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[Heroes of the Storm] There is no new hero, ONLY XUL.
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What have these careless hands wrought . . .
I once rode Mecha Tassadar around on a unicorn rather than allowing him his right to transform and roll out.
Steam: TimIsOnSteam
Battle.net: TimIsOnBnet#1745
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I agree that the deal for the packs was bad, but the card back was awesome, and they made some of the game boards festive.
They must sell a lot more card packs in HS than they do heroes/skins in HOTS though, or you would have seen a similar deep discount. The 50% off in HOTS felt like they just put everything at an actually reasonable price, and people ate it up thinking they were getting a deal.
They did adjust CB to only spread to 3 targets, so that's something.
They never should have implemented those scaling changes if they knew they wouldn't be able to adjust them before the holiday break. People have been playing what is essentially a broken game since that patch has been implemented. Before then, things weren't perfect, but you didn't bullshit like Nova and Kael'thas are right now (or Illidan, for that matter). Even the worst heroes had a chance to stay a live for longer than 3 seconds and actually contribute, and now it's just Everybody Dies.
The current meta is built for super twitchy reaction times, and if that's going to continue then I doubt I'll be investing nearly as much time into this game over the long term. I don't play multiplayer FPS's for the exact same reason.
Hypothetically, the team couldn't sit on the scaling changes because other incoming balance decisions hinged on them, and pushing scaling back might mean either A) push those other balances back as well, or
hypothetically
The time to death and the strength of supports is still a great draw for this game.
Maybe things are bursting down a bit quicker now, and that is worrying if they continue down that path, I agree with you.
Keep in mind that Shadowbolt is on an absurdly low CD for what it is.
I mean, piercing shadowbolt just deletes teams when you fight in tight spaces on objective based maps.
saying things are bursting down a bit quicker now is hilarious. the meta is basically stuntrains and <2 second kills on the entire roster. i miss towers actually being a threat, as is nowhere on the map is safe to avoid instaganks from incredibly easy to land stun combos.
I just don't want to see this game become a burstfest. It already turns into that when you're facing certain comps/heroes. Unless they are actively working on walking this problem backwards in some way, the meta is going to continue down this path because it is by far the most powerful way to win games. Without the ban mechanic in place, people will simply pick up Kael/Nova/etc. and ignore any of the weaker heroes who are easily exploited. While there's always a ranking or meta of some kind in competitive play, it wasn't that bad before. I mean, we saw some crazy comps at recent tournaments like Blizzcon that proved that you don't always need to stick to an established script to win. Now, I'm not necessarily sure that's the case.
This argument only makes sense if you assume that the scaling changes are themselves a net positive or progressive change. Without any follow-up to adjust the inevitable skew, I'm not sure that's the case. They only released Cho'gall and Lunara in the same span that they pushed the scaling changes through, and both of those heroes are weaker than they should be. The game itself is now a lot burstier, and structures are a lot weaker. In the meantime, all you've really seen is a relative reshuffling of the existing hero balance, which was actually in a pretty good place overall. They could have easily just changed the numbers for the two new heroes to account for the existing hero scaling, and then waited until after the holiday season to implement the scaling changes.
This would have allowed people to play what they already know is a relatively balanced, as opposed to simply embarking on an unknown and letting the chips fall where they may. Especially during a time where they knew they simply wouldn't have the bandwidth to make any changes for several months, including through a holiday and marketing season where tons of new players would be trying out the game for the first time.
I bet Towers of Doom, for example, would be a lot less irritating to people if it didn't exacerbate the fact that structures are basically worthless now. Once you get those walls down, the fort provides almost no help in a team fight and takes literally 10 seconds to kill, and that's a direct result of the scaling change.
Hypothetically
Never gets very much uninterrupted sleep.
Well Hearthstone pulls in a lot more whale moolah than HotS, but that's a crummy reason to lame out on a holiday sale. Sure, the standard HotS prices are kind of crazy -- that's been discussed to death -- but let's not pretend that the Hearthstone pricing isn't greedy as fuck too.
Nova breaks all that. She feels like a character from a different game. And she feels like she doesn't belong in Heroes. Nobody else can 100 to 0 someone in 1 second in Heroes except for Nova. She's a one of a kind, and completely out of place.
don't sleep on the job
They didn't really have a choice on that because Cho'gall. Remember that Cho'gall is the entire reason they realised the problem with the way power changed as you leveled and Cho'gall basically requires that smoothing out of the leveling curve to work.
