Heart of the Swarm Campaign- Kerrigan Abilities: Spawn Banelings (Level 20)

The level 20 ability Kerrigan can have with the longest cooldown, Spawn Banelings is cool in a whole different way from most of Kerrigan’s abilities.  Some players (myself included) have issues with banelings, as their nature (suicide unit) makes them a null investment of resources in situations where a zergling might have killed enemies and then had a chance to regenerate and go on to fight again.  Combining that with the significant overall resource investment in each individual baneling, and you have a strategy that needs to be very carefully managed if it’s going to be effective.  Fortunately, Zergling Reconstruction soothes the issue somewhat, replacing exploded banelings with fresh zerglings automatically- but this ability takes it a step further.  Costing 50 energy and with a cooldown of 30 seconds, each time Kerrigan uses this power it will spawn six new banelings near her.  While they are on a timer, chances are you’re using this ability when Kerrigan is in the middle of combat anyways, and so the banelings will automatically use themselves attacking whatever is near Kerrigan.

While it lacks the durability improvement of Kerrigan’s other two level 20 abilities, the disposable banelings can take damage for other units and will often weaken or destroy a patch of enemy forces in the process, so it’s not an overall loss.  Better still, since the banelings appear where Kerrigan is, the ability combines well with Psionic Shift and/or Leaping Strike, letting you drop a squad of banelings in the enemy backlines before either having Kerrigan chew through any survivors, or evacuating her to a safer location.  You can also combine this with various baneling evolutions for even more fun- a squad of splitter banelings dropped into the middle of enemy fortifications can wreak some real havoc, and having Kerrigan plunk down into a thick melee and unleash a cluster of ally-healing banelings can function as a surprisingly effective heal as well as a support strike.

The only real drawback of this ability is the long cooldown- a 30-second timer is much longer than you want on a cluster of six banelings, who almost certainly won’t outlast a single combat.  This creates the temptation to save the baneling spawn for when they’re ‘really needed’, which can often result in not using them at all- at which point you’d have been better off with Mend, which has the smallest timer of the tier.  Generally speaking, you should be using this ability as often as it comes available and just leave it at that- if it happens to not be available when you want it most, well at least it’s just a good ability and not vital to your strategy- or rather it shouldn’t be.

Micromanagers will find this ability useful- but less so than Wild Mutation.  People who are using Kerrigan as a ranged attack unit should consider Spawn Banelings the least useful ability in its tier, as it doesn’t support the strategy to any degree worth noticing.  Melee Kerrigan operators, however, will love the stuffing (acid?) out of it, though, particularly for its ability to turn Kerrigan into something like a leaping bomb every half a minute.