Jaina is a mage, skills base assasin. She bring tons of slows, and some lock downs to the team, while also providing tons of AoE damage which can be effectively used to burst single targets if needed.
Frostbite is Jaina's pasive. It will slow targets hit by your spells by 25%, while also increasing damage dealt with your abilities to targets with Frostbit applied by 50%. Correct abilites chains, are the key to fully using the pasive to kite, and/or burst.
Frostbolt is your main skill. It doesnt deal much damage, but with 4 seconds cooldown, which is exactly the same as your pasive will last, can be used to apply Frostbite before every other spell, to guarante the damage amplification. It is a skillshot, but with its decent movement speed its fairly easy to land.
Blizzard is your main AoE damage spell. It will strike in a fairly small circle area with 2 waves, both applying your pasive. Usually you will only hit champions with the first wave, but huge damage of this spell will still make an impact even if reaching only 50% of its potential.
Cone of Cold is your main utility spell. While it still does solid AoE damage in a cone, you will mostly use it for its debuff talents, or to apply [Frostbite] with its instant cast time.
Ring of Frost is Jaina's first heroic ability. Its propably the worse one, but its still good and has its own unique cons. After a short delay, [Ring of frost] deal huge chunk of damage and roots enemies in the RING (not a circle, it will only hit on the edge of the area). Its really easy to dodge and hard to land, which usually requires some help in form of stun/root from the team.
Summon Water Elemental is Jaina's second, and most popular heroic ability. It will summon a water servant to fight by your side for 20 seconds. Elemental deals splash damage, while applying your pasive to everyone hit, and if it survive those 20 seconds in fight, it will achieve much more than a 5 men ring of frost.
I will rate the talents by coloring their numbers
red yellow or
green, green being the best. Note that the talents are my personal feels, but i am very experienced with Jaina and i experimented with literally all the talents she has access to.
LEVEL 1
Spoiler: Click to view
1
Winter's Reach is great if you plan on poking, or are against some high range heroes, like
Tyrande
2
Lingering Chill I see some potential in this talent, which lets you without any other boosts keep target perma chilled while only using your
Frostbolt, but I dont think its worth it.
3
Deep Chill will increase your pasive slow, which will make your kiting more effective, as simple as it sounds. Doesnt matter what heroes are you facing, improving your streanght is usually pretty solid.
4
Conjurer's Pursuit is not a talent i would recommend on Jaina. You are not able to solo camps early to gather globes from those, and you are too squishy, with no mobility nor sustain to let yourself get poked on lane just to pick up one globe. Just dont pick this talent.
LEVEL 4
Spoiler: Click to view
1
Frost Shards is a talent that doesnt really give you anything. If they are hiding behind minions you wont hit them by addint 1 target to your
Frostbolt anyway, and if you want more AoE in teamfights you should rather upgrade your
Blizzard.
2
Snowstorm is basicly a better fersion of
Frost Shards. If you really need that additional area of damage you should always pick this over
Frost Shards
3
Arcane Intellect is answer to Jaina's mana problem. I'm not really a fan of this talent because you can really control your mana investments and not run out of resources too fast, but if you want to, or you know you will have to spam abilities, Arcane intelect is always a better option that
Conjurer's Pursuit.
4
Envenom We all know and love this talent, but on Jaina its especially good. Most of the times if you land your full combo on a squishy target you will need just about that much damage to finish them off, resulting in level 4 one shot combo. In late game
Envenom becomes only more powerfull, giving enemy assasins less time to take you and your allies down. Pick it as often as you can.
LEVEL 7
Spoiler: Click to view
1
Ice Floes This will never come in handy. Cone is big enough to hit multiple targets, and the 2 seconds you will get most of the times from the cooldown reduction part will not make a difference in a fight, since you will be mostly one shoting people.
2
Frostbitten increases damage of your pasive, which increases your burst combo by roughly 20% which is crazy ammount for a thing you dont need to do anything with. It's deffinitely the best talent on this level.
3
Frost Armor is just a much better version of
Block. You can pick it if you want, I played with it a long time, but by picking it you give up
Frostbitten which is much much better.
4
Ice Lance let's you spam your spammable ability even more. The con of this talent is - you usually want to open your combo with
Frostbolt and you propably wont hit another one on that target, which means the talent won't give you much.
LEVEL 10
Spoiler: Click to view
1
Ring of Frost This heroic ability is straight foward burst spell. It extremaly hard to land, as its only hitting targets on the edge of the spell, and if you want to use it you will propably have to pick up
Numbing Blast on level 16, while there are better abilities there. Pick it only if you are confident in your aim, or if you have solid CC support on your team like
E.T.C. or
Uther.
2
Summon Water Elemental Is overall a great ultimate. It deals damage as you summon your water servant and then continues to deal damage which stack up up to absurd ammount of health lost, while also chilling your enemies. Whenever in doubt, pick this talent and let Elemental do the job for you!
