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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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%.
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.