Very awesome.
Both heroes look really interesting and unique and the ranked/season stuff is great and way overdue. I’m quite excited for all this stuff to land.
Plus upcoming changes to Arthas and Anub’arak may help bring them out of dumpster town.
Chromie, from the very brief video, looks like she’s going to be like Li’Ming and Jaina, where her attacks are mostly skill-shots. I like they they are continuing the tradition of the damage casters being skill-shot based.
Interested to see what Medivh ends up being. Support? Assassin? Specialist? Hard to tell from the brief video. Looks mobile as heck though. And that bird looks like a nice zoning tool (making me think Specialist).
QM matchmaking continues to drive me insane. Why aren’t the majority of players playing as a bloody team? Le sigh.
Here, these are much more useful.
Chromie - https://youtu.be/uRm_S-hTT6A
Medivh - https://youtu.be/1DunY5JgzRo
Thanks! Good info videos. Chromie looks like the ultimate flee-stopper. If a team pushed too far while your team is recovering, and they start to run after your rez, there has 2 different ways to weed out 1 member at a time from the flee-ball. Going to be fun to see in action once people get some practice with her.
I’m quite excited for Medivh really. The ball of utility mage thing is quite appealing. Plus if I can get a friend to play him I might actually be able to play the Butcher as more than a yolo joke.
I am a sucker for mounts though, so I’m slightly irritated that they are tempting me to play HL before the new stuff to try to get the damn elemental wolf mount. I really don’t want to, but I feel it’s probably an achievable goal.
Damnit.
An impressive list of changes are now on the PTR, including the long-awaited (for me!) Arthas revamp!
Arthas feels scary again, hooray! Anub’arak feels like the last Chen rework, nice in some ways, but nothing really huge. Falstad is weird but interesting. I feel like the sm quest really benefits his AA build a lot more, but boomhammer is mostly the same aside from having a defensive talent option at 4 since you can no longer take the extra hammer toss range.
Solid stuff.
Well so much for the dream of hitting 20 in HL before the preseason ends. It really only seems to come down to whichever team has the least idiots wins and Blizzard seems determined that idiots are what I deserve. I even duo queued with a friend last night and our KT apparently thinks he’s a tank because he was always up front getting annihilated. Then they get jumped and exploded by John Cena. I calmly type, please don’t engage punisher outside our gates… Guess how many more times this happens? At least 4. With multiple idiots doing the same dumb shit repeatedly.
They really need to figure out some sort of individual performance metric as a part of their ranking algorithm. I’m not God’s gift to video games, but I’m nowhere near the Helen Kellers I keep getting stuck with and it’s infuriating. I love the characters and the gameplay, but it’s zero fun to queue for a competitive environment and be certain that it’s going to be a random pile of shit.
Yeah 5vs5 is shitty for this reason. Unless literally God is doing the matchmaking, you are kinda fucked long term.
I don’t think it’s fixable, personally.
(16v16 would reduce the statistical impact of one or two jackasses so, so much)
I know I’ve probably said it before, but it weirds me out that I feel like the csgo ranked matchmaking is about a billion times better. I realize that they aren’t the same game, but it’s still a 5v5 format and teamwork is very required and I feel it does a hugely better job at finding you matches based on your performance than just team average number nonsense.
It’s just annoying to assume that I’ll just get stuck with people throwing games through sheer stupidity and keep dropping like a rock and that pretty much ensures I’ll keep getting shit games. This could possibly change in a month, but I’m just baffled.
Seems to me in CS you play the same “hero” over and over. Not true in MOBAs, the heroes have radically different roles and abilities. Skill in one does NOT imply skill with the other, at all. So quite different.
Also in an FPS one person can easily carry the team. In HotS if you have one worthless player, you’ll probably lose unless the other team has one just as bad or worse. The math just doesn’t really support one person beating 3-5 other people. That’s one of the things that made LiMing so powerful - she could actually hard carry a team with her resets at times.
Both good points, I’m just saying that I wish that there was some better metric that could take individual performance into account when matchmaking. It obviously does not currently do so and that is more frustrating because it’s damn near impossible to carry a game.
So Chromie’s burst in madness if you can land it.
Dropping dragons on people for 1.4k is crazy.
MOBAs are a hard thing to rank players in. Yes the team size requires such similar skill that “whoever gets the bad player” generally loses. This creates crazy flip flop that translates into “ELO hell” until or if you can break into a section of the ranked structure that significantly lowers the odds of either team getting the inaccurately ranked player.
Sometimes when thinking about this I think a potential serious flaw in the system is to try to use ELO structure tied to wins versus losses in a single player game such as Chess to a very different competitive envioronment where bad players can be pulled up in rank by good players, but then be a sink to other pools of good players.
I was musing about the value of tying rank to standard deviations of end game stats and checking them against the fellow players of a team rather than the outcome (win/loss), and it seems like a workable idea that will never see light. Basically you could then see how each player related to each other which matters much more when rating a single player of a group than if that group (which may never play together again) managed to out compensate skill difference of the other team for a win. Or even cross it with averages of that role and that character for games on the same map with the same game length of other players of similar rank not even in the game. A win is a single statistic that doesn’t say much at all about player two versus player 5 on a team. However if you pool all damage dealt, damage absorbed, deaths, assists, gold obtained, exp obtained, etc into a match statistic and 1 player is clearly off of the other players on their team or their rank (win or loss) game after game, then that tells a lot more about where the player should be ranked.
Something along those lines would be great. It’s weird to me that a lot of the appeal for many people is the fact that the game is fun, but tends to have shorter matches and generally less time commitment. Then they have this mmr system which often doesn’t seem to balance out until you have hundreds of games. Hopefully the rework system is better, but it has truly sucked since release.
It’s not very motivational to see people play like they just glued an angry cat to their mouse and the only real thing to do is grind through the idiocy. I’m lucky if one of five hl matches doesn’t feel like a complete shitshow.
Last week I had an amazing match where I was pretty doubtful considering the draft, but unlike most other matches people just kept playing and at the end we finished convincingly after 36 minutes. I had 355 bonus damage on my Storm Bolt as Muradin and 2 deaths. Meaning I hit over 70 of those things through the match and was popping structures for over 2.6k damage a shot near the end. Our aggressive Abathur was the mvp in my opinion racking up over 45k xp. Sadly, those amazing matches are very much the exception.
Chromie has proven to be exceptionally strong (op?) as Blizzard has been wont to do with new assassins.
And are they fucking serious with Li Ming still? Not only can she do insane burst, she resets CDs AND heals with each kill, has a low-CD blink, and her ult fucking slows? “But we made it gradual!” That totally makes up for her being a jack of all trades that isn’t decent at everything, but amazing at everything.
Chromie can be killed 1v1 by most supports.