Hi all,

this is my first guide and I cannot claim to be any kind of pro player, but the new Stitches inspired me to write some build ideas down. Please try them out and tell me what worked and what did not. As the new Stitches is very new atm, it'll all be prone to revisions and I'm not sure how good I'll be to keep it up to date, but we'll see - please go easy on me if I screw up. :)

I'll not really talk that much about each skill since there are plenty of guides for it. Nonetheless, this guide does not feel complete without them.

The one defining skill of Stitches - up until this patch people treated him as a one-trick-pony: "Land your hooks and your good, miss them and you're useless. I believe he can now bring more to the table. Nonetheless, the hooks are important for him and can be completely gamechanging.

A cone-style AoE damage on a reasonably cooldown will help you clear lanes or just add some more damage - note, that it immediately adds an AA, so that you should do AA-slam-AA combos for respectable damage. Nothing fancy about it and for my builds I mostly chose Vile Cleaver over Putrid Ground because I find clearing waves more effective with distributed AAs. It is still fine to use, though.

This is where it starts to get interesting: The cooldown of devour is quite long, but got buffed from 24 sec to 20 sec in the Lt. Morales patch, the range is abysmal, and the damage on heroes is negligible. But the damage on Minions is very high and it will be your main sustain tool after picking Last Bite at level 7. Eating only 4 minions in 20 seconds puts you at 100% hp even if you started at 20%. The cooldown reduction and Last Bite buff (now you got 3 more seconds to kill the enemy in order to get the cooldown reduction) are big parts that make Stitches more viable now for me.

Stitches' trait is nothing to write home about, but it gets a lot better with Vile Cleaver. While doing some minor AoE damage over time when struck is not that useful, being able to distribute it over a minion wave with AAs feels quite nice to me. Cover 'em in slime and eat em! Yummy!

This is your "get out of jail" card. Being able to run away while leaving slime that slows and dismounts enemies? All of that on a reasonable cooldown? Count me in! It can also be used as a pretty fine chasing tool if necessary. This is an all-around solid heroic.

Gorge is fun and useful and, now that the movement impairment is gone, even more useful. It can be devastating to hook someone, gorge him and just walk (or even blink) away. Isolating him for forever and having your whole team collapsing onto him. The other heroic just feels a little more universally useful... But I love a successful gorge. :)

I'll now go though the talents at each level and try to give some advice on how to skill your Stitches. I'll use color coding to indicate my preferences: green indicates a talent for my "Eat most of the things" build, yellow a talent that is used in an alternative build, orange a situational choice and red a talent that I consider sub-par in general.

Long story short: Hungry for More is just sooooo good, that nothing else really matters. It has great synergy with Last Bite at level 7 and simply makes you into an hp monster. Over 7000 hp at lvl20 this talent makes it easy and when you farm correctly, it'll get ridiculous very fast. Dampen Magic might seem like a contender, but if you're not planning to stand in all cooldowns of Jaina and Kael'thas at once, it won't do that much - and even then it'll only block two charges of damage.

Amplified Healing has it's place and makes the life of your dedicated healer much easier. It synergizes well with Devour, bringing the health gain up from 20% max health to 26% max health, but I feel there are better options here. If you want to be really tanky take this talent, but if you want to do things besides taking damage and being healed... try other talents. -- I have to say, that I like this talent more and more if your comp already has enough push and damage. It softens the impact of Hungry for More on your healing from the support and has synergies with Last Bite and Savor the Flavor.
Mercenary Lord feels kind of useless on Stitches. I don't see him as a jungler and he can already tank a boss quite well for the team.
Vile Cleaver surprised me recently. It still is a close call between this and Putrid Ground, but it felt just right to attack different lane minions and spread your Vile Gas all over the place. The wave clear offered by this is really decent and softens the minions quite effectively to be devoured later on.
Putrid Ground contests with Vile Cleaver and I'm torn between these two. There is testing to be done... :)

