Apparently you can even cleanse the blind and then just wreck face; unclear if it's a bug or not
I'm not really sure what controls when you have vision, either. Sometimes some enemy heroes are visible. Is it just when they are specifically revealed, like the red eye?
Apparently you can even cleanse the blind and then just wreck face; unclear if it's a bug or not
I'm not really sure what controls when you have vision, either. Sometimes some enemy heroes are visible. Is it just when they are specifically revealed, like the red eye?
...Mal'Ganis+Tassadar or Hanzo, OP?
I doubt anything that obvious works. Seen a few reports on reddit of things like the turret camp drop providing vision. I think in ten games now I've probably seen an enemy once during blind as a bat but no idea what was around.
Creep used to mess up dehaka's isolation, though apparently the code is borrowed from containment disk
It comes and goes. I’m ok with stuff being mildly busted but this dude is just nuts.
Honestly most of the really busted stuff hasn’t been new, all the reworks have been the biggest balance issues. Raynor Azmodan Kerrigan tyrande were all problems.
0
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Apparently you can even cleanse the blind and then just wreck face; unclear if it's a bug or not
I'm not really sure what controls when you have vision, either. Sometimes some enemy heroes are visible. Is it just when they are specifically revealed, like the red eye?
...Mal'Ganis+Tassadar or Hanzo, OP?
Mal'Ganis seems to turn off your character's vision, and then things that are outside of that you can still see. Stuff like dudes around capture points, for example.
This is probably an unintended consequence of how they coded it in.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
0
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
KingCaffeine just announced his retirement from professional HotS:
It seems like the design philosophy lately is just "let's make something that's fun to play and absolutely awful to play against"
I mean, I don't want to accuse Blizzard of seriously propping up heroes upon release to push sales.
Buuuuutttt...
They don't do that.
We very quickly forget when underpowered new Heroes are released. Or ones that are actually within reason. We have a tendency to only really remember the OP ones because those stick out to us more. But there have been plenty of underpowered/on par Heroes released as well. Like, Zarya came out being horrendously UP (and then she was kneejerk-adjusted and slungshot back and forth for a bit, oops), Yrel was pretty UP, BW rework was on par, Deckard was on par I think (maybe slightly higher, dunno), I think Alex was on par or slightly under, I seem to recall Dehaka being on par, etc etc etc etc etc etc. If you dig back far enough you'll see there's been plenty of those.
The truth is that honestly, balancing is hard. Numbers are hard. And I'm not saying that in a condescending or sarcastic way, like, it's actually really really fucking hard to get all those numbers right when they're in-house testing. They don't have that many people! Even PTR numbers aren't that useful because not many people are playing that. It's not until it hits Live that you actually get proper data.
If you were to ask me what I thought of Mal'ganis just from watching PTR streams, I would've told you "yeah i think he's probably pretty good, maybe." And I watched a good amount of PTR streams.
It is a lot, lot harder to nail down tanks/healers over DPS as well because it's a lot more vague and less clear cut. Tanks even less than Healers.
Granted, there's been some Hero releases where you could just fucking tell from moment goddamn zero that this particular Hero was busted beyond belief (Kerrigan rework, Fenix, Maiev, etc). And it does get pretty puzzling how it worked its way through testing like that. I can't really speak for the general skill level of the in-house testing they do but I do know for a fact they have some very highly skilled players in there. But, yknow, if those are only a handful vs everyone else having a more broad range....
I dunno. I'm not defending OP releases or anything. But I am providing some perspective that this shit ain't easy. Especially when you're working with limited data and mostly "how it feels" rather than actual real raw data.
Anyway. Just keep in mind that there's been just as many UP/on par releases as there have been OP ones.
Edit: I have pretty high respect for the HotS balancing team regardless though. Outside of a few, er, outliers, they tend to make good adjustments. Kerrigan's nerfs were pretty swift and PRETTY hefty, like. You look at fucking Fenix who was left in such a garbage OP state for SO long because they kept hitting him with baby nerfs, and then you look at Kerrigan. With one single round of nerfs they dropped Kerri down to a ~50% WR. That's really good. And if she's struggling still they can readjust her again, upward a bit, if they need to.
~SHRUG~
Dibby on
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
+5
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
You also get more and better data from releasing a hero slightly overpowered than slightly underpowered, so I have no doubt that Blizzard errs on that side of the equation early on in a release in order to better inform future tuning that will need to be done. This doesn't mean they aim to have every hero have a +60% on release, it just means that while they try for balanced releases, they don't mind having numbers be slightly too high in cases where they are unsure what the full impact will be.
