HP: 2464.2
HP Regen: 5.1328/s (480~ seconds to reach max)
Damage: 85
Attack Speed: 1/s (1 second cooldown)
Attack Range: 5.5
Unit Radius: 1.1875

I'm not sure why Azmodan has an extra 0.2 HP, but it's right there in his file, plain as day.

Speaking of Azmodan's HP, I'm going to emphasize how absurdly high his HP is. It's very clear players mostly rely on 'gutfeel' for assessing Hero durability and very heavily rely on categorical trends to inform their starting point, and Ranged Assassins are, as a category, the frailest in the game...

... but Azmodan is a big glaring exception. He's got the highest base HP of any Ranged Assassin, and not just by a little bit: 'regular' Ranged Assassin durability tends to hover within 200 points of 1500, while Azmodan is nearly 1000 ahead of that benchmark, and even compared to the closest runner-ups like Zul'jin and Mephisto Azmodan is still a pretty noticeable amount above them.

This point gets complicated by some factors, as Gul'dan can Talent to get very close to Azmodan's HP, and Nazeebo's Voodoo Ritual can theoretically get him above Azmodan, but the core point is that Azmodan should be assessed more like a Bruiser or Tank, not like his fellow Ranged Assassin, when it comes to topics like 'will my Heroic execute him at this percentage of HP?' And to be clear, I'm emphasizing this right away because I pretty regularly see clearly experienced players heavily flub this assessment: Kael'thas lobbing Pyroblast when Azmodan is at 60~% HP, when 60% on Azmodan means almost 1500 HP and so Pyroblast's base 820 is going to fall well short, people in general seeing Azmodan pushing a bit too aggressively onto his enemy's Towers and being surprised when Azmodan can walk right back to his Gate, ignoring one or sometimes two Heroes trying to gank him, that kind of thing happens a lot.

A sub-component to this oddity is that Azmodan has essentially no self-healing. He has exactly one Talent ever for such, and it's not exactly a strong heal. While Azmodan is vastly harder to burst down than most of his fellow Ranged Assassins, he's oddly vulnerable to being chipped down in an extended engagement: normally, Heroes with such high HP also have significant potential to generate HP ex nihilo, whether through healing or shielding themselves, and several Ranged Assassins who don't have innate healing nonetheless are outright forced to get a decent heal (eg Valla, Cassia) pr at least have the potential to pick up such if they want. (eg Tassadar can Talent for a weak self-heal and an okay self-shield, and combining the two can allow him to potentially shrug off papercuts indefinitely) This is particularly significant if his team doesn't have a Healer, but even with a Healer about it can matter as far as solo laning and whatnot, as Azmodan is comparatively easy to bully into a retreat with even relatively light damage pressure that a lot of Ranged Assassins would just shrug off forever.

On a different note, Azmodan's rather large unit radius is slightly offset by having a smaller 'inner radius' of 0.9375, allowing Azmodan's allies to path around him slightly more easily.

Like Azmodan's base HP, Azmodan's large unit radius is something really worth emphasizing in how it affects interacting with him as a foe. In particular, Azmodan's closest peers for 'ability to safely fight from a large distance away' are almost all much smaller and much more mobile: only Sergeant Hammer is comparable on these two points. While the impact of unit radius is difficult to articulate in clear ways, it broadly means Azmodan is simply more vulnerable to pretty much any traveling projectile or area-targeted delayed effect. One of the clearest examples of this weakness is that if he's fighting Orphea and she takes Ancestral Strength (Which lets her apply a modest Slow with her Basic Attack), she can chain Shadow Waltzes onto him indefinitely with almost no ability for him to maneuver to evade future strikes: once Slowed, he's simply too large for a center-of-mass strike to miss, no matter how he moves and no matter how well he predicts Orphea's intended strike zone.

D Slot

Demon Lieutenant
Cooldown: 60 seconds
Windup: Instant
Can be targeted at unlimited range, but must be targeted within radius 5 of an allied Minion, Mercenary, Demon Warrior, Demon Lieutenant, or Demonic Grunt. Summons a Demon Lieutenant to the targeted location, which has 593 base HP, a unit radius of 0.75, a base Movement speed of 3.25, a sight radius of 7, attacks once a second for 41 damage at range 2, and every 7 seconds uses Demonic Smite to instantly kill an enemy Minion within range 7.5 of itself. (There is a 1.5 second delay before Demonic Smite can first be used) The Demon Lieutenant loses HP each second, dynamically calculated to give it a maximum duration of 21 seconds. (ie by default it loses 28.2~ HP per second) Can be cast during Globe of Annihilation's windup and recovery without interrupting either. Doesn't disMount Azmodan to cast, but will interrupt weak channels. Can be targeted via the minimap.

As with many summons, Demon Lieutenants use basically standard Minion AI, where they will attack nearby hostiles, and if there aren't any they go to the nearest lane and advance down it until they do find something to fight.

Demonic Smite itself is something Demon Lieutenants prefer to aim at, unexpectedly, the farthest valid target they can identify. The code seems to imply they're supposed to also prefer to hit the highest HP by percentage, but my own play doesn't seem to bear out this logic as being cleaved to. Regardless, this is kind of an odd preference to attach to an instant-kill effect: in terms of HP value, Smiting a Melee Minion will always be much better than Smiting a Ranged Minion, but for that to actually occur Azmodan needs to arrange for the Demon Lieutenant to have Smite ready before anything frailer than a Melee Minion can get into their range. This is especially awkward on Alterac Pass, where Reaver Minions replace Catapults as the reward for destroying Forts and Keeps, as Reaver Minions do their job very specifically by being able to tank huge amounts of punishment and taking the lead so enemy Minions will prioritize them: on Alterac Pass, there is a very good argument that Azmodan should prefer to summon Demon Lieutenants into Minion waves that haven't made contact with the enemy wave yet so they will spot and Smite the Reaver Minion. (When targeting into a lane his team has lost the Fort and/or Keep in, obviously)

But even outside Alterac Pass, I suspect this is correct play.

I think the idea is that Smiting Ranged Minions is more valuable because they do so much more damage, especially in Minion-on-Minion combat, but I'm a bit doubtful that's enough to offset how useful it is to make a Melee Minion instantly disappear. Especially since Catapults always fire from farther than Demonic Smite's maximum range: if Demonic Smite's max range was 10 or more, I might wonder if the point was so Demon Lieutenants would reliably delete enemy Catapults, but as-is they're usually only going to Smite a Catapult if there's no non-Catapults around to tie them up. Also awkward is that Demonic Smite often ends up aimed at the Leader Minion, who is the absolute worst target to Smite, with bad damage and bad HP and not even providing any experience for the Smite to collect.

A contributor to my suspicion is the aspect of experience collection. Demon Lieutenants are useful to put into 'offlanes' in part because they reduce experience wastage: while they can't pick up Experience Globes, anytime they land the finishing blow Azmodan will immediately be credited the full experience from the target, and of course Demonic Smite means they'll certainly scoop up a minimum of 2 Minion kills, and they can also pick up experience by happening to finish a Minion with their Basic Attack. Overall, if a Demon Lieutenant is aiming Smites at Melee Minions and Basic Attacks at Ranged Minions, the expected experience yield is going to be higher than their current reality of aiming Smites at Ranged Minions and Basic Attacks at Melee Minions.

Honestly, I wish Demon Lieutenants were able to collect Experience Globes directly in the same sort of way as Abathur's Symbiote. Their ability to collect experience through timely Basic Attacks implicitly brings in some of that sort of utility, but in a manner that's overly sensitive to the exact timing and conditions such that it's effectively the same thing as a random chance of collecting extra experience, and the current state is this awkward design where Azmodan assigning a Demon Lieutenant to an unattended lane will in fact collect part of the experience coming in, but will miss so much of it that if experience collection is the goal a Hero (or Abathur's Symbiote) really ought to actually swing through.

Minor mechanics point: the Demob Lieutenant checks for Smite targets every 0.25 seconds.

Q Slot

Globe of Annihilation
Mana: 70
Cooldown: 10 seconds
Windup: 0.5625 seconds
Recovery: 0.125 seconds
Targets a radius 4 area whose center is within range 30, firing a projectile that travels overhead to its destination, providing vision in a radius of 3 underneath it as it travels. On impact, does damage to all enemies in the targeted radius. The base Level-scaled damage is 176, but Globe of Annihilation's damage is also boosted by Azmodan's current Annihilation. (This part of the damage is not Level-scaled) Against non-Heroic enemies, reduces damage by 50% of base damage and 50% of Annihilation-derived damage.
Globe of Annihilation has an inherent Quest that caps out at 450 steps of progress, steps being called 'Annihilation'. Globe of Annihilation itself adds 2 Annihilation for each Heroic enemy hit by it as well as for each enemy Minion that is either killed by it directly or that dies within 3 seconds of being damaged by Globe of Annihilation. At 225 Annihilation, the damage penalty against non-Heroic targets stops applying against Minions and Mercenaries. At 450 Annihilation, the radius is increased from 4 to 5, and another 150 damage is added. (This extra damage is also not Level-scaled, and doesn't count as Annihilation)

Reminder that standard line of sight is range 12. Azmodan can thus lob Globes of Annihilation from over twice the distance enemies can see from; an Azmodan keeping an eye on other lanes can thus contribute to them with little warning on several maps.

Also, Globe of Annihilation's travel behavior is... weird. Projectiles that visually arc significantly tend to be odd in Heroes of the Storm, but Globe of Annihilation is one of the funkiest.

First of all, if it's fired very close, it skips all this 'travel time' business and simply smashes its destination the instant its windup completes. I'm not sure what the exact cutoff point is, but a good rule of thumb is that if the guide's radius overlaps with Azmodan's radius circle, that's probably close enough for this to kick in.

