Heart of the Swarm Campaign- Kerrigan Abilities: Crushing Grip

Kerrigan’s first ability on the second tier is another energy consumer, again with a 50 Energy cost and a 10 second cooldown.  Crushing Grip will be familiar to anyone who uses Phoenixes, or who plays a lot of Mass Effect, as it grabs all the enemy units in a modest area (roughly the size of a standard building, 3x3 squares) and stuns them for three seconds while suspending them in the air.  During the course of this time, everything held by Crushing Grip also takes 30 damage total, not enough to really kill anything on its own but still enough to help kill enemies off.

The overall intent of Crushing Grip is to handle mid-sized units that have either debilitating secondary effects on their attacks (marauders), or nasty abilities to begin with, particularly if they’re channeled abilities (thor/barrage comes to mind).  Thanks to its decent area of effect, it can also be used passably to direly injure clusters of light units (particularly useful against zerglings and marines) which will then be easily picked off by Kerrigan and any ranged attackers you have on hand.  The relative lack of channeled abilities makes Crushing Grip considerably less effective against Protoss forces as an interrupt, though sometimes Grip-ing a templar at the right time can mean avoiding a fight-ending psi-storm.

Unlike the other abilities in its tier, Crushing Grip is not improved in utility at close range, so it doesn’t mean as much on, for instance, a Leaping Strike Kerrigan who wants to spend the same energy without triggering a cooldown to get in close and murder the troublesome enemy unit before it has time to be a bother.  The combination of cooldown and energy cost also makes it more of a burden on resources than the other two options, and its mild damage means that it does as much to prolong a battle as to ease it.  Thus, while useful tactically it isn’t necessarily very strong, and raw strength is a major focus of the Zerg as a whole to begin with.  Optimal placement of the area of effect is very important to this power as well, so if you’re not good at quickly selecting a cluster of enemies to use it on then you probably shouldn’t bother with the power.

Overall, this is the micromanagement option for Kerrigan’s second tier, giving fast-thinking tactical players a very nice tool for temporarily removing some uncertainty from a combat- and it’s very effective at that.  Those who are more interested in steamrolling enemies will find it less useful.  Lastly, it can come -very- much in handy if you are trying to work Kerrigan as a field force separate from your main assault troops, letting her save herself rather a lot of damage.