And of course until you implement the scaling changes you can't do anything else or test anything else cause it's all a waste of time and inhibiting you from collecting real proper data that you need to see to make changes.
But yes, they really need to hit this game with some serious rebalancing to at least lower the power of CC-trains. And hopefully increase the power of towers again cause seriously, tower diving in this game is now just stupidly safe.
As a hypothetical, what if Cho'gall and Lunara were slightly overpowered when they were introduced, but everything else was left the same and no scaling changes were introduced. Would that have the same impact that we are seeing now, or would people just be saying oh look, a new hero is OP, they'll just nerf it later?
I've heard a lot of players asking where is Mankirk's wife, so I assume she will be added in at some point.
only other announced hero is tracer, but i would assume they're going to try to sync her release a bit more with the overwatch release
You do seem to be missing the point. The scaling changes were coming no matter what. It had to be done. So any delay in implementing it becomes a delay in any balance change because any pre-scaling balance changes are a waste of time and energy and money. And you also lack any data from which to work on future balance changes. Once you know it's gotta happen, delaying it just introduces a complete standstill into your development pipeline.
And beyond that, Cho'gall according to them simply didn't work pre-scaling changes. He was either stupid overpowered or stupid underpowered depending on whether he was up or down a level on the enemy.
So delaying the scaling changes means delaying both the introduction of new heroes and the implementation of balance changes. It's just a waste of time.
Though the timing, with the holidays and everything, is far from ideal. But I suspect they really wanted/needed to get Cho'gall out as their pre-christmas promotional event in order to get players into the game in time for teh sale.
since he's such a great liar and all...
his trait is that he appears on the minmap as an ally, and no skills and no autoattack will every automatically target him
you have to click each one
and then he can have some of the other shit he cast like tornados and cave ins
B.net: Kusanku
There's still the old list of heroes that might be ready. I remember Mengsk was on there, but since he's likely a really weird hero they are probably gonna give it a bit more time between Cho'gall and him. Dehaka and I think Mekkatorque and a bunch of others were on that list too with various bits of data in the files.
Uh, D3 Wizard I would expect soon.
Other then that, no cue.
There used to be 3, before Tassadar was neutered. Alas. now his damage is crap and he might as well not be a High Templar. High Templars are the mages of the Starcraft universe, and a mage Tassadar is not. Not anymore.
And it's not just Gathering Power: we saw that, after the GP nerf, Nova became even more useless because she's totally reliant upon burst. It's her kit, and while I don't want to see GP 3.0 makes Nova OP or anything, it does make her complete anti-fun because she's such a binary character. Her kit is just a terrible, "baby's first character" example of design that should be removed entirely and reworked from the ground up. You will not get a good character from this kit: you will either get a character that isn't fun because she's very ineffective, or a character that isn't fun because there's no interaction to be had with "I kill you before you can react."
Compare her to Gazlowe, a character who has been bad for a while. His kit has flaws (namely his inability to target stuff), but it's something you can work with. You can't work with Nova. It's inherently rotten design.
Considering my entire point is that doing it right before the holidays is bad timing and shouldn't have been done, I guess I'm not missing anything? They could've introduced Cho'gall and Lunara without implementing the scaling changes. They might have been over- or under-tuned, but that's not meaningfully different from where they are now with the scaling changes.
Triple tap is phenomenal if the enemy team is right. If they have enough squishies it's perfect. You can solo pick them off before they get to a fight, or when they're running, and choosing when to so there's no one to block it is rather easy. How many times to people just blindly run to an objective by theirselves??? -- always!
and at lvl 20 you can triple tap a whole team to death
B.net: Kusanku
That's not how they tell it. Plus, again, you are ignoring how this completely stalls the entire development process for the game since nothing you do till the scaling changes happen matters.
I mean, do we really need another mage when the three that came before were game-centers-on-them-OP for long periods of time until one was gutted and totally reworked while the other two were simply tuned down to "in every game" from "literally always first pick"? :P
Yeah the thing with TT is that once you hit late game, there's very little counterplay for anyone not right next to other people on their team. Even being half a screen away won't save a squishy from a Nova with some GP stacks.
It's to the point no where whenever I play against Nova, if my character has it I automatically take Spell Shield. Even if it's not always up, it means you have a chance of taking the damage and turning on her, whereas without it you might as well just never leave your base.