Second, it has code for like... three different projectile behaviors, and I'm not sure which ones it actually uses, and two of them are adaptable parabolas, which never map cleanly to the straight-line projectile speed calculations. I can say with confidence it has a relatively conventional behavior in the sense that farther shots will take longer to impact: this isn't like how Hanzo's Sonic Arrow always takes 1 second to impact its destination no matter how near or far Hanzo aims the shot.

Third, Globe of Annihilation marks out its destination shortly after launch, not only to allies but even to enemies, giving foes plenty of time to move out of its area even if Azmodan is out of sight when he makes the toss.

A micromastery trick I find useful is to arrange to lob Globe of Annihilation from just a little bit beyond the enemy's line of sight, using allies as spotters. Firing a Globe while visible to enemies gives them a significant heads-up that they need to be ready to move, so even though it doesn't change the timing of when they see the intended impact point, it's still the case that not seeing the windup animation means they have to take a moment to register Globe of Annihilation is incoming at all. This small delay is significant enough that opponents able to reliably dodge Globe shots fired from within sight often still react too slowly to quite get out of the radius if they didn't see the windup animation.

And to be clear, the part where I'm firing from only a bit outside line of sight is important. A max-range shot has such a large gap between the impact point being revealed and the shot actually landing that only players really not paying attention are going to fail to dodge without some outside factor restricting their movement. Hearthing players are sometimes that careless, but that's about it. A shot from only a little bit outside of sight has much less warning.

A neat thing I like is that Azmodan's buff bar has a tracker for current Annihilation that, if hovered over, will provide a precise breakdown of exactly how much Annihilation has been acquired from a given source of Annihilation. This includes that Azmodan has multiple Talents that provide new ways to build Annihilation, and these do in fact get included explicitly in the tally. I have particular appreciation for this given I'm making these pages, since I can casually say with confidence things like 'I consistently get more Annihilation from this Talent than that Talent' and can assure you I'm not simply going by 'feel' but also don't have to laboriously go through replays to manually tally the info, but it's also just nice on a basic player skill feedback level, where you can check how things are going in your matches and use that info to refine your Azmodan play going forward.

385.64 at Level 20, so max Annihilation adding 600 damage is more than 150% added damage

different behavior within range 6?

speed 18 to start, accelerates 6 to a maximum of 26 speed

speed 18 period when within range 6? or starts at 15 and accelerates to 26, with 100 acceleration?

different animation if fired past range 14

W Slot

Summon Demon Warrior
Mana: 25
Cooldown: 10 seconds
Windup: Instant
Summons a Demon Warrior in the chosen direction at range 2. The Demon Warrior spends 1 second immobile, impossible to target, and with no unit collision, but still able to intercept enemy Skillshots and be hit by area of effect abilities. Once summoned, it has 435 base HP, has a base Movement speed of 3.6015, a unit radius of 0.75, a sight radius of 7, attacks once a second at range 1 for 53 damage. (Against Minions and Mercenaries, adds 100% of base damage) The Demon Warrior loses HP each second, dynamically calculated so it lasts 17 seconds at most, which by default works out to losing 25.5~ HP per second. Can be cast during Globe of Annihilation's windup and recovery without interrupting either. Stores up to 2 charges.

Summon Demon Warrior has the odd distinction of using the standard Skillshot UI element for targeting it while not being a Skillshot. This is because the summoned Demon Warrior will in fact walk a good chunk of the indicated distance in the indicated direction if it doesn't spot anything to fight along the way; they don't actually walk the full distance, and if they bump into terrain their actual path can be pretty odd, but still, it's a useful enough indicator.

Once they do walk most of the distance, they revert to 'laner logic', seeking out the nearest lane and then advancing down it, much like a Minion. They still don't behave exactly like a Minion, mind: they stick to a given target until it becomes invalid, where actual Minions can be distracted from a Heroic target by non-Heroic enemies coming into range, and if a Demon Warrior's target moves out of the lane the Demon Warrior will still pursue rather than returning to the lane the way minions do. It's still a decent comparison for understanding the basics of their behavior, though. Also note that if they lock onto a target and it becomes invalid, they switch to this 'laner logic' immediately, even if it happens quickly enough that they normally wouldn't have timed out their walk forward.

Also, I should emphasize that Demon Warriors can be summoned to the other side of impassible objects, like Walls and terrain. This is only partly because of them being summoned 2 units of distance in front of Azmodan: while that is in fact a large enough distance to slap a Wall in between with no effect, it's actually the case that even larger chunks of impassible terrain where the Demon Warrior's default target placement is ending up inside the terrain will often respond to this impossible request by 'shoving' the Demon Warrior further ahead until they're not generating inside an impassible zone. This is pretty odd to me: Li-Ming's Teleport has twice the range as Summon Demon Warrior, but has worse ability to cross big gaps, because her Teleport instead interprets 'you're trying to place inside impassible terrain' with 'let's smush your face against the wall you want to get to the other side of'. Why is Summon Demon Warrior's placement logic so much more generous?

Regardless,

Also note that, unexpectedly, the ability to summon Demon Warriors during a channel extends to the channel for launching a nuke on Warhead Junction. This is just for launching, though, not for the channel to collect a nuke.
Also, a funny bit in the code:

<CActorModel id="AzmodanSummonDermonWarriorDeathModel" parent="StormModelAnimationStyleOneShot">

You probably passed over it, but this bit doesn't say 'Summon Demon Warrior', it says 'Summon Dermon Warrior'. Oops! I don't think this error is actually breaking anything, though?

E Slot

All Shall Burn
Mana: 25
Cooldown: 6 (Starting from channel end)
Windup: 0.5 seconds
Azmodan begins a mobile channel on an enemy, with an initial cast range of 6 and a 'leash' range of 8.25. For the duration of the channel, Azmodan is Slowed by -30% while his target takes 32 damage every 0.25 seconds. The channel lasts up to 2.5 seconds, and if it reaches its full duration the target takes an additional 340 damage all at once. (For a total of 660 damage) Azmodan cannot Basic Attack during the channel, and attempting to Mount, Hearth, use Trample, or use Globe of Annihilation will interrupt the channel, but all of Azmodan's other Abilities can be used during the channel without issue. There is a 1 second delay before All Shall Burn can be reactivated to cancel it.

Note that slightly over half of All Shall Burn's damage is tied up at the end; the over-time damage totals to 320 damage, and of course if you didn't get the end-hit you also missed out on at least one damage tick.

A related point is that it should be emphasized that All Shall Burn prevents Azmodan from using his Basic Attack while it's channeling. If Azmodan is certain he will complete the channel this isn't a big deal, as 2-and-half seconds of Basic Attacking is only 212.5 damage, while a complete All Shall Burn Channel is 660 damage, but it's noticeably more harmful if Azmodan isn't completing the channel: if he channels for exactly 2 seconds, he's roughly given up 170 damage of Basic Attacks to get 256 damage from All Shall Burn, which is a much narrower damage advantage. If eg the target has some Spell Armor, that can easily put Azmodan in the hole. This gets especially important depending on Azmodan's Talent choices...

A couple usually-minor mechanics notes: firstly, All Shall Burn's channel will continuously attempt to cancel any Stealth on Azmodan so long as it's maintained, which can be awkward when working with teammates who can grant Stealth. Second, Azmodan faces his target continuously during the channel; this typically doesn't matter, but is important when fighting Valeera, since her teleport attacks put her at her target's back. Using All Shall Burn carelessly around Valeera can result in Azmodan giving her an easy opportunity to bodyblock him.

Heroic 1

Demonic Invasion
Mana: 60
Cooldown: 100 seconds
Windup: Instant
Recovery: 0.5 seconds
Targets a roughly 2.8 radius area whose center is within range 13.5. Over the course of 0.5 seconds, 8 Demonic Grunts spawn into the area at partially randomized points within the target area, each dealing 85 damage to all enemies with a radius of 1.25 of its arrival point, with a 0.375 second delay before a given Demonic Grunt can act. Demonic Grunts themselves have 750 base HP, a base Movement speed of 4.875, a unit radius of 0.6875, a sight radius of 7, attack once a second at range 1 for 39 damage, and when they die they explode, dealing 40 damage to all enemies with a radius of 2. (Against Heroic enemies, the death explosion adds +100% of its base, so +40 damage) Demonic Grunts lose 75 HP per second (With this scaling with Level at the same rate as their max HP), and so last at most 10 seconds and effectively have their duration reduced by taking damage. They automatically seek out targets in radius 20, but they prefer to stick to an already-acquired target until it becomes invalid.

The game does a somewhat poor job of communicating that Demonic Grunts are a completely separate summon from Demon Warriors, unfortunately. This includes that most of Azmodan's Talents for improving his demon summons don't actually apply to Demonic Grunts. They probably should've been given a different name, like Demonic Invaders or something.

For reference, if Demonic Invasion is dumped on a target that is hit by every initial impact, death explosion, and Basic Attack, this works out to a total of 4120 damage. In the improbable event that this happens to a Heroic target, it rises to 4440 damage, since the death explosions do doubled damage to Heroic targets.

In actuality, Demonic Invasion's damage will almost always be noticeably below the scenario laid out above. The overwhelming majority of that damage is derived from the Grunts performing Basic Attacks, and is premised on the idea that they last their full duration, when every 10% of their HP they lose to attackers will reduce their Basic Attack damage potential by 1 iteration, and can be further reduced by targets moving, delaying Basic Attacks. Only an immobile target that never fights back will take 4120 damage from a full Demonic Invasion; in practice, this is only applicable to unattended Forts, Keeps, and Towers, where it's plausible they may spend the full duration distracted by other targets and be the only source of damage of relevance.

