I cannot commend the team enough for asking for feedback on this issue, more of this please! It gives a better idea of your guys train of thought and also insight as to what you’ve tried already internally.
IMO i believe option 3 is where the core of the issue lies: You want to punish people who chase after heros under the structures but without downright annihilating them either. I think 2 good examples of this highlight my point: Tracer and Muradin.
As an attacking Tracer you want to dive under towers, smack enemys a few times and if it’s not enough, then retreat. If the towers decide to target me first as i dive in with my team, i should be punished for this as an assassin. However if a Muradin does the same atm, a much tankier hero, he wont survive more then 1-2 extra shots before he is toast. I don’t believe this should be the case. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime.
On the other hand, if we’re deffending against an invading force as Mura/Tracer (just to keep the examples similar) 5vs2 we should be able to rely on the towers atleast punshing fast assasins who takes 1 too many shots because their tank isn’t tanking them.
I guess my feedback boils down to:
Finding the sweet spot where you make sure squishy heros who overstep like Zerathul and Tracer gets punished without getting 1 shot while tanks can in fact tank the towers without their healthpool dissapearing within seconds because of a shot and something else happening at the same time to them, like ricochet at lvl 16 from tracer hitting Muradin from the building
Just to get to know me better i mainly do supports/ranged dmg as i am not much of a diver myself.
I have not yet read others’ posts, as that will take a while, but I still want to give some input:
Option - Structures prioritise objectives:
I like that one, though I only have subjective input. To me, it just feels odd having structures ignore the big boss to shoot puny heroes. Especially on the Diablo maps, the objective has this air of “Let us march for hell’s gates”… And then the heroes hide like cowards as they might draw structure aggro which is lethal. Then there is the opposite approach highlighted by Hoku: Intentionally drawing structure aggro to let the objective live longer. While it’s an interesting tactic, it also makes the duration how long the objective lives volatile.
So yes, please have structures focus objective bosses.
Option - Towers work as they did in the past:
I am a big fan of this one. You highlighted well how much smaller the safe area of the map is right now. The laning phase now revolves almost exclusively around your own half of the lane, which is pretty boring. Also, just like in the option above, it feels cowardly to push with an objective but staying back since one might hit a hero and immediately get targeted by 2 towers.
Option - reduce armor shred speed:
This is something that I played around with. In my opinion, the armor shreds too fast. Say you push with an objective (see the common argument here?) and you stand slightly behind the enemy gate. You accidentally hit an enemy hero - and all of the sudden 1 fort and 1-2 towers would like to have a word with you. Even if you realize immediately and back off, you are guaranteed to eat 2 shots per structure, giving you -30 armor in less than 2 seconds. That’s too harsh. Letting the debuff stack at -3 or -2 per shot would be much more manageable.
I think you can already see how my 3 preferred options all revolve around similar situations and applying them all would probably be overkill. Still, at the current state, getting targeted by 3 structures is devastating and will pretty much require you to hearth, even with a healer around. That’s not fun. And there is a good chance of this happening during an objective push.
I would say increase the Hit Points of Structures in order Objectives will be more important then just pushing lanes and structures as per says, or increasing Spell Armor to make them more tough against mage with High Range.
According to Nexus Anomaly, i like all changes you ve made. But still need improvements, yes games could be longer about 5min more but the game will be more team based. Try to tweak the game in order it will not lookslike to other Moba, HOTS is HOTS and in HOTS we need everyone in the team to win a freaking game
Strongly support option 2. It would keep objectives like TotSQ and Garden valuable early as it is currently very difficult to get value from them when towers are still up.
Concerning dive, heroes like Illidan and Genji can counter the damage from all 3 sources anyway with their abilities so it would not affect too much.
Increased potential for skill and playmaking in the solo lane and late game pushes is surely never a bad thing. The complexity bump seems pretty minor, the aggro changes made it much more complex themselves and only having one structures range and aggro to consider seems to me to offset it entirely.
Bring back Fort’s attacks slowing move speed and attack speed, but cap armor shred at around 20% to compensate the return of this. In my opinion the slow was a very key element that set apart the forts and made them feel like safety: if someone dived you under a fort, you could rely on the CC to aid your survival/escape. Just my 2 cents.
My English is not really good so i’ll try to make it quick but i wanted to say i’m 99% for this Nexus Anomaly, i think it’s a good change for Hots.
For the Tower aggro, i think it could be great if summoned units can take aggro first again, it can make some pick great again and interesting choice in draft.
