Number Changes Suggestion

Raise concerns about balance.

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Number Changes Suggestion

#1 Post by watermelon »

A post dedicated to requesting number changes or easier changes for Yak to work on EotA1 if he ever felt like it. I bolded stuff that I thought were particularly important and easy to do.

Changes:
2/24/15
Storm comments and much other stuff.

9/10/14
Added Swash, Inf, Defiler, and Harpy Blade Rain.

8/25/14
Updated to 1.17b2.

8/19/14
  • Cleaned up post due to Yak addressing them in 1.17b. By address, it means Yak did something to show that he's paying attention to this thread.
  • Added new stuff which is at bottom of list.
Items:
Mindgem: Reduce casting range to 300 and/or reduce sleep duration to 3 seconds.

Holds check: Hold Person (Aero), Gravebind (Lich), Anchor (Reek), Tree Hug (Tree), Neutralize (Tact), Garg, Bane, Stun Rune (DW), DS, Penance (Scarab), Flo, Roots (AC), Tyrant (Ice Trap and Avalanche), IB (AM), Seed (Eido), Nausea (Tony), Exhaustion (Defiler)

Oracle:
Ki Blitz - This spell is problematic as a mass healing spell. It looks like it's good for healing creeps but in actuality it's only good when sieging as most of the times only a few creep units get targeted in normal clashes. It also has the problem of being a channeling spell while also being limited to a number of units. Sure it heals Oracle too, but she's also pretty useless when she's channeling this spell.
I feel like the orbs' speed should be faster since it still feels frustratingly slow. (Around Dark Altar's missile speed)
Reduce the base mana cost to 60.
In general, the talent costs are expensive.
Mindstab - Reverse changes from 2% to 3% for each point of Int, but keep the cap.

Storm:
Innate - I still feel that this innate gives her incredibly brainless mobility. I would argue that the leap should be based on her movespeed so that nets and slows will actually affect her. Something like (Current movespeed / Default movespeed) * Teleport Distance.
Tether - Reduce damage or adjust it so that actually running away with Storm chasing you will break it somehow.
This problem could also be solved if Storm moved at Lich molasses speed, which I think would make her a much more interesting hero and her innate more reasonable.
Snowball - Adjust so that simply spamming it isn't so strong.
I would argue that the freeze talent is not necessary or should not affect heroes. At the very minimum, reduce the chance to freeze on heroes.
Ult - Should not be able to hit magic-immune units, aka Artifact Wagon.

Harpy: most broken flyer.
  • Innate - Her evasion makes it more difficult than necessary to punish her. Reduce evasion to a max of 30% for moving.
  • Blade Rain - Make it have a cast time, reduce bleeding duration to 3 seconds, and/or reduce damage. Adds more damage than necessary for her in hero combat and feels like it's too easy to punish enemies when they're only in the rain briefly.
Flo:
Mesmerize - Part of the reason Flo is weak early-game is due to her high cooldown skills even though they're not really that useful early-game.
Reduce cooldown for Level 1 but make it scale to what it is at Level 6 so the cooldown would always be a bit higher than the stun duration on units.
In general, she scales to be incredibly annoying late-game.

Swash: This guy has severe mana problems.
  • Dash - Make it deal increased damage to non-hero units. Something like double damage.
    This would allow him to actually contribute to the team outside of just trying to PK.
  • Pilfer - Reduce mana cost. At level 1, I would suggest reducing it to 40, making it lower than Demoralizing Blow.
Inf:
  • Smoke Cloud - The current spell is useless in the beginning and very strong by Level 6. I would argue that the scaling should be changed so that Inf could make use of it at all levels.
    Example: At Level 1, the miss chance would be 50% and scale to 90% by Level 6. However, duration would be reduced to 4 seconds and then scale to its current duration by Level 6.
  • Mines - For the talent, change the scaling so that it decreases the delay by 0.2 secondsinstead of 0.1 second with each investment.
    The current talent doesn't make much of an impact.
  • AoO - Remove random damage component and follow one of my suggestions in the InfAoO sucks thread.
RK:
Runepault - Reduce knockback scaling so that Level 6 doesn't fling a unit across half of Stormwail.