The 'unavoidable' portion of the damage is 680 damage on arrival, and 320 damage from the death explosions. If we imagine Demonic Invasion is launched on a single enemy Hero and then the Grunts are instantly killed en mass without performing Basic Attacks, that would be a total of 1320 damage (Because the 320 death explosion damage gets doubled against Heroic targets), which is still a lot. A few of the frailer Heroes would die to just that!

Of course, it's not really unavoidable. While Demonic Grunts walk a bit faster than standard Hero speed, there's that initial period of inactivity on arrival, and when they perform a Basic Attack they do briefly pause and so will fall behind a fleeing target, and while they don't have collision with Heroes they do have collision with each other. All that means that a Hero simply running away in a straight line shortly after Demonic Invasion's animation starts will probably avoid some of the impact damage, most of the Basic Attacks, and most of the explosion damage. As Azmodan himself has almost no ability to limit enemy movement, he really needs to be coordinating with an ally to have any chance of getting high value from a Demonic Invasion aimed at an enemy Hero -and I'm just ignoring that a lot of Heroes can dash or teleport to further reduce the effectiveness.

Indeed, dropping Demonic Invasion on an enemy Hero is often actually substantially wasting its potential. Since Demonic Grunts don't like changing target unless their current target dies or otherwise becomes completely invalid a target (eg by entering Stasis), to the point that if the targeted Hero runs through a Gate the Grunts will simply huddle against the Gate until they die, not even bothering to attack the Gate, a Hero doesn't need to do anything special to accomplish this wastage. Just walk away. Notably, Demonic Grunts prefer to pick Heroic targets over non-Heroic targets: if Demonic Invasion is dumped on a Hero who is standing amid Minions with a Fort right behind them, all of the Demonic Grunts will fixate on the enemy Hero, ignoring all these non-Heroic targets that are also right there.

So there's a fair argument Azmodan should generally prefer to not aim Demonic Invasion at enemy Heroes, unless he's doing so in concert with allied Heroes constricting enemy movement.

Some less important mechanics points: firstly, Demonic Grunts 'self-root' for 0.75 seconds on arrival, meaning it takes thema moment to start moving after being summoned. Second, if they don't have a current target, they only actually check for a new target every 0.5 seconds, which can result in oddities here and there.

Also, have some scary-sounding damage numbers:

If every Demonic Grunt lands on a target: 680 damage
If every Demonic Grunt performs its maximum number of Basic Attacks: 3120 damage
If every Demonic Grunt explodes on the same target: 320 damage (640, if the target is Heroic)

So yeah, in the event that an enemy Hero just walks back and forth in a small spot while Demonic Grunts rain down on them, they're very dead. In real play, though, you're never going to see anything close to these numbers expect maybe if dumping Demonic Invasion on a Structure currently distracted by Minions.

Heroic 2

Tide of Sin
Mana: 100
Cooldown: 20 seconds (Starting from charge being expended)
Windup: Instant
Activating grants a Tide of Sin charge that lasts until the next Globe of Annihilation cast. The Globe of Annihilation that expends this charge costs no Mana and adds 50% of its base damage and 50% of Azmodan's current Annihilation damage. Tide of Sin doesn't disMount Azmodan to cast nor does it interrupt All Shall Burn, but it will interrupt weak channels.

Level 20 max Annihilation: now 1,478.46 damage

An unimportant but potentially misleading bit of jank is that activating Tide of Sin will immediately cause the summary at the top of the screen to start counting down Tide of Sin's cooldown. This can result in eg one of Azmodan's allies seeing Tide of Sin being at 15 seconds of cooldown and so thinking Tide of Sin isn't ready, when in actuality Azmodan primed it 5 seconds ago and hasn't expended the charge.

Also odd is that Tide of Sin's charge is retained if Azmodan dies with it activated and not expended. This is atypical with priming effects of this sort: they normally deactivate themselves on death.

Also note that while Tide of Sin makes the next Globe of Annihilation free, Tide of Sin is functionally a 30 Mana surcharge.

Once upon a time, there was going to be a big long mathematical screed here bout how Tide of Sin sucks. (A screed that was wrong about the math because for some reason I wrote it with this notion that Demonic Invasion had a shorter cooldown than its reality) Then, well before this page went live, the devs bumped up Annihilation's max damage and, importantly, baked-in the 'Pride' Talent, making it an automatic reward for reaching max Annihilation. Between these two points, I currently feel Tide of Sin is in fact the overall superior Heroic (So long as you're good at collecting Annihilation), a fact I'm perfectly happy with since I always found it more fun than Demonic Invasion anyway.

Level 1 Talents

Greed
Globe of Annihilation adds 15% of its base damage plus 15% of Annihilation's damage against non-Heroic targets. Once Azmodan reaches 225 Annihilation, All Shall Burn's maximum range is raised from 6 to 7.5 and its leash range is raised from 8.25 to 9.75, while Demon Warriors permanently gain +20% of their base Attack Speed and Movement Speed. (ie raising their Attack Speed from 1/s to 1.2/s, and raising their Movement Speed from 3.6015 to 4.3218)

better now that there's a -50% penalty

Greed's baseline effect is odd and I'm not convinced it works as intended in a design sense.

The thing is, all three of Azmodan's Level 1 Talents are little customizations to the process of Annihilation collection. Gluttony and Wrath do this explicitly, by modifying existing Annihilation generation numbers or adding a whole new vector for Annihilation collection, while Greed does so implicitly, by making Globe of Annihilation more effective at killing Minions and so theoretically making it easier to collect Annihilation through killing Minions.

If this is indeed the thought process with Greed, then, well... seriously, it doesn't work.

+15% damage, even considering it affects Annihilation-provided damage (And even considering the innate additive penalty against non-Heroic targets that means it's more like a 30% increase initially), has a fairly narrow period in a match where it has any possibility of meaningfully improving Azmodon's ability to collect Annihilation from Minions. At low Annihilation and low Levels, Globe of Annihilation falls far short of the numbers necessary to kill Ranged Minions, and once Azmodan is higher Level and higher in Annihilation, he can collect Annihilation from those guys without the 15% damage boost. If he takes Tide of Sin, this starts happening the instant he hits Level 10. So there's this pretty specific period where Azmodan is a bit short on killing Ranged Minions where Greed can theoretically close the gap and improve his Annihilation collection from Minions compared to the alternatives.

Due to all this (And a bunch of detailwork of how Minion fights work and how Azmodan's kit works that collectively mean he really just can't get more than 2, maybe 3 Annihilation from a Minion wave early on unless he's being assisted by allies, but I'm not going to lay out that whole thing), in practice Greed is the weakest option to build Annihilation. This is notable for several reasons, starting from the fact that it undercuts Greed's advantage: say Azmodan took Gluttony and hits 200 Annihilation at exactly Level 7. (I've done this, so this isn't a purely hypothetical scenario) We'll specifically say he got 140 Annihilation from Hero hits, and the other 60 from Minion kills; this means his next Globe of Annihilation will do 231.6+200 damage. (ie 431.6 damage) if he had Greed instead and we just assume that he gets the same number of Hero hits and the same number of Minion kills, he would only have 130 Annihilation, and his final damage against non-Heroic targets would be 231.6+130*1.15=415.84 damage. So... about 15 points less than our Gluttony Azmodan does to everything.

There's a feedback loop here. Since Greed is inferior to its competitors at building Annihilation, that means it's bad at raising Globe of Annihilation's damage, and harvesting Annihilation from Minions is pretty directly dependent on Globe of Annihilation's damage, so the sub-par Annihilation generation recursively worsens Annihilation generation from precisely the source Greed is ostensibly specialized in exploiting.

Also not helping is the fundamental tuning of the base Annihilation numbers in the context of how Minion waves work and how access to Heroic enemies works. If a Globe of Annihilation instantly deletes a full wave of Minions, that's 7 Annihilation. If Azmodan is perfectly double-soaking two lanes with Globe of Annihilation, he's generating 14 Annihilation every 30 seconds, whereas if he clips 2 Heroes with every Globe of Annihilation fired, he generates 12 Annihilation every 30 seconds. Those prior numbers sound favorable to focusing on Minion harvesting, but are only meaningfully true later in a match when Azmodan can have deadly enough Globes to mass-delete Minions with one unsupported toss: early in a match, it's difficult to get more than 2-3 Annihilation out of a given Minion wave, and often requires holding Globe of Annihilation for multiple seconds while waiting for some Minions to get low enough on HP. Even with Greed, it's just a lot faster to build Annihilation by prioritizing Heroic targets in the early portion of a match.

Assuming 'Greed is supposed to harvest Annihilation from Minions' is indeed the intent, I wish it instead (or additionally) had a 'fractional' Annihilation gain for simply hitting Minions. (Or maybe non-Heroic targets in general, though I have concerns regarding how that would affect Braxis Holdout and Infernal Shrines) By this I mean a Heroes of the Storm standby used by eg Diablo: have Greed add a separate counter that increments for each relevant target hit, and once this counter hits whatever goal the devs set, it 'rolls over' and adds 1 Annihilation. Say that this counter worked at a rate of every three hits adding 1 Annihilation: in that scenario, Azmodan would gain 2 Annihilation (plus 1/3rd) each time he lobbed Globe of Annihilation into a full Minion wave. This would make focusing on the Minions a slightly superior choice over focusing on the Hero if Azmodan was alone with a lane opponent (In the sense that if they're positioned so Azmodan can't hit the Minions and the enemy Hero with a Globe toss, then he should just toss it at the Minions if he's prioritizing Annihilation gain) and would also mean Greed would still give an edge at Annihilation generation later on, once Azmodan is able to mass-kill Minion waves. (As opposed to the current state, where Gluttony is just plain superior at Annihilation collection once Globe tosses are sufficiently deadly that mass-kills are doable)

Now, I should emphasize that the above is a Design Issue, which is not necessarily the same thing as a viability issue. I'm personally not a fan of Greed, but the stats suggest it's actually the best choice at this tier, and I can kind of see why this might be so. While Greed is seriously bad at building Annihilation, it has two big advantages over its peers: firstly, it has an innate benefit that isn't just 'here's a way to build Annihilation faster'. Secondly, its benefits for reaching the 200 Annihilation checkpoint are rather large, making All Shall Burn much more useful and noticeably enhancing Demon Warriors, where Gluttony's payoff is just 'slightly more Globe tosses per second' and Wrath's payoff is nice but only helps when specifically firing Globes at Heroic targets at close range. Thirdly, building Annihilation isn't centrally important to Azmodan the way, say, building up Fresh Meat is vital to The Butcher's success: the core benefit of Annihilation is just to enhance the damage of a single Ability with a long cooldown, and the only other benefits are these Level 1 Talents unlocking a bonus benefit at 200 Annihilation and that at Level 20 Azmodan can't benefit from Pride unless he's at 400 Annihilation. Reaching 200 Annihilation before Level 10 is nice and reaching 400 Annihilation before Level 20 is useful, but Azmodan ending a match with less than 200 Annihilation is a fairly mild loss in performance.

