GUL'DAN Top
Gul'dan is the latest hero released in HotS (July 2016). He is a ranged assassin, a mighty orc warlock able of bringing pain among enemy rows! He does
NOT regenerate mana, his only way of recovering it is with his
Life Tap or recalling/using the well. He can
drain enemy's health and
curse multiple enemies. Due to these set of skills, Gul'Dan has a lot of
self sustain; His health pool is very low, similarly to
Jaina,
Kael'thas and
Nova also, his burst is not impressive compared to the heroes mentioned,
Gul'dan basic offensive skills are 3, but his
E has a very
long CD so he can rely mainly on
Q and
W to deal damage.
TRAIT SKILL
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This trait (D) is your mana source of sustain, it will sacrifice health for mana, this skill can be very dangerous if not used properly, but at the same time it can be your best friend once you understand when to and when NOT TO use it.
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ACTIVE SKILLS
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This skill (Q) is
Gul'dan main source of damage, it's very similar to
Jaina's
 Cone of Cold with a deeper but less large range and specially 1.5 seconds CD! You can literally spam this ability when chasing enemies or simply to clear waves of creep really fast, just keep in mind that
Gul'dan mana pool is not big and each use costs 75 mana.
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This skill (W) is what makes the use of
Life Tap possible! Without this skill we wouldn't be able to recover the lost health from the fight or from our tap. The range is pretty short and it's channeled making us vulnerable during the cast if we're not positioned well, what really makes
Drain Life OP is that it's mana free and has a pretty quick CD!
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Our (E) is a damage over time spell with a very big range and a long CD; This ability is a bit tricky to use, many times you will just fail to hit with it or just use it in the wrong situation/spot and this will reduce your damage output drastically. With some pratice you will be able to always hit your enemies with at least 1 circle, squishy targets are very vulnerable to this skill, 3 stacks can take more than 50% of their health.
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ULTIMATE SKILLS
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Ultimate skill (R): This is by far the skill in the game with the highest damage final output! The damage is really amazing (you shoot 2-3 meteors each second for 7 seconds) but it has 2 mayor downsides, first of all it's channeling making it easily interruptable by stuns/knockback/silences and the other major problem is that the meteors are totally random making impossible to predict where they will land and if they will hit the enemies!
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Ultimate skill (R): This is the second option for
Gul'dan and his only form of crowd control. This ultimate can be very usefull to save your or a friend's life when hard engaged, it can break the position of enemy team misplacing them in the battlefield or it simply can be used to gain 2 seconds of time while you & your team cam deal damage undisputed; It also can counter some annoying channeling abilities like
 Mosh Pit,
 Ravenous Spirit,
 Pyroblast or other channeling skills.
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-PRO-
[*] One of the best laners in the game for short
CD and sustain.
[*] All talents are potentially viable, not like others heroes where builds are pretty straightfoward.
[*] Fast creep farm with
Fel Flame.
[*]
Drain Life is mana free and has a short
CD.
[*]
Corruption can hit from very far and his poison stacks up to 3 times.
[*] Due to
Fel Flame ultra short
CD,
Gul'dan excels at poking enemies or finishing them.
[*] Once mastered, a good
Gul'dan will recall 2-3 times in all the match thanks to
Life Tap.
[*] A well casted
Rain of Destruction can help clear altars, temples, plants, defend a huge push or destroy enemy structures fast.
[*]
Horrify can reverse the sort of the teamfight, later on is not rare to get an ace and this can lead to victory at a certain point of the match.
-CONS-
[*] One of the lowest basic attack damage in the game.
[*] Very low health, only
Cromie,
Tracer and maybe a few others have less than him.
[*] Some heavy burst champions can literally 2 shot you if they focus well (
Greymane).
[*] High learning curve,
Gul'dan requires a lot of pratice to be mastered, early you will probably be weak with him.
[*] Pretty low mana pool considering he is a "caster".
[*] He doesn't have a heavy burst (at least early-mid game), like other caster assassins.
[*]
Life Tap can be a double-edged weapon if not used correctly.
GUL'DAN BASIC PLAYSTYLE
So let's give a deeper look at
Gul'dan; as we already said he is an unique assassin, he compensates his very low health/mana pool and weak basic attacks with the chance to drain health & mana while still dealing decent damage! He excels versus melee heroes like
Illidan/
Tyrael/
Diablo because he can punish them often with
Fel Flame and
Drain Life, he also can face without any problem specialists in 1vs1 lanes like
Nazeebo,
Xul,
Azmodan,
Zagara!
