Last Friday we had a HUGE balance patch, which consisted of nothing.

Today, we had a “balance discussion“, hosted by Breaky, Tralf, and Dogkaiser (aka S2’s mentally challenged lead Balance Designer). Let’s see what they had to say.

Blitz – The hero is fine, competitive players just refuse to play him correctly. -Kaiser

Defiler – Nobody likes this hero, so we didn’t buff her. – Kaiser

Pollywog Priest – Ward traps are overpowered, I had to nerf it – Kaiser

Flint – This hero is great. If you get a Geo’s Bane, his illusions will do 16 damage every time the passive procs! -Kaiser

Tralf proceeds to bring up the point that Flint has nothing early game in terms of an escape mechanism, compared to other hard carries like Sil and TDL.

Kaiser responds with: Flint is great in midwars.

Ravenor – Breaky begins by telling us how the words “Ball Lightning” roll off the tongue, and how he just loves the two words put together. Everybody agrees the hero is shit, and Kaiser makes another “but this hero is good in midwars” statement.

Ophelia – Finally, a top tier hero enters the discussion! But wait… what’s this? Another nerf that does nothing?! She only lost one strength and had her agility gain reduced from 2.1 to 1.7, despite being picked/banned in 99% of competitive games. Surprisingly, Tralf got on Kaiser’s case about this one, calling it a “charity nerf” that changes nothing about the hero on a fundamental level. The “balance discussion” starts turning into a real discussion (actual quotes):

DogKaiser: So what would you say makes her overpowered in the current meta?

Tralf: Her ability to gank ridiculously, stronger than any jungle almost, arguably stronger than Parasite while being able to farm just as fast as say Tempest. The ability to do both of those things, gank and farm.

DogKaiser: Her ability to gank effectively and farm so fast is because of her creeps, right?

Tralf responded to this last statement by bringing up how in an attempt to nerf Ophelia through various jungle changes they actually buffed her. Currently, the strongest ganking creep is the Skeleton King because he has a 1.5 second hold with a long cast range and a ranged auto attack. The old problem with Skeleton Kings was that they did basically no damage. Now, after the most recent patch, their damage was increased by 12, from 38 to 50, making Opehlia even more formidable during the early stages of the game.

After that exchange I waited patiently for the conversation to switch to what we all really wanted to hear about, the upcoming changes to heroes like Tundra, Wildsoul, Fayde and Pebbles. So I waited, and waited, and waited, until I realized that we weren’t going to be talking about anything relevant today. Why?

Because it’s DogKaiser, the guy incapable of doing a single fucking thing correctly. How long did it take for heroes like Gemini, Tremble, Drunken Master and Midas to get nerfed? Literally MONTHS, and when he did finally nerf them, he beat them so hard they vanished from the game completely. Even pubs won’t play these heroes now.

Has anybody else noticed Kaiser only has two settings?

Nerf hero to complete shithouse so nobody ever plays it again.

or

Remove 0.1 agility from hero every other week.

After half an hour of listening to these three drable on about microscopic hero changes, we get on to the magic armor change that made the game more complicated than necessary without fixing a fucking thing. Thunderbringer having 6.75 magic armor isn’t going to make that abomination viable, and making Moraxus have .5 less magic armor isn’t going to make the hero any less tanky.

Dogkaiser explained that these changes happened because certain heroes should be less tanky physically and more tanky magically. Presumably this explains why heroes like Empath and Thunderbringer have more magic armor while heroes like Wildsoul and Armadon have less. Except… This doesn’t really make any sense whatsoever. It’s just another annoying metric by which we have to judge heroes by. The DotA genre of games is not an MMO, it’s not Dungeons and Dragons, it doesn’t have different armor classes where certain types of armor protects you better from siege attacks. Seriously Kaiser, if you want to play DnD that’s fine, I don’t care when and where you use your “+1 ring of gargled semen”, but leave it out of HoN’s balancing. It is unbelievably stupid and an unnecessary change.

Thankfully they didn’t waste too much of my time by talking about the inane-as-hell magic armor changes and instead moved onto items.

Brutalizer – The change was pointless because we’re not gonna see the item picked up. It’s a Brutalizer. You’re not getting it for damage, you’re getting it for a stun proc that’s unreliable so you can spam macros about how you just raped somebody’s mom whenever the stun procs.

Nullfire – The recipe cost is 50 gold less. This item is now viable, said nobody ever.

Pickled Brain – Overbuffed, overnerfed and finally in a decent spot. Only took a year for Kaiser to fix it. In the past year you’ve managed to balance one item properly. Good job.

Last but not least, Kaiser talks about the jungle changes. Basically, a lot of numbers got switched around to make it look like something happened. He explained it as “normalizing” the jungle as to prevent randomness in each game. Some creeps had their experience adjusted while others had their base damage altered, but in reality this didn’t make any noticeable changes. Kaiser points out that the jungle change will help all the junglers who take damage while jungling. By my count that’s… one jungler, who goes by the name of Legio. If you’re taking damage with any other jungler you’re doing something wrong.

-Written by guest writer Airwave

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