I do wonder if Greed's success in stats is in part due to ignorance of Talent interactions or some such, mind, but I'll explain that more when we get to the relevant Talents, and my primary point with the above paragraph is that if you're scoffing and going 'Ghoul Tyrant thinks the best Azmodan Talent is the worst one, what an ignoramus', you're misunderstanding my actual point.


Gluttony
Annihilation gained from hitting Heroic enemies with Globe of Annihilation is raised from +2 per Heroic enemy hit to +4 per Heroic enemy hit. Once Azmodan reaches 225 Annihilation, Globe of Annihilation's current cooldown is reduced by hitting targets; 0.25 seconds per non-Heroic enemy hit and 0.5 seconds per Heroic enemy hit.

Note that Gluttony is not explicitly, separately tracked by the Annihilation tally on the buff bar. This isn't a big deal since you just look at your Hero Hits tally, divide it in half, and now you know how much Annihilation you have, but it's worth explicitly pointing out.

Gluttony's Annihilation-building bonus of course skews Azmodan even more heavily to Hero-hunting, since now even hitting 2 Heroic enemies gives more Annihilation than deleting an entire wave of Minions. For that matter, if the option is 'kill 3-4 Minions with a Globe' or 'hit one Heroic enemy', the latter will be at least as good as the former.

Do note that the cooldown reduction, though it gives double value against Heroic enemies, will still tend to skew toward Minion hits being a bigger payoff. That is, if the Globe hits 2 Heroes, you get 1 second of cooldown reduction, whereas if you hit 7 Minions you get 1.75 seconds of cooldown reduction. It's not until you're hitting at least 4 Heroic enemies that the cooldown reduction is higher than tossing the Globe at a regular full wave of Minions.

Gluttony itself is pretty straightforwardly the best option at building Annihilation. Doubling the Annihilation gain from Heroic hits is a big improvement to the baseline best way to increase Annihilation, and once the cooldown reduction kicks in more Globe tosses can occur to trigger Annihilation gains more often. The cooldown reduction is almost never a large percentage of the base cooldown, but even hitting a couple Heroes and getting the next Globe 9 seconds later rather than 10 seconds can add up if it keeps happening. And deleting a Minion wave and getting 1.75 seconds of cooldown reduction is pretty nice.

One bit of awkwardness is that Gluttony doesn't affect Tide of Sin's cooldown. Since Gluttony's cooldown reduction is almost always minor, taking the two together will regularly put Azmodan in a situation where he has to choose between firing a third Globe and then having Tide of Sin finish and have to wait several extra seconds to be utilized, or kind of waste Gluttony's cooldown reduction so he can fire Tide of Sin as soon as it comes off cooldown, resulting in him only tossing 2 Globes every 20 seconds, exactly as if he didn't have Gluttony. I sort of wish Gluttony applied the cooldown reduction to Tide of Sin, either on every Globe toss with the base numbers, or only on Tide of Sin hits but at double-strength. (That is, getting 1 second of cooldown reduction per Heroic enemy and 0.5 seconds of cooldown reduction per non-Heroic enemy hit by Tide of Sin shots) Both of these would smooth out this particular jank to some degree. Or if not one of those solutions, then something to smooth out this awkwardness in combining the two.

To be fair, this issue can be ablated some through player skill. Knowing by heart when you can skip applying Tide of Sin to a Globe toss at Minions reduces this jank, after all. Still funky, though, and when first getting Tide of Sin it's generally not much consolation if the goal is to build Annihilation and all.

It's also worth pointing out that Gluttony implicitly rewards focusing on Annihilation, since more Globes-per-second means more Annihilation-leveraging-per-second. Since the cooldown reduction is mild, this implication is mild, but for one thing it's part of why I wish the Tide of Sin jank was smoothed out: so these two choices that both reward building Annihilation make more sense to pick together!


Wrath
Every second Basic Attack Azmodan lands on a Heroic enemy or Structure adds 1 Annihilation. Once Azmodan reaches 225 Annihilation, Globe of Annihilation marks Heroic enemies for 3 seconds; if Azmodan lands a Basic Attack on such a marked Heroic enemy, the mark is removed and 85% of Azmodan's current Annihilation is added to that Basic Attack's damage.

now adds up to 382.5

Note that the added damage is, oddly, simply Physical damage rolled directly into the Basic Attack boosted by it. This is very strange: Imperius' Valorous Brands are, I think, the only other example of 'Ability marks target, Basic Attack then consumes mark to do extra Physical damage'. Normally this type of mechanic adds Spell damage. It's also worth pointing out by extension that Wrath's mark is not a separate damage tick: if it were, it would consume 2 Block charges, among other implications.

Wrath, incidentally, is Azmodan's one and only Talent choice for explicitly rewarding Annihilation grinding. Tide of Sin does so implicitly, as does Gluttony, but nothing else does so explicitly.

For reference, at Level 10 Azmodan's Basic Attack does 125.82 damage, and at Level 20 it does 186.25 damage. If Azmodan hits 225 Annihilation in time for Level 10, he's adding 191.25 damage to basically 126 damage, or about a 152% increase. If he hits 450 Annihilation in time for Level 20, then he'll be adding 382.5 damage to basically 186 damage, or slightly over 200% added damage. It's only once per target per Globe of Annihilation use, but still, it's pretty impactful.

It's also worth pointing out that Wrath's marker, if being leveraged, lets Azmodan 'double-dip' on Annihilation. That is, if expending Wrath's marker successfully, he's getting 185% of Annihilation value in on a target in under a second. This also makes Wrath one of the more significant Talent options for improving Azmodan's capacity for burst damage, which I have the impression is an under-recognized implication.

Level 4 Talents

Army of Hell
Summon Demon Warrior summons 2 Demon Warriors per cast, but its base cooldown is raised from 10 seconds to 20 seconds. The two Demon Warriors are each offset half a unit to the side of where a single Demon Warrior normally spawns, and so they spawn 1 full unit apart.

I don't get Army of Hell.

To its credit, it effectively halves the Mana cost for spamming Demon Warriors, in the sense that summoning 2 Demon Warriors over two casts of course costs 50 Mana whereas an Army of Hell-backed cast produces that same pair of Demon Warriors for only 25 Mana. As Azmodan is broadly prone to running out of Mana and needing to Hearth, this is potentially nice.

Even so, I'm just... not sure what the appeal is supposed to be? All three Talents at this tier are about improving Summon Demon Warrior; Hellforged Armor also improves the per-cast value, but also improves Demon Lieutenants in the process and has no tradeoff of any kind, while Battleborn lets Azmodan output Demon Warriors quite a bit more often, and once again also offers a benefit to Demon Lieutenants.

So I'm just not sure what the appeal of Army of Hell is meant to be?

It's somehow, in my experience, the most popular Talent at this tier, and normally I might wonder if I'm missing something obvious, but the majority of Azmodans I see pretty inarguably Play Badly, so I'm... doubtful. But we'll get into that next Talent tier.


Hellforged Armor
Demon Warriors and Demon Lieutenants permanently gain +20 Universal Armor and their health decay is 25% slower. (ie Demon Warriors go from 17 seconds at most to 22.66 seconds at most, while Demon Lieutenants go from 21 seconds at most to 28 seconds at most)

It's worth pointing out that the duration extension to Demon Lieutenants adds a Smite by default.


Battleborn
Summon Demon Warrior's Mana cost is reduced from 25 to 20. Every Basic Attack Azmodan lands reduces Summon Demon Warrior's current cooldown by 0.75 seconds and Demon Lieutenant's current cooldown by 1.5 seconds.

Note that this is functionally an increase to Mana drain in spite of strictly reducing Summon Demon Warrior's Mana cost, as it only shaves off 20% of the cost, but sustained Basic Attacks will result in about 75% more casts of Summon Demon Warrior. Put more directly, by default Summon Demon Warrior spends 2.5 Mana per second if cast as soon as possible every time, whereas with Battleborn it can rise to about 3.33 Mana per second. This gets even more true if combined with Bombardment, since a Bombardment volley provides a total of 3 seconds of cooldown reduction per second, and so Azmodan can be summoning a Demon Warrior about 3 seconds after his last summon if things are timed right, rather than about 6 seconds later.

Also, this is probably pretty obvious, but I should explicitly point out that while Battleborn gives Demon Lieutenants twice the cooldown reduction as Summon Demon Warrior, the proportionate impact is still greater for Summon Demon Warrior because Demon Lieutenant's cooldown is 6 times what Summon Demon Warrior's is. Specifically, it results in Demon Lieutenant coming off cooldown every 24 seconds if Azmodan sustains Basic Attacks.

