Heart of the Swarm Campaign- Kerrigan Abilities: Chain Reaction

A strangely specialized ability choice, Chain Reaction causes every attack Kerrigan makes to deal 10 damage to up to 4 enemy units other than her main target within her attack’s range.  This makes it virtually useless against heavy units and immensely powerful when Kerrigan is part of a force dealing with numerous light enemy units.  It can also serve as a nifty tool when Kerrigan’s in the front line for ensuring that she gets more attention than frailer units or those supporting her with ranged attacks- provided she’s tough enough to take the added attention.  Just don’t expect the effects of this ability to actually be visibly noticeable in the morass of combat unless you spend a lot of time carefully measuring unit battlefield life expectancy and the precise number of attacks enemy units manage to make before getting slain by your forces.

It would initially seem that this option meshes poorly with the choice of Leaping Strike, since that cuts the range on Kerrigan’s attacks, but keep in mind that Leaping Strike will consistently put Kerrigan into range of any enemies that group up near her target.  It doesn’t actually perform any notable combination effect with any of the first-tier abilities Kerrigan has either, which leaves it not fitting as well as the other second-tier selections you can make, but generally speaking if you’re interested in dealing significant (but not high) additional damage to nearby enemies, chances are that this is its own concern anyway and you’re not really looking to pick up a combination of abilities to begin with.

Unlike Crushing Grip or Psionic Shift, this is an ability with no burst-effect at all, and is a passive rather than active ability, making it a nice selection for those who have a Kerrigan with too many buttons on her for their liking anyways.  The same exact traits make it considerably unattractive to an experienced micromanager, who will find the random targeting of the extra damage and lack of any way to actually control this ability a detriment to a slot that could otherwise be filled with something they can manually operate when and how they need it- while it’s easier than the other two parts of its tier, it’s also less powerful overall in exchange for being an ability you don’t have to actually do anything with.  This particularly stands out when Kerrigan winds up fighting widely spaced or individual units and gets little or no effect out of the ability at all.

Overall- bad choice for micromanagers, acceptable for everyone else.  Just don’t try to actually measure its effects on combat, you’ll give yourself more of a headache than you need to have over something like this.