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Mexico2170 Posts
Blizzard has released a preview of the next patch. On this article they showcase upcoming changes and share their thoughts about concers the community has over certain heroes.
Some highlights:
ETC and Diablo
Diablo will have his Storm Shield replaced with a Storm Power called “Lord of Terror.” The ability will be an activated area-of-effect life steal that can hit multiple enemy heroes near Diablo. We want Diablo in the middle of team fights, and this new talent allows him to do so effectively.
ETC has a new Storm Power called Death Metal, in which, upon death, a ghost of ETC will unleash an uninterruptible Mosh Pit. Do note; this Storm Power can be selected with either of ETC’s Heroics.
Illidan
We’ve seen feedback calling out Illidan as an over-powered hero. When looking at internal data, we do see Illidan trending towards the top of the Assassin category in terms of win rate, but he is still well within our threshold. Statistically, Illidan is not an outlier. We’ll continue to keep an eye on the aggressive Assassin but, for now, we have no major changes in store for him.
Lost Vikings
The Vikings continue to trend towards the top of our win rates. We believe the high win rate can be attributed to the Vikings ability to soak a massive amount of experience and the strength of their Longboat Raid! Heroic ability. For our next patch, we’ll be altering both of the Vikings’ Heroics to include:
If the Lost Vikings’ Longboat is destroyed, all the Vikings will be stunned for 1.5 seconds. This should allow for coordinated teams to pick off the Vikings. For Play Again, we’re adding a full heal to all live Vikings in addition to the current functionality.
Sylvanas
Sylvanas is in a fantastic spot when it comes to her win rate. Currently, she sits close to a 50% win/loss ratio—the benchmark we aim for with our heroes. When looking at her talents, we’re happy to report that we’re seeing a number of diverse builds. However, we have noticed that Wailing Arrow is the clear winner when it comes to her Heroic abilities. We are looking at possible changes and community feedback to make Possession more viable. We’ll be leaving Sylvanas in her current state until we have a better answer.
You can read the hole thing at the official Heroes of the Storm site. http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/blog/18962729/developer-insights-patch-preview-552015-5-5-2015
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Caldeum1976 Posts
I think the healing ward stuff is the most important change.
It will no longer always take 2 auto-attacks to destroy the Healing Ward; instead it will have a scaling health value and can be damaged by area-of-effect abilities. This means placing a healing ward in the center of a massive team fight might not be the best decision, as it’s likely to be destroyed quickly.
Healing Ward will have a higher targeting priority, so players won’t be able to protect the ward by standing on top of it.
To make it higher target priority than heroes and hit by aoe really changes how you have to play them. I've always been really frustrated with my team never killing the healing wards and always auto attacking heroes when denying the ward is one of the most important things you can do. Maybe more people will try other talents now instead of the 95%+ rate of picking ward.
With Sylvanas I saw someone suggest that only her auto attacks and Withering Fire proc Black Arrows instead of Shadow Dagger proccing everything in sight, and I agree with that. It doesn't change too much but as is it's undeniably strong and blizzard probably doesn't want to completely overhaul it so that's the best option imo.
I really hate that E.T.C. talent.... no more really to be said, it's just crazy. Why are both of the top 2 warriors getting the awesome new talents instead of Arthas, Sonya, or any other discarded warrior? Can't really speak on the Diablo talent since we don't have numbers though.
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Looks good for the most part except that ETC death thing. I mean, they've just redone Uther so that death is actually a penalty again and now they bring this back.
Why are they are so bent on having after-death abilities when dying is what every hero should be avoiding anyway except maybe Murky. It just punishes the enemy team for killing ETC and worse suiciding ETC can become a tactic, like what happened with Uther and getting him killed so he could land the perfect Divine Storm.
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Mexico2170 Posts
Yeah the ETC change is just stupid. ETC basically becomes untargetable by any melee hero in the lategame, and since he can dash and stun probably just unkilleable overall.
We don't know all the deatails though, it may end up being bad for some reason, still it seems terrible that they give another hero a invinerable ghost whop can use an ultimate again..
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What did I just read, diablo gets something like a AOE bfb?
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What is Blizzard's obsession with post-death skils
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On May 06 2015 04:07 FreeZEternal wrote: What did I just read, diablo gets something like a AOE bfb?
I think that's fine pending the scaling. It's clearly not going to be 15% on each hero. It'll probably be scaled where it's a waste to use on 1 hero but pretty strong if you hit all 5 and depending on the range that might not be possible even in some of the tight fights like on Haunted Mines, tributes, ect.