LEVEL 13
Spoiler: Click to view
1
Storm Front grants you additional range on
Blizzard which is totally useless because you need to be in range of all your abilities in order to execute good combo chain. Never pick this talent.
2
Improved Ice Block is standard
Ice Block but with bonus of applying your pasive to nearby enemies. If you need the stasis effect of
Ice Block you can pick this talent.
3
Icy Veins Is propably the best talent on this level. It lets you cast your abilities 3 times faster, which results in almost 3 times more damage. If you combine it with wintermule The damage output becomes insane.
3
Sprint just good old
Sprint. Usually better deffensive option than
Improved Ice Block because it also provide you offensive utility. I rarely pick it over
Icy Veins but it is still worth consideration.
LEVEL 16
Spoiler: Click to view
1
Snow Crash It's nearly impossible to land 2 waves of your
Blizzard on an enemy, why would adding 3rd wave help?
2
Northern Exposure applies vulnerability, which is really strong, burst mechanic. It will also amplify damage of your allies, what can result in bursting a tank like
E.T.C. or
Diablo
3
Numbing Blast Well, you can take it if you are playing with
Ring of Frost and can't land it, but since I recommend picking up
Summon Water Elemental I cant say i like
Numbing Blast.
4
Ice Barrier is much better than it looks, since Jaina has no mobility or tankiness, but usually bolt of storm on level 20 is enough. But if you want to pick
Wintermute which will almost double your damage output you need the defensive tool in form of
Ice Barrier.
LEVEL 20
Spoiler: Click to view
1
Cold Snap Even if you land first part of the
Ring of Frost people wont walk into the second blast. The only way to land this is some form of push or fling like
Diablo's
Shadow Charge or
Overpower. I don't recommend this talent, even if you are playing with
Ring of Frost.
2
Wintermute will DOUBLE your damage output if you can land all your abilities (both yours and your elementals) which requires a lot of pratice, but the potential is INSANE. It will also alow you to catch people hiding behind tanks off guard if you can position yourself and elemental correctly. Extremaly high skill cap, but the results can be just outrageous.
3
Arcane Power I played with this talent a lot, and i couldnt find a good use of it. You have enough damage to burst assasins without it, and it doesnt grant you enough power to burst through tanks. Overall it can be a nice addition but i dont really recommend it.
4 Bolt of storm is a single blink ability which opens you a sea of possibilities. You can use it to escape, to chase, to dodge, to reposition, to juke, in every moba blink abilities are simply overpowered. You can pick it as often as you like, but if you have
Ice Barrier already you may lack some damage if you take bolt of storm.
Picking up Jaina is fairly easy, but mastering her can take a lot of work. Her diverse builds open a lot of possibilities, but playing with every single one of those requires you to recognize when to you use it, and to change your play style on lane and in teamfights.
Jaina's job is similar on every map. You are assasin, you have to one shot people with your spells.
COMBOS
LANING
Spoiler: Click to view
On lane focus on not throwing all your mana away. You rather want to use only your
Blizzard to clear the waves, and finish mobs with auto attacks. If you pick arcane intelect on level 4 you can start spamming your abilities.
If your opponent walk into the
Blizzard you can use
Frostbolt with damage boosted by
Frostbite to take some of their HP for fairly low mana cost.
Dont greed for the regen globes, since you are one of the most squishy heros in the game and have no mobility not defensive tools early in the game.
If enemies engage onto you dont hesitate to throw everything you have at them, and aim for the lowest HP targets. But since you wont one shot people at early levels position yourself safely and try to avoid ganks.
TEAMFIGHTS
Spoiler: Click to view
You are assasin, but you are also a great kiter. Try to go for a squishies kills, like enemy healers and assasins, but if you cant reach them focus on kiting tanks with your
Frostbite. Remember to retarget your Elemental if you decided to go with
Summon Water Elemental and land your AoEs on as many target as possible while still locking down the low HP heroes.
That should be everything you need to know about Jaina. She is a great kiter with a lot of burst and if you learn to land forstbolt and
Blizzard you should be good to go.
Pros
Constant slow
High burst
Constant damage with water elemental
easy to pick up
cool ice magic
Cons
No mobility
Squishy
Some spells may be hard to land
And that wraps it up. Thanks for reading. Leave your opinions and suggestions. And also write in the comments if there is any champion you would like to know my opinion on.
Hey guys. My name is Robert but i go by the nick Roxos. I am polish, so I hope my english is good enough for you to understand my message. I used to play League of legends on Diamond 1/Masters tier elo, but since the release of HotS closed beta i mostly spend my time on this moba. I really like supports and skill based assasin, while also know how to tank, and hate auto attack based champions. Specialist are really unique and i cant generalize here, lets just say some fits my play style and others dont. I plan on making guides about every hero in hots, but i have no idea about order, so make sure to leave your suggestions about which hero you want me to talk about next. Peace.
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