Brightwing acts differently than other healers-- her usefulness isn't within her healing. Instead, she relies on her shields, mitigation effects, CC which shuts down most melee heroes in the game, and soak potential. Brightwing has global presence and can teleport to any friendly hero on the map on a whim-- even moreso if you take certain talents that increase its effectiveness and reduces its downtime. She excels at split pushing due to this, and a part of what makes Brightwing hard to master is knowing when to be with the team and when to gather experience with no threat of you or others dying. There is never a dull moment with Brightwing-- you're either watching the map to save your ally from a sudden 2-person gank, which is even more useful this patch with the death timer changes, or you're blinking across the battlefield, shielding your allies and healing them with a mix of her ultimate and her passive.


Brightwing has 2 viable support builds: shielding and healing. Shielding is, in my opinion, much stronger in this meta and makes her a great pick if Uther is taken. She is easily tier 2 worthy with the recent emergence of melee assassin/bruiser comps. Brightwing works well with and against melee assassins due to her shielding and polymorph, and her vulnerability upgrade at 16 can shred through tanks and other high health pool heroes. Another noteworthy change are the buffs to Tyrande and Tassadar. Brightwing is incredibly strong within a double support composition.

PROS of the Shield build:
-Incredible mobility and global presence.
-Counters stealth heroes as hard as Tassadar without giving up the Support role (this is not to say she is a hard counter to stealth, however).
-A hero with a mitigation effect and a very low health pool can benefit a lot from this build, like Illidan.
-Effective with a diver composition-- you can jump in, polymorph a target and speed your teammate up so they can finish the enemy hero off. Excels in quick, bursty encounters. Run in, burst them down, continue aggression.

CONS of the Shield build:
-Very weak against long encounters.
-Forces you to channel every few seconds to give someone a shield.
-No 'safe' way to heal melee without preemptively shielding them or if the enemy is backing off already.


PROS of the Healing build:
-A 'safer' build. You're less likely to jump into melee range unless you're Blink Healing, because your healing can reach ranged and melee without much risk.
-Strong against heroes that can do amounts of poke while you have no heavy dive.

CONS of Healing build:
-Much more susceptible to burst damage from heroes like Jaina or Kael'thas.
-Melee characters like The Butcher or Illidan can't benefit from you well. In fact, there's no way to save an overeager melee character, so you have to rely on them being smart.
-You would have to clump up slightly so everyone gets the full effect of your healing.


HEROES THAT BRIGHTWING COUNTER ARE LISTED UNDER 'THREATS'.

The Recommended Talents:


Unfurling Spray is one of the options you can opt to go into if you go for a healing build. This increases the range on your passive (where most of your healing is coming from) by 33.3%. This allows you to stay further back in the backline or allows you to heal that pesky Butcher, Illidan, or Anub'arak that just WON'T STAY FOR YOUR HEALING with your passive.

I consider Hyper Shift to be another viable tier 1 option. This talent states, "Every time you heal a Hero with Soothing Mist, reduce the cooldown of Phase Shift by 2 seconds." Basically, if you're constantly in the middle of 5 damaged allies, you will reduce your cooldown of Phase Shift by 10 seconds every 4 seconds. Every 16 seconds, you'll have your Phase Shift up and ready to go, which isn't even counting its natural cooldown (45 seconds and ticking down).

If you feel confident in your abilities to spam Phase Shift effectively, Hyper Shift gives you a clear edge over Unfurling Spray, especially if you use your Blink Heal effectively to weave into your team for healing.

Recently I've been trying Brightwing with Bribe, but it always felt like you could take a better talent. However, if you have a ranged composition and take the healing build, this could be a welcome addition to your utility.

Alternatives:
Arcane Precision increases the inner circle's damage by 50%. Pre-patch, this was only 33%. It still doesn't give any incentive to take this talent, and it's mostly just a useless talent unless you want to be a damage Brightwing (which, by the way, still isn't viable. Her damage was nerfed significantly).

Recommended Talents:

Unstable Anomaly is the "damage" of Polymorph, baked into a talent. It used to be innate-- but then they added the slow to Polymorph and removed the damage itself. The talent states that a small amount of damage will be applied to a polymorphed target and allies around him or her when the polymorph ends. What makes this talent great is using it for split pushing. It adds that little bit of damage that Brightwing needs to shove lanes, and it's great in team fights as well. Manic Pixie doesn't do that much healing, to be honest, and if you're picking Brightwing, the odds are it's not for her healing anyhow.

