Heavenly Thunder (for Physical Imortals!)
Did you know that Heavenly Thunder (magic) performs INSANELY well on ALEXANDER and other physical Immortals?
Using Heavenly Thunder Passive on Physical Immortals for SURPRISING damage!
Heavenly Thunder is a Tower of Knowledge Passive that has been overlooked ever since we began playing Infinity Kingdom back almost two years ago – it’s description offers magical damage procs on Normal Attack hits, which just has never really proved viable to use. Since the mages of Norheim have pretty low attack speed and dosen’t really benefit from boosting set attack speed, most players like myself has left Heavenly Thunder rightfully where it belongs – on the bench – while we took full advantage of the many strong magic damage passives that the Tower of Knowledge has to offer.
But did you that on Alexander or Barca in an attack-speed based build, Heavenly Thunder despite having no physical damage actually deals a surprisingly high amount of damage! Moreover, and maybe even more importantly, it deals damage to random enemies offering us a rare opportunity to have our Alexander frontline deal solid damage to the enemy backline!
How does Heavenly Thunder work?
When your Immortal lands a normal attack Heavenly Thunder has a 30% deals 150% magical damage to 2 random enemies.
This means, that the more attack speed we get, the more procs we are also getting on Heavenly Thunder – same as with Cleave and Combo. What is different is the fact that this on the face of it, really shouldn’t be any significant damage since Heavenly Thunder deals magical damage and we are trying to use it in a physical damage Immortal? Well, we were wrong!
How does it perform in combat?
I have been running Heavenly Thunder on my Alexander and my Hannibal Barca lately to test out what kind of damage we are getting on this thing. I must admit, it is quite a bit more than I expected! We are getting near the same damage as many of the best physical damage passives and on rare occasions I see Heavenly Thunder doing MORE damage than Death Breath (a notoriously strong passive).
While it is true that it CAN even perform better than some of the best physical damage passives, I will not go as far as to say it is indeed better. Usually I see results of between 10-20% of total damage dealt, which is very very solid. Though I do see both combo and cleave provide significantly more, the fact that we are damaging backline Immortals adds further value to this passive!
Does Heavenly Thunder work on any physical Immortal? No. You need to have a very high attack-speed for this passive to work well, meaning it can be run with success on Alexander the Great and on Hannibal Barca (in the right build). In addition, you can run it on Julius Caesar if you are doing the meme-build where you run him as a mage (since he has abnormally high magical attack attributes). But I do not recommend you using this Passive unless you are running either Alexander or Hannibal Barca (and even on Barca you want it to be in an attack-speed centric build like earth-wind hybrid with the attack-speed boost from Qin and Zeno with unique artifact).
But if you are running Alexander especially in an AOE-build with either Genghis Khan or Elizabeth Bathory in the backline, then the value of the damage dealt is a lot higher than e.g. combo, since we turn our Alex into additional pressure on the enemy’s backline. Between an Alex with Heavenly Thunder and a Genghis Khan or Elizabeth with Anger and Death Breath, you can really melt backline Immortals at a very rapid pace.
Conclusion
The overall verdict from me is that this is a passive that anyone running Earth as a main has to look into! For me personally, I see huge potential in this Passive for my future march composition, especially because I will be running Alexander in either a wind-hybrid attack speed build (scaling well with Heavenly Thunder) or in an Earth-Khan lineup!
Published: 18-11-2022