Tassadar Guide

Tassadar Overview

Tassadar can be an excellent support hero in multiplayer games. Alternatively, he can be an excellent pusher with greater pushing power than even Anvil with Jotunbanes or Fury with Iron Legion. However, the pushing power depends heavily on proper teamwork to babysitting his reavers, is most effective during the Odin push phase against the General and therefore, is not suitable for non-speedrun games. Therefore, for slow casual games or normal games, he is still more optimally used as a support hero, skipping Reavers and Golden Armada Masteries in favor of other masteries.

Tassadar is also an excellent kiter and support hero. He is very capable against hordes of weak mobs.

Tassadar Perks

For games that are not about speedrunning, Tassadar has 3 extremely important perks:

1. Onslaught
2. Helldivers
3. Leadership
4. (Hellwalker) Absorption or Tenacity

For his first 3 perks, there is no debate about their effectiveness. Helldivers are already important for numerous heroes. Additionally, for Tassadar, they allow him to attack them to keep his auto-attack charges up at any point on the map.  It very frequently occurs that there are no enemies to hit, making Tassadar lose his charges. When this happens, Tassadar's survivability is lessened because he loses shield armor and auto-attack damage that, when at full charge, can quickly melt nightmares before they start causing trouble. 

Helldivers can also be empowered, and thus Ascendance is the first mastery that Tassadar picks.

Leadership also adds to empower damage, being even more effective on Tassadar.

While Absorption is overkill in Oldschool games and certainly less effective than Leadership when Tassadar is played properly, Absorption starts to find utility in Hellwalker games, and by late game in Hellwalker, Tassadar can continuously spam Thunderstorms.

Tassadar Mastery Order

Tassadar's mastery is pretty static. It only starts to vary after level 50, depending on whether the General has already been triggered or not by that time. 

Reavers and Golden Armada are only used in speedruns. Because if you clear all bases and trigger the general, you run the risk of pushing TOO fast into the Toxic Hives of Oldschool while the General is still invulnerable, causing the deaths of odins and forcing you to retreat.

On Hellwalker, pushing "too fast" happens when pushing across the bridge, which can spawn chain general nukes. Combined with the double hybrids pop on each player, this is the situation which causes the most deaths on Hellwalker. And often, players are in the odin bubble when that happens, therefore killing most, if not all odins.

1. Level 0 = Ascendance
2. Level 10 = Protective Sensei
3. Level 20 = Lightweight
4. Level 30  = Power Overwhelming ULTIMATE
5. Level 40 = Twilight of Adun
6. 2K Streak = Pierce the Veil/ Khaydarin Deposition
7. Level 50 = Khaydarin Deposition/ Pierce the Veil

Comments on Tassadar's Masteries

Tassadar has 14 Masteries:

1. Energy -> Mid Game Mastery. Especially Oldschool without Absorption.
2. Lightweight -> Core Mastery. Reduces cost and cooldown of Thunderstorms
3. Weapons -> Late Game Mastery. Damage increase to empower is too low. Tassadar's auto-attacks are also not the main source of damage
4. Protective Sensei -> Core Mastery. Energy regeneration + armor. Added bonus is saving teammates
5. Iron Man -> Onslaught locks out this Mastery.
6. Twilight of Adun -> Core Mastery after ultimate. Slowing effect means ability to kite bosses that cannot be blocked with force fields.
7. Ascendance -> Core Early Game Mastery.
8. Stargate -> Useless. Damage from scout and tempests is far too low. Highground vision can be provided by team
9. Golden Armada -> Situational. Only in speedruns
10. Power Overwhelming -> ULTIMATE Mastery
11. Nuke -> Global Nuke
12. Reaver -> Situational. Only in speedruns
13. Khaydarin Deposition -> Core Mid Game Mastery
14. Pierce the Veil -> Core Mid Game Mastery

Tassadar can safely skip Stargate(8). He also cannot pick Ironman(5) since he picks Onslaught perk.