Level 7 Talents

Art of Chaos
If a given Globe of Annihilation cast hits at least two Heroic enemies, Azmodan restores 40 Mana and gains 2 additional Annihilation.

I don't really get Art of Chaos.

For Annihilation-building, it's oddly bad, and in a pretty straightforward manner. It gives at most 2 Annihilation per Globe toss, and can never give Annihilation if only one Heroic target is in reach: if Bombardment is faced with two Heroic targets, it automatically eclipses Art of Chaos... while Bombardment can also scale all the way to 4 Heroic targets, and will still give some Annihilation if only one Heroic target is in the area. Master of Destruction is a less direct comparison since it runs off All Shall Burn, but All Shall Burn can be used every 8.5 seconds (if we assume a full channel every time) rather than Globe of Annihilation's every 10 seconds, and Master of Destruction can give Annihilation if only one Heroic target is in the area, gives equal Annihilation to Art of Chaos if it hit just 1 Heroic target, and can scale still higher if multiple Heroic targets are clustered together. The only thing Art of Chaos has going for it (in terms of Annihilation generation) is that it can trigger on long-range Globe tosses, where its competitors both require Azmodan is somewhere closer than line of sight. That's something, I guess, but undercut a bit by the fact that longer-range shots are particularly difficult to get multiple Heroic targets with.

But okay, it does also have its other benefit of refunding Mana. It is worth emphasizing that Azmodan is prone to running through his Mana, and Globe of Annihilation is in fact the single biggest drain on his supply by default. Furthermore, Azmodan doesn't have many other Talents for reducing his Mana drain, and in fact has multiple Talents for increasing his Mana drain. Art of Chaos is almost unique on this point.

On the other hand, it's only about half of Globe of Annihilation's cost being refunded, it doesn't increase the refund for Tide of Sin shots (And so is only refunding exactly 40% of the cost of a Tide of Sin toss), and Azmodan's propensity for running low on Mana is a slow-burn issue. He's prone to running out of Mana in the sense of needing to Hearth after 5 minutes of action, not in the sense of a 60-second teamfight running him dry. Extending how far his Mana goes is a benefit, but a kind of nebulous, light payoff. That's not a clear, strong appeal.

I can kind of see what happened here from a design perspective. This Talent tier is something of a repeat of the Level 1 Talents, in terms of 'every Talent provides new vectors for accruing Annihilation', offering more customization to the Annihilation-collection grind. Furthermore, Heroes of the Storm doesn't like to combine multiple cooldown-reducing effects, and there's both design and coding reasons why this makes sense to me -this might seem like a random aside to you, but the thing is I think Art of Chaos would make much more sense if it gave a partial Mana refund and a partial cooldown refund. But since that overlaps with Gluttony's 200-Annihilation benefit and is positing a version of Art of Chaos that doesn't customize Annihilation collection, it's probably not on the table given the dev design tendencies.

Even so, I wish it was designed very differently. For one thing, its Annihilation-granting condition is functionally just 'Gluttony, But Bad': Gluttony also adds 4 Annihilation if exactly 2 Heroic enemies are hit, but then it gives Annihilation if only 1 Heroic enemy is hit and will scale the payoff higher if more than 2 Heroic enemies are hit. While Gluttony and Art of Chaos aren't in direct competition, it's clear Heroes of the Storm prefers Talents to be reasonably distinct from each other, not just within Talent tiers but across all Talent tiers, and not just in the literal sense of not having the exact same effects but in the sense of generally preferring that they're meaningfully different

Confusingly, it was nerfed since I started playing: it used to give 4 Annihilation if triggered, not 2. It was already underwhelming at the time, and I have absolutely no idea why the devs felt it needed a nerf. I dunno, maybe they thought it would synergize well with Inescapable Annihilation, which was added at the same time? That'd be a very bizarre line of reasoning, but it's all I can think of...


Bombardment
For 3 seconds after casting Globe of Annihilation, Azmodan's Basic Attacks have their maximum range raised from 5.5 to 7 and will clone themselves onto targets within radius 3 of Azmodan's primary target (extended by the primary target's unit radius), with a maximum of 3 extra targets per attack. For each Heroic enemy successfully hit by a Basic Attack fired while this effect is active, Azmodan gains 1 Annihilation.

A couple clarifications: firstly, Bombardment is actually mechaniced as a 'bounce' effect, so it follows bounce rules like 'cannot go after targets that are not currently visible', even though it doesn't look like any bouncing behavior is at work. Similarly, it should be emphasized that the secondary shots can travel up to about range 10 if Azmodan is aiming at a target at his Bombardment maximum range and further hostiles are beyond his primary target. Thirdly, I am mostly confident Bombardment is one of Heroes of the Storm's rare truly random effects, in that if there's more than three possible secondary targets it appears to pick at random which three to target. Also, I should point out that 'benign' targets will never be selected by Bombardment for secondary shots, even if that means not using the full secondary shot potential. eg if Azmodan targets an enemy Tower whose adjacent Wall is still intact, Bombardment will never select the Wall as a target. This can be worked around, mind; Azmodan could target the Wall to have Bombardment select the Tower as a secondary target, for example.

Anyway, Bombardment itself is a Talent I rarely see picked, and at first glance I totally understand why: it's a Basic Attack-focused Talent on a Hero whose Basic Attack is weak, and who can go long periods not using it because most of his kit doesn't require getting that close and the one exception actively blocks usage of his Basic Attack. However, I kind of suspect Bombardment is being widely-underestimated, because it has several non-obvious advantages that are collectively pretty significant, especially if Azmodan's build leans into them.

Firstly, Bombardment is extremely synergistic with Wrath. It can actively provide 'extra' Wrath-derived Annihilation, as Bombardment shots will in fact collect Wrath Annihilation if secondary targets are Heroic targets, and probably more importantly it makes Wrath's damage marker much more useful. There's the straightforward point that Bombardment's range extension lets Azmodan trigger Wrath markers from a safer distance, but what I'm actually driving at is chiefly the multi-shot implications: if Azmodan hits 5 Heroes with a Globe of Annihilation, he'll mark all 5 of them but by default he'll only be able to use a maximum of 2 of those marks. The remainder will time out before his third Basic Attack can make contact, not to mention before he can even start fourth and fifth attacks. With Bombardment, suddenly a Globe that hits 3 or more Heroes can have every Wrath mark utilized! This is a very big impact on Azmodan's burst damage potential against grouped-up enemy Heroes, and Bombardment is the only way for Azmodan to accomplish this result.

Similarly, Bombardment has significant synergy with Battleborn, as the Bombardment shots do in fact all trigger the cooldown reduction effects. 3 Bombardment volleys per Globe toss means he can trigger the cooldown reductions 12 times in 3 seconds: that's 9 seconds of cooldown reduction to Summon Demon Warrior and 18 seconds of cooldown reduction for Demon Lieutenant per Globe toss. Altogether, Azmodan can output a shocking amount of summon pressure, including have multiple Demon Lieutenants active at the same time! This can be taken still further if Azmodan took Gluttony at Level 1, resulting in Globe tosses occurring more often to get Bombardment triggered more often and so mass Battleborn triggers more often, and Brutish Vanguard or Chain of Command can be taken at Level 13 and Hell Rift at Level 16 to noticeably increase the value of flooding out Demon Warriors and Demon Lieutenants.

Thirdly, Bombardment is actually a rather big aid to Azmodan's ability to collect Annihilation from Minions. This might sound like a nonsensical statement, since of course you collect Annihilation from Minions by virtue of Globe of Annihilation killing them, but there's the last-hit 'grace period' to consider: since a Minion dying for any reason gives Annihilation so long as it occurs withing 3 seconds of a Globe hit on that Minion, Bombardment can mass-kill Minions and collect Annihilation en mass. If Azmodan is fairly close to the Minions (But not so close that Globe of Annihilation skips its travel time entirely), the entire Bombardment volley will actually make contact within that 3 second window!

Now, Azmodan's Basic Attack is pretty weak, but, well, so is Globe of Annihilation. Three Bombardnent volleys is a total of 255 damage added against 3 extra targets: that's 79 more damage than Globe of Annihilation's base damage. Alternatively, you could compare it to Annihilation: since Annihilation isn't Level-scaled where Azmodan's Basic Attacks are, at Level 7 utilizing Bombardment in this way is kind of like suddenly gaining 335 Annihilation. (Actually, until you have 225 Annihilation, it's more akin to gaining over 600 Annihilation, thanks to the penalty against non-Heroic enemies) That's more than half of what's possible to get out of Annihilation! (Even accounting for the 150 damage added at max Annihilation)

One might object that this is really misleading, since Bombardment is only adding damage against 3 targets, whereas increasing Globe of Annihilation's damage affects every victim hit. This is true, but a bit less relevant than you might think for the specific context I'm talking about here: a 'standard' Minion wave's composition of 3 Ranged Minions, 3 Melee Minions, and 1 Leader Minion is 7 targets, but the thing is that there's a large HP gap between Ranged Minions and Melee Minions. If Bombardment's added damage is enough to push the Ranged Minions into dying quick enough to collect Annihilation, then the damage total is almost certainly still noticeably below what's necessary to kill the Melee Minions. If Bombardment's added damage is instead getting the Melee Minions killed quickly enough, then generally the Ranged Minions actually died to Globe of Annihilation's initial impact.

As such, for the purpose of collecting Annihilation from Minions, Bombardment's added damage often functions almost exactly as if one was instead adding damage directly to Globe of Annihilation: it's only with built-up Minion waves that the distinction tends to be more significant.