NGS Season 5 is winding down! Tonight Arrogant Nephalem will be playing in the Div C semi-finals against the #3 seed Tickle Me Tassadar. If we win, we'll play for the Div C Championship some time next week. If you want to see Korror using Nano Boost on the wrong target, SeGaTai diving in on Diablo with absolutely no backup, or kime taking a merc camp instead of showing up on time for team fights, join us at 9 PM PST.
And if playing competitive HotS in a more organized fashion sounds like fun to you, we're looking for a few substitute players for next season as well. Shoot me a PM if you want more details.
25 minutes from now, biggest match of the season! Hope some PA-ers can watch!
You also get more and better data from releasing a hero slightly overpowered than slightly underpowered, so I have no doubt that Blizzard errs on that side of the equation early on in a release in order to better inform future tuning that will need to be done. This doesn't mean they aim to have every hero have a +60% on release, it just means that while they try for balanced releases, they don't mind having numbers be slightly too high in cases where they are unsure what the full impact will be.
I also think it's a lot, lot easier to tone a Hero down than to tone a Hero up.
If a Hero is OP or broken, it's typically pretty easy to point to a particular aspect of the kit or talents and go "aha, this is it. this is the thing." And adjust accordingly. You look at Mal'ganis and go "ah, well, he's very survivable, and maybe that's fine given his main tank status, but then he ALSO does a shitton of damage on top of that, maybe his damage should just be lower?" And so you can try lowering his damage, see where that puts him. You could lower his damage just a little, or you could lower it a lot but then buff the Lifesteal % to compensate (so overall survivability remains the same but damage is much lower). More recently with Kerrigan, it was a combination of her Shielding/Burst, so base Shielding was lowered, Volatile was lowered, Kinetic was nerfed, ez.
On the flipside, it can be a looot more difficult to identify what specifically a Hero needs when they're underpowered. There's always the fear of buffing too much, as we saw with Azmo. They could buff something or certain aspects and have it hardly make a dent one way or the other. It gets a lot trickier with certain problematic Hero kits as well. Maiev and Hanzo are good examples, they've been obliterating in high level play but they were average/fine elsewhere. Kept eating nerfs because of that high level OP-ness, now they're not performing very well at all and it's VERY very hard for Blizz to buff them back up to where they should be without tipping the scales further. They tried buffing Hanzo's AA in exchange for nerfs to his E and D and his WR didn't budge an inch.
I think I should just one trick cassia. Full time cassia main.
+4
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
You: How can you tell a Zul'Jin game is gonna be a steamroll?
Me:
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
my opinion about hots balance is that they release too quickly to get meaningfully accurate balance in testing
their cadence reminds me a lot of LoL a few years ago, where they eventually said "You know what? We're gonna slow our asses down for better uniqueness among characters and better balancing therein. And this'll let us spend more time on reworking old characters to be up to modern standards."
and hots sort of slowed down and started focusing on reworks but they're still....pretty quick, all things considered. and i feel like they could definitely benefit from both more unique designs and more balance time
i'm not too beat up about them not really using ptr tho, it's pretty clear at this point that blizzard culture throughout their games is that ptr is more for testing code in a live environment on smallscale where you're connecting to people's computers round the world rather than the internal servers
cassia is a big strong hero and i'm very good with her, but it doesn't matter because entire team decides the loss was my fault for not dropping healing beacon when mal'ganis had dove far too fucking deep in and everyone starts yelling at me
this wasn't even during obj
i'm not wasting that shit so that you could still die regardless
even if i had used it i'm sure y'all would've found some other stupid bitch-ass excuse or reason to come up with.
maybe you should've picked it up yourself then! instead of leaving it alone! i was the only one there anyway.
or maybe it's because our sylv was splitpushing/dying all game and we never had 5 for teamfights/objs but still somehow it's my fault
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
0
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
My guess is that the data they're getting from PTR is not very reliable. So they don't really use it and just end up going with their gut.
Yeah the data from the PTR is essentially random noise. There's no way they get enough people and enough games to get anything meaningful in terms of balance or design. It's really only good for checking for game-breaking bugs across a wider set of use cases.
Every mal’ganis dives so deep I don’t even know where they are anymore.
The problem is that frequently they don’t die for it, lol.
Seriously, just put an Abathur hat on Mal'ganis and he's worse than Cho'gall.
just stun him, lol!! :^)))
Real talk though, he is CCable during Night Rush, like he doesn't have Unstoppable during that, and I think a lot of people don't realize that you can stun/root/silence him out of that?
It's like Junkrat's Riptire, they see it and panic and run instead of just hitting the damn thing so it blows up. People see Night Rush and panic and run.
