Simple changes that will make Whitemane better

Just some simple convenient changes that would make her better as a healer overall and reduce frustration when playing as her.

1 - Remove the hidden 0.5/0.4 second cooldown on her Desperate Plea

When applying Zeal to your allies, you want to do that as fast as possible seeing how short Zeal’s duration is. When allies are close enough to each other, it may take less than 0.4 seconds to click on even 3 of them.

Having this hidden cooldown makes the Hero feel unresponsive at times, because you pressed Q and yet nothing came out.

You could time it properly but that’s unnecessarily difficult and it takes time out of your Zeal. You could mash Q to cast it as soon as it comes off cooldown but, in my opinion, players shouldn’t have to resort to mashing because that creates a bad habit.

I believe that making this change will improve the Hero’s responsiveness, rewarding players who have the precision to click fast on their allies, and you can trust that if you pressed Q on the right target, the Zeal buff was applied and you don’t need to double check.

2 - Make Clemency and High Inquisitor baseline

I think this is a change that a lot of people would like to see. The two talents work very well together and it honestly feels like it should be part of her base kit anyway, because it can be kind of weird to heal people before Level 4.

Managing your Mana and Desperation Stacks is one of the things that makes her fun to play and I believe she should have that ability from the start.

Her other talents at level 1 aren’t terrible, but they just can’t compete with Clemency, seeing as if you don’t pick Clemency, your healing outside of fights is greatly reduced and you’re giving up the amazing synergy that it has with High Inquisitor and Radiance at level 16

Also, it’s important to reduce Inquisition’s cooldown from 14 to 10 seconds. That’s how most people are used to playing her (seeing as Clemency has such a high pick rate) and it just feels a lot better on a 10 second cooldown, because her abilities sync pretty well that way.

Cast Q 3 times, then E + W. By the time Inquisition’s channel finishes (assuming it doesn’t get interrupted), you can cast 1 or 2 Q’s (if you have the mana to spend) and use another E if you see it’s gonna get good value.

Then, by the time your desperation stacks go away, your W is almost off cooldown and so is your E and you can already start casting Desperate Plea to set up for your next big heal.

When everything is going as planned and you’re able to pull this off, it’s satisfying, it’s fun, it’s effective, but unfortunately that will not happen very often.

Casting Inquisition is risky, you root yourself in place and if they break the leash, if the channeling gets interrupted or even if the enemy dies, you lose all that healing potential.

An ability that is punishing to use even when you get a kill with it and is crucial to the hero’s playstyle shouldn’t be on a long cooldown.

Imagine if Anduin’s Divine Star didn’t come back to him if he was able to kill a squishy in the backline with it, if Malfurion’s Moon Fire didn’t heal allies with Regrowth if moonfire killed them or if Lucio’s Reverse Amp lost its healing property if he got a kill with it.

Whitemane is the only healer that has her healing ability taken from her if she gets a kill.

I would even go so far as to suggest that if an enemy Hero dies while you’re casting Inquisition on them, the cooldown is reset. There were times when I helped my team get a kill because I rooted an enemy hero, but we still lost 4v5 because I didn’t have healing. Both my W and my E were on cooldown and Desperate Plea and Scarlet Aegis weren’t enough to make up for it, all I could do was auto-attack, which made me an easy target for the enemy team. If I had Divine Reckoning maybe we could win that fight, but enemies can easily move away from its AoE if they’re not under some hard CC effect, not to mention its 100 second cooldown.

Having to use a long cooldown ult to make up for a flaw in a basic ability isn’t a good solution.

3 - Add a talent that makes Desperate Plea’s Zeal spread to nearby allies, similar to Medivh’s Circle of Protection.

If High Inquisitor becomes baseline, her Level 4 talent tier loses its identity. It’s supposed to be the Talent Tier where you pick something to manage your Mana, but since she’ll have that mana management ability baseline, I think the Talent Tier would have to receive new talents altogether and I think one talent that is greatly needed is something to make it easier to spread Zeal.

Many supports in the game can benefit when allies are stacked together. Lucio, Brightwing, Auriel, Kharazim, Alexstrasza, Stukov are examples of multi-target Healers who do not lose control over their healing ability when your teammates are stacked.

Even Rehgar with his Chain Heal and Anduin with his Divine Star aren’t so hindered by that.

But if you’re playing Whitemane and your teammates are stacked up, there isn’t much you can do because you can’t click on them, it’s impossible, because their in-game models are overlapping each other.

Ana used to have this problem, but with her most recent rework, she can make her Healing Darts pierce and that issue was greatly aleviated.

Malfurion may have this as well, but I don’t find it nearly as bad with Malfurion because Regrowth lasts for so long, so you can usually apply your Healing-over-Time before a fight happens, so when things get chaotic and everybody’s stacked, you don’t have as much trouble healing people because they received they’re already buffed

I can see single target Healers like Uther or Lt. Morales having a similar problem of not being able to click people, but their healing is much more impactful than Whitemane’s, which requires a time consuming setup.

Yes, you could communicate to your team not to stack up so much, but that’s impractical, because that’s something totally out of your control. When you can’t click on something because everybody’s too close together, you lose control of your healing ability.

There have been many situations where I’m trying to heal someone, but I just can’t apply Zeal to them, it’s virtually impossible no matter how precise you are.

A hero who doesn’t have good base healing numbers (Desperate Plea and Scarlet Aegis don’t heal all that much by themselves and it is preferred to use Inquisition over Clemency to heal allies) and needs to setup her healing quickly otherwise she is heavily punished, shouldn’t have to deal with this problem.

She’s already punished if she can’t auto-attack, if she fails to cast Inquisition, if heroes break Inquisition’s leash, if it gets interrupted and if she misses her E, but for all these things, there are ways you can improve and not have that happen as much, you have some control over this. When your teammates are stacked, you have no control over that whatsoever.

That would also make Divine Reckoning more appealing, since you won’t have to rely so much on Scarlet Aegis to quickly spread Zeal among your allies.

If this is something that would make her OP, I don’t think it would be too difficult to find ways to balance that. In my opinion, this is the most frustrating aspect of playing Whitemane and I cannot emphasize enough how much I think this is necessary for her.

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Reading this topic after seeing new “rework” (another nerf if you call things what they really are) Am I the only who doesn’t get it in the first place why is everyone is so obsessed with “changing” and messing with her at all? It was OP at release, ofc, but so is any hero Blizz releases, she was fine after 2nd nerf in a month or two after release. That’s it. It was a well designed hero with well-thought skillset and talents. Not OP anymore, not bullsht yet. THAT’S IT. DON’T TOUCH IT ANYMORE. But here comes another nerf after a year since release, which is already ridiculous, and now they are nerfing one more time again, now with removing a well designed and well thought sinergy between skills and talents and giving her a completely random talents, which kinda raises a question “what do I have to do with them, exactly?” I don’t understand at all, after so crucial changes, why exactly she still has to have a desperation mechanic?

If it was up to me, I’d reverted the hero state back to the one before third nerf (the one in this year - regarding manacosts n stuff) and did absolutely nothing anymore. In this exact hero state I’ve played around 400 matches with 61% winrate, that’s in case if someone wants to say that she was bs already, judging only according to hotslogs pick and winrate stat (genji also had one of the lowest winrates in hotslogs, does this mean the hero is bad?)

Rework needed in my opinion is to change her portrait and voice completely. But I know this is not gonna happen. I like old days when amount of heroes was less but they were normal.