Eve of the Apocalypse: Twilight

Many months ago, I was talking with Yak about hero abilities. We were discussing alternatives to Mass Haste since it's functionally an aura. The following was the idea I proposed, and remembered earlier today.

Focused Haste:
Target a non-hero unit to grant it a 40% attack-speed increase for 10 seconds. This bounces to up to 6 other non-hero units, prioritising units of the same unit-type.
Also grants a light movement speed boost to all nearby units for the same duration.

I liked it because it would be the first EotA ability to interact directly with your choice of troop spawns. It can be used selectively on certain units during a siege, push, or while defending. It also has potential synergy with Fenris, Rue, or Crest Witch since they have summons sharing a type. Sadly AA's summoned familiar is one of a kind .

The prioritizing is an interesting gimmick but I'm not convinced that it would get used well. To make the prioritizing actually matter, there would need to be a lot of some unit-type which generally just means a common unit-type like the melee units in a regular push. However, I would usually want to buff the strongest unit, like say the captain of a Level 1 Merc push or units from spawntowers, rather than trying to buff a common unit-type, and those units aren't usually numerous. Since it's just prioritizing I don't really care that some other random units get buffed as long as the one I chose gets buffed. The prioritizing seems like it would only be notable in rather specific situations.

Yeah, I accept it has practical limitations. But it might branch into some other ideas; EotA's the only map I can see it working on.

My original thought was that it would be nice to focus mass-haste on catapults to bring down towers faster, but then I was told they're magic immune.

The bonus could be split among available units of that type: 90% if there's only one, 50% each if there's five. But I don't think that actually adds any thinking.

A related idea would be amplifying the affected units' modifiers on the damage table, so piercing has x% more than its usual bonus versus unarmoured, and x% less damage than usual against fortified. That seems more demanding of knowledge of damage-type tables rather than unit-type purposes though.

This class of spells would be more interesting, imo, by removing the non-hero restriction, removing the cap, and making it particular to the type.

Taking the sample haste spell for instance, and upping the duration:
- Targeting the melee line would give you the most dps (due to numbers + they're relatively strong), but they are front line and die fast so it wouldn't last too long
- Targeting one of the ranged would normally last full duration, but there's fewer of them so the dps would be lower
- Targeting special units would be more situational (and often not a good idea, but something like an abberrated spawn that has a siege attack)
- Targeting a hero gives you more controlled + focused damage

DarnYak

I agree with Yak's perspective there: it's more true to the concept to buff only the chosen unit-type. But I was concerned that choosing based on volume would always be optimal.

Two further variations to suggest:

• +50% effect on summons, +100% effect on tower-core units
• Can be used on enemy units to slow (slow dragons when you have ballistae)

I think you can provide an equally useful ability that's easier to describe and balance.

Q: What are the use cases for the ability? A: Making tanky wave units advance faster to build a more powerful lane push.

So, just make your ability an active instant-cast that hastes nearby melee/tanky non-heroes.

If you don't like this, I propose that you list a set of use cases for various spawn-types and try to reason about at least 2 of them. I suspect that you'll find that adding more functionality without actually increasing player options isn't worth it.