Is he fun? I keep getting "play overwatch heroes" quests and I dread it. The only overwatch hero that I kind of enjoy is Ana, and I don't always feel like playing support.
3DS Friend Code:
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
+1
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
In B4 Dibby's post on the random game we got matched together in, where we went 40 and zip on Towers.
"YO FAM, WE HAD THIS GAME ON TOWERS OF DOOM TODAY, IT WAS SO LIT! WADDLEDOO AND I GOT MATCHED TOGETHER EVEN THO WE WEREN'T PARTIED, IT WAS CRAZY!! MY BOI MAL'GANIS THO. MAKING ALL THE SICK PLAYS. TOOK EM TO SICK CITY. CAPSLOCK!!! EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!"
good enough for ya?
also, my pal i was playing with pointed out you and i had the exact same profile level (976), haha.
Posts
I'm not really sure what controls when you have vision, either. Sometimes some enemy heroes are visible. Is it just when they are specifically revealed, like the red eye?
...Mal'Ganis+Tassadar or Hanzo, OP?
3DS Friend Code: 3110-5393-4113
Steam profile
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
I doubt anything that obvious works. Seen a few reports on reddit of things like the turret camp drop providing vision. I think in ten games now I've probably seen an enemy once during blind as a bat but no idea what was around.
Creep used to mess up dehaka's isolation, though apparently the code is borrowed from containment disk
I mean, I don't want to accuse Blizzard of seriously propping up heroes upon release to push sales.
Buuuuutttt...
XBL: InvaderJims
Bnet: Pudgestomp#11153
i love hearthstone!
Honestly most of the really busted stuff hasn’t been new, all the reworks have been the biggest balance issues. Raynor Azmodan Kerrigan tyrande were all problems.
Mal'Ganis seems to turn off your character's vision, and then things that are outside of that you can still see. Stuff like dudes around capture points, for example.
This is probably an unintended consequence of how they coded it in.
Apparently Jin of No Tomorrow also announced his a few days ago.
They don't do that.
We very quickly forget when underpowered new Heroes are released. Or ones that are actually within reason. We have a tendency to only really remember the OP ones because those stick out to us more. But there have been plenty of underpowered/on par Heroes released as well. Like, Zarya came out being horrendously UP (and then she was kneejerk-adjusted and slungshot back and forth for a bit, oops), Yrel was pretty UP, BW rework was on par, Deckard was on par I think (maybe slightly higher, dunno), I think Alex was on par or slightly under, I seem to recall Dehaka being on par, etc etc etc etc etc etc. If you dig back far enough you'll see there's been plenty of those.
The truth is that honestly, balancing is hard. Numbers are hard. And I'm not saying that in a condescending or sarcastic way, like, it's actually really really fucking hard to get all those numbers right when they're in-house testing. They don't have that many people! Even PTR numbers aren't that useful because not many people are playing that. It's not until it hits Live that you actually get proper data.
If you were to ask me what I thought of Mal'ganis just from watching PTR streams, I would've told you "yeah i think he's probably pretty good, maybe." And I watched a good amount of PTR streams.
It is a lot, lot harder to nail down tanks/healers over DPS as well because it's a lot more vague and less clear cut. Tanks even less than Healers.
Granted, there's been some Hero releases where you could just fucking tell from moment goddamn zero that this particular Hero was busted beyond belief (Kerrigan rework, Fenix, Maiev, etc). And it does get pretty puzzling how it worked its way through testing like that. I can't really speak for the general skill level of the in-house testing they do but I do know for a fact they have some very highly skilled players in there. But, yknow, if those are only a handful vs everyone else having a more broad range....
I dunno. I'm not defending OP releases or anything. But I am providing some perspective that this shit ain't easy. Especially when you're working with limited data and mostly "how it feels" rather than actual real raw data.
Anyway. Just keep in mind that there's been just as many UP/on par releases as there have been OP ones.
Edit: I have pretty high respect for the HotS balancing team regardless though. Outside of a few, er, outliers, they tend to make good adjustments. Kerrigan's nerfs were pretty swift and PRETTY hefty, like. You look at fucking Fenix who was left in such a garbage OP state for SO long because they kept hitting him with baby nerfs, and then you look at Kerrigan. With one single round of nerfs they dropped Kerri down to a ~50% WR. That's really good. And if she's struggling still they can readjust her again, upward a bit, if they need to.
~SHRUG~
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Then why did you say that....
to fuel HotS doomsayers without explicitly burning bridges (though probably still burning bridges)
25 minutes from now, biggest match of the season! Hope some PA-ers can watch!
