The most “efficient” way to go was to always reroll if you only got the minimum payout for the box. So an epic chest guarantees a single epic-rarity item. If you only get the one, you can reroll and hope for two. That maximizes the shard value of the items you gain.
But if you just rerolled until you got stuff that you actually wanted, I think you did it right.
Well, I think I rerolled until I got stuff I wanted. But since I don’t know what most of the rewards even are, I’m not sure.
I have mastered the dunk.
I’m 20-3 over my last 23 games as Azmodan. 34-10 over my last 44.
Not only that, but two of my friends started playing the game a couple of months ago and they only want to play when I play, so I can guide. But because they never played solo or just wit them, they never really got accurate placement - I carried them to a lot of wins early on which inflated their MMR, so now they’re about 500 MMR ahead of where they’d be if they were solo, so the games we get are tougher than they should be, but I’m still racking up that winrate anyway.
Hotslogs says that going army of hell has the better winrate, but I do it all with pure dunk build. I can only guess that people aren’t very thoughtful with their dunks or the win rate would be higher.
Not only am I hitting the enemies with my dunk after they dash away or whatever, but I’ve learned to look at where the minions are in my own lane from the minimap to estimate where the center of the enemy minion lane is, so often I can kill an enemy and perfectly aim a dunk to clear a wave at the same time.
I also don’t think people use him to his best as an xp gatherer. You can easily push your lane using only auto-attacks and demon warriors while also doing blackpool dunks on another lane, which completely wipes out a lane, which gives you the XP from two lanes at once.
Azmodan is amazing. I’m getting the trifecta - top hero damage, siege damage, and XP most games. And killing people who thought they’d gotten away is just about the best thing in the game. And Azmodunk is the best skin.
Woops, I said “army of hell” build had the higher winrate, but I meant demonic invasion, the non-black pool ultimate. Army of hell is the level 4 talent for cheaper warriors, which I do take.
Demonic invasion actually has a 4% higher winrate than black pool, which baffles me because black pool seems essential to me to how Azmodan should work.
In other news three of my friends (possibly including an upstanding member of this thread) asked me if I wanted in on a game with them and then started like 23 seconds later before I’d had a chance to respond. They got matched up against a 5 stack of supports. All healers.
What a silly stunt, right? Going all healers as a 5 man.
Anyway, my friends got destroyed. By 5 healers. In 12 minutes. Much amusement was had as I listened on voice comms during the game.
Gimmick comps can absolutely wreck QM. All tanks, all healers, a team built around Chogall. Whatever. Stuff that would otherwise get countered in a draft goes completely unanswered.
If you happen to QM into a team that CAN counter your gimmick, though, ya burnt.
A team built around chogall isn’t a gimmick team, I don’t think, just a team with a purpose.
I have a hard time believing that all tanks or all healers would regularly win games.
It was Li-Ming, Rehgar, Nazeebo, Varian, and Genji vs Malf, Auriel, Li Li, Khara, Tyrande. I guess they did pick the best damage-oriented healers, but it still seems kinda silly to me. I would think the balanced team would win most of the games.
This ended up being 17 kills to 1… a 12 minute stomp.
The non-healer team just wasn’t well-suited for the matchup. No stuns except Varian’s taunt. Rehgar’s got a root and Nazeebo has the zombie walls, but neither of those stop the sustain train. They’ve got really great poke damage, but the heal comp is virtually immune to that.
On the other hand, the healer team had very respectable damage output potential, blinds to neutralize the AAs, and CC for days and days and days. Auriel doesn’t use mana, Malf can give mana away. Khara can have unlimited mana with insight. Khara, Auriel, and Tyrande all have multi-target healing. I was initially going to say that Uther would have been better in there for the stuns, but I think these five have a really excellent overlap of abilities.
They were also a five-stack against what was at best a 3-and-2, so the usual advantages apply. My uninformed guess would be that they started rotating as five immediately, and were letting Tyrande call targets with hunter’s mark.
I think that healer team would lose against any comp that has both big single-target burst and the ability to isolate/pick off enemies. There’s a lot of “greater than the sum of its parts” stuff going on there, but their ability to dish out meaningful damage drops off way too quickly as they lose characters. The comp relies on everyone keeping everyone else alive. As soon as that fails, everything crumbles.
What constitutes “a team built around Cho-Gall”? I mean, just having Cho-Gall at all ties up 40% of your hero choices. And I can think of things that counter him (anything that does a percentage of a hero’s life in damage), but I can’t think of any healers that heal a teammate for a percentage of their life, or the like.
