Heart of the Swarm Campaign- Kerrigan Abilities: Apocalypse (Level 60)

Apocalypse is the most ‘raw power’ of Kerrigan’s tier-8 abilities, using a nasty brown cloud explosion graphic to denlineate its area of effect.  Costing 100 energy and with a five-minute cooldown, this ability drops a large area effect that deals massive damage- 300 to units, and a whopping 700 to structures.  This can easily serve as an instant kill for defensive emplacements or entire swaths of enemy units, and thus makes an excellent opening strike in a base assault.  Alternatively, it can be used with herding techniques to take out enemy forces on the field, particularly with the AI’s tendency to cluster up units that are attacking at a similar range.

While it’s a bit unfortunate that Apocalypse is a single burst of damage every six minutes with no lasting damage area or anything of extended duration, the raw power of it means a lot to any fight it’s used in, and it will often turn a losing battle into a win, or a close contest into no contest at all.  Careful timing can mean a lot with Apocalypse, but as with any limited-frequency resource, it’s of no use to you if you consider it ‘too awesome to use’ and wind up never firing it at all.  Sadly, the very high energy cost means it’s a terrible panic button, since any situation you get into where you direly need Kerrigan to fire it off is one where she’s likely just spent all her energy doing other things.  Thus, it remains an excellent opening blow to many fights, or a good way to finish off a crippled enemy base quickly if you have some sort of a time constraint.

The massive damage it deals to buildings does mean that this ability is most efficiently and most effectively used in base assaults, so if you’re keeping Kerrigan in your own base or otherwise back from combat to keep her from getting killed, Apocalypse’s viability just flies straight down the drain and you shouldn’t have bothered selecting it to begin with.  Generally speaking, Apocalypse is, despite having the most raw power of Kerrigan’s 8th tier abilities, the worst of the lot (inasmuch as any of them can be considered ‘bad’) because it has no chance to stick around and deal extra damage later or otherwise support your troops for anything other than a single instant.