Rose Mother Build

Background and Base Stats

Rose Mother's whole theme is poison. You see it the second you open her base stats. Each star level increases her base damage and her damage to poisoned enemies, scaling up past 1.2x and higher. That bonus follows through to her hero faction camp, where she gives a 1.1x multiplier to poisoned enemies via her faction bonus. It's poison on top of poison, and you'll see it stacked through the rest of the kit.

In level progression, you're hunting for talents like cooldown, projectiles, or critical strike chance to maximize her damage. The plus-one physical projectile at level 30 is the standout pick — 15 damage at level 10 isn't great, and evasion at 20 is basically useless. At 60 she gets 1.1x damage to poisoned enemies. And at 140? If you guessed damage to poisoned enemies, you were correct: 1.2x damage there. Most heroes get something like a 1.15x bonus at their 140 star, but she's getting 1.2x — and she poisons everything, all the time. It's actually really, really strong.

Global Bonuses

Globals are for when your hero is no longer your active hero and is just sitting on the shelf. Rose Mother's are loaded.

• Faction Bonus: +20 physical damage and a 1.05x multiplier to poison damage. Poison is one of the rarer statuses in the game, but a 1.05x multiplier on any status is great.
• Level 90: More damage to poison. Particularly strong for Rose Mother herself and for Druid, who lives in her faction camp and lights up bosses. If you want to maximize Druid damage in Boss Brawl, and Boss Brawl is life, you actually need Rose Mother in your hero set.
• Level 120: Flat damage. Probably the weakest global of the bunch.
• Forge Level 30: More damage to poison. The week I unlocked her, I had Druid sitting in the faction camp without her. Suddenly I had Rose Mother — and because she'd been featured in Arena over the last year, I forged her up to five stars almost immediately. That gave me a giant boost to poison damage across all my heroes, but Druid in particular.

Her globals alone probably put her in A tier, maybe even low S tier — assuming you can reliably get the horde poisoned. That's better in certain game modes like Boss Brawl, but you can also pump out poison damage in Dragon's Tower and Hard Mode Arena.

What you're looking for in a forge is improvements to both skills and the weapon. Strong skill upgrades are how a hero pushes into top tier. A strong forge in general is how you go from B-class to A-class. Rose Mother's checks out off the bat: her weapon evolves off the Damage Tome, which is core to every build, so the evolution is essentially free. She also has a physical weapon, which I wouldn't have expected — for some reason I assumed magical.

• Level 1: Bleed Exploit gives 1.3x damage to bleeding enemies. 1.3x is a giant multiplier — but they have to be bleeding, so you need bleed coming from somewhere. The other option is Mighty Vines, a more lackluster damage increase that doesn't require the bleed. Until you have bleed in the kit (which shows up later), Mighty Vines is the safer pick.

• Level 2: Crippling Poison slows poisoned enemies by 50%. Thistle Field already slows, but this lets her main attack apply slow to everything she poisons — which is most of the screen. That's huge for keeping the horde off you. The other option is Swift Lash, which reduces the cooldown of her main weapon. Take Swift Lash early in the game until you hit the cooldown cap, then switch to Crippling Poison. Honestly, Crippling Poison might be strong enough to take from the start.

• Level 4: Thornling. Her unique weapon — the thorn tendril — becomes a weapon of floral ferocity. Hitting a poisonous bud additionally spawns a stationary thornling that fires thorn projectiles at enemies. Aiming at her buds now triggers damage all across the battlefield.

• Level 5: Thornlings now shoot in a 360° pattern, and thorns additionally cause bleeding. This is where the bleed comes from — which means you don't take Bleed Exploit at Level 1 unless you've already got this forge level, or you're packing a bleed weapon like Sword of Damocles or Phantom Fang. The other option is Grow Faster, where hitting a thornling enrages it for 4 seconds, making it attack faster.

She doesn't have a tremendous amount of skill upgrades in the forge, but the slow on her main attack is huge, and the thornling boost feeds directly into her bud mechanic. The whole key to Rose Mother is spawning poisonous buds and making sure your main weapon hits them. Everything in the forge bends around that loop.

Rose Mother is a new adventure hero, meaning she gets a lot of additional power from star levels — and star levels take a long time to acquire. Hitting four stars can take something like a year if you're not throwing money at the game or focusing a single hero. I have her at four stars after two years, just barely, and I also have the faction wars bonus for her camp.

Level 40: Poisonous Bud

Spawns a poisonous bud every 2.5 seconds. Hitting the bud with your main weapon causes it to explode in a poisonous blast for around 3,000 damage. Starring her up gets more buds onto the battlefield doing more damage. This is the heartbeat of the kit.

Level 80: Thistle Field

Every 15 hits with the main weapon, Rose Mother summons a field of thorns on the ground that slows enemies and deals a whole bunch of damage. Poisoned enemies take an additional 100% damage on top of that, and the scaling on this skill is solid.

The "every 15 hits" line is more important than it sounds. Hits are tied to cooldown, so game modes where cooldown caps higher mean Thistle Field procs faster. In Normal, Hard, and Arena, where you can sit at 90% cooldown, you'll be cycling this level 80 skill much more often. Skills are a big source of hero damage, so that makes her especially good in those modes.

Level 100 Ultimate: Wild Growth Toxin

Hitting poisonous buds with the main weapon fills a meter. The interesting part: this isn't off of kills, it's off of you actually hitting buds with your main attack — which means you can proc it in any game mode. When the meter fills, you get a 50% increase to bud spawn rate, and exploding buds leave behind a poisonous cloud doing damage per second. The horde getting forced to walk through that cloud is how you maximize her damage.

Let's take her into Try Mode. Her main weapon is the big green thing shooting out of her face, and the buds pop up every two seconds. Get the green attack to hit them and they explode into all the toxic chaos you'd hope for.

Here's the special tip: while most heroes you want auto-aim on, with Rose Mother you actually want it off. Her attack alternates forward and back behind her, so you have to work that rhythm to land on the buds. That makes her a higher skill cap hero — you can't just let auto do the work. But aiming and hitting the rose buds creates a toxic amount of damage all over the battlefield, and once you evolve her weapon and the buds turn into thornlings, they start spewing out doom and destruction in every direction.

The play loop is: let the rose buds spawn, hit them with your attack to proc them, then have the horde run over the leftover clouds to die. Those clumps of Zyra's ultimates — sorry, Rose Mother's ultimates, League of Legends brain — give you pretty solid coverage on the battlefield. Area of Effect doesn't seem to scale her ultimate clouds, but it does seem to bump the size of the bud explosions. Tested it side-by-side in Try Mode and the thornling explosions came out the same size, so for science, that one's a wash.

Rose Mother lands in the high A, mid A range. Strong globals that boost up the rest of your roster — particularly for Boss Brawl and particularly for Druid. The slow in her kit, tied to your ability to hit the rose buds, plus the evolved weapon, pushes her into harder content like Hard Mode Arena and Dragon's Tower. She's not elite in any one event, but she's a lot of fun, her kit is entertaining, and she actually makes you play the game. Solid A.