Death Metal does look really stupid/broken though.
Edit: Reading the preview there are unannounced nerfs to Diablo and ETC too.
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Northern Ireland174 Posts
No mention of improved matchmaking. Sigh. Hopefully there will be something in the full patch notes! Regardless if this is only some of the announced changes, I look forward to seeing the full list.
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On May 06 2015 05:24 NihilisticGod wrote: No mention of improved matchmaking. Sigh. Hopefully there will be something in the full patch notes! Regardless if this is only some of the announced changes, I look forward to seeing the full list. I guess they would release another preview for that kind of stuff, so just wait a few days.
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blizzards design/balancing teams nowadays are just so funny. sylvanas is atleast semi broken by design. putting a pushing ability which just denies other mechanics, high dmg and high mobility(plus debuff utility...) on one hero is plain stupid.
why evrything has to be triggered by death is beyond me anyways.
and that they still totally lack the ability to see stats need to be taken in context is another thing...
well overall just another "why do stuff, people are paying anyways lolz ^_^v" blizzard patch
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After looking at other heroes winrate's, and taking into account Master league bias, Sylvanas really doesn't seem that bad anymore. Previous post in spoiler.
+ Show Spoiler +I'm guessing they completely neglected to look at Sylvanas' winrate on a map by map basis. On Haunted Mines, her win rate is: Overall: 54% Master: 60% Diamond: 57% Plat: 56% I don't know, but that looks to be an unbalanced hero that once people are decent enough to abuse, makes the map tilt heavily towards one side. (60% winrate means one team has a 50% higher chance to win then the other... it's larger then you would think.) + Show Spoiler + 60% winrate means teams vs her have 40% chance to win, 60/40 = 1.5
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Why can't Wailing Arrow just have a short cooldown between occurrences?
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On May 06 2015 13:12 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Why can't Wailing Arrow just have a short cooldown between occurrences?
Less charges (3), 30% extra damage to non-heroic by default, Violá, Sylvanas with the Banshee talent is no longer a 10Q spammer, and she becomes a much more Specialist-oriented.
It would also pair up nicely with the auto-launch when the carcarj is full.
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It's sad they hardly do anything about the boring talent builds. For example illidan is fine from a balance point of view I think, he can be really good but it depends largely on the metagame as well where double support tends to be very good which benefits him. If single support with heroes like brightwing and malfurion and more nuke becomes popular he could get fairly weak pretty quickly. However illidan has just 1 build, all his dominant talents are 90%+ of the time chosen at higher levels which is pretty much always as the data for not picking it includes toying around, misclicks etc. He has two choices, sixth sense or giant killer at 13 and demonic form/bolt/nexus blades at 20 which both are lopsided too towards sixth sense and demonic form actually.
It's the same thing as sc2, sure balance by numbers may be alright and a fair number of the hero pool is 'viable' but the strategy diversity is lacking because of insufficient tweaking. Especially a moba just more tweaks to freshen up the metagame is good, who cares if by massively tweaking illidan talents he goes from often picked to rarely picked for a while, you can buff him afterwards to get him back to playable. However this reluctance to touch talents more is annoying. They have done a great rework on Tyrande which arguably is the best designed hero now where at most talent choices you have 2-3 viable picks and you actually have to decide ingame a bit which you want. 90% of the heroes however lack this still.. I wish they would just use their data on what picks are taken at some decent level (diamond/master at hotslogs or some arbitrary cutoff of their own mmr) and just take a good look at all talents that are 90% taken, they are just too dominant. Reroll talents into the base of the hero, adjust other talents, nerf the overpicked talent, swap tiers around etc etc. There are so many ways to change it and make the heroes actually interesting..
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haha I like how they buff diablo and ETC because other warriors are coming back. Should have taken into consideration that everyone knows how to outplay those two to some extend by now, while the new builds of other warriors still get many off guard. I basically only meet Diablos who think they can 2v1 my muradin with only one assassin helping them out post level 16.
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On May 06 2015 11:19 dae wrote:After looking at other heroes winrate's, and taking into account Master league bias, Sylvanas really doesn't seem that bad anymore. Previous post in spoiler. + Show Spoiler +I'm guessing they completely neglected to look at Sylvanas' winrate on a map by map basis. On Haunted Mines, her win rate is: Overall: 54% Master: 60% Diamond: 57% Plat: 56% I don't know, but that looks to be an unbalanced hero that once people are decent enough to abuse, makes the map tilt heavily towards one side. (60% winrate means one team has a 50% higher chance to win then the other... it's larger then you would think.) + Show Spoiler + 60% winrate means teams vs her have 40% chance to win, 60/40 = 1.5 I don't know how reliable the winrate data on Hotslogs is given how screwed up matchmaking is. All I know is that, in my games, the team that has Sylvanas on Haunted Mines always has a huge advantage, which makes perfect sense when you consider what her passive does.
