EotA: Twilight 1.14b2 Download

[DarnYak]

Balance + minor improvements. Probably new bugs.

DarnYak

[Dekar]

Make phoenixs unable to damage buildings with explosion or reduce their hp by a lot so that they can be intercepted.

Ember is awesome!

Heals still imba.

Not enough bans for verdant to ban all the usual suspects from other maps + everyone with skills that cover the whole screen.

[watermelon]

• Bugs:
• Offhands hotkey (E) doesn't work.
• Probably obvious, but Defiler and Ember don't have their hero selection tooltip updated with their new spells.
• Stonegaze's tooltip still mentions healing.
• Hamstring lists 30 seconds as a duration.
  
  Suggestions:
• Could you make some kind of indication when the Fork starts losing life really fast?
• Could you change Soar so that it will actually still be useful at Level 1 when Aero is at higher levels? The current mana drain makes it a useless skill when Aero gets more mana.
  
  Misc:
• Echoing Strike seems to work. Is it supposed to have any visible effect?
• Echoing Strike is OP with its extremely low mana cost and cooldown. It pretty much slaughters any enemy melee heroes.
• Stonegaze is insane. Is it supposed to have a visible effect (not considering the buff)?
  
  AI:
• Doesn't look like the Fork AI uses Echoing Strike or Echo.
• It looks like the AI knows how to teleport if AI Serra is in the game.
• AI Serra likes lingering around the top lane of Stormwail.
• Defiler doesn't cast DP or his ult.

EDIT
I seem to crash the game a lot when I'm using Bane's Acid Sheath.

EDIT 2
A hired AI Blackguard from the Tavern does not move at all.
The weird thing though is that the enemy AI started running to attack the hired Blackguard whenever they could, as if they were on a suicide mission. The enemy AI also started showing that they could actually cast spells well, like Reek casting Anchor, Roth casting Entangling Seed, and Martyr casting his Ethereal spell. It also somehow made AI on both teams learn how to teleport which they didn't do prior to hiring him.
This was in a Verdant Falls game and could be due to full vision in the map.
EDIT 3
Ok, so this basically happens in any map with full vision from hiring a Blackguard.
AI enemy heroes that can specifically assault other heroes will run to the Blackguard and try to cast their spell on him without any regard to the new AI that's controlling them.

Just hiring the Blackguard without full vision seems to give AI heroes the ability to teleport.
It also looks like hiring Blackguard first will mess up the other mercenary heroes' AI.

[DarnYak]

Good catch on the merc Blackguard thing. A bit of an explaination: When I redid the AI a few months ago, I didn't want to take a few days to re-write all the hero specific spellcasting stuff from scratch, so I just made it call a portion of the old AI code. Unfortunately, within that there was a variable that I forgot to initialize so the AIs were completely blind when it came to casting specific spells. Buying the blackguard, however, has its own bug since it doesn't operate under the old AI anymore even though it tries to. It's failure to run causes the viarable to be initalized, but never cleaned up as a functioning AI would do. This caused all the other AI's to think they're standing on top of the Blackguard for the purposes of spellcasting.

Teleporting is a seperate issue entirely so far as I can see. They should actually teleport in the current version, they just assume it can only be done every 150 seconds instead of every 15 seconds, so its kind of rare. Or there's another part of the bug I haven't found, but one thing at a time ;P

Fixing merc blackguard will have to wait, that's a fairly major and annoying re-write (I basically need to re-write all the tavern code, and I may as well move the other mercs + inf to the new AI system while I'm at it).

More general question: Looking for feedback on Ember/Defiler now that they've gone through their first balance run. Still need to add in their new talents though.

[watermelon]

You nerfed Pyroclasm so much that it deals no damage. =P (At least for higher levels.)
Cinderfury is awesome.
Defiler's Heal damage bonus should probably be toned down.
Cloud seems reasonable now that the hero can actually escape it.

[DarnYak]

Yea Pyroclasm has a weird dynamic now that I gave him Cinderfury. Cinderfury is single target (well, relatively) and can be dodged and/or mitigated, and can't be reliably combined with his hold + torture talent, so it should have the higher damage. Pyroclasm can be used to hit heroes somewhat reliably and get higher damage with the torture talent even with current numbers, but it does have the delay and cooldown factors. Plus having a spell that you can't interrupt in any way that can decimate entire spawn waves is bad. And of course having both makes him the highest damage potential in the game if you manage to time it right and land it all.

[Dekar]

Ember is a beast with
a) nuke heroes from range with awesome fireballs ( and moderate spawn damage )
b) heal + autoattack damage + slow + armor reduce to destroy anything coming too close to you