3DS Friend Code: 3110-5393-4113
Steam profile
I also think it's a lot, lot easier to tone a Hero down than to tone a Hero up.
If a Hero is OP or broken, it's typically pretty easy to point to a particular aspect of the kit or talents and go "aha, this is it. this is the thing." And adjust accordingly. You look at Mal'ganis and go "ah, well, he's very survivable, and maybe that's fine given his main tank status, but then he ALSO does a shitton of damage on top of that, maybe his damage should just be lower?" And so you can try lowering his damage, see where that puts him. You could lower his damage just a little, or you could lower it a lot but then buff the Lifesteal % to compensate (so overall survivability remains the same but damage is much lower). More recently with Kerrigan, it was a combination of her Shielding/Burst, so base Shielding was lowered, Volatile was lowered, Kinetic was nerfed, ez.
On the flipside, it can be a looot more difficult to identify what specifically a Hero needs when they're underpowered. There's always the fear of buffing too much, as we saw with Azmo. They could buff something or certain aspects and have it hardly make a dent one way or the other. It gets a lot trickier with certain problematic Hero kits as well. Maiev and Hanzo are good examples, they've been obliterating in high level play but they were average/fine elsewhere. Kept eating nerfs because of that high level OP-ness, now they're not performing very well at all and it's VERY very hard for Blizz to buff them back up to where they should be without tipping the scales further. They tried buffing Hanzo's AA in exchange for nerfs to his E and D and his WR didn't budge an inch.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Me:
Or is he just a worse ray ray at this point?
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
Jimmy is more consistent but zul’jin goes to space when you have a good game.
their cadence reminds me a lot of LoL a few years ago, where they eventually said "You know what? We're gonna slow our asses down for better uniqueness among characters and better balancing therein. And this'll let us spend more time on reworking old characters to be up to modern standards."
and hots sort of slowed down and started focusing on reworks but they're still....pretty quick, all things considered. and i feel like they could definitely benefit from both more unique designs and more balance time
i'm not too beat up about them not really using ptr tho, it's pretty clear at this point that blizzard culture throughout their games is that ptr is more for testing code in a live environment on smallscale where you're connecting to people's computers round the world rather than the internal servers
3DS Friend Code: 3110-5393-4113
Steam profile
cassia is a big strong hero and i'm very good with her, but it doesn't matter because entire team decides the loss was my fault for not dropping healing beacon when mal'ganis had dove far too fucking deep in and everyone starts yelling at me
this wasn't even during obj
i'm not wasting that shit so that you could still die regardless
even if i had used it i'm sure y'all would've found some other stupid bitch-ass excuse or reason to come up with.
maybe you should've picked it up yourself then! instead of leaving it alone! i was the only one there anyway.
or maybe it's because our sylv was splitpushing/dying all game and we never had 5 for teamfights/objs but still somehow it's my fault
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Yeah the data from the PTR is essentially random noise. There's no way they get enough people and enough games to get anything meaningful in terms of balance or design. It's really only good for checking for game-breaking bugs across a wider set of use cases.
The problem is that frequently they don’t die for it, lol.
NEVERMIND CASSIA IS BIG STRONG HERO AND I'M V GOOD WITH HER
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Seriously, just put an Abathur hat on Mal'ganis and he's worse than Cho'gall.
just stun him, lol!! :^)))
Real talk though, he is CCable during Night Rush, like he doesn't have Unstoppable during that, and I think a lot of people don't realize that you can stun/root/silence him out of that?
It's like Junkrat's Riptire, they see it and panic and run instead of just hitting the damn thing so it blows up. People see Night Rush and panic and run.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Seriously guys the TLV experiment is going really well
Switch: 6589-6405-3399
HAWKRAY AT IT AGAIN
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Switch: 6589-6405-3399
because his kit is actually scary oppressive given the right numbers
they literally cannot buff him or else he would start dominating, QM in particular
also he's not nearly as bad as everyone makes him out to be, really
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
"YO FAM, WE HAD THIS GAME ON TOWERS OF DOOM TODAY, IT WAS SO LIT! WADDLEDOO AND I GOT MATCHED TOGETHER EVEN THO WE WEREN'T PARTIED, IT WAS CRAZY!! MY BOI MAL'GANIS THO. MAKING ALL THE SICK PLAYS. TOOK EM TO SICK CITY. CAPSLOCK!!! EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!"
good enough for ya?
also, my pal i was playing with pointed out you and i had the exact same profile level (976), haha.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
XBL: InvaderJims
Bnet: Pudgestomp#11153