Bane: of a game
Charge - Make the stun duration constant when invested so it's always 0.5 seconds. The speed boost and extra mobility Charge offers is already strong.
Increase Trample talent cost.

DW:
Holy Strike - Reduce damage scaling. Wiki lists level 6 as 48% increase from old nuke; change it so that the damage increase is only 24%. This is pretty ridiculous when combined with Empower.

Garg:
Innate - Reduce the evasion on the flying ones. I would also say that the charge time for the ground ones could be increased.

AM:
IB - Reduce damage. At level 1, it can deal ~120 damage that most single target nukes struggle to do along with making the target ethereal.

Tact:
Neutralize - Reduce damage scaling. Wiki says that Level 6 is 54% stronger; try reducing the damage by 30%. Also, make it hit air units.

Gravel:
  • Innate(Tree) - The armor reduction can be rather broken as it lasts a long time. Or there should be a limit on the armor reduction stacks.
  • Smash! - Reduce Slow AoE by 20-30%.
IS:
Chill Sacrifice - Reduce healing to 10% max life.
Brain Freeze - Reduce casting range by 20%. As it currently is, it's too strong of a harassment skill while letting IS be very safe.

Defiler:
Pestilence - Reduce mana cost scaling.
Exhaustion - Reduce duration on heroes by 50%. It is particularly annoying in that it has little risk in casting but is very disruptive.

Tree: Obnoxious to fight against in 1v1. Has a self healing skill and can CC both heroes and creeps brainlessly. Pixies can be very dumb for boosting his DPS.
Eat Tree - Make it have a maximum cap of healing 30% of Tree's max life. The heal is too strong early- and mid- game.
Hug Tree - Reduce duration scaling or make it constant at 3 seconds. Sure, the hold can be interrupted but it should generally be treated like the other holds that can also be interrupted (Aero and Ember).
Revival Tree - Reduce health scaling. Increase its build time.

DS:
Cleansing Totem - Increase the time it takes for it to dispel buffs and reduce the time it takes when invested. Ex: 1 buff every 6 seconds at Level 1 to 1 buff every 3 seconds at Level 6.

AA:
Meteors - Make it stun fliers.

Neph:
Make all single target spells (Scorch, Duskslash, Vampiric Bite, Pain) deal 100% damage to heroes.

Harder Changes
CS - Reduction in cooldown for all of his spells except innate and Dominant Blow. If this ever happened, they may need slight nerfs as well.
Reasoning is that the current spells have an agonizingly long cooldown which often means CS is just using Dominant Blow and auto-attacking.

Addressed

Code: Select all

DS: [s]Voodoo Doll - Feels largely worthless. Investing in the spell doesn't really seem to make it stronger so I think the scaling should be looked at. If anything, making the factors be constant (health and damage conversion) would make balancing this less of a headache.[/s] 
Actually this isn't as bad as I thought it was since it might be useful for a niche build stacking agility on DS and only hitting doll for last hits.

TC: Phase - Reduce duration to 4 seconds. It's a pretty long disable as is and especially annoying with TC forks running around.

Storm: Innate - This gives too much mobility to a hero that's already hard to take advantage of due to her long-ranged spells.
Increase the amount of time before she can blink and/or reduce the number of possible blinks (I'm thinking to 3).  
Ult - This really should be tweaked so that it's not that much BS for a global skill. The biggest problem I feel is with its scaling.
Reduce the damage scaling since the number of strikes also increases.
Increase cooldown to three minutes. 