Then, about lower the damage that structures do to Heroes, there are some issues i give to you
=> Change the debuff from -10 armor to -5 armor but that debuff can stack more (longer dive will be more punish because a “good” dive it’s a “short” dive).
or
=> Take off the armor debuff (What !?), but add an armor buff for champion who defend on their structures when they take damage. (every X second, got X armor). With this changes maybe people can still feel “protect” from their structures but not the same way they imagine it. (but maybe keep the focus of structures).
Finally, For “Hero Objectives” like Dragon or Mech, i think something have to change because they are not really a “Hero” but they are not really a IA “Objectives”, so tower focus or debuff armor should be adapt to theirs specifics status
Thanks for ask to all of us what we think about this.
New anomaly is crap. Just drives more people away from the game. When i get killed by towers because i wanted to fight there, i am out and afk.
I literally stopped playing LoL many years ago and started playing HotS ONLY because here you could fight under towers, and the pathetic enemies could not simply hide under them.
Hate the change, completely ignore it, and if it kills me, screw the match. Not my fault that this game is turning more and more into what i hated about LoL.
I wish we would get a HotS classic with tower ammo, all the non-reworked heroes and none of the autistic Overwatch garbage. Heroes and maps are both trash.
Thank you for this. It feels good to know that developpers actually care about their player base and are trying to do what’s best for us. And to try to help you guys the best I can, I will give my honest opinion on each points you have named. I hope this will be useful to you.
What you like:
I pretty much agree with everything you said here. Overall, this change feels great. However, I do not understand how attackers are supposed to manipulate the tower. It feels conterintuitive when the healer happens to land the first hit on the defending team and then stays there trying to heal its team, and the tower focuses it while all the DPS are dealing heavy damage to the defenders.
Issues with the current system:
Structures are indeed very damaging. To me, this is not a problem, it meens the defender are safer under their tower. And as you have highlighted earlier, there are a number of ways you can tweak numbers to reach the point you like.
Splash damage is a problem, especially on same heroes where you have no control over it or it specifically prioritizes heroes. An example would be a Tassadar who picked Kaydharin Amulet as his level 1 talent. With this, even if you try to ignore the defenders and focus your attacks on the keep, your beam will bounce to another Hero and you will be targeted. This feels bad.
To me, this is not an issue. I find the laning phase interesting enough as it is, especially since the change with the experience orbs forces us to get closer to the action to get XP, which creates more interaction between players.
To me, this is the biggest issue with the changes to the structures. Winning an objective should feel powerful. Right now, you are forced to watch it try to take down the structures by itself because if you try to help it you will be taken down by the structures. So the correct move seems to be to juste let the objective push alone and have your team push another lane, which sucks. Also, in my opinion, losing an objective should be about doing your best to mitigate your losses, not using it as an opportunity to fight under your structures. A map objective is punishment for failing to conquer it and should feel as such.
Again a non issue to me. It took a little bit of time to adapt my gameplay to the changes, but they feel great. As you said, the fact that it has been that way for a long time is not a reason to keep it that way if a better way is available.
Possible solutions:
In my opinion, this change is needed, for all the reasons I said earlier. It sucks that the rule will be arbitrary and counterintuitive, but overall the Pros far outweights the Cons.
I don’t believe this change would be a great idea. In that case, the added complexity is not worth the benefits it will bring.
If you believe structures deal too much damage, this is a way to solve it. This and tweaking the armor reduction numbers. Just a little bit less damage would be good, but I like things the way they are for now.
Another fix that would be needed in my opinion would be one to splash damage. Maybe the structures should not target a player if the damage is done by an ability where the player has no control whatsoever about who he targets. For example, Tassadar’s Amulet, LiLi’s serpent, Tracer’s bouncing bullets, Cassia’s Charged Strikes, etc. I do however that this could be counterintuive and hard to manage. But right now, it feels bad pushing with heroes with such abilities.
I would also like to use this opportunity to voice another concern about another problem I sense in the game, the toxicity of some players. I understand you have absolutely no control over what people say in chat. But there are two simple changes that I believe could make a large difference. First, you could send a notification in the main menu when a player we reported gets penalized, like some other games do. This would make the reporting system feel more meaningful. In turn, this could lead to an increase in the number of reported cases because the people will start to believe more in the system. And as toxic behaviour gets more punished, it will diminish. The second one would be to prevent us from being paired ever again with a player we reported. I had a case recently where a player started insulting everybody before the game even started, kept this during the whole game, went afk for a while, feeded at other times, etc. I reported him and got paired with that person again the very next game. Obviously, he repeated the exact same behaviour for a second game in a row. I prefer spending a few more seconds in queue to match me away from such people than wasting 15 to 30 minutes of my life in a frustrating game because of such people. If I’m correct, there are other games (Overwatch maybe?) that pair players with too much report of toxic behaviour together. Let these kind of player play together and let us who play just for fun play away from them.
