Zagara

Zagara, the Broodmother of the Swarm, is a Ranged Assassin Hero from the StarCraft universe. If Kerrigan is the Queen of the Zerg, then Zagara is the mother of the brood. Cunning and tenacious, she commands her vicious children on the field of battle. Encounter her brood and beware: mess with her children, and you'll answer to mama.

Zagara is a Summoner who provides lots of vision of the battleground.

History
Like many of the Queen of Blades' creations, the  was birthed of the terrible ash and heat of. Unlike most, Broodmothers are capable of complex problem-solving and multi-tasking, and are possessed of the ability to command members of their race with fewer sapient traits. Each Broodmother is an important piece of the greater Zerg organism, able to provide large groups of Zerg with a nearly "independent" perspective.

Zagara is as vicious and resilient as any in the Swarm, but she also possesses extreme cunning. In the years since her emergence, the Broodmother came to see the volcanic planet of Char as the Swarm's crucible: a brutal environment that pushes the zerg to increasing fitness, sharpening their claws and teeth and forcing their flesh to grow thicker.

Autonomic learning has convinced Zagara of the inferiority of other intelligent species, and the time she spent uniting disparate feral broods on Char only strengthened her contempt for the weakness of most races in the galaxy.

When Kerrigan first returned to Char, Zagara resisted Kerrigan's attempt to retake the Swarm, but when Kerrigan defeated her, Zagara submitted, and thus she served the Queen of Blades.

Zagara continued to serve the Queen of Blades during her campaign of vengeance against. After Kerrigan's victory against the Dominion, she turned her focus towards destroying, a fallen. Eventually Kerrigan, Artanis and Jim Raynor met a xel'naga who could gift his essence into Kerrigan to transform her into a xel'naga. Zagara participated in defending a flank during Kerrigan's long transformation sequence as Amon's forces attacked her. Just before the transformation was complete and as Amon's forces were decimated by a psionic pulse eliminated by Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades relinquished her leadership and gave the Swarm to Zagara.

After aiding her Queen in destroying Amon, Zagara took her Swarm and returned to Char where she forcibly lay claim to Char and the systems surrounding it, and crowned herself Overqueen. However, seeing the only way forward for the Swarm in the sector as peaceful co-existence with the terrans and protoss, Zagara set forth motions of peace to the and. This was met with hostility from Abathur, who instigated a silent coup against Zagara in an attempt to respark conflict, but Zagara was able to discover Abathur's plot and foil it, maiming and imprisoning the evolution master and allowing peace talks to continue.

Gameplay
Zagara is a long Ranged Assassin who draws support from her seemingly endless brood to wreak havoc on her opponents. Creep Tumor is Zagara's most iconic ability, providing not only buffs to several of her attributes including attack range and movement speed, but also supplying precious vision throughout the Battleground. Zagara is capable of tearing down enemy defenses from afar and when left alone for even a small duration will turn the strongest enemy structures into nothing more than heaps of rubble.

Strengths

 * Excellent long range, sustained damage
 * Great waveclear
 * Incredibly strong sieging and pushing power
 * Creep Tumor provides a massive amount of vision throughout the entire map
 * Good poke and harass

Weaknesses

 * Quite vulnerable to crowd control
 * Zero mobility, except on Creep
 * Painfully Mana hungry; requires careful Mana conservation
 * Low burst damage

Abilities

 * See Data page for a table of scaled values at key levels.

Trivia

 * Zagara first appeared in StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm (March 2013).
 * Zagara is voiced by Nika Futterman.
 * Zagara was one of the four heroes revealed at PAX East 2014.
 * Due to her size and the length of her legs, Zagara is limited to mounts she can stand on (such as Blackheart's Doubloon, Champion's Nexagon, Championship Banner, Hearthstone Card, Magic Carpet, Star Chariot, and Void Speeder).
 * In the lore, Zagara is a zerg broodmother that summons and commands an endless legion of zerg to destroy her enemies. The developer took that fantasy to heart when they designed her kit and made it so all of her power was reflected in her summons, which can easily outnumber and overwhelm minion waves. They made sure that all of her abilities summoned in some fashion, and they matched the ability functionality with a zerg unit that properly represented it. Another huge part of the zerg fantasy is their ability to spread and use creep. Being a zerg summoner, it felt appropriate for Zagara to be able to lay Creep Tumors down.
 * According to Jeff Beaudoin, Zagara definitely has limited the design space, from an engineering and design perspective. Implementing a ground changing effect other than Creep alongside Starcraft's Creep implementation is complex. The system wasn't meant to support more than one texture overlay on our geometry, and expanding/rewriting the system would take considerable time/resources. This is in addition to the visual issues this would cause, trying to display multiple terrain types coherently and still have them look good. Having other characters that create and use Creep is problematic, because they would have super strong synergy with Zagara. Even a hero that can spread creep and do nothing else would massively increase the value of Zagara's abilities, making it much stronger in any game with an allied Zagara, but not necessarily by itself.
 * Zagara's Heroes of the Storm abilities were later used as the basis for her abilities in StarCraft II's Co-op Missions mode.
 * The ability utilizes the creep tumor from StarCraft II, which is usable by the  unit Zagara is based off of.  allows a zerg player to build structures on ground corrupted by it, and in StarCraft II, creep gives a speed boost to zerg units.
 * Baneling Barrage utilizes, suicidal zerg attackers in StarCraft II that evolve from.
 * references an advanced strain of that appears as a hero unit in StarCraft and an advanced unit in StarCraft II.
 * Infested Drop uses a zerg to drop in . Roachlings first appeared in Heart of the Swarm as a temporary spawn from the  strain of.
 * Nydus Network is based off of the structure from StarCraft II, which similarly allowed for  to be spawned and transport units across the field.
 * The Level 1 talent Infest references the ability queens had in the first StarCraft to infest terran.
 * The Level 4 talent Medusa Blades later appeared as an upgrade for Zagara in StarCraft II's Co-op Missions.
 * The Level 13 talent Mutalisk changes the Hunter Killer into a, a light and nimble flying strain of zerg.