Some nerfs inbound for Tracer.
BTW I am Speusippus#1370 if anyone wants to add me. Send me a note saying you’re from the SD!
I am pretty terrible though, based on my MMR. (1300s. I think I have the strategy and tactics down, I just don’t have the reflexes. Yet I keep playing and love it!)
magnusblitz, JRagon says it, at least:
Which is not something that I can see at all, with how few tricks she has against enemy heroes, and how many she has for pushing.
And while Azmodan is also a great pusher, he couldn’t singlehandedly destroy a keep while cursed. Buffing up the minions doesn’t work when they’re all dead. Though I’ll grant that Hammer could do it.
Sylvanas is a pusher, but she’s not really a heavy split-pusher. Sylvanas can viably and effectively split push, and sometimes split-pushing to apply pressure or force the enemy team into a choice is absolutely the right call. However it’s not like Murky or Hammer where you want to or can spend significant time away from your team, you usually just want to quickly lane clear and then go help your team. I’d definitely say things like the Murky Split Push during objectives on Battlefield of Eternity isn’t a good playstyle for her.
Sylvanas is usually by far the best pushing with a team. She can murder your towers, but that’s not what she’s built for. She’s built to disable all your towers so the rest of your team and/or minion wave can wreck it for free.
That’s why I said an “assassin that can kind of push”. Of course she’s specialized in pushing, but she’s played more like someone who clears nearby lanes, and then tries to assassinate heroes leaving a team fight so your team can push.
E: Sylvanas is kind of like a portable one-lane killable curse of the raven lord. She aids in pushing, but isn’t really a pushing force herself.
To add on to your point, she can split push without her team - but with bosses and mercs. It was part of why she was so good on mines, and why she is good on the Immortal/punisher map - the rest of the team can push the other lane, and she can make the boss last forever and kill everything until the team responds, and hopefully she can get away and let her team get value in the meantime.
In a PvP game, spending a curse plinking at a fort would mean the other team going “lol” and five-man pushing down two of YOUR forts in response while your team is completely unable to mount a defense because you’re off doing your own thing.
That’s what a good team would do. A bad team would just rotate down to you and kill you (which would be a waste of the curse time).
Ordinarily, I would have switched to defending during the curse. But the last tribute was far enough away that I had no chance to reach it, and the major enemy push was also far enough that I’d have had a hard time getting there quick enough to do any good. Meanwhile, I had a 2-3 wave army built up and was almost at the keep, so I figured the best I could do was to keep on going and maybe force some of them to hearth back to defend.
I have to admit, the specialist I’m not sure about the role of is Nazeebo. He doesn’t seem to fit in any specialist niche, and tends to be played exactly like a ranged assassin with some extra CC. He also doesn’t play particularly uniquely like, say, Abby. Like, Gazlowe isn’t a hardcore pusher either (at least, not in the same way Azmo, Murky, or Xul are), but he is meant to wreck merc camps so the specialist label makes sense. I’d honestly argue that Nova makes more sense as a “specialist”, in that even though she’s an assassin, her permastealth and high burst damage puts her in an odd niche that makes Nova a class separate from your Li Mings or Vallas.
I dunno, it seems to me that Nova is the very exemplar of an assassin. Everything she has is for dealing lots of damage to a single target, which means that she’s not good for much besides picking off heroes.
There’s nothing particularly unique about Nazeebo, but he is relatively good at doing damage in a large area, mostly thanks to his toads, which makes him pretty good at clearing out minions. And his trait is good for keeping him alive while doing so. He is less specialized than many, though.
The only “niche” a specialist has is that it’s not a tank, support, or assassin.
Nazeebo’s job isn’t “stay alive/be disruptive for a long time in the frontline,” “keep allies from dying,” or “deal lots of damage to heroes quickly,” so that makes him a specialist.
Man, at least at lower tiers, Vikings has to be the most abused hero by far. Even when you’re doing well, your idiot teammates don’t understand how they work and get on you.
We start a garden of terror match. I pick vikings. Teammate asks which lane I’m going to be in. I said I’m going to be in all lanes and I’ll split push during night. So he says “okay vikings will get lanes, everyone stay in group of 4” and I said no just lane normally I can’t hold lanes alone except during night. But it didn’t matter, they were all 4 mid.
