Zeratul is a melee Assassin who comes from the shadows and surprises opponents with quick bursts of damage, and slowing/blinking abilities to prevent them from running away to safety.
Zeratul can be a difficult character to play because of his Cloaking abilities he is relatively vulnerable to being killed. His strengths lie in knowing when to come out of stealth, killing opponents, and then running off back to the shadows. Knowing when to engage and when to retreat is key with playing Zeratul successfully.
Early Play (L1-L6)
There are generally 2 things you want to do in the earlier levels.
1. Collect Health Orbs - While everyone is weak and is generally limited on what they can do this is perfect time to collect orbs and start gaining Health Regeneration. Later on in the game Health Regen is very important because it allows you to roam around without having to return to the base often, giving you a lot more opportunities to kill heroes, retreat and stay nearby to wait for your next opportunity. As the game goes on there are more team fights and less time for you to collect orbs.
To do this, keep an eye on waves of minions, kill the caster, and move from lane to lane. Maps with 3 lanes are better for orb collecting than maps with 2 lanes, obviously because it gives you additional chances to run back and forth collecting these orbs. You also get orbs from capturing mercenaries and during some of the different map objectives.
2. Harass Opponent Heroes - In between picking up orbs coming out of stealth to use
Cleave and
Singularity Spike can generally do ~50% of an opponent's total health. Because you have no follow up and are generally weak to them retreating to their base, your goal is not to chase them and kill them, because most of the time you will just die, but it allows your team holding down the lanes to gain an advantage and keep pressure on. Since you are rotating through all the lanes collecting orbs you'll often find that opponents were not expecting you to come up behind them. Forcing the opposing team to Hearthstone back to base and heal up repeatedly gives your team additional pressure on the lanes, additional experience, and additional leeway to leave lanes and potentially cap mercenaries early on.
Mid-Game Play (L7-L13)
Once you pick up your L7 talent, you can start trying to close out more hero kills. Generally, you want to find Healers/Assassins who are at less than 50% health. Generally, you want to avoid trying to take out Tanks, they have too much health and will usually have some way to stall until they receive backup from their team. At this point you want to make sure you are still collecting orbs, but you can still go out and capture mercenary camps, if you are going solo stick to the smaller camps.
Late Game Play (L14+)
Once you hit L20 Double Bombs and Rewind gives you a lot more burst potential. You can use it to single-handedly take out more vulnerable opponents caught off guard or one their own. You can also divide up your burst to take out multiple heroes in succession.
Make sure to use your Void Prison when needed. You can use it to separate the team so you can single out a hero, kill them, and retreat before the other heroes are unfrozen and able to kill you. You can also use Void Prison defensively to help your teammates escape, or to prevent an unfavorable engage. Be careful though, as your team will also get frozen in your Prison.
Check out my video walkthrough below. Also includes 6 full games.
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