The bringer of pandamonium, the master of cool, refreshing brew, and my personal spirit hero, Chen Stormstout. He is the next hero I have chosen to feature as a dark horse hero, due to the high win rate, but low play rate. His win percentage is currently 51.5% while his play rate is a measly 6.9%. Chen is a really strong hero with insane potential that really can have a large impact on games. This article is here to tell you what Chen does, and how you can maximize the potential of one of the tankiest heroes in Heroes of the Storm. In this article I will go over his role, various builds, maps that I feel he is strong on, and some of the heroes that I think synergize well with Chen. For starters, what is the alcoholic panda’s role?

Role

Chen’s role is to soak damage, period. He is one of the tankiest heroes in the game and has amazing sustain. Chen is not the best warrior for crowd control, but he can be talented in a way that increases his crowd control ability. When you are playing Chen, your goal should be to absorb everything. He is a big meat shield that is excellent for soaking against sustain heroes, and does pretty well against bursty characters as well. Chen has great soloing capabilities because his keg smash, fire breath combo clears minions well for a warrior and his brewmaster’s balance talent gives him the best health regeneration in the game. In short, soak damage, solo lane, and body block. That is your role and if you focus on those three things you will succeed with Chen.

Builds

There is one main build on Chen, one that is situational to maximize crowd control, and one that is based around dealing damage with his fire breath.

The main build on Chen takes regeneration master, amplified healing, brewmasters balance, (heroic is kind of your choice, storm, earth, and fire is best for extreme tankiness and wandering keg is best for creating picks and peeling), enough to share, pressure point, and hardened shield. This build aims to maximize sustain and tankiness. The only talent that is taken that is not for this purpose is pressure point which is just too strong not to take in my opinion.

The crowd control build is best for sticking to enemies, peeling, and setting up for your team’s abilities. This build takes keg toss, amplified healing again, full keg, wandering keg, a touch of honey, pressure point, and hardened shield.This build makes it a must to land your keg smashes, but it also makes landing them much less difficult. Your job with this build is to create picks and

peel. Your goal is to be starting fights. You are not nearly as tanky with this build so you have to play more like a bruiser instead of an unkillable monster like with the full tank build. Play wisely and choose your engagements.

Obviously, the fire breath build is pretty self-explanatory. If for some reason you need to do a lot of damage on Chen this is probably your bet, although, even when you build for tankiness you can still do a ton of damage if you play well. You take all the talents that boost the power of your fire breath and you play like a melee assassin. You go in and try to burst people and then get out. Play safe and smart with this build, pick your spots wisely.

Maps

The best maps for Chen are maps that sustain is required. Maps like Dragonshire, Battlefield of Eternity, Sky Temple, Cursed Hollow, and Infernal Shrines. Any map where the team fights for the objectives are a long duration and where people are poking to avoid the objective being secured. His natural sustain makes him great for long, drawn out fights, and with a solid healer, he can become almost impossible to push off of the stationary objectives. His wandering keg heroic is also great for pushing enemies off of the objectives or for stealing bosses from the enemy team. You can pretty much feel safe picking him in any scenario in which your team has hard crowd control from other heroes.

Hero Synergy

Chen synergizes with heroes that have targeted, hard crowd control (Uther, Diablo, Brightwing, Xul, and others where you click a button, and the target cannot be pushed out of the crowd control. He has a lot of anti-synergy with certain heroes that are skill shot reliant (Kerrigan, Falstad, Li-Ming, Kael’Thas, etcetera. In these scenarios, it is best to pick the storm, earth, and fire heroic in order to avoid messing up your teams’ combos or skill shots. Generally, Chen excels with all healers. Sustained healing can many times make his health bar refuse to drop, and burst healing can give him the necessary push to allow his sustain to kick in and take over the job. Basically, Chen is best chosen with heroes that can take care of themselves and that will not be messed up by him pushing enemies all over the place.

Conclusion

That is what I think about Chen and the way I think you can best maximize his potential. He is extremely tanky, probably the tankiest hero in the game (you could make an argument for Johanna). His damage potential is also extremely high because of the keg smash, fire breath combo. Quite often a good Chen player can be top damage and top tanking in the same game. It just requires practice and the mindset for using all the abilities on a target, and then immediately pressing his trait and drinking. It seems counterintuitive to be stationary so often, but he really does nothing until his cooldowns are back up. You should press Q, press W, press E, and then press D. Do this over and over and I promise you that it will surprise you how effective you will be. Eventually, you learn when to weave in auto attacks and how to maximize his body blocking potential which is when Chen truly shines. I personally love Chen. I have his master skin and I have played him frequently ever since his release. I truly enjoy playing him and hope you will too. Thanks for reading. Please comment on the article and give me your feedback about what you think. Also follow me on all my social media mediums in order to keep up with new content and streaming times!

-PanDuhChuu

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