Again, there are some nice picks in this talent tier, but from my point of view, nothing compares to last bite. Why is Siphoning Impact with Clean Kill just so good on Kerrigan? She can self-sustain herself from a minion wave. And you can do that, too, with Last Bite. It gives you a 3 second window where you can finish off the minion you did not immediately kill and has a 5 second cooldown for 20% health regain. What is there not to like? There are many maps where you fight with minions of any kind around and you can pull off amazing self-heal with it. If your team is really, really lacking CC, you might consider Tenderizer, but generally that will not do too much anyways and feels somewhat lackluster in effect. Toxic Gas is just pointless and Savor the Flavor will not do too much because you need to bite heroes for it to be applied (20 sec cooldown... -.-) and it will have trouble keeping up with your increased health - it does combine well with Amplified Healing, though.

Already talked about it in the previous section: Putrid Bile provides more utility and keeps you safer while Gorge is just hilarious and really effective to Hook someone and destroy him. That's about it.

Relentless is a great generic talent to have on a tank and you should consider it for the tank-build as well as for each situation where you find yourself CCd a lot. I recently fell in love with this talent and strongly encourage you to take it most of the time. The retchlings are great and all, but not being CCd as long feels huge.
Mega Smash would be mildly useful if we skilled into the Slam talents which we didn't. So... no.
Indigestion Since the retchling now also applies Vile Gas on attack this might actually be a viable pushing tool. Devour a wave for health regen and you add 3-4 retchlings to the lane which push it passively. After some testing I'm not completely convinced if you can give up Relentless for this, so consider it to be more situational if your team lacks pushing power.
Helping Hand Don't, just don't! Finding yourself in the top5 fails videos is already easy with Stitches, but Helping Hand effectively doubles the probability. Let your teammates work their things out and don't ruin a clutch but effective play.

Pulverize is situational: Again, if your team lacks CC big time, you can provide some now. Nothing fancy, but might help. Otherwise, there are better options in this talent tier.
fishing hook lets you pull enemies from even farther away. Nobody is safe anymore, Stitchescan get all the ... Ehm, not going into that one. If you can land your hook this is devastating and obviously part of the fishing build.
Shish Kabob reads weird, but might actually be good if you can grab someone through walls with it. Nobody is safe anymore. I'll ad some more testing before I provide final judgement.
Stoneskin increases your tankiness through the roof: With Hungry for More you'll have a gigantic health pool and stoneskin adds 30% on top. That can easily be a 2000 hp boost and get ridiculous extremely fast. You just won't die - at all!

Regenerative Bile can be situationally useful: You become faster for a longer time and you regenerate health through it. It's just that the health regen is 40 hp per second per enemy in the bile. with your health pool being around 8000 hp at this moment, it just does not feel like too much - it's only 0.5% max hp. Even if you get all of the enemy team in it for all of the 10 seconds, you just regen 25% of your health: That's mildly more than one Devour.
Hungry Hungry Stitches Use this to land in the top5 plays videos. Eating the whole team and stealing the boss is hilarious and happens once every other 100 years. Or take something useful instead...
Hardened Shield Did someone say tank? I like hardened shield on practically all warriors. It's just too good: Run into the enemy team and up being focussed? No problem, trigger hardened shield and eat all their cooldowns. With Stitches' enormous health pool and Stoneskin there is nothing the opponent can do to kill him in that time frame.
Bolt of the Storm is generally never a bad pick. And with Gorge and fishing hook you can use blink to displace an enemy 1.5 to 2 screen widths away from his team. Those are fun plays with the fishing build. If you like that, take it.

That's it, I'm done and had a great time writing this guide. I hope you liked it and can get some nice games out of it. I love the new Stitches and am very excited about his new playstyle. If you got any comments, suggestions or critic remarks, just go ahead: I'm very interested in your opinions.

Sooo long, everybody!

07.10.2015 Original guide creation
30.10.2015 Update after some playtesting