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On May 07 2015 00:31 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2015 11:19 dae wrote:After looking at other heroes winrate's, and taking into account Master league bias, Sylvanas really doesn't seem that bad anymore. Previous post in spoiler. + Show Spoiler +I'm guessing they completely neglected to look at Sylvanas' winrate on a map by map basis. On Haunted Mines, her win rate is: Overall: 54% Master: 60% Diamond: 57% Plat: 56% I don't know, but that looks to be an unbalanced hero that once people are decent enough to abuse, makes the map tilt heavily towards one side. (60% winrate means one team has a 50% higher chance to win then the other... it's larger then you would think.) + Show Spoiler + 60% winrate means teams vs her have 40% chance to win, 60/40 = 1.5 I don't know how reliable the winrate data on Hotslogs is given how screwed up matchmaking is. All I know is that, in my games, the team that has Sylvanas on Haunted Mines always has a huge advantage, which makes perfect sense when you consider what her passive does.
The absolute winrates mean pretty much nothing as people uploading have beter winrates anyway, and for example master players all have way above 50%. Relative order could mean something but is even hard to interpret as popularity and other things are a thing too, for example sylv being good because she combo's nicely with LV but the strenght of that combo may more be the result of LV being so good in pubs then sylv. (Just a random example but you get the picture).
For sure she's good on haunted mines though, just like LV dominates on garden terror and illidan on blackheart bay. When you have a tier 1 hero on it's best map you get good first pick material, if it's broken is another question though. I think she might well be but it's tough to have different maps and have some hero not stand out above the rest on a map occasionally. For the rest she is perfectly fine I think, I think the proper fix is just to remove haunted mines.
The entrace waypointing and minimap workings on haunted mines are annoying, the entrance camping leads to random blowouts to much and the map design is snowballing too much. It's just not working well at the moment. Fixing heroes for that map may be like fixing balance for starcraft including steppes of war.
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On May 06 2015 19:14 FeyFey wrote: haha I like how they buff diablo and ETC because other warriors are coming back. Should have taken into consideration that everyone knows how to outplay those two to some extend by now, while the new builds of other warriors still get many off guard. I basically only meet Diablos who think they can 2v1 my muradin with only one assassin helping them out post level 16.
Read the full article, there are nerfs to Diablo and ETC coming, those are just the talent changes listed.
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On May 07 2015 01:32 Markwerf wrote:Show nested quote +On May 07 2015 00:31 xDaunt wrote:On May 06 2015 11:19 dae wrote:After looking at other heroes winrate's, and taking into account Master league bias, Sylvanas really doesn't seem that bad anymore. Previous post in spoiler. + Show Spoiler +I'm guessing they completely neglected to look at Sylvanas' winrate on a map by map basis. On Haunted Mines, her win rate is: Overall: 54% Master: 60% Diamond: 57% Plat: 56% I don't know, but that looks to be an unbalanced hero that once people are decent enough to abuse, makes the map tilt heavily towards one side. (60% winrate means one team has a 50% higher chance to win then the other... it's larger then you would think.) + Show Spoiler + 60% winrate means teams vs her have 40% chance to win, 60/40 = 1.5 I don't know how reliable the winrate data on Hotslogs is given how screwed up matchmaking is. All I know is that, in my games, the team that has Sylvanas on Haunted Mines always has a huge advantage, which makes perfect sense when you consider what her passive does. The absolute winrates mean pretty much nothing as people uploading have beter winrates anyway, and for example master players all have way above 50%. Relative order could mean something but is even hard to interpret as popularity and other things are a thing too, for example sylv being good because she combo's nicely with LV but the strenght of that combo may more be the result of LV being so good in pubs then sylv. (Just a random example but you get the picture). For sure she's good on haunted mines though, just like LV dominates on garden terror and illidan on blackheart bay. When you have a tier 1 hero on it's best map you get good first pick material, if it's broken is another question though. I think she might well be but it's tough to have different maps and have some hero not stand out above the rest on a map occasionally. For the rest she is perfectly fine I think, I think the proper fix is just to remove haunted mines. The entrace waypointing and minimap workings on haunted mines are annoying, the entrance camping leads to random blowouts to much and the map design is snowballing too much. It's just not working well at the moment. Fixing heroes for that map may be like fixing balance for starcraft including steppes of war. I don't get the sense that Vikings or Illidan are as problematic as Sylvanas -- and certainly whatever dominance that they have on Garden and Blackheart's respectively does not compare to what Sylvanas does on Haunted Mines.