Oracle: Mindstab - This spell is a great case of trying to do too much but not being good at anything.
Since Mindstab already has a bad history of one-shotting stuff, I would argue that the slow scaling could be increased more from 20% to 50%. 
Zen Shot - Reduce cooldown of the active (would be fine if reduced as part of investing in the skill). Reduce the scaling of the knockback. 
Geyser - Change damage reduction against buildings to 25% since she now has to channel to maintain it.[/list]

AM: Haunt Talent - Halve spawning chance of Haunt talent spamming ghosts upon hitting a hero. Really cheap talent but makes Haunt's damage even more ridiculous.

AA: Scout - Reduce duration to 60 seconds.

CS: Overwhelm - Reduce AoE scaling which at Level 6 seems to affect an entire screen (larger than the targeting circle indicates).
Surge (Int) - Reduce AoE scaling which also seems to affect an entire screen at Level 6.

Murloc: Tidal Curse - Making the duration shorter/reduce the number of waves in exchange for making the waves deal more damage (making it less spammy/griefing by causing creepblocks).
Ult - Increase cooldown by 50%.

Lich: Dark Altar - Get rid of the UD reduction since it's a useless nerf with all pick available. 

IS: Brain Freeze - Shorten debuff duration to 60 seconds (maybe even lower to 30 seconds but make it more potent like by making the silence duration longer). I would argue that the cast range could be reduced by 20-30% so that IS can't easily interrupt a channel from two screens away.

DS: Mass Healing - Nerf the heal since it is not dispellable (would argue 10% reduction).
Earthbind Totem - Reduce slow scaling. I don't know what the actual numbers are but in-game it seems ridiculous.

Reek: Maw of Death - Reduce spit AoE by 30-50%. Increase cooldown to 11 seconds.
Brainlust - Reduce scaling of health gained from 10% to 5% (so Level 6 would have 35% gained from the max health). I'd also argue that it should be reduced when healing from an enemy hero.

Scarab: Retribution - Reduce duration scaling by 20-30%. Being unable to directly fight a hero for that long is pretty abusive especially considering there is no way to counter this.

Other Number Changes:
Wealthy Perk - Nerf the bonus gold to 300. The income per second is mostly the main reason to get this perk.

Bounty Hunter Perk - In addition, remove the effect of halving the killed hero's bounty. This already sucks as a perk since it requires the player to land the last hit since assists don't exist and Wealthy is much more reliable. With this change, at least now it's possible for the PKer to thrive on PKing.

Mana Regeneration Perk - Would doubling this even make it more usable? The current wealthy perk easily allows heroes to grab mana regeneration items. I would be curious if making it 100% mana regeneration would be useful or overpowered.
Also note that mana regeneration generally becomes less important as heroes get larger mana pools. 

Circlet Teleport - Reduce duration before the user returns to the original position to 5 seconds. This is mainly to reduce the abuse of healing at main.

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Re: Number Changes Suggestion

#2 Post by Jouven »

I agree with most the points except:
watermelon wrote:Ult - Increase cooldown by 50%.
^^TBH I wouldn't mind but its so easy to interrupt and its one those skills, like stormweaver's ultimate, prone to fuck ups. I haven't seen people doing that well using it.
watermelon wrote:His auto-attack is ridiculous with certain items.
Mass Healing - Nerf the heal since it is not dispellable (would argue 90% reduction).
^^ About the auto-attack, IMO, to be more accurate it's only against many units... and the healing nerf... for me DS isn't one of the strongest heroes, it only it has its gimmicks, maybe an increase of CD or reduce it like you suggest but make it better with the int scaling...
watermelon wrote:Other Number Changes
Wealthy Perk - Nerf the bonus gold to 300. The income per second is mostly the main reason to get this perk.
^^The problem with the wealthy perk is that if you nerf it then you should nerf the crystal one too, let me explain, because If it happens, what I will do is focus on choosing heroes that get most advantages with the 30 crystals perk, like AC and the thunders talent, Incarnation and the altar money, Acid Reaver and many of his talents, Aero and her mana+hp regen, Defiler mana regen and pestilence range and so on and so forth... but there are many heroes that have talents that don't improve that much with 30 crystals like Behemoth, Sorrow Liege, wretched chef, fire knight, tactician (it has the 8s banner thing but IMO that's negligible)... that just get some temporal stats that can be only used in rare situations but not fixed pure dps or money making or good utility like Bane ones.
Last edited by Jouven on July 20th, 2014, 2:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Number Changes Suggestion

