Is the defense really just "Icefrog wouldn't of added him if he was bad/unplayable"?
If Icefrog was that good, there wouldn't even be buffs or nerfs. Not sure why you would flat out dismiss player feedback like that even, saying that the dev is always right.
"El Psy Kongroo!" Hearthstone Moderator
Gratz on becoming a mod, Jester Joe.
@Techies "discussion":
Here's what techies does for your team.
- Has terrible base stats, so cannot effectively harass or lane; he'll just feed if he tries
- Landmines are so easy to dodge or destroy safely now you have to go full retard to die to them
- Suicide requires at least +1 if you land the near-melee range explosion, +2 otherwise
So... until he has his ultimate he provides nearly or literally nothing for his team even if he actively tries. And since he has no lane presence and little effectiveness if any he's gonna get level 6 when exactly?
Troll fell out of the meta ebcause 6.84 was largely magic damage meta and winter wyvern came into the scene.
6.85 didn't change a whole lot.
6.86 is still being discovered. :/
I don't think Icefrog knows what he's doing at all. So many nerfs and buffs are so kneejerk and obviously performed just to force people to play the game differently. At this point, it's painfully obvious that the balancing decisions behind Dota2 are simply used to drive esports interest, and not competitive fairness. I don't think anyone can seriously examine Valve's practices over the past year or two with Dota2 and say that they care about anything other than esports. Believing otherwise is nothing short of delusional, in my opinion.
And I don't really blame them. The game is free to play, which means making it "more fun" won't make them any more money. So they might get more players, who cares? Maybe it would translate into some more cosmetics, but they probably know there's a reasonable cap on that long term. Eventually, everyone will have great sets for their favorite heroes, and interest in hats dies down. They have years of experience with hat simulator 2.0 also known as TF2 to prove this. So, the way to keep massive profits in the long term is to get people interested in watching, not playing. Viewers are more powerful than players will ever be.
See Leshrac is overpowered, always first pick/ban. That's boring. Force the pros to forget about him by nerfing him to death. Same for any other popular hero. Take unpopular heroes and buff them so they get played, game is interesting again. Release a balance patch like this before every major tournament so every tournament feels new and fresh for the viewers. Is Invoker underpowered? Probably not, but people still aren't picking him, keep buffing him. Oh, shit, he's overpowered and people finally realized it, well it's too late to nerf him before the next major, we'll let it ride out and then cut his stats in half and remove his ultimate after the tournament when people are sick of watching him again.
Probably because he can buy rapiers and travels and cheese for days. I agree, once he has 30k net worth, Zet is a fine carry. It's getting there that's the issue. AM is the fastest farmer in the game now, unquestionably, I think, PA has a pretty strong early game, Zet is a glorified creep who can use midas twice.
Also ridiculously high armor and solar crest and a number of other ways to punish auto attackers including dazzle first pick.
Explains updated SK Agh's and updated Pudge Agh's. In no fucking way are those items balanced but because they're so broken it's going to result in those heroes seeing more play. Pudge in particular has always been one of those heroes that the viewers cream themselves over when he gets picked (along with Techies and Meepo), and doubly so when Dendi picks him. In no fucking universe is Agh's+Blink Pudge (fuck the aether lens, if you have blink you don't need 200 more range) fair, but who cares? It'll result in pros using him again, resulting in viewers losing their fucking minds.
Zet is pretty amazing at ganking. Flux pretty much completely fucks anyone who isn't hugging their creeps or teammates and there are lots of heroes that can punish group hugs. His AOE thingie also makes tower diving a cinch and Spark Wraiths are like storm spirit Q's on steroids. I do think he has problems farming but that's what double Hand of Midas is for.Probably because he can buy rapiers and travels and cheese for days. I agree, once he has 30k net worth, Zet is a fine carry. It's getting there that's the issue. AM is the fastest farmer in the game now, unquestionably, I think, PA has a pretty strong early game, Zet is a glorified creep who can use midas twice.
Late game Zet is probably stronger than most any other hero for ratting/trading, even Naga Siren. Put a Refresher Orb in your stash and just hang back in base where it's safe spamming rapiers and teleporting your clones to where they're needed. Because BKB doesn't lose charge time on the clones, you can essentially have a permanent 10 sec BKB on a Zet with 2 rapiers. Just teleport when creeps are near rax, BKB, and ignore enemies to click the rax until they die. Repeat until you win.
Yeah, but the rapier rapier rapier mask of madness build leaves you with 900 health clones that die in one or two hits from the enemy carry, it only works as long as nobody is defending. I had no issue as Troll keeping a 2x rapier Zet from even taking my 3rd tier 1 tower, let alone t2 or rax. Fortunately, MKB works like a charm.
Last edited by Lysah; 2015-12-30 at 07:04 PM.
"El Psy Kongroo!" Hearthstone Moderator
I don't think Pudge's is quite as gamebreaking as it appears. Pudge is a hero that is severely constrained by his tiny mana pool, so while throwing out 450 damage hooks every 4 seconds sounds great on paper, realistically he's only going to get 4-5 off before he's out of mana, perhaps less if one connects and he uses Dismember. Thats not to say he's not extremely dangerous while he has mana, but its not as if he can keep doing it indefinately. It can make him extremely disruptive, however he only really needs to land one hook to change the course of a match. The main benefit of it is that its no longer quite as punishing if you miss a hook, since you can fire off another one in a few seconds. It does give him access to game changing power at a far higher frequency than is really appropriate, making him much easier to pick up and play with some degree of success.
