Heart of the Swarm Campaign- Kerrigan Abilities

During the course of the Heart of the Swarm main campaign, you will be adding levels to Kerrigan, who is your primary hero unit.  As she gains these levels, she will gain access to a number of very interesting abilities that alter your gameplay and allow you to accomplish things in interesting ways.  These abilities all interact to some degree with your choices for unit evolution on top of their expected effect on your battle tactics and, in fact, some of them exist entirely for the purpose of altering the way your not-Kerrigan units and activities operate.  Because of this, it pays off immensely to be aware of what each of these abilities is and what you give up as other options by choosing it.  This factor is enhanced by the fact that you can re-select Kerrigan’s abilities in between missions, and then further reinforced by the way she gains the ‘levels’ that grant her access to the abilities.

The majority of the sub-campaigns, or planetary mission sets, grant your Kerrigan a few levels at their conclusion- though one of them grants a whopping 20 levels instead and another two don’t, by default, grant any at all.  This is going to be your main source of Kerrigan levels- however there’s an added benefit in the side missions.  Where in Wings of Liberty each side mission would grant you a shot at an achievement and potentially a character portrait for the online play through Battle.net, many of the possible side missions in Heart of the Swarm will grant Kerrigan additional levels at the conclusion of the map.  Managing to accomplish a good number of these can be vital, as without attaining any of the levels the extra goals grant you, Kerrigan will not even come close to reaching her maximum potential level, and you’ll be short one or two of her possible sets of abilities at the last mission of the campaign, not to mention a considerable number of Health, armor, damage, and energy points.

As if that weren’t enough, while each level or ‘tier’ of abilities includes two potential options, one of the mission sets on a particular planet will grant you access to a third option for each tier once you conclude the goals on that planet.  This leaves Kerrigan with a whopping 24 potential abilities, of which she can possess 8 at any time- a total of 6,561 possible ability setups that fit with varying strategies and methods of play.

With that established, it’s time to have a look at each of Kerrigan’s possible abilities and how they affect your play.