Auriel was pretty balanced on release. I can’t even remember if they’ve changed anything about her.
But yeah, I agree.
Samuro has the same problem that pre-rework Nova had. If he’s not being actively countered by detection, it’s almost impossible to answer him.
I’ve played a few times against him as Kharazim (who has two different detection talents) and Tassadar. As long as your team is able to adjust on the fly to attack the real Samuro, he implodes.
A bigger problem with Samuro is the “multiple characters” design philosophy. I played one match that had two Samuros and a set of vikings. Teamfights were just about impossible to keep track of.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently overpowered about his kit, it can be solved with some numbers tweaking. Assassins are fairly straightfoward like that, just a matter of how much damage they can put out.
I do wish they would choose a different color indicator for the clones, though - even if you have detection showing which one is real, the clones are a yellowish color, which blends in with his green orc skin (or the rusty brown/red of his demon skin). The bright cyan of false images in Warcraft 3 was a lot better.
But yeah, their balancing for new champions has been pretty out of whack. Zarya was especially hilarious, as she went from trash, got patched to godlike in 2 days, and 2 days later got patched down to overpowered.
The damage isn’t even the worst part about him, it’s that he’s nearly impossible to kill. So numbers adjustments can mitigate how much he wrecks your face, but they can’t really adjust how hard to kill he is.
I fully expect a nerf to the cooldown of his Wind Walk, probably encompassing the level 20 talent for it as well.
That actually does make me think of one tweak his kit could use, though. Instead of making his cloak instant (and unbreakable for a period of time), instead make it like Twitch’s from League of Legend where it takes a second to cloak, and if he takes damage, it lengthens that period of time. Which actually isn’t that dissimilar in practice from Zeratul/Nova I suppose.
Balance patch is out. Nerfed Samuro’s HP and HP regen, longer cooldown on clones (but they last longer), less movement speed on Wind Walk and lower clone damage on his ult. Not the changes I was expecting, we’ll see if it makes enough of a dent.
Doesn’t seem like the nerfs will be all that impactful. Windwalk is still amazing for escaping and securing kills.
I understand why the light touch, though. They don’t want another Zarya situation where they hilariously overcorrect and then have to release another balance patch right away.
Every hero is free to play this weekend. Always wanted to try the Lost Vikings? Now’s your chance.
In other “pending invasion” news, Blizz is running a HoTS/World of Warcraft cross-promotion that gets you in-game mounts in both HoTS and WoW if you play…
[Quote=Blizzard]
15 Heroes of the Storm games with a friend as any Hero from the Warcraft universe.
[/quote]
So, expect an influx of newb HoTS players running any Warcraft hero that’s currently up in the free rotation.
You’re welcome.
ETA: WoWHead’s guide page is stating that you can complete the 15-game requirement in AI matches, which strikes me as sketchy given the “with a friend” language from Blizz. But if it’s so, you may not be afflicted with an overrun of clueless n00bs. We shall see.
Too late to edit: It just occurs to me that “with a friend” and “against an AI” could mean team co-op, you and a friend against an AI opponent team.
That’s definitely what it means. I think a lot of people did that during the last “with a friend” promotion.
Maybe y’all can explain some things about this game to me.
A few ground rules. Think of them as hypotheticals.
[ol]
[li]I’m not interested in how to play well, or even better than I do now. Which is probably terrible. I got through the tutorials, but that means nothing.[/li]
[li]I’m in it only for my “15 games with a friend” mount. I play WoW and that’s all I play in the Blizzard stable. MOBAs as a class don’t interest me.[/li]
[li]I can be my own friend, if I have to, with a second Battle.Net account and two copies of the game running at the same time. It looks like there are enough new “15 games with a friend” players out there now that I won’t really have to, though. I can always pare back my “friends” list when I’m done. Because I’m not interested in accumulating B.Net friends as well. IMHO, the social elements of MMO games are a sometimes-necessary evil, not a feature.[/li]
[li]However, I do not want to inflict my ineptitude, curmudgeonlyness, and lack of commitment on actual players. I’m antisocial, not sociopathic.[/li][/ol]
So I downloaded and installed the game. Started running it and got through the tutorials.
Picked the same hero I’d used in the tutorial and entered (what I thought) was a lobby. I was… shocked… when all of a sudden I get dumped into a game with four other players against AIs. I guess I accidentally jumped into matchmaking? Is that what happens when you pick a hero and a play mode? I would have thought there would have been a lobby for that, rather than putting you in queue.
Is there any way I can do AI battle 2v2? Pairing up with my self-made faux-friend? Because as I indicated, I refused to drag down an actual team of real players. My intent is to turn the AI up to “HYPER OVERDRIVE” and lose as fast as possible, and I won’t do that to people.
Can I assume my plan to game the game isn’t going to work, and it’d be best for everyone involved if I just uninstall HoTS and resume grinding at WoW?
All matches are 5v5, even against the AI. But when you select the ‘play against AI’ mode, you can set it to AI teammates as well. It’s somewhere near the bottom left (haven’t played in a little while - sorry).