SK's on the other hand seems to be totally fine. The extra damage is really quite hard to measure, sometimes its great, sometimes its totally negligable depending almost entirely on your team comp and how closely the other team is bunched up. Its a nice effect, but its not really why you'd buy the item. The extra range on the other hand means he can almost always find a supprise initiate, or a safe out of the way spot to channel his ult. Realistically speaking, he's not going to get an Agh's most games until after a Blink and at that point he can both safely channel his ult and initiate already. I'd say he's better off spending the gold on a Shiva's Guard or a Veil or something instead of Agh's. Items that add more punch to his initiates rather than just unneeded extra range.
As much as I hate to have to phrase it this way, Icefrog does make some extremely amaturish changes. That was totally fine when Dota was a WC3 mod, he actually was an amature developer. When your pay cheques are being signed by GabeN and you're developing one of the biggest eSports in the world some of the changes he made aren't really acceptable for a professional game dev if he was held to the same standards as others in the industry. We see it a lot when he's slowly buffing Heroes to see just where their breaking point for being OP is, it should be obvious at this point that a small selection of stat increases usually won't do the trick, and when he finally cottons on he makes some crazy changes just to force the Hero into the limelight without reverting any of the other small buffs along the way we're left with a gamebreaking monstrosity for months at a time.
I'm sure the insane changes are done simply to generate outrage to bring attention back to Dota. Its a very effective marketing tool.
Most of it is done to shift things around for the eSport viewers, but its not really a sustainable model for long term interest. It requires a lot of time spent on making sure that it continues. The more sustainable model would be more along the lines of a rock/paper/scissors, where Heroes form their own popularity based on which other Heroes are being picked at the time. You'd end up with a kind of cyclical balance, where heroes would rise and fall in popularity based on which other heroes are currently being played and when games cater to their individual strengths rather than when they're buffed to breaking point. This kind of system would require very little micromanaging once set up, and any outliers could be more easilly brought back into line with small changes, rather than huge buffs/nerfs. But I don't think Icefrog is good enough as a Dev to get something like this working properly if his track record is anything to go by. Not that it matters, I don't think Valve would allow it even if he was capable of delivering.
I didn't say that but he doesn't get enough credit. There is a reason why Dota blew up. And it wasn't just the gameplay. Noone here would do a better job balancing the game.
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You can believe he's not exactly professional, but to say that is a bit overboard. Also many unpopular heroes are good but it's the players who choose not to pick them. They don't all need buffs. People tend to stay away from heroes like Invoker because he requires more skill, not because he was underpowered. There is some truth to what you are saying but I don't think every nerf/buff is for esports.
We were actually seeing this with 6.85 before 6.86 destroyed everything. 6.85 was intended to be very similar to 6.84, so in a sense we had several months with only one real patch cycle, containing only a handful of drastic changes (Leshrac neutered, etc.) Big differences between major events, and Summit 4 had everyone throwing all their cards on the table since they knew 6.86 would destroy their existing playbooks - imagine if 6.86 just continued the trend of relatively mild changes and they didn't have to throw all those cards away. It showed just how differently a single patch could be played if the players had time enough to adapt to it and develop strategies for it.
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Jesus fuck Omniknight is so goddamn broken after 6.85's cutting Purification cast time in half. I don't know how the fuck the pros are so blind. Hero completely breaks the game, you either get a Diffusal Blade by 15 minutes or you lose the game. And Diffusal Blade just makes the hero merely balanced.
jester is a mod, we fucking lost boys
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or you pick oracle, sd, invoker, dominating purge creep/doom eating it etc.. at least 2 of those heroes are meta right now. I think we've seen some omni picks by liquid iirc but it doesn't always work out, even when theres 0 purge.
"We live in a world where a style of play that uses posession and passing to try and make spaces is made fun of.
While a style of play where a team sits back for 90 minutes and breaks away in 1v1 situations is respected."
- Ronald Koeman.
Depends on the skill level of the player, you can easily spam mines and get a tower down fast. Techies is not the only hero with bad stats. When you say he provides literally nothing for his team, it's laughable, and sorry but I don't buy it. He forces a team to play carefully, and spend gold on sentries.
http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/2043151436
You'd enjoy this one Pizza
Omni has a massive winrate in pubs because you don't get as taxed for a poor early game or lack of disables and because the supports aren't roaming/ganking mid/etc. You're going to get your items, team fights are always gonna be 5vs5, etc. At pro level, its just not that easy.
Invoker can't deal with repel, however his Tornado will remove Guardian Angel from any un-repelled un-BKBed targets. Depending on his build, it might not be great for Invoker, but its nice for the right clickers on his team. The creep's purge is the weakest of the bunch, but if Doom devours it, he's going to want to be in melee range of whoever needs repelling anyway so the range is less of an issue for him.
Unfortunately the problem with Omni's heal is that he very rarely gets to use it as both a healing tool and as a damage one. It sounds like its great on paper, but in practice its usually one or the other. Excluding those times when people get it into their heads to challenge Omni to fisticuffs, then its a 720 HP swing in his favour and usually nets him a tidy gold sum. Its a powerful spell to be sure, but its small damage radius is what keeps it in check.
It's incredibly easy to setup Purification bombs with any decent kind of communication, especially now that the cast time was almost literally cut in half. It's really hard to overstate just how huge of a buff this was to Omniknight, on a hero that frankly didn't need any buffs (they just needed to stop buffing Diffusal Blade since it was already pretty good after they changed it to not be an orb.)
Also, I'm fucking sick of ES. Echo Slam is just way too fucking powerful for an instant ult. Does damage equivalent to Epicenter with only like 2 heroes and maybe a couple creeps in the AOE (which is pretty big!) except it's instant.