Manic Pixie is one of the better talents for this tier. Brightwing needs active healing-- this talent gives you an extra heal over time when your Soothing Mist procs on a target with Pixie Dust active on it. When it comes down to it, Manic Pixie heals for a bit more than Soothing Mist itself does, and this healing becomes absolutely great when you have two targets being healed with Bouncy Dust, basically doubling the healing your passive can do.


Peekaboo! is a great talent. As it states, Phase Shifting to an ally grants vision in a large area around her target and reveals cloaked characters for 6 seconds. This is NOT T***' oracle ability. It simply marks a rune on the ground and reveals the area around the Phase Shift target. It doesn't move with her or her target. I recommend taking this ability if there are cloaked heroes on the enemy team on maps like Cursed Hollow or Sky Temple where team fights will occur over a stationary objective, effectively zoning out the worse stealth hero, [Nova], from team fights. This basically makes sure your team won't be ganked at the objective-- and again, you can cast this "Clairvoyance" ability every 16 seconds if you've taken the tier 1 talent.


Alternatives:

Arcane Barrage allows Brightwing a bit more poke potential. This talent increases the range of Arcane Flare by 50%. It isn't as good as it looks-- and by that, I mean not at all. Brightwing has no need to poke with mediocre Moonfire damage (no, seriously, look at the stats. Arcane Flare does less damage than Moonfire). She can simply fly in, hit someone, then blink out.

Recommended Talents:

Phase Shield is a great talent. Pre-patch, it used to be on the lvl 13 talent tier and only lasted for 3 seconds. However, it was bumped down to lvl 7 and its shield now lasts for 20 seconds. As the talent states, it gives a large shield on an ally every time you use Phase Shift upon them. Basically, this is a Tassadar-level shield that you can give to an ally in very quick bursts (if you took Hyper Shift on level 1). This is an incredibly powerful ability and I feel it is mandatory if you're going to focus on shields. It is the bread and butter of every Brightwing shield build. Illidan, The Butcher, or any other dive hero can't be hurt until that shield is down, which allows them to dive into the backline with a sizable amount of protection. If your enemy tries to wait the shield out, they will die.

Cleanse is, arguably, the best talent in this tier if you do not go with a shield build. Usually the team at least has SOME CC. It saves people from dying, which makes it really valuable. It can get your friends out of The Butcher's Lamb to the Slaughter or Murky's Octo-Grab, which basically wastes an ultimate as a lvl 7 talent. Is it worth taking when your best healing ability (Phase Shield) and your best Soothing Mist upgrade (Mistified) is on the same tier as this? Maybe not, but it is definitely usable if your team has another healing source (like Tyrande or Tassadar-- she synergizes well with these heroes).

Mistified is the replacement for the Regenerative Rains talent pre-patch. It reduces the cooldown of Soothing Mist every time a Basic Ability is cast. I personally don't like this talent alone, as I didn't like Regenerative Rains last patch. However, this is her only healing talent on this tier. Couple with Hardened Focus (if you have a comp that can protect you well) and Revitalizing Mist for a LOT of healing.

Alternatives:

Dream Shot reduces the cooldown of Arcane Flare for every hero hit by the outer circle by 1 second, and by 3 seconds each hero hit by the outer circle. It's not good since it's on the same talent tier as Mistified and therefore there is no need to spam. However, in a DPS build, it is okay.

Not much to say here.

Blink Heal is the go-to talent. It's always good. It has INCREDIBLE flexibility. Use it on minions as an escape to get away from 5 enemies that are tired of you having your FRIENDS BE HEALED! Usually this makes you impossible to chase, especially if you can get enough distance to Phase Shift. It's a sizable amount of healing (the burst healing that Brightwing needs) if you need to heal up your team. Hell, use it for positioning. It's a great ultimate, so take it most of the time, basically.

Emerald Wind just isn't a choice here, unless you're in a double healer composition.