Anyway, I do also feel it's actually worth emphasizing the value of the temporary range boost. I already did earlier in regards to Wrath's markers, but there's actually a lot of matchups where it's dubious for Azmodan to stay within his default Basic Attack range of enemy Heroes because they'll do far better when exchanging Basic Attacks and/or because they have the ability to harshly punish Azmodan with other Abilities if he's that close. Range 7 is noticeably safer for pressuring various Heroes, and Azmodan can potentially get hits in from even farther than that by eg targeting a Minion standing in front of the Hero he's actually trying to put damage on.

So yeah, I genuinely suspect Bombardment is being underestimated. It has a lot of useful interactions and utility advantages that really aren't obvious, several of which I've personally never seen another Azmodan make use of at all, so I'm very doubtful the typical Azmodan player actually knows what they're giving up by selecting a different Talent.


Master of Destruction
If All Shall Burn's channel lasts its full duration or the target dies while being channeled on, the final 340 damage for completing a channel additionally hits all other enemies within radius 3.5 of the target. Azmodan gains 1 Annihilation per Heroic enemy inside the radius when this triggers. (Including the primary target if they're a Heroic enemy)

Note that the blast zone preview is visible to allies, and more importantly is visible to enemies. Really visible, more so than All Shall Burn's leash range indicator: foes are pretty unlikely to not notice All Shall Burn starting up once Master of Destruction is taken. Also, an unexpected bit of convenience is that if All Shall Burn was aimed on a Heroic target, and that target dies before the channel completes, Azmodan will still get 1 Annihilation out of them.

Master of Destruction is, in my experience, by far the most commonly selected Talent at this tier, and the stats I can find are consistent with this. I hope this largely comes down to 'players correctly assess Art of Chaos as bad' and 'players simply don't recognize the various non-obvious advantages Bombardment offers', but unfortunately I'm a bit doubtful that this is why this is so, as the combination of build decisions and playstyle I overwhelmingly see from other Azmodan players is... confusing.

Thing is, the majority of the time I see another Azmodan, they elect to play him as a dedicated split-pusher who rarely bothers to join the team for Objectives and similar. Such players typically take Greed, Army of Hell, Master of Destruction, Demonic Invasion, Cydaea's Kiss, Hell Rift (Or sometimes Trample), and then their Storm Talent actually varies heavily but as far as I can tell mostly by virtue of people being equally underwhelmed by all the options and so picking one functionally at random. I'm... not sure why these people don't reliably take Sin's Grasp?

Regardless, I bothered to lay out the full build I see very often, because it's a very clear sort of build (Outside the outliers who take Trample for some reason) that's straightforwardly focused on summon spam and All Shall Burn play. That's all well fine and good, but then the actual way these Azmodans play is, in detailwork... confusing.

First of all, these Azmodans almost never put any effort into collecting Annihilation; it is very normal for them to end the match within 20 points of 100 Annihilation, far below the threshold for activating Greed's boosts to Demon Warriors and All Shall Burn. I rate this as confusing and bad in general -why aren't you playing Zagara if you want to be a lane bully and not deal with Quests?- but it gets doubly confusing with how these players almost always treat Master of Destruction as their primary tool for rapidly clearing waves. If you're not going to get to Greed's advanced benefits and you're not using Globe of Annihilation for waveclear, why on Earth are you picking Greed? Take Wrath so you'll at least get free Annihilation out of pushing in enemy Structures. Even Gluttony would be a more relevant choice to this playstyle, since even these players invariably land Globe of Annihilation on enemy Heroes sometimes, and so would get some extra Annihilation here and there, as opposed to Greed giving this playstyle essentially zero bebefit.

This is especially frustrating to watch ever since Globe of Annihilation's window for Annihilation collection from Minions was doubled from 1.5 seconds to 3 seconds. It's currently possible to (barely) fit a full All Shall Burn cast into that window after launching a Globe, and so it would be very easy for these players to straightforwardly improve their play simply by getting close, launching Globe, then blowing up the wave with Master of Destruction as they already do. With Cydae's Kiss, you can be outright a bit slow to start the channel and still have it work. But even before this change occurred, these players could -and should- have been doing what I just said, just trying to aim All Shall Burn at whatever Minion will die soonest so the channel will end early.

Second, these Azmodans tend to aim All Shall Burn directly upon enemy Heroes, where they seem to think of Master of Destruction as somehow being an improvement at winning lane duels? It's not: if All Shall Burn is aimed directly upon a lone enemy Hero, the only benefit Master of Destruction provides is 2 Annihilation upon completing the channel. These players clearly don't care about Annihilation collection, so... all they're really doing is making it much easier for the enemy to notice All Shall Burn is being channelled on them and indeed letting the enemy see exactly how close it is to completion, so they can more easily time effects like Genji's Deflect. If you want to be a lane bully with Master of Destruction, what you ought to be doing is aiming All Shall Burn at nearby targets when possible, preferably very low-HP ones so you can spring the Master of Destruction explosion on them with essentially no warning. eg targeting the Leader Minion or the lowest-HP Melee Minion, when the enemy Hero is standing nearby that Minion.

Overall, these players would almost certainly get much more value out of taking Bombardment. Among other points, using Master of Destruction for waveclear purposes gets awkward anytime the Leader Minion is dead for any reason; targeting a Ranged Minion or Melee Minion will generally catch 0-1 of the opposite type in the explosion's radius, in which case Bombardment gets very close waveclear capacity in damage numbers while getting to fight from a safer distance and generally adding more Annihilation anytime a fight with even one Hero occurs. If these players were actually hitting the Annihilation threshold to activate Greed's benefits, Globe of Annihilation would in fact reliably kill the Leader Minion and worsen Master of Destruction's ability to do swift waveclear!

I'm also not really sure why these Azmodans pick Army of Hell? I'd understand if I regularly saw these Azmodans do more of an 'in and out' approach to hitting enemy Forts, but they tend to do an extended push where they just refuse to leave until enemy action kills them, and for that purpose Hellforged Armor and especially Battleborn are both better choices. And okay Battleborn doesn't synergize with obsessively using All Shall Burn, but why not at least take Hellforged Armor instead?

The whole thing is very confusing and I genuinely don't understand why I see this so often. Was there some point in development where this was genuinely optimal Azmodan play, and old players simply haven't adapted and new players see gold ring players make it kind of work and just blindly trust that this is in fact Currently Correct Play? Because if it's not something like that, I don't get it.

Anyway, as for Master of Destruction's actual value as a Talent: I personally much prefer Bombardment by default for a variety of reasons (Starting from the fact that All Shall Burn can be countered by Stuns, Silences, well-timed defensive actions, etc), but I don't think Master of Destruction is at all bad. In teamfights it can be useful for pressuring enemies to spread out or be punished, which can be quite useful in its own right, especially against teams that are benefitting a lot from staying close to each other. If you're actually bothering to aim All Shall Burn at low-HP entities, Master of Destruction also becomes a way to spring a lot of damage on potentially multiple enemies very suddenly; this is often a very reliable benefit when certain summon-heavy Heroes like Zagara are on the enemy team, as for one thing most players are terrible at paying attention ro the position and condition of friendly summons, especially summons some other player made. eg Genji teamed up with Zagara will certainly be on watch for an All Shall Burn aimed at himself, but probably has basically forgotten Zagara's Roaches are in the area.

Master of Destruction is also just pretty straightforwardly the best Talent if you are in fact going to do the Full All Shall Burn Build, just with the caveat that you really do need to actually commit to collecting enough Annihilation to activate Greed's benefits or else the full build is losing a lot of value. This is kind of the main of my point regarding Other Azmodans Confusing Me: that if you are going to ignore Annihilation collection so completely, you probably ought to do a different build that doesn't have so much of its value tied up in activating Greed's benefits.

Level 10 Talents

Demonic Invasion

or


Tide of Sin

Level 13 Talents

Brutish Vanguard
Demon Warriors and Demon Lieutenants gain 25% of their base HP. (ie Demon Warriors rise from 435 base HP to 543.75 base HP, while Demon Lieutenants rise from 593 base HP to 741.25 base HP) Additionally, Demon Warriors in particular apply a -30% Slow to enemies with their Basic Attack, lasting 0.5625 seconds past last application.

Note that combining this with Hellforged Armor results in quite beefy demons: Demon Warriors will take about 680 damage to go down, while Demon Lieutenants will take nearly 930 damage.

'Why is the Slow duration so brief', a player might reasonably wonder. This is because Demon Warriors used to have a damage aura that the Slow was also applied by, which ticked every 0.5 seconds, and so at that time they did in fact sustain the Slow continuously if they stayed somewhat close to a target. Unfortunately, when the damage aura was removed, Brutish Vanguard was not updated; this Slow really ought to last 1.5 seconds or something right now, but alas, for now it barely exists.

It's still a decent enough Talent just for the HP boost, but still; not ideal.


Cydaea's Kiss
All Shall Burn's channel time is reduced from 2.5 seconds to 2 seconds. If All Shall Burn's target is Heroic and it either lasts its full duration or the target dies during the channel, Azmodan is instantly healed for 8% of his maximum HP. (ie 197.12 HP)

This does of course lower the total damage, shaving off 2 damage ticks (64 damage lost), thus reducing the total damage of All Shall Burn from 660 to 596. That's almost a 10% loss. That said, it means the enemy has 20% less time to try to break the channel, and more than half the damage is tied up in completing the channel so that's a pretty good trade all by itself. It's even more straightforwardly worthwhile if other All Shall Burn Talents are being taken, since almost all of them tie their value up in specifically completing the channel. The primary target taking almost 10% less damage is much less of a loss if it's securing catching one or more secondary targets for Master of Destruction, as a mathematically straightforward example.