#3 Post by watermelon »

I haven't seen people doing that well using it.
Actually the main reason this nerf was suggested because of how you used it in a Candleburg game (a long time ago). =P
I don't feel that strongly about this nerf but just as there are ways to interrupt a channeling spell, it's still possible to maintain the spell, especially with team support.
By the way, I'm not sure what you really mean about Storm's ult being prone to fuck ups because it doesn't even require her to be visible to the enemy to begin with.
Then make the bite area bigger?
Yeah, I don't think my number changes alone would be that much balanced, but I also didn't want to complicate the basic message of a nerf or a buff.
Specifically to this, Maw of Death is supposed to be a close-range spell and increasing bite's area of effect can distort that.
The problem with the wealthy perk is that if you nerf it then you should nerf the crystal one too
I don't think the two are really related to each other to begin with (they purchase different things) and it looks more like you're pointing out how the two perks differ in being more or less valuable for a hero.

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Re: Number Changes Suggestion

#4 Post by Scheba »

watermelon wrote:Haunt Talent - Halve spawning chance of Haunt talent spamming ghosts upon hitting a hero. Really cheap talent but makes Haunt's damage even more ridiculous.
Haunt against heroes is a really unpredictable skill. Whenever the AI uses it against me it spawns far more ghosts than I can ever spawn when I play the Arcane Mistress. Maybe the base spawn rate per second depends on something undocumented? I really wish it wasn't so unreliable. One ghost every five seconds doesn't really put much pressure on anyone.
watermelon wrote:Maw of Death - Reduce spit AoE by 30-50%.
A slight nerf might be justifiable if Maw didn't bug out so often.
watermelon wrote:Innate - Reduce the evasion on the flying ones. I would also say that the charge time for the ground ones could be increased.
It was nerfed already, from 80% to 60%. Do you think that's still too much?

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Re: Number Changes Suggestion

#5 Post by watermelon »

One ghost every five seconds doesn't really put much pressure on anyone.
Yeah there's a lot of randomness involved with Haunt so it's not easy seeing it be that strong. Instead of being a nuke, I see Haunt as a really cheap harassment spell (easy to cast on enemies with no repercussions and can't be countered). Following up with IB is a gamble since ghosts may not appear early enough but it's still favorable for AM since immobilizing the target gives a better chance of abusing the talent. It's basically a little-risk/investment, potentially high reward situation.
A slight nerf might be justifiable if Maw didn't bug out so often.
That's not a good reason for arguing about balance. =P
It feels like Maw's spit aoe is rather disjointed and bigger than normal AoE nukes. Keep in mind that Reek is already hard to push against since Maw will instantkill at least one enemy unit and can heal him.
Do you think that's still too much?
Yes. There's definitely bias from me trying to kill them off with melee heroes who will always trigger their activation. In general, I feel that high evasion (hey Harpy) is unfun to play against since there's not much one can do about it except hoping one strike hits. I would argue their evasion should be nerfed to 30-40%.

----

Other additions (added to main post):
  • Reduce IB's damage. At level 1, it easily deals ~120 damage that other single target nukes can't accomplish.
  • Tact's Neutralize nuke probably should be nerfed. Would be nice if it hit enemy air units.
  • Reduce Smash!'s slow aoe.
  • AA's owls only lasting 60 seconds.
Extra credit: Garg's Stonegaze working like Mesmerize (only affects units facing him).

If you made any changes to Flo, I think early-game is best to consider since that's when she's most useless. It's funny how she can evolve from being useless to overpowered in the course of a game though.

