Offlane through 2018 and going forward

Lets just start by saying, I love HotS. I've played a ton of it, made friends through it, became part of a great community (Heroes Lounge) and met up with tons of folks from them. It really exposed me to a great social part of gaming, and I love that about it.



Last OD season I started taking the game more seriously, scrimming several nights a week, and playing a lot of HL, maintaining GM (at an actually good winrate) relatively easily. At the start of OD season, offlane was in a pretty good spot. There was plenty of diversity, especially if you were already naturally playing the more uncommon offlane picks because they're just fun.



Then came a lot of feedback from what I'd call the Old Guard of HotS offlanes, which are players that transitioned into the role from when it was still the "Melee Flex" or "Melee Assassin". Back then the game worked differently, and both scaling and minion/tower changes drastically changed how the game plays. There were a lot of comments that offlaners didn't have a lot of impact, no avenue to outplay because every hero was a sustain machine, and all you did was AFK and soak.



I loved offlane at this point. Offlane was (and is still for now) all about supporting your team. Enabling rotations for them, managing the map, you really were playing a supportive role within your team, and most of the focus was on macro. There were lots of avenues to outplay (watching pros that cried that there's no room for outplays get bodied by Wubby and top KR offlaners is still amusing) that didn't directly involve killing someone, but was a lot about who got more XP, had better vision control, was better at half rotations, and who took favorable trades. A lot of this doesn't have the immediate feedback of "I killed that guy" or "I destroyed his fort" but ended up winning you games.



Then changes come around, trying to target the sustain and general power level of the high prio offlanes. The changes however, are horrible, and don't really serve a purpose. You can nerf Yrel's mana costs and sustain, you can nerf Blaze's mana costs and "nerf his waveclear" despite not even changing the breakpoint on an ability you _already didn't use_ to clear waves. It doesn't change the role.



You don't bring up the squishier heroes in priority because they're not being held down by their competition. Plenty of the squisher heroes win lanes into tankier counterparts, can get rotation advantage, can merc, whatever. They just become unpickable because they die to rotations, be it popular roam heroes like Tracer/Genji/Maiev, or just regular rotations. Then if that doesn't fuck you over, pretty good chance you will get farmed by higher mobility heroes, or displacements, or slows. You get kited, thrown around and farmed by the meta heroes.



Changes like nerfing mana costs and sustain only really serve one purpose. They nerf the map uptime, and shift matchups. The relative power level between offlanes do change because of it, but the result of the change is just this: the hero becomes frustrating and/or boring to play.



Yrel's claim to fame, and main fun as a hero was just running it down all the time. Instead of nerfing the efficiency of how much each spell does, mana costs went up. Result? You use the bare minimum of abilities and go AFK, because otherwise you go OOM. You literally just spend more of the game not doing anything, to be optimal.



Don't get me wrong, trying to change heroes that are top performers is fine. Changing them in the way they've been changed recently is not. It's bad design. It makes heroes feel worse to play and it doesn't push any of the outdated characters into relevance.



I hope in the future either Blizzard embraces the role as it is currently (a macro-oriented support basically), and focuses on making that a fun experience (and dealing with issues that low mobility/survivability heroes have), or they actually think ahead how they want offlane to play, and rebalance heroes from the ground up to accomodate this vision.



Right now it's honestly hard to be excited for HotS. The XP changes look bad for competitive, and though I do have faith that if it ends up as bad as expected Blizzard will be quick to change, I am still worried about the general responses, and the end result of any changes they make. On top of that they seem to not only misunderstand what the offlane does, but also not have a good idea of where to take the role in general.



TL;DR: Offlane as it is is fine, not everyone likes the macro focus, and maybe changing to accomodate those players is justified. But don't nerf heroes in ways that make them feel bad to play. Keep them fun, relevant and engaging. Don't make me AFK in lane because otherwise I run out of mana. Thanks.

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