Recommended:
Shield Dust decreases the spell damage taken by targets with Pixie Dust active by 50%. Yep, your very own spell shield. With Bouncy Dust at lvl 16, you can reliably stop that pesky mage damage from destroying your team. Jaina swoops in for a combo? Halve that damage immediately. Take this talent most of the time.

Ice Block is a great lvl 13 talent if you're being repeatedly focused by heroes like Zeratul who just want to burst you down quickly. It gives you invulnerability for 3 seconds, but also puts you in Stasis (you cannot move or act). Of course, this has always been a situational pick. Only take it if your team can back you up when you come out of it.

Alternatives:

Pixie Boost is okay, but situational. It gives you a 50% speed boost, but this rapidly decays until it is simply a 20% speed boost again. Quite easily the replacement for Sprint, to be honest. Take this if you don't have any spellcasters on the enemy team (AA heavy team, but usually they have either Kael or Jaina every time). The only time I can justify getting this is if you have a very immobile team with characters like Gazlowe, Azmodan, or Kael'thas and when the enemy team has AA heroes.

Sticky Flare wasn't used before the patch and isn't going to be used now. It's a 40% movement speed slow for 2 seconds-- hardly noticeable, and other heroes can do it much better. If you need a slow, hit Polymorph. It slows for 20% now. I really hate this talent-- not even good in damage builds, because you're not going to burst someone down under a slow. If you're trying out an Executioner build, then it might be worth having, but otherwise, the other talents REALLY outshine this.

The Situational Tier:
Hardened Focus is, at first look, a very lackluster talent. However, it is actually VERY powerful when paired with Mistified. Her healing output is significantly increased from this tier-- that is, if you can keep yourself above 80% health. Maybe if you have a strong frontline, this talent will be viable.

Greater Polymorph is a viable talent for this tier. If you have a Thrall, Illidan, Zeratul, or The Butcher that you just want to stop on the enemy team, take this talent. It increases your Polymorph duration to 2.5 seconds, which is actually .5 seconds greater than pre-patch Polymorph. It's great against auto-attack self sustain targets, especially if you didn't take Shield Dust.

Critterize does what it did pre-patch-- make your enemies Vulnerable, increasing damage taken by 25%. Take this when you have burst damage dealers that can go into the backline, like Zeratul or Kael'thas whom can poke from a distance. When all abilities do 25% more damage, it takes much less for burst to kill somebody. It is situational, though. If your damage is sustained, it barely makes a difference.

Bouncy Dust is the talent I talked about at level 13. When you use Pixie Dust, another one is cast to another hero on your team. I'm not sure how this targets (it's probably proximity) but it is marked with a small leaf above their head, much like Li Li's Q. You can use this in conjunction with Shield Dust to negate Flamestrike damage or any other hard hitting spell effects.

Double Wyrmhole is the level 20 upgrade to Blink Heal. It states that Blink Heal can be used twice on two different targets in a short amount of time without consuming a charge. This means that you effectively have 4 charges. I feel as if this is better with a melee-based composition, where you can blink into your melee quickly without consuming charges, then still have something left to escape towards your ranged heroes. (According to HotS Logs, this is the HIGHEST win rate talent in all leagues. Revitalizing Mist is highest win rate in Master League. Take this information as you will.)

Revitalizing Mist, on the other hand, is the talent to take if you have many ranged damage dealers where you can stack Soothing Mist. It states that healing another hero with Soothing Mist will increases its effectiveness by 25% up to 75% effectiveness. It lasts 6 seconds and stacks. Basically, you have to have heroes that you can stand near for this to work, so melee is out of the question. If you have range on Soothing Mist, this might be the go-to talent if you can keep up the healing.

Storm Shield is just as good as it always was. It grants a huge amount of shields to all of your allies, granted if they are in range of you. This feels standard if you have a mix of melee and ranged, as you can simply jump in, give everyone a shield, and jump out.

Rewind is a great talent if you took Greater Polymorph or Critterize at level 16, or you took Hardened Focus and Mistified at level 16 and 1 respectively. With Rewind, you can spam abilities for even more healing, or you can lock out melee assassins from killing you all and giving your team enough time to turn on them and kill them. This amounts to a HUGE 5 second silence if you have Greater Polymorph. Rewind also resets the entire cooldown of your Phase Shift, which is insane with a shielding build.