With regards to Vikings, I tend to think that the problem is mostly that too many players don't know how to play against them. Specifically, they don't know how to punish Vikings players for split pushing. Longboat definitely needs some more tweaking and I think that the Vikings escape cooldowns are a little low, but they aren't too far from where they need to be.
Illidan is certainly strong, but I don't consider him to be broken or imbalanced at all. It takes a very good player to get the most out of him, he requires the team to be built around him, and counterpicks are available that can shut him down.
Sylvanas, on the other hand, has a butt-simple-easy-to-use passive that lets her shut down base defenses at level 1. That's just an obvious problem.
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On May 07 2015 02:24 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On May 07 2015 01:32 Markwerf wrote:On May 07 2015 00:31 xDaunt wrote:On May 06 2015 11:19 dae wrote:After looking at other heroes winrate's, and taking into account Master league bias, Sylvanas really doesn't seem that bad anymore. Previous post in spoiler. + Show Spoiler +I'm guessing they completely neglected to look at Sylvanas' winrate on a map by map basis. On Haunted Mines, her win rate is: Overall: 54% Master: 60% Diamond: 57% Plat: 56% I don't know, but that looks to be an unbalanced hero that once people are decent enough to abuse, makes the map tilt heavily towards one side. (60% winrate means one team has a 50% higher chance to win then the other... it's larger then you would think.) + Show Spoiler + 60% winrate means teams vs her have 40% chance to win, 60/40 = 1.5 I don't know how reliable the winrate data on Hotslogs is given how screwed up matchmaking is. All I know is that, in my games, the team that has Sylvanas on Haunted Mines always has a huge advantage, which makes perfect sense when you consider what her passive does. The absolute winrates mean pretty much nothing as people uploading have beter winrates anyway, and for example master players all have way above 50%. Relative order could mean something but is even hard to interpret as popularity and other things are a thing too, for example sylv being good because she combo's nicely with LV but the strenght of that combo may more be the result of LV being so good in pubs then sylv. (Just a random example but you get the picture). For sure she's good on haunted mines though, just like LV dominates on garden terror and illidan on blackheart bay. When you have a tier 1 hero on it's best map you get good first pick material, if it's broken is another question though. I think she might well be but it's tough to have different maps and have some hero not stand out above the rest on a map occasionally. For the rest she is perfectly fine I think, I think the proper fix is just to remove haunted mines. The entrace waypointing and minimap workings on haunted mines are annoying, the entrance camping leads to random blowouts to much and the map design is snowballing too much. It's just not working well at the moment. Fixing heroes for that map may be like fixing balance for starcraft including steppes of war. I don't get the sense that Vikings or Illidan are as problematic as Sylvanas -- and certainly whatever dominance that they have on Garden and Blackheart's respectively does not compare to what Sylvanas does on Haunted Mines. With regards to Vikings, I tend to think that the problem is mostly that too many players don't know how to play against them. Specifically, they don't know how to punish Vikings players for split pushing. Longboat definitely needs some more tweaking and I think that the Vikings escape cooldowns are a little low, but they aren't too far from where they need to be. Illidan is certainly strong, but I don't consider him to be broken or imbalanced at all. It takes a very good player to get the most out of him, he requires the team to be built around him, and counterpicks are available that can shut him down. Sylvanas, on the other hand, has a butt-simple-easy-to-use passive that lets her shut down base defenses at level 1. That's just an obvious problem.
Hmm actually i think LV dominance on garden terror is a fair bit bigger than sylv dominance on haunted mines. In general for pubs vikings are much more dominant id say. Numbers indicate this too. Of course you can question the validity of those numbers and if this is really relevant to pro play and thus what should be fixed but i'd say vikings on garden terror wouldneed attention much more than sylvanas on haunted mines. Sylvanas is much easier to counteract and her effect is only doing much on haunted mines if you get into a position where you can actually push freely with the golem, which is usually just when your golem is bigger. Lv on garden terror is amazing for soaking while contesting seeds and mercs much with nice amount of bushes to hide plus 1 viking in the terror while 2 help push creates a real hard 6v5 scenario basically which you cant really counter that well
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