Basically we are the masters of poke, all we want to do is to harass the enemy with our
Fel Flame 2-3 times, go back at a bit, use
Life Tap and if needed
Drain Life on a minion or directly on enemy champion (just make sure that you can drain health for at least 2-3 seconds from your target), add to this cycle your
Corruption as well whenever it's up and MAKE SURE to hit the enemy at least with 1-2 circles otherwise you will be punished by a very long CD. This is how basically
Gul'dan should be played, but now let's give a look at our build which will change a lot our playstyle.
GUL'DAN BUILDS ANALYZED
Gul'dan has very cool talents which allow him to choose a lot of builds, but the main ones are 3, here comes a brief introduction;
[1]
[Drain life build] Single target damage with high survivability. (High single target damage, Very high health drain, Never mana-less, Lot of range)
[2]
[Corruption build] Damage over time build.
(High area and single target damage over time, Late-game AoE direct damage added to damage over time, High Range)
[3]
[Tanky build] Mixed survival build. (Nice crowd control skill, good health pool, decent damage, instant teleport can save your life and gives great mobility, funny to play)
DRAIN LIFE BUILD
Drain Life:
As you may imagine from the build's name, this is our core ability; This skill is very powerfull also if not buffed, but with some talents spent on it, his potential is overwhelming.
At level 1 we will gain 25% range, at level 7 it will deal 50% extra damage to enemies below 50% hp, at level 13 it will heal for 50% more when used on heroes and at level 16 our every spell we cast will deal 20% more damage after
Life Tap.
So basically when the conditions are met, it deals 70% extra damage, heals us for 50% more and hopefully with the extra range we can benefit of the spell for his whole duration (3 seconds).
With this build our goal both in teamfight and in 1vs1/2vs2 situations is to wound or go for the wounded enemy (below 50% HP) and finish him with a
Corruption+
Drain Life.
DAMAGE OVER TIME BUILD
We will be focusing on
Corruption, our damage over time skill; it has a very big range and can sometimes be tricky to use, because it has a weird mechanism but with some pratice you can master it; it has very high damage if you hit with 2-3 circles.
What we do is try to finish our level 1 mission on
Echoed Corruption fast, at level 7 with
Bound by Shadow we will maximize it sooner (1 second CD reduction when you hit a hero with
Fel Flame). We must play safe because our
Drain Life is not buffed and if your positioning is bad in the fight or lane you can get killed pretty easily with this build. So you just want to land some
Fel Flame and
Corruption from far ahead,
Drain Life when safe and wait for the skill to charge.
By the time we get our level 16 talent we should have finished our mission, so our
Corruption will now shoot 6 times and deal extra damage thanks to
Ruinous Affliction, this will boost a lot our final damage output.
TANKY BUILD
This build is a bit weaker compared to others because you don't focus on a single skill, so in the 15-25 minutes the match will last, you will for sure lack some damage considering you are an assassin but you will gain a lot of health, mobility and some crowd control. Our level 1 mission (
Chaotic Energy) will give us a bit of sustain and later on will let us spam
Fel Flame without having to worry about mana. At level 4 if you are in the middle of a lane-fight, you can instantly self-heal for 800 with
Consume Soul and/or use it for all the match, that is very cool because it has 2 charges and the CD is pretty fast!
Then at level 7 we sacrifice 25% of heals received by allies to gain 15% extra global damage and later on at level 13 we will gain 25% extra health permanently , then our level 16, our
Fel Flame augments our damage by 6% for each enemy hit up to a maximum of 30%.
Finally one of the coolest ability in the game;
Demonic Circle has instant cast and can be used in several ways, one chance could be to instant-teleport away when you are focused hard or feel like you're gonna die or you could place the portal at a crucial point like an objective, a camp or simply enemy base to backdoor or recall and rejoin the fight in 5 seconds!
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10% extra range after hitting 40 times enemies with
Fel Flame really not worth compared to the other level 1 talents.
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25% extra range on
Drain Life is extremely usefull with the extra range you can drain much more! With this you can hit enemies also if they are far behind the first line in the teamfight and even finish them behind their gates! Take this if you go Single target build.