Thanks for the post! I’m glad to see that the team cares and asks what we think!
Overall, I like the changes. I like that towers actually protect you now, versus needing to AoE down the minions to make them useful. It can make pushing more frustrating, though. I think this system of tower aggro works in League of Legends mostly because (most) abilities can’t dammage towers. I really like that abilities in HotS hit structures, but that makes the balancing harder. I know the comparison to LoL isn’t exactly relevant, but I think it’s important in asking what works and why.
Of the proposed changes I like having towers focus objectives, and gate towers prioritizing minions.
Objectives are big and powerful, and can create high intensity moments. I was playing Battlefield of Eternity yesterday, and I really felt the changes there. Since the immortal stands at range (with a shield) and doesn’t target enemies, it’s really hard to push with them. The immortal is fairly safe for enemies to be around so they can zone the pushing team off while hiding under their tower, which is scarier than the immortal. the result is the team that won the objective standing there throwing long range damage and hoping to be useful. I suppose this could emphasize split pushing, but without defense the immortal dies pretty quick and feels underwhelming. in regard to the targeting change being confusing, maybe a new visual indicator? this could be in icon over the objective and/or a different color or look for the targeting beam.
I also like front towers reverting to old targeting. Heroes that do primarily AoE damage really suffer when attacking walls, especially melee ones. Because you can’t see through a gate, you can’t tell if an ability is gonna pull aggro or not. Seeing as there is probably a defender there, it likely will. This puts Heroes like Sonya in a bad place. Most of her damage is in her abilities, which are AoE. accidentally pulling aggro for a melee Hero can be fatal, especially if the enemy punishes with cc.
This is a good summary of the most common strategy employed before the Call for Help anomaly went into effect. The unstated corollary is that since smart towers now prioritize enemy heroes and apply a stacking armor debuff, then defending heroes have an opportunity to attack those enemy heroes with advantage and may either get counter-kills or force them to retreat. Thinking through the many games I have watched and played since then, I have rarely seen defending teams take full advantage of the armor debuff. Enemy heroes more often retreat because of the direct threat of the structure itself.
There are two main scenarios that play out when defending structures without an active enemy objective:
You have a handful of enemy minions at the gates and one or two heroes that are trying to push towers or get a kill.
There is a massive stack of minions and mercs with two or more enemy heroes. The second scenario tends to occur when a team falls behind in wave and camp clear.
In the first case, the tower changes are nice - you feel like you have backup, and you can trade a couple of shots, but you don’t want to over-extend, so you don’t chase and you make sure the wave is cleared before venturing back into the lane.
In the second case, you cannot afford to focus heroes that have the armor debuff, because the wave is too strong and it will quickly overwhelm your structures. So you must be a good teammate towards the structures and protect them by throwing as much AOE as possible to clear the wave. The waves that you face can be dangerous in their own right, if you are not careful about your positioning. This goes back to the original point #2 - under these conditions, the counter-play is the same as it was before the anomaly went into effect. You have the option of attacking the enemy heroes, but you need to do a quick assessment every time: do you have time to attack those heroes, or must you clear the wave to prevent the loss of structures?
What if, instead of applying a stacking armor debuff to enemy heroes, the structures used explosive cannonballs on heroes?
This would do a several things:
The removal of the armor debuff means that an enemy hero could possibly stay longer under a structure, but they now need to be careful about their positioning. I can see a situation where a solo hero eats several cannonball shots while damaging a fort, but maybe they can’t do that and take minion shots at the same time.
Enemy heroes that stand with their waves will help you clear those waves, so that you can focus less on clearing the wave and more on the invading hero. Because enemy heroes do not want to clear their waves, they would want to stand apart from their wave, which opens them up to skillshots that would otherwise be blocked by waves, like orbs and hooks.
Enemy heroes would not want to stand next to each other, so as to minimize the effect of the splash damage. This opens them up for isolation and additional counter-play.
I would only make this change for forts and keeps - this seems too powerful for towers, plus towers aren’t large enough to store the big ammo. I am not sure what this would do to game length or turtle situations. It could be that this would thoroughly discourage structure dives, but that could maybe be a function of adjusting how damage is allocated in the explosion, such as splash damage is less to the direct target and +100% to minions. There is also the consideration that there may be a disproportionate effect on melee vs ranged.