I should also explicitly note that Master of Destruction will not duplicate the heal if multiple Heroic targets are caught by the blast. In general, you probably shouldn't be taking Cydea's Kiss on the idea that it will improve Azmodan's HP sustain; the time between triggers is pretty long (8 seconds, by default), it requires the channel doesn't get interrupted, it only kicks in if directly aimed at a Heroic target, and since this is literally the only self-heal Azmodan has, the fact that it triggering will generally be negated by 1-2 enemy Basic Attacks means it's certainly not going to keep Azmodan going in extended combat. It's also a bit awkward in my book for the fact that Azmodan is very good at keeping himself alive by keeping his distance from enemy offensive action and Cydea's Kiss of course requires he has to get in close to get the heal; when up against Heroes like Illidan that are very difficult to stay a safe distance from, this is a minor point overall, but otherwise trying to leverage the heal is going to just put Azmodan in the hole for HP. I'd thus argue you really should focus on the part where it makes successful completion of All Shall Burn's channel; if you want that, awesome, if you don't, probably pick a different Talent.


Chain of Command
The base cooldown on the Smite ability on Demon Lieutenants is reduced from 7 seconds to 5 seconds, and Demon Lieutenants now generate an aura with a radius of 7 that causes allied Minions, (non-Elite) Mercenaries, Demon Warriors, Demon Lieutenants, and Demonic Grunts to add 25% of base to all their damage. (This aura does not affect the Demon Lieutenant producing it, but if two Demon Lieutenants are within range of each other they will benefit from each others' auras) The aura cannot stack with itself, and updates every 0.5 seconds, with its benefits lasting 1 second past last application.

Note that Chain of Command adds one extra Smite use in the Lieutentant's duration, including that if Azmodan took Hellforged Armor it still raises it from 3 potential uses to 4 potential uses. Also note that while Demonic Grunts benefit from the aura, the damage they do on initial impact is not counted.

I find Chain of Command particularly great if combined with Battleborn and Bombardment; this allows Azmodan to exert substantial pressure with Demon Lieutenants, where it will be very regular for multiple lanes to be covered and/or for individual lanes to have two Lieutenants oblterating enemy Minions. On maps where (non-Elite) Mercenaries are a major part of play especially, this can genuinely be a pretty big deal.
Level 16 Talents

Total Annihilation
Heroic enemies hit by Globe of Annihilation additionally take damage equal to 4% of their max HP.

I'm not sure why Total Annihilation isn't something more like 8-10%, and I'm not sure why it has such a boring mechanical implementation.
By 'boring', I mean that Heroes of the Storm prefers, when possible, to design a Talent so its benefits are not a passive automatic boost, but rather are something that requires the player do something particularly skillful in using the relevant Ability to gain the benefits. Art of Chaos does this in the form of requiring Azmodan catch multiple Heroic targets at once to get its benefits; why is Total Annihilation simply a bland improvement anytime Globe of Annihilation happens to hit a Heroic target?

And to be clear, there's a lot of potential ways for Total Annihilation to do skill-focused things, even just glancing at some semi-common variations already seen on other Talents. Total Annihilation could be implemented as a 'sweetspot' that triggers the percent damage (The center, or more oddly the entire outside edge), or only trigger if the Globe traveled far enough, or Total Annihilation could be implemented as something that strikes after a small delay. (eg '1 second later, Heroic targets that are in the Globe impact radius are hit for X% damage') It really is weird that it's so bland.

As for that percent damage point, Total Annihilation simply has a very oddly low payoff considering how long Globe of Annihilation's cooldown is. There's a lot of Talents in Heroes of the Storm that grant a Hero access to percent damage, and they tend to hover in the range of 2-4% per second being done; Total Annihilation is effectively 0.4% per second unless you assume Globe of Annihilation is always hitting multiple Heroic targets and/or assume Gluttony is giving it cooldown reduction. For Globe-focused play, you... might as well take it? I guess? Assuming you are confident Hell Rift and Trample won't give more value, which is a big 'if'.

I also have mixed feelings about the fact that Total Annihilation doesn't interact with Tide of Sin nor with Annihilation stacks. On the one hand, I think it's good for Azmodan's design that his Talents mostly don't hinge themselves heavily on his Annihilation performance: while a good Azmodan player can reliably build up a decent amount of Annihilation, Annihilation collection can vary quite widely somewhat independent of Azmodan's own skills. It would be pretty frustrating if Azmodan's Talent tree was made entirely of choices scaled explicitly or implicitly to Annihilation, as Azmodan's performance would be very volatile in a wonky way if this was so.

But having some options scaled to Annihilation isn't bad, and Total Annihilation's late placement makes it a particularly good opportunity in terms of having a player make a reasonably informed choice in their build: say Total Annihilation instead did 1% damage for every 50 Annihilation Azmodan currently has. If in one match you got to Level 16 with only 150 Annihilation, you'd be able to shrug and pick Trample or Hell Rift, and then in another match where you already have 420 Annihilation, you could grab Total Annihilation with confidence you were going to hit 450 and so get the full 9% effect. It would also make the name make more sense.

And to be clear, when I point out that Total Annihilation is so low-impact I'm not simply whining 'make one of my favorites stronger!' Total Annihilation being weak isn't just a viability issue, it's a clarity issue; there's not really a clear argument to take Total Annihilation when fighting high HP and/or high-Armor foes, as its effect is so light it's genuinely only slightly more helpful against such Heroes. Most percentage-damage Talents have clear use-cases for helping fight eg Cassia, Deathwing, Cho'Gall... Total Annihilation doesn't have enough impact to have that kind of clarity.

Also to be clear: I take Total Annihilation constantly simply because Globe Azmodan is my favorite way to play him and it's the only option at this tier that enhances that style of play, and I'm still firmly of the opinion that this is a bad choice and I'd probably be better off taking Trample or Hell Rift 99% of the time. If anyone was going to try to argue for picking Total Annihilatio, it'd be me, but no.


Hell Rift
If All Shall Burn either channels for its full duration or has its target die before the channel completes, a Demon Warrior is summoned in the target's vicinity and all of Azmodan's Demon Warriors add 35% of their base damage for the next 5 seconds. (ie adds 18.55 damage to their Basic Attack damage)

Note that this has no range limit on the bonus. Azmodan's ability to have Demon Warriors significantly separated from him is limited, but still. Also note that it only boosts Demon Warriors, not Demon Lieutenants nor the Demon Grunts from Demonic Invasion. I should also reiterate that Master of Distraction has no interaction with it, though this is probably something most people intuit readily enough.

I used to have a pretty high opinion of Hell Rift. Then the devs stripped Demon Warriors of their damage aura, making them much less able to do waveclear, lowered Hell Rift's damage bonus, and made it so Azmodan stores two charges of Summon Demon Warrior, making Hell Rift's free summon less significant in terms of improving Azmodan's ability to push on enemy Structures. Brutish Vanguard's Slow functionally no longer existing also hurts Hell Rift's utility a bit.

It's still the natural choice for a full All Shall Burn build, but currently I'd argue that if you're not doing a full All Shall Burn build, you should probably default to Trample.


Trample
Additional activatable ability
Cooldown: 20 seconds
Windup: Instant
Azmodan charges out to range 6 over 0.6875 seconds, with his unit collision disabled for the duration. Azmodan has a 2.5-long and 2.5-wide hitbox centered on him for the duration, and all enemies who touch it take 275 damage and suffer a -60% Slow for 1.25 seconds. If at least one Heroic enemy is hit, the current cooldown of Azmodan's selected Heroic Ability is reduced by 25%. (ie -5 seconds to Tide of Sin or -25 seconds to Demonic Invasion) Cannot be used while Rooted, and is interrupted if Azmodan becomes Rooted.

Trample's speed is oddly complicated, in that first there's an 0.125 second delay where Azmodan is walking at normal speed, then he's traveling at speed 14 for 0.4375 seconds, then 1 speed for 0.125 seconds. ie there's a big burst of speed in the middle, flanked on either side by much lower speeds. The hitbox itself only lasts 0.625 seconds; I assume that either the first 0.0625 seconds or the last 0.0625 seconds of the charge lack damage.

There's also a radius 1.25 component in the code: I'm not sure if it does something non-obvious, is actually cut content, or if it technically still applies but doesn't matter because the hitbox is covering its full area, but I'm not aware of this doing anything. If you encounter some oddity with Trample, though, this might somehow be the cause.

Anyway, Trample is notable for being literally the only mobility-enhancer Azmodan has. It can be used to help dodge enemy attacks, to let Azmodan escape bodyblock attempts by just ramming right through the bodyblocker, to engage in abrupt bodyblocking, and of course is also a decent chunk of damage delivered very suddenly. This is all nice all by itself, enhanced hugely by Azmodan's complete lack of alternatives for getting those functionalities.

The Heroic cooldown reduction effect is also nice. I'd say it's pretty straightforwardly better for Demonic Invasion, but if you're running Gluttony alongside Tide of Sin, it gives non-trivial value to Tide of Sin as well.

Level 20 Talents

Siegebreaker
Azmodan's Demon Warriors, Demon Lieutenants, and Demonic Grunts add +40% of all their base damage against Structures. (The Demonic Grunt death explosion is an exception and not boosted, but their impact damage on being summoned is affected)

Note that while Siegebreaker uses the Demonic Invasion icon, it doesn't require Demonic Invasion to be selectable, unlike most cases of a Storm Talent sharing an icon with a Heroic Ability. It obviously is more appealing if Demonic Invasion was taken, of course, but it can absolutely be taken alongside Tide of Sin.

That detail noted, Siegebreaker is a weird Talent to me much more for it being a Storm Talent with this anti-Structure payoff. Heroes of the Storm is designed so that a Hero's personal capacity to apply damage to Structures has almost always become pretty irrelevant by the time Storm Talents are in play: often, one clean teamfight victory can be directly parleyed into immediate victory, whether by claiming the Objective and it having scaled so hard by then that it simply smashes the Core or by the surviving team beelining to the Core and directly attacking it as a group. This point is so dramatic that even if a team has destroyed zero enemy Structures prior to Storm Talents, they may still turn a single teamfight win into an unopposable match victory. All without anti-Structure specialization!