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After hitting 30 enemies,
Corruption will hit for an additional 3 times (for a total of 6), this talent can add quite a lot of damage specially if we take later the other one that adds other damage on hit, if we decide to go DoT build take this!
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I do not reccomend this talent; it reduces the mana cost of basic skills after 20 globes are looted, it can be usefull for more
Fel Flame spams, but our
Drain Life is free of mana and our
Corruption has a very long cd, so not really worth it.
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This talent can be cool if you decide to perma-stay in the lane farming, with this you can reset the CD on minions and stay with high health every time, it can be good if that's your case.
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This is very important for us, because it improves the mana gained but not the health lost, go for it 90% of the times.
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This can be a nice alternative, at level 4 when we get it, we can also use it as a fast heal to survive the fight! It has 2 charges and the value you get healed is pretty nice.
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If you are going DoT build, without any doubt take this talent! It will boost our damage a lot.
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This is very important for us, because it improves the mana gained but not the health lost, go for sure if you plan to use Single target build.
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It can be usefull in situations where your team don't have slow or cc anyway, but overall the other talents of this level are better.
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If you feel safe enough you might consider this ability, 15% permanent ability power is lot, but the heal reduction is quite heavy.
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This ultimate will deal a massive amount of damage in a period of 7 seconds, if the enemy team doesn't have many stun/silence ecc you should take this one, always cast it from backlines or in hidden places!.
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Our only source of crowd control, this jewel can be handy when the enemy team is very aggressive and literally jumps on you or on your teammates or to dispatch the enemy rows and slay them one by one!
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A nice defensive talent that will grant us some damage reduction while poking, valuable option.
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Amazing boost, with this we get 50% extra health drain! A must for our Single target build and it can also be used on other build anyway, because improved survivability is never bad!
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A very cool talent that drastically increases our health at the cost of +15 sec death timer, this talent is very good as well.
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When your healer is having a hard time keeping you all up, this can be the right choice, it also gives a good survivability boost because the enemy won't be expecting us to instantly self heal for 30% of out max health.
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I don't like this talent personally, we will be always spamming our
Fel Flame so teorically our 6-30% bonus damage should be always active but it only works on heroes and it does not last long, you have to charge stacks and often you will just waste them, I prefer the 20% flat bonus on the other talent we get at this level.
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This is one of the most important talents in our DoT build. At this point of the match if we're going DoT path our
Echoed Corruption should be already at 30; This way our damage output will be increased by a lot, because with 6 circles its pretty easier to hit 1 or more enemies with 3 or more.
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Extremely handy buff that will occur everytime we use our
Life Tap! (always considering we have 0 mana regeneration) If we took the Single target build, our
Drain Life should be already very buffed, this will add another 20% of dmg/drain which is a lot, but it can also boost our ulti or dot.
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Not much to say, if you took Haunt take this.
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If you have the meteor ultimate this will add a very cool slow to it.
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This ability is very cool, it can have man uses like instant recall to base (to save your a**) objective, enemy core exc. Choose this talent if you don't think that in the match the 90% slow or 1 extra second of the other 2 talents is worth.
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Green: Main build, these talents are functional to our build so most times they will be the best choice but not always.
Yellow: Situational, sometimes these can be even better than green ones because HoTs is a very situational game where you have to adapt yourself and react to the different situation you face everytime.
Red: Not viable, the other talents of that level are way better.
#NOTES & CHANGELOG
Sorry for the bad english guys but I am still studying it, feel free to post questions and/or doubts in the discussion box if you wanna discuss about something.
Version 0.7 - Known bugs:
Corruption tooltip does not show the real skill, this happens because they share the same name with another skill, waiting for a solution from heroesfire.
#ABOUT ME
Hello there guys, I am a huge fan of videogames, my passion started when I was really young.. when the PC were not even so common.. anyway I was born in 1989 in Rome, Italy so I am not that old :P. I played all the main MOBAs out there or at the least the most important ones..(LoL, Dota2, HoTs) I started playing HoTS at the closed beta stage, I didn't play for 2 months only untill today. In the old rank system I was rank 2, right now with the new system after the placement matches i qualified for
Gold but after a few days I moved to
Platinum. Right now I am working a lot but I'll keep the guide up-to-date and possibly move to
Diamond very soon. I like to play all roles but mainly I prefer Tanks and Assassins.
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