Making SB start with full or even half mana could make early-game less painful for him. He's pretty much a sitting duck in the beginning.

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Re: Number Changes Suggestion

#6 Post by Jouven »

Edited my first post, after some thinking maw spit might not become so weak after an AoE reduction.

I think AM ghosts with talent can trigger even more ghosts, eg initial skill ghosts hit --> triggers a talent ghost which when hits can trigger even more ghosts...
wm wrote: Extra credit: Garg's Stonegaze working like Mesmerize (only affects units facing him).
^
They are completely different skills... I wonder how are you even comparing them... (different area, one is instant, one is broken on damage... so different... why are you even relating them... sorry but it bothers me)

Agree with everything else, except things I already mentioned.

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Re: Number Changes Suggestion

#7 Post by watermelon »

I think AM ghosts with talent can trigger even more ghosts
Yeah that's why I think the current talent is pretty cheap crystal-wise to get.
They are completely different skills... I wonder how are you even comparing them...
They're not as different as you make it sound since they're both disables.
The current Stonegaze by itself isn't really that overpowered but on Garg who already has a lot of CC, it's kind of ridiculous. It doesn't seem easy either to suggest number tweaks without making the skill useless. Current Stonegaze is rather brainless to use by virtue of Garg's skills alone (Terra Stomp or Dive). I feel that making Stonegaze harder to land but still having the same reward is a good compromise.

Of course since this isn't really a number tweak I don't really expect Yak to do this.

----

More stuff (added in main post):
  • Reduce slow scaling of Earthbind.
  • Voodoo Doll seems too worthless now. The damage could be buffed a bit.
  • I would argue that Dragonfear should only affect units close to Bane (600 range). Actually I'm just more confused by the weird disjointed aoe that can stun a hero a screen away from Bane. Otherwise reduce the stun duration against heroes to 1 second.
  • Get rid of stun scaling on Bane's Charge so basically it's always a 0.5s stun
  • Level 6 Holy Strike gets kind of ridiculous. Reduce damage scaling.
EDIT (7/22/14):
Playtested Reek with a build of Maw, Brainlust, and Anchor (one point) against the AI. He feels more ridiculous than I thought he was.

Maw easily allows Reek to farm early-game thanks to the low cooldown and instant kill mechanic. It's not that hard singling out the enemy magic units to get 40 gold each time Maw is used. Late-game it's still difficult to instant kill several units in one bite but that largely doesn't matter due to the enormous spit AoE which can weaken enemies for a subsequent Maw.

It's pretty surprising that our local Reek player isn't really using Brainlust. It has a strong scaling potential in its attack speed boost and duration alone. What's also ridiculous is the health gained upon killing a unit, which combined with Maw easily allows Reek to patch himself quickly. Of course the unit kill cap is a bit deterring but it's still a pretty strong creep buff and makes decimating bases pretty fast. Compared to Miasma, it's definitely more noticeable as an offensive buff (and of course why bother debuffing enemies if you can just kill them?).

Anchor is pretty strong as a one point skill since it can place a lot of pressure on enemy heroes. Assuming they try to destroy the anchor, for melee heroes, it's often possible to place them in an awkward position that they can't hit (or combining it with Innate/talent to push them away from it). And of course making a ranged hero focus on them allows Reek to close in on them for a Maw. If they try to run away, using a hold on them with an item like Nets or from an ally makes it pretty likely that they will get pulled back. Reek's ult also synergizes pretty strongly with Anchor by being able to creep block a running hero. The only easy counter to Anchor seems to be dispels.

For now I would argue these changes:
  • Maw - Increase cooldown to 11 seconds.
  • Brainlust - Reduce scaling of health gained from 10% to 5%.

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Re: Number Changes Suggestion

#8 Post by watermelon »

Updated.

Changes:
8/19/14
  • Cleaned up post due to Yak addressing them in 1.17b. By address, it means Yak did something to show that he's paying attention to this thread.
  • Added new stuff which is near bottom of list.

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