If Siegebreaker's effect was simply rolled into Demonic Invasion, I'd nod along to that more readily: it would make Demonic Invasion the split-pushing choice (Even more so than it already is, I mean) in a phase of the game where split-pushing is still viable, useful, and relatively safe. (In the sense that if the split-pusher screws up and dies, this generally has basically no risk of immediately costing their team the match) But as a Storm Talent? I don't get it.

As a result of the prior point, the main context Siegebreaker seems straightforwardly appealing is on Towers of Doom, where anti-Structure damage value is evergreen and split-pushing never becomes completely unviable. Otherwise, I'm not really sure when you're supposed to want it, and I'm pretty sure I'm far from alone in this, as I see it taken very rarely even though most Azmodans I see do in fact take Demonic Invasion and love to do split-pushing; on paper, this is a Talent tailor-made to support that set of decisions, but exactly the people making those decisions seems only slightly less underwhelmed by it than I am.


Black Pool
When a Globe of Annihilation uses a Tide of Sin charge, the impact point leaves behind a radius 4 zone for 5 seconds after impact. This zone does 14 damage every 0.25 seconds to all enemies inside and against Heroic enemies it also applies a -1 Universal Armor penalty every 0.125 seconds, stacking to a maximum of -15 Universal Armor. (ie it takes 1.875 seconds for the Armor penalty to reach the cap on a given enemy) The Armor penalty lasts up to 0.3125 seconds past last application.

Unfortunate oversight: the Black Pool's radius does not increase when Annihilation is maxed. This is because the radius increase for maxing Annihilation was previously a Storm Talent, and so couldn't be combined with Black Pool, and oops the devs didn't consider this new interaction when they turned the Storm Talent into an automatic reward for reaching max Annihilation. Hopefully that gets fixed at some point.

For reference, this is 280 damage added to non-Heroic victims that stay in the pool for its full duration. Heroic targets that stay in the pool for its full duration will take something a bit higher than 305 damage -I'm not going to calc it exactly, but 193.2 damage will occur after the Armor penalty has reached -15, and 112 base damage will be delivered over the course of the Armor penalty rising.

Also for reference, if Annihilation is maxed, at Level 20 a Tide of Sin Globe of Annihilation's final damage will be 1478. After Level modification is taken into account, Black Pool's 280 damage becomes 613.51 damage: against targets Azmodan expects to stay in the Black Pool radius, Black Pool is over a 33% increase in damage! Enemy Heroes will obviously be quick to try to leave the radius, but it's still a good illustration of how Black Pool is legitimately a pretty big increase in power if leveraged well.

It's also worth pointing out that Black Pool helps Azmodan gather Annihilation from Minions in the event that he's still struggling with that at Level 20, since deaths within 3 seconds still trigger Annihilation collection. 168 base damage in those 3 seconds is almost as much as Globe of Annihilation's base damage.

Also note that the pool itself has a sight radius of 6 while it persists. While blowing Tide of Sin for the purpose of monitoring a location is not what I'd call a good first choice, it can be a useful thing to keep in mind when eg trying to prevent enemies from taking a Boss Camp -Black Pool's vision may make the difference!


Inescapable Annihilation
Globe of Annihilation's maximum range is now infinite.

Why, devs, why?

Okay, I do get how we got here overall. First of all, Inescapable Annihilation came along simultaneously to Pride ceasing to be a Talent and instead its effects were made an automatic reward for reaching max Annihilation; there did in fact need to be a replacement Talent here, and ideally it would in fact still be something for Globe-focused play to minimize the disruption to Azmodan's Storm Talent balance/design.

Second, a major part of distinction to Globe of Annihilation is that it has a very long range, and one of the ways Storm Talents do decently often work is to take an existing quality of an Ability and make it go farther, metaphorically. Inescapable Annihilation is the logical endpoint of that exact thought process.

But man do I hate the Talent itself.

There's the relatively obvious point that its implementation per se is... not done well. Globe of Annihilation's marker for an incoming impact will simply time out well before the Globe arrives when fired at extremely long ranges, which is certainly not intended behavior. The Globe's travel speed isn't any higher for extremely long-range shots, and so leveraging it against anything that actually moves is somewhere from 'basically impossible' to 'extremely awkward to actually do at all'. The Globe providing vision as it travels gets extra-weird in its details and implications on very, very long-range shots, in ways I don't think were at all considered when this Talent was implemented. Gluttony providing cooldown reduction can, on extremely long-range shots, result in the cooldown reduction being applied to the next cooldown cycle because yes, the Globe took more than 10 seconds to reach its destination. Globe of Annihilation still briefly reveals Azmodan to the enemy team upon impacting enemy units, and so he can lob a Globe, Mount up, go hide in Brush somewhere, and then be surprise-ganked because he was revealed 12 seconds after he actually tossed the Globe!

If this Talent was going to be done at all, I really think it needed a new custom behavior for shots farther than the regular maximum range. I'd personally have such shots result in Azmodan throwing the Globe up and out of view, and then after a fixed delay (4 seconds or whatever) drop straight from above to the target location. Or such could be implemented as a number button that's linked with Globe of Annihilation, where it's not 'Globe of Annihilation gets more range', but rather is 'Azmodan gains a global-range shot that works differently'. Either way, simply raising Globe of Annihilation's maximum range to 500 and doing nothing else is a very problematic way of handling this Talent.

But I also don't like how it fits into the design space.

Heroes of the Storm is, overall, extremely unfond of letting players force damage onto Structures from extremely long range. Abilities that can travel forever like Sergeant Hammer's BFG very consistently either can't hurt Structures at all, or technically can but not in a manner that isn't casually used to siege Structures with no recourse for the ebemy. (eg Hanzo's Dragon's Arrow will, in fact, damage Structures caught in the explosion, but has to hit a Heroic target to actually detonate) There are very good design reasons for it to be careful with this, and ARAM is very good at highlighting how stupid such capabilities can get: it's always horrible to be on a death clock because your ARAM Core is exposed, Nova took Precision Strike, and she actually realizes she can just blast your Core until you lose.

Now, Storm Talents are more okay to have 'breaking rules', and non-ARAM play has measures in place that mean Inescapable Annihilation doesn't let Azmodan kill your Core trivially by just lobbing Globes at it... but I still really dislike the effects Inescapable Annihilation has, where Azmodan can do things like freely demolish enemy Forts with literally no way to curtail this if he decides to just hide in his team's Hall of Storms. This gets further exacerbated by the current implementation being so bad at hitting moving targets, and for that matter bad at hitting immobile targets if time is a consideration: since it's basically impossible to use Inescapable Annihilation as long-range support to teamfights, and it's such an enormous pain to try to use it for clearing Minion waves on the other side of the map, and it's worthless for trying to interrupt Objective channels at the other end of the map, the main legitimate uses for Inescapable Annihilation are in fact the obnoxious, non-interactive 'Azmodan continuously pokes enemy Structures from so far away he can't be punished' forms.

I'd personally rather Inescapable Annihilation was replaced entirely, given how problematic making Globe infinite range is, but it certainly needs to be reworked, even if it's just making the current idea less busted in its behavior. Just having it provide a number button version that's an infinite range shot that explicitly refuses to hurt Structures and arrives after a fixed delay regardless of distance would honestly cure most of the issues it presents.

As for you-the-player purposes, uh, I still don't like Inescapable Annihilation. Precisely due to how horrendous its current implementation is, it's not very useful, even if you have Tide of Sin and maxed Annihilation: while I complained earlier about the ability to non-interactively slowly demolish Structures, it should be emphasized that it is in fact quite slow: it'll tend to only give serious value here if either used to finish a nearly-dead Structure with impunity, or if used to delay the Core's shield regeneration alongside other plans so you actually increase the damage the Core takes. Similarly, on very, very large maps it is potentially useful to lob Globes at the other end of the map to do waveclear and keep lane pressure in your team's favor, but actually doing so is extremely difficult and can easily just be wasting Mana if teammates arrive and clean up the wave or enemies arrive and get their Minions moving faster than you planned for. You'll almost certainly get a bit of value here and there out of it if you take it, but for a Storm Talent it's pretty underwhelming; if you took Demonic Invasion and haven't gone for an All Shall Burn build I suppose it might be legitimately your best choice in those circumstances, but for Full Globe Build play I'd very firmly argue you should prefer Black Pool, and for an All Shall Burn build you should prefer Sin's Grasp.

So yeah, it needs to be reworked or replace, full stop.


Sin's Grasp
All Shall Burn applies a -15% Slow to its target for the duration of its channel if the target is Heroic. Additionally, if the channel completes on a Heroic target the target will suffer a -50% Slow that lasts up to 2.5 seconds, and in that case All Shall Burn ends the channel with a 3-second cooldown instead of six seconds. This latter effect also triggers if the Heroic target dies during the channel.

All Shall Burn Talents tend to be rough on wording the 'finish channel and/or kill' aspect to their behavior, but Sin's Grasp is probably the worst of them at this, as the text can be validly read as 'refund part of the cooldown if aimed on a non-Heroic target that dies during the channel'. No, it only does anything if the target is Heroic. Full stop.

Sin's Grasp is of course a very straightforward capstone to an All Shall Burn build. The Slow compensates for the self-slow so that it's harder for victims to break the lock, and cooldown reduction means more All Shall Burns, meaning more value out of any prior All Shall Burn Talents Azmodan has taken.


This All Shall Burn icon variant is currently unused. Which is unfortunate: it looks really cool, I like it a lot. It's also mildly interesting to me that the Azmodunk skin set does in fact have All Shall Burn use a purple beam, like this depicts.

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Next time, we cover another villainous person with a name beginning with 'A': Alarak.

See you in the Nexus.