Despite sticking to that strategy, and the fact that they were 4v2 in mid during the first 5 minutes, they only got 2 kills. Meanwhile I’m getting beat back in top and bottom lanes because vikings can’t counter-push normal heroes alone. I take 5 deaths (1.25 deaths) in about 5 minutes, and my teammates are going OMG NOOB VIKING STOP DYING. I actually have the lowest deaths on the team at this point despite the rest of the team being in a group of 4 and me facing off heroes alone with 1 of my vikings.
Now… they’re doing a 4 stack and can’t kill the enemy team. I’m doing a pretty good job of getting xp out of top and bottom lanes despite having no health. Even though they’re doing nothing useful, we’re even level. The only reason we’re in this game at all is because I have almost double the combined XP as the rest of the team at this point, without me it would be a complete stomp.
I pull out some heroic vikings play. My teammates keep getting themselves killed. I solo 2 forward enemy bases and 2 enemy fortresses while my team is dead. Still, every time one of my guys dies, it’s “OMG NOOB VIKINGS” - these idiots are completely oblivious to the fact that I’m carrying them, and without me they’d be in for an embarassingly quick loss.
Final stats:
Siege damage - me 360337. Rest of team combined 217k.
XP - me 54163, rest of team combined 31000.
Not only that, but they kept stealing the fucking terror from me even though I asked them to let me have it, just to sabotage us even more, so the siege damage stats from the terror should’ve favored them.
They spent most of the last part of the game dead, while I was using split pushing and fury of the storm to single handedly take out enemy bases. Did they realize the error of their ways and thank me at the end for carrying them?
No, the last thing said was “gg everyone except noob vikings”
If it’s any consolation, I expect that Abathur gets similar amounts of abuse.
Have there been super long hero league queue times for anyone else? I thought it was because people were playing the overwatch beta over the weekend, but here I am sitting at 350 seconds and counting after it ended.
Report aba AFK
I forgot it’s free week. I should hop on and play him so at least I guarantee a decent Aba on my team.
I’m really excited about the new ranked changes. Anyone wanna try to get a team together so we can get some gold/reward for our rank?
I’ll join if you need a fifth, but if anyone else is interested in that spot, let them have it.
I haven’t had a chance to play yet this week, and was wondering who the heck’s portrait that was in the last slot. I guess that explains it. Ah, well, I’ve already fived him, and I don’t enjoy him enough to play him without a reward. Xul on rotation is nice, though: I need to finish him off yet, and I have a quest for a specialist.
Speaking of which, has anyone else noticed that, unless I’m miscounting, he’s the only new specialist released since the game went live? And there’s only been two supports in that same time (Morales and Kharazim). C’mon, Blizzard, not everyone likes playing assassins and warriors.
And apropos nothing in particular, based on my observations last week when Dehaka was on rotation, I have to say that he’s absolutely great at denying enemies objectives. My last game with him before hitting 5, I bought off Blackheart twice in a row single-handedly, by popping out of the bushes and killing an enemy hero who was trying to cash in a bunch of coins. Likewise for Raven Hollow tributes, Towers of Doom altars, and so on.
What the hell are they doing to Falstad? He’s one of the few heroes in the game that gets about a 50% winrate and has multiple talent builds to work with. He’s one of the best hero designs.
Removing power throw seriously takes him from one of my favorite heroes to one I probably won’t touch again. That’s a totally vital talent to the hammer build. And their comments don’t even make any fucking sense of what htey’re trying to do. “Yeah, we don’t know if these changes will nerf or buff him, and he already had more than one talent build which is more than a lot of heroes have, but fuck it, let’s just swap a bunch of shit around and see what happens”
I don’t play Falstad, but my guess is that they didn’t like that he had quite a few talents which were basically must-picks at their tier, like Gathering Storm at 1 (85%), Power Throw at 4 (77%), and Boomerang at 7 (77%). I’d argue that it’d be better to just raise the power of other talents to compensate, but whatever.
I admit I’m actually a bit surprised that Falstad sits at a 50% win rate, I’d expect him to be higher since he’s seen as the best AA assassin right now. Maybe it’s because he’s picked so often, it normalizes his win rate? He’s #3 in games played (though he drops to #9 if picks+bans are used instead of just pick rate)
For anyone unhappy with the battletag Blizzard is giving you a chance to change it.
Have they moved development away? We’re getting new heroes at least once a month and balance patches are coming out a lot quicker than they used to, about every week now.