduction effect provided by this Talent. By using Snipe more often, you will also be more prone to miss, therefore Perfect Shot synergizes with Psionic Efficiency at Level 13 because it helps you stack Precision Sniper with 3 casts of Snipe rather than 5.

One in the Chamber provides more DPS than Anti-Armor Shells, but comes at the cost of requiring better uptime and weaving Basic Attacks in between every Ability cast. One in the Chamber tends to be better against teams that do not have the means of pressuring you so that you may maximize the efficiency of your attacks.

To best use One in the Chamber, follow this typical rotation: Pinning Shot, Basic Attack, Snipe, Basic Attack. Holo Decoy and your Heroic Ability of choice can be used in the same manner, according to the situation. While you do not want to spend a long cooldown just to empower a single Basic Attack, it is good to know that activating Ghost Protocol will trigger One in the Chamber.

Although Anti-Armor Shells may seem like an unintuitive choice at first, the usefulness of delivering nearly 3 seconds worth of Basic Attacks in an instant is indisputable. Leaving aside the fact that burst is harder to respond to than sustained damage, the attack speed reduction allows you to freely move for about 2.5 seconds between each and every attack all while sustaining optimal damage per second. This indirectly increases your survivability.

Anti-Armor Shells is particularly powerful against nimble Assassins such as Genji, Li-Ming, and Tracer, as burst damage tends to force such Heroes to play more defensively.

Triple Tap, while able to deal an unparalleled amount of single-target damage against isolated targets, suffers from the fact that its projectiles can be intercepted by undesirable targets such as resilient Heroes and structures. This makes the Ability only situationally powerful. Furthermore, its lengthy channeling time—which you may not manually interrupt, should you be endangered—leaves you open and vulnerable.

Precision Strike deals a significant amount of damage in a large area from global range, meaning that you do not have to be physically present to partake in large combos. Pinning Shot, as well as crowd control effects provided by allied Heroes (such as Storm Bolt by Muradin), can make it way easier to hit the desired enemy Hero or even Heroes.

Psionic Efficiency is a decent Talent that helps you stack Precision Sniper, the Baseline Quest for Snipe. The range increase is not surprising, but getting twice the default amount of stack makes your damage ramp up quicker when playing Perfect Shot at Level 7 and helps you build it up again when you happen to miss.

Double Tap is a good Talent that gives you access to a second charge of Pinning Shot. After casting both of them, you will have to wait twice the cooldown to be able to repeat so.

The additional charge has obvious synergy with all Crippling Shot-based Talents: Longshot at Level 1 and Crippling Shot at Level 16. In addition to that, you can also get an additional trigger from One in the Chamber at Level 7. Last but not the least, when going for Precision Barrage at Level 20, you can use each Pinning Shot as setup for each Precision Strike.

Ionic Force Field is a decent Talent that increases your survivability by giving you a fair amount of Armor right after Stealth ends. Clones will benefit from this Talent as well, so they will be harder to take down and the enemy team will not be able to easily spot the real Nova because of it.

In case you are going to take damage while in Stealth and you want to mitigate it (for example Consume Souls by Mephisto), you can manually break Stealth by channeling your Hearthstone or your Mount and then immediately interrupt their channel to keep moving.

Explosive Round allows otherwise impossible Snipe casts to deal damage. By targeting Summons, Minions, Structures, or even less desirable Hero targets near your intended target, having a direct line of fire is no longer necessary. This ultimately improves your uptime.

Crippling Shot provides a significant damage increase for yourself and your entire team against anything Pinning Shot hits, which is incidentally almost always your intended kill target. Crippling Shot is a key Talent for burst team compositions, especially when picked with the Hero Level 13 Talent Double Tap for sustaining the armor reduction effect.

Lethal Decoy is a good Talent that turns Holo Decoy, a defensive Ability, into an offensive one. You can use Rewind at Level 20 and Ghost Protocol to spawn multiple Clones at the same time. The damage of a full Holo Decoy-Rewind-Holo Decoy combo should not be underestimated, especially with Anti-Armor Shells to reduce your kill target's Armor.

Fast Reload is a weak Talent which relies on the unlikely event that a Hero dies within 0.625 seconds of being hit by Triple Tap.

Due to its win-more nature, we do not recommend to choose this Talent. If you want to deal more damage, Rewind is simply more useful and reliable.

Precision Barrage has the potential to inflict a significant amount of area of effect damage. This damage potential is, however, gated behind Precision Strike's archetypal weakness of relying on crowd control for successful hits. Against team compositions that either prevent you from isolating vulnerable targets for effective Rewind kills, Precision Strike's long range is a boon.

When ahead of your opponents in terms of Hero Levels, and especially before Bolt of the Storm comes into play, Precision Barrage allows for successive kills that are extremely hard to avoid, something that Rewind does not do.

Apollo Suit competes with vastly superior offensive Talents, however, it allows Nova to trick enemy Heroes by giving herself and her Clones the ability to get into Stealth after 1 second, rather than the default 3 seconds of wait.

Rewind can be activated to reset the cooldown of all your Basic Abilities. Cast them twice in a row to deal high burst damage. The extra Clones can be used to further confuse enemy Heroes instead.

Rewind obviously synergizes with One in the Chamber at Level 7 and surprisingly resets the cooldown of Ghost Protocol.