HOWEVER, don’t feel bad about playing in an AI match with real human teammates if the difficulty mode is set to beginner. It’s virtually impossible to lose at that level and, in fact, it’s faster than the method you’re proposing. Losing to AI can take 15-20 minutes or so, but speed-running a game against beginner AI will take 5-8.
Next time you queue into one of those games, take a look at what heroes everyone else is playing. Most likely at least four of the five will be Warcraft heroes, which means most of those people will be in exactly the same boat as you, just playing to get the mount. So you’re probably not actually dragging them down any.
In any event, even if they’re not playing just for the mount, anyone playing vs. easy-mode AIs is doing something that they’re not taking very seriously (grinding XP on a hero they don’t like much just because it’s on rotation and they want to get all heroes to 5, or picking up the daily quest, or something like that).
EDIT: You said that you just used the same hero as in the tutorial-- Last I saw, that was Raynor, a Starcraft hero. I think you need to use a Warcraft hero to get the mount.
The tutorial hero I used was Muradin. And most of the NPC heroes in the tutorial were also Warcraft properties, especially the AIs on “my” side. They may have tweaked the tutorials for the cross-promotion.
ETA: At tutorial start, you’re offered three heroes to choose from? I’m sure at least two were Warcraft.
I’ve been playing heavily again for a few weeks. I tend to binge on the game then leave it for a few months.
I’ve discovered Guldan might be my favorite hero, definitely top 3. I think if you’re really good you can probably carry bad teammates with him better than you can carry with any other hero. He just has so much sustain that if you play him right you can always be on station doing something useful. I go corruption build 85% of hte time with him, but it can be fun against the right comp to surprise them by taking all the life drain talents, and then just tanking them to the face while you kill them.
I’ve been playing a lot of Azmo too. I actually bought Azmodunk. I feel stupid spending $15 on a skin, but on the other hand, it’s the best skin. My favorite thing to do in this game is to make long range shots on people who thought they’d escaped, so Hammer, Falstad, and Azmo are some of my favorites. So many dunks. I usually lead the team in hero damage.
The placement matches at the start of a new season in hero league are kind of a joke. I finished last season Gold 4, won 7 placement matches… and got placed gold 4. If winning 70% of my matches doesn’t move me, what would? I went 8-2 last season and still had to start at like silver 4. There need to be more placement matches or they need to matter more or something. I’m like 16-6 in hero league matches including the placement matches and I only moved from Gold 4 to win 1 game into Gold 3. On the plus side, Hotslogs, which isn’t limited by their stupid grindy system, puts me at 2250 MMR in HL, which is the highest I’ve been.
I’m getting used to the new interface. It does provide more info which is nice, but I wish you could resize it. The team pane is too small.
I just started playing HotS about 4 months ago. I’ve gotten a fair number of heroes, but I find myself playing either Auriel or Raynor. It’s a good game and when I get tired of WoW, or Planetside 2, it’s a nice fallback.
I just won a game 1v5 while my teammates served as very minor speedbumps and distractions.
https://www.hotslogs.com/Player/MatchSummaryContainer?ReplayID=104011374
We killed 9 to their 27 kills, but even that’s a little misleading in our favor - our kills were mostly early when they didn’t matter. Comparing time spent dead, the 4 people on my team other than me spent 14 minutes dead to their collective 6 minutes dead. Factoring in viking death time (which isn’t recorded) we spent at least 3x as long as they did dead.
My team did very little, and didn’t even gather seeds well - they had 3 terrors to our 2 - even though I told them to go balls out for seeds because I could push the lanes during the night.
And yet… we won pretty decisively. We had our 3 inner keeps alive as well as one of the outer forts when we destroyed their base. Pretty much entirely due to my constant pushing.
I took a long break and was amused, on my return, to see how low my hotslogs mmr had fallen. It had me at low bronze in every category.
The new Chogall is a definite nerf, but he is also much more of a quickmatch monster. When he comes “online” at level 16 it’s pretty much all over for the other team. His rune bomb, with enough stacks from Gall’s level 4 talent, becomes what happens if you shove a Malfurion ult into a bowling ball. Crazy damage, a silence, and almost no cooldown in teamfight situations. I’ve gotten to really good at aiming the rollback to catch backliners who think they only have to dodge it once.
For a while, my Gall and I were wearing the level 1 skins and using the poverty pony in QM to see if we could make the other team think we were just trying to get the ‘two heads’ quest done and underestimate us. I have no idea whether it worked but it was very funny to imagine that it did.
The only thing he gets hard countered by at relatively casual tiers is a strong split push comp.
My main beef with ChoGall is that I’d like to see a map where the gimmick is just that there are four lanes instead of three, with nothing else going on. But ChoGall pretty much makes that impossible, since he’d force you to either leave a lane empty, or put your support on a lane solo (or queue up without a support whenever you’ve got the ogres, but you really don’t want to encourage that in formats where you don’t know the map in advance).
And success with them really depends a lot on having two players who not only both know what they’re doing, but also know what each other are doing, and can coordinate.