Amazing how people here literally say “It was good before the anomaly” and “i like the anomaly” in the same argument.
It was PERFECT before the anomaly, just like gathering XP was perfect before that bs anomaly. Now i mostly play Abathur, because towers can’t attack him anyways, and i just stay in the base, because you can’t gather XP as casual Abathur anymore. Team just gets mad, reports me, and after a few games, i have to switch accounts again.
Thinking about it… it’s sad how the anomalies basically just cause more and more people to become toxic. I was so nice back in the day, had an account on like lv 2000 or something. Now i don’t give a crap anymore. If the match isn’t fun because of the new bs, i’m done.
This game has me greatly pissed off. I used to love playing, however for the past NINE MONTHS TO A YEAR the glitching on my mac makes the game almost unplayable. How am I supposed to attack things when they randomly disappear from my screen? Also, not as big of an issue, after matches it goes to a loading screen FOREVER instead of showing who the MVPs are and such. Having looked at other questions and forums dealing with this same issue… NOTHING IS BEING DONE… No one from Blizzard even responds to any of those threads…
First of all, thanks for asking for feedback.
I really appreciate this.
I hope you will find new ideas in all the comments.
Change all structures to prioritize Map Objectives before anything else
Like you said in the cons, that would be confusing to change the rules like that.
The rules must stay simple to enjoy the game.
If you put this change in the game, you will have to prioritise mercs camps over heroes too.
A new player will not understand when he can attack or not.
Other players will struggle too : “What’s the rule in that case ?”
Change Tower aggro so that the front Towers prioritize Minions, but the Forts, Keeps, and Kings Core prioritize Heroes who attack other Heroes
Same problem than the first idea.
Towers can be destroyed easely and the problem remains with the Forts and Keeps.
Lower the damage that Structures do to Heroes
That’s the only change that made sense in your propositions.
This mechanic don’t add complexity to the game.
But the problem is always here : attackers have to be passive under structures.
Another idea : Revert the structures focus and add a defensive aura under the towers (like 15% armor).
Dives must be more punitive for the attackers, that’s right.
With the anomaly, the problem is solved but it’s really too effective.
Like you said, structures became stronger, even too powerful.
Now, attackers cannot be aggressive, they are punnished instantly by the towers for trying.
But even worse, if you “accidentaly” attack a hero under the tower, this is a mistake and you will take the rage of structures.
For me, the focus mechanic doesn’t suit to HOTS in many ways and is the center of the problem.
We can take examples :
Melee heroes cannot use their spells under the structures : if they hit accidentaly a enemy hero, they will take the focus of structures and have to get back out of the structures.
Invocations are dangerous to use now, if one of your minions hit an enemy hero under a strucrure, you’re responsible and you take aggro : Anub’Arak, Azmodan, Malfurion, Zagara, Arthas, Raynor, etc…
Heroes that heal themselves or others by hitting enemy heroes have limited actions under structures : Diablo, Malfurion, Whitemane, Garrosh, Johanna, Alarak, etc…
-> If healing yourself or others make you take more damage than before the heal, the only choice is to get back out of the structures.
AOE heroes are affected too. Using these kind of spells to hit a maximum of targets including heroes is now a mistake : Jaina, Kael’Thas, Kel’Thuzad, Orphea, Gul’Dan, etc…
-> Special treatment for Tassadar : distorsion beam is a dangerous weapon for himself and the enemy can run into one tick of his psy storm to trigger the towers again him.
Camps and objectives lose their efficiency : it’s better to split push after winning an objective instead of pushing with it.
New totally unintuitive mechanics emmerge :
-> in defense, try to take a hero damage under the structures to trigger the focus.
-> in attack, try not to use your spells or run away as fast as you can if you hit a hero.
There are aven more examples but my message is already long enough to understand my point of view.
I know that you want to test things before taking the final decision and I understand that.
But to implement this focus mechanic, you will have a lot of work just to make it works properly.
Sorry for my english, I’m a frogger and this is not my native language.
I hope you will understand me
You sound insanely toxic and really clueless. You can still gather XP with Abathur you just have to be much more careful. And I’m sure your team has good reasons to report you. Also the anomalies obviously didn’t make anyone become more toxic - I’m honestly not sure if you’re just trolling.
I am not sure what this would do to game length or turtle situations. It could be that this would thoroughly discourage structure dives, but that could maybe be a function of adjusting how damage is allocated in the explosion, such as splash damage is less to the direct target and +100% to minions. There is also the consideration that there may be a disproportionate effect on melee vs ranged.