SenorBeef, Azmodan is one of my favorites, too. And I, too, aim my three-pointer shots by watching my own creep waves on the minimap. It definitely takes some practice to get the timing right, but you’re right about how satisfying it can be when you get it.
And still no answer on what voicelines, sprays, banners, and emojis are for?
That’s pretty much happened.
There are two pretty well known streamers who had a friendly tournament of their subscribers played each other at their respective ranks. So bronze would play bronze, etc. At the GM level one team drafted pure supports while the other did a meta team, and the support team won pretty handedly.
So I’m not ashamed.
Auriel is the best healer for Cho’gall because she gets double energy from him. Cho’gall also has very little in the way of CC or chase, so characters who can help him facilitate kills are very useful. I particularly like having a Butcher along for the ride.
They do nothing useful. You can use them during a match. Press “x” during the game to bring up a wheel. Banners pop up when you take a keep or a camp.
Auriel is sort of broken with Cho-Gall because her energy charges based on the damage output of both players. In QM, Cho-Gall is almost unplayable without her but pretty good with her.
The new cosmetics are something you can manually use in the game by hitting various keys. T puts your spray under the ground where you’re standing, I (I think) plays your voice line to near by players, and your banner deploys when you’ve done certan things like capture a merc camp or destroyed a fort.
Next time we have 5 people then let’s do the all support thing and see how it goes. If we get stomped then will there be shame?
Eh. We get stomped all the time. I’ve ran out of shame.
Ah, OK, I went on hiatus before Auriel was introduced, so I’m not familiar with her (and why, of all the Diablo characters they could have added, did they go with an NPC who does almost nothing in the game?).
On the other hand, I absolutely love that they’ve added a protoss probe hero. I’m definitely going to be trying him out. And even if it turns out that he sucks, I still love that they added him.
I’m still waiting to see Eirena, General Warfield, Tosh, and Karax get added to the lineup, too.
So I’m at gold 3 because even though I won 8 of my placement matches the last 2 season, it barely moved me up and I don’t play enough hero league to get the damn thing to let me move up. But it’s funny because my hidden MMR is clearly way too high for my league, because I keep getting put on a team with gold 1/plat 5 players yet I’m the crown which means I have the highest MMR from 2-3 divisions below them. But I gotta grind out the ranked games to actually get there.
I have what might be my most dominating non-vikings game in hero league. 46% siege damage, 41% team damage, highest XP by far, no deaths - I’m stuck in the gold leagues and I can just wreck them.
And… the other side of the coin. The next game we’ve got Azmo, guldan, artanis, dehaka - solid team - and our #5 guy insta-locks medivh. There was no call for that. We didn’t do anything to deserve it. No one was shit talking. He just decided to throw the game.
The sad thing is that we were so good that we almost overcame it. It as a 25 minute match on towers of doom that we barely lost. Which means that if he had picked any healer at all, we would’ve won easily. We almost overcame his shittiness.
He wasn’t even a good medivh.
I really like Nova. I know she’s currently in a bad spot, but her “fantasy” as a long-range stealth ambusher who can pick off isolated targets is really good right now. I go on binges with her, and 2.0 gave me access to some of her cool skins (if she doesn’t have the most skins of any character, she’s a top contender).
Anyway, lots of people are playing Valeera, and she is a titanium-hard counter to Nova. After a few times playing the role of “Valeera’s dinner” in QM I decided to give the new hotness a shot.
What a dumb character. I don’t even know what I’m doing with her. I just pop into stealth, open with any of the three abilities, and then mash buttons while my damage output ticks ever upwards. Get it in trouble? No worries: pop your stealth whenever you damn well please. Nova can’t do that until level 20, and it’s on a 60-second cooldown.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. And I didn’t even play her before her recent nerf.
At some point a while back they did a rework in which all stuns had a shorter duration because they figured out having people not control their characters was not very fun gameplay. They unlearned that lesson with Valeera’s long ass stun and Varians various ways of making sure you can’t control yourself (he was worse in this regard at launch).
Valeera without the stun would be reasonable enough, I think, but being able to stun you and do so much damage while you’re stunned is pretty toxic to gameplay.
Valeera’s a QM stomper. She isn’t great in HL where you can draft around her and counter her pretty hard. In QM either someone has a counter and she’s worthless. Or someone doesn’t and she stomps.
I hate her character. I also hate the “unrevealable” mechanic.