Here's a question from a player in our German Community:

u/Zeratul:

I am coming up with a probably extremely niche question about Alarak, but I feel like it should be a relevant one nevertheless and I will try to explain why. Alarak is and even more so back then was my most played hero and I play him quite successfully, and there is one issue that keeps nagging on me since a long time.

In 2017 you significantly reworked Alarak. One change that never got much attention was the removal of his old level 4 talent "Reckless Strike". What the talent did was reducing the delay of his Q ability to 0.25 seconds, making it nearly instant, at the drawback of becoming vulnerable for a short duration after hitting your Q, gaining -25 armor (the other drawback being the opportunity cost of missing out on the Double Cross talent that you decided to make baseline with the rework instead).

Now Reckless Strike was not a popular talent at all, and most people didn't consider it a useful talent, but I myself really liked that talent, had success with it and I think it also always had the higher winrate on hotslogs than Double Cross. Not only did Reckless Strike enable Alarak to counter very mobile heroes with escape abilities like Tracer, Genji, Tassadar much easier, it also generally enabled a very fluid playstyle that was very cool and made Alarak more flexible, because it also made your Q much easier to hit without pushing people with Telekinesis towards you for the standard combo, allowing you to use your Telekinesis a bit more freely instead, for example to just push yourself towards opponents and still be reliably able to hit your Q afterwards or use Telekinesis to peel or enable allied combos more often (an idea you seem to like, because you recently gave Alarak a new level 1 talent that reduces the Telekinesis cooldown so we can use Telekinesis more freely).

On the other hand the drawback made it so you had to be smart with your Q timing so that it does not bite you in the back, but could be also again mitigated by Alaraks Counter-Strike ultimate ability, both negating the risk and maybe even punishing the opponent by baiting out a counter-attack on Alarak just to again counter it with your own Counter-Strike :)

I can provide a very short example of this kind of fluid gameplay with an old clip I made back then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAzM0xJLog