Heart of the Swarm Campaign- Kerrigan Abilities: Kinetic Blast

Kerrigan’s first-tier abilities start off strong- with Kinetic Blast.  Costing fifty energy and with a ten second cooldown, this ability has range comparable to Kerrigan’s attacks, an deals a whopping 300 damage.  This makes it excellent for obliterating siege tanks or reducing bunkers to a sliver of their previous life, or for cutting large chunks out of other heavy enemy troops before they can mow down your own units.  This power works very well when you use Kerrigan as a focus for your attacking army.

While the ten second cooldown makes the attack a bit alluring as a frequent shot at anything big, the energy cost can cut down your ability to fling it at will.  Generally speaking, it’s better to conserve your energy, as Kerrigan really needs to have a lot of energy available for her other energy-using abilities, should you choose to select those.  If you have otherwise equipped your Kerrigan with abilities that are passive or, better still, have no energy cost, then this becomes less of a concern- but you should still save it for hard targets.  Ten seconds can be the entire length of a battle, and having 300 damage to kill an annoying firebat isn’t nearly as useful as having 300 damage to cripple an enemy thor, siege tank, colossus, bunker, photon cannon, or ultralisk before it gets a chance to carve up your army in large chunks.

The downside of this ability as a selection is that it is the only one of Kerrigan’s three options for the first tier that doesn’t affect her stats in any way.  This may not seem like a big deal, but if you want Kerrigan to operate solo, this becomes a very poor choice- as well as if you need Kerrigan in the front line.  It is also terrible for dealing with masses of light enemies, so if you’re anticipating facing swarms of enemy units you’ll want to select something different as well.

Kinetic Blast’s main selling points are its range and the large concentrated damage, so it makes using Kerrigan as a sort of mid-range artillery unit quite possible, and is an excellent way to support an army that serves as your main offensive force.  Defensively it can be alright, but you generally will want to use less powerful units for defense during the campaign- large enemy base assaults are rare and relatively predictable, so having Kerrigan sit around to hit incoming enemies with this is inefficient at best.