That was back where the only way to get to level 20 against bots was to actively try. A.I matches lasted a hot minute back in those days with real players.
All that siege damage from all the specialists in addition to towers having limited ammunition made matches lasting to 20 extremely rare.
Hereâs something most people forgot, remember when heroes didnât have the current 4% scaling and had their own unique scaling rates?
Still in the game on characters with external scaling (some examples are Azmodanâs Globe and Butcher Basic Attacks scaling at +2.5% instead of +4%)
Oh god, I just remembered the talent gating that used to be in effect. If you were playing a new hero, you did not have access to a large amount of talents until you hit level milestones.
I was envious of my friends when the game first came out because I was the only one who did not get invited and sometime later after trying it out myself I did not enjoy it at all. I was a fan of the art style but something about the UI, controls and lighting just didnât feel right so I quit after two days. It must have been that weird sc2 glare instead of wc3 matte colors which were so appealing.
Several rounds of improvements later I gave it a second chance and it wasnât too bad, but it wasnât amazing either. A year and half of content drought between WoW expansions must have had something to do with it and Hots was in all hands on deck mode at this time, which was very exciting.
I liked the direction the game was moving in so I spent a lot of time in tech and bug forums. The devs continued inviting me for private chats over my contributions but it was awkward to participate because of the time zone difference. This would have been a great opportunity to request freebies in a game where everything was ridiculously overpriced and I have no doubts they would have obliged after speaking to some of them.
Got permabanned 27k games later and Iâve not touched the game in last four months. Even when I wasnât playing I would still check the forums every other day to see what was going on, thatâs how much I liked it. In comparison I have been playing WoW since day one but I canât even stomach what people are talking about over there.
We have this in common, itâs so instinctive for me to at this point, yet Iâve adapted with all other hero reworks!
Also, youâre right about Sylâs OG trait and her lack of hero damage. That cheese really only worked in some QM games, if players were too lazy, or lacked coordination to gank her. That trait did help snowball some maps like Haunted Mines, or BOE where permanently disabling structures made pushing with the objective more oppressive.
That reminds me, I still miss Stitches little âRetchlingâ summon.
Nydus Worm could spawn minnions aswell with a 20 cd with lvl 20 talent.
Yeah I donât miss that. It made me expect that the later talents were always going to be better.
If we are talking about what used to be.
Butcherâs LtS used to be 4 seconds, didnât silence, but if that chain was on you, and at one point it did not leave even if you got unstoppable, resulting in you getting yanked all the way back to it no matter where you were.
Zeratul used to have a different heroic to Might of the Nerazim that caused him to repeatedly dashed towards an enemy with his auto-attacks.
Kaelâthas living bomb used to be so annoying to deal with, especially with the original ignite talent. You could set a living bomb off by throwing another one on the same target or having it spread, and it used to spread to everything.
Release Varian with twin-blades used to be semi-immortal with heroic strike being physical instead of spell damage, along with warbringer causing a small stun along with reducing chargeâs cooldown. He also got his ults at level 10 like everyone else.
Kelâthuzad used to be able to attach his chain to enemy structures.
Alarak had so many bad talents cause the heroes team never intended for him to be a combo assassin, he was suppose to make plays off the tank player. This can be reflected in how many of his talent had sever drawbacks or actively punished you for trying to use them. Pure malice was also the only way to gain sadism.
Than there was the nightmares of all the OP heroes on release such as Sam, Maiev, Fenix, Deathwing, Emergency patch Zarya who got another emergency patch a few days later to correct her, Ess of Johann Li-ming, The unkillable angel of death malthael, Tracer bullying melee heroes for like a week.
Thrall that was a quarter health, so three swoop in to finish him, only to have him finish them and wind up with full health.
Dug this up. I wonder when Kevin started voicing the trailers?
Sylvanas used to be able to take samurai camps solo with Mercenary Queenâs buff affecting them. With her perma trait back then she could walk alongside one all the way to enemy core. It would have power to destroy gates, towers, keeps, and forts incredibly fast.
That is if she was allowed to. A Lost Viking back then was enough to make her sweat a bit.
To this day, Iâm worried about getting the AFK warning before the gates open when playing Abathur.
So glad they removed that, but Iâm still suffering from it.
I started just the week before sylvanas release!
I remember jaina was in free rotation but only for account level 17 or something. So I played the hell out of the game just so I can play the hell out of the game with jaina who was 10k hero back then.
My main ever since 
Thatâs so old lol. I remember the Retchling
Sometimes, I remember how the alpha didnât have body-blocking. I understand the utility of it now, but I sure didnât like it when they added it.
8 years ago (according to my in-game profile) I started playing thanks to the Nexus 2.0 update with the OW event (the Officer D.Va and Oni Genji skins), deciding to stick around even after the event. Even all those years ago, I still gravitated towards everyoneâs favorite Probe. But good grief, pre-rework Probius was SO much more cumbersome to use, and being a brand new player only made everything that much worse. For those who donât rememberâŚ
Iâm really, really glad they reworked the probe before going into maintenance. I think people think of Probius the way they think of Torbjorn in Overwatch, where people are so used to when Torbjorn was a throw pick that they still underestimate him, even during the times where heâs actually a viable choice.
I believe I started playing when Thrall was the most recent hero, and then The Lost Vikings were released not long later.
Back then I played a lot of Li Li. She was a very fun hero to play⌠great and bullying other heroes and was able to hold her own in 1v1 and actually had build diversity. Unfortunately at one point she got a rework that completely ruined her and has never recovered. It was one of those reworks where they take a neat talent and made it baseline and had her entire kit now revolve around it.
Originally Fast Feet only made her move faster when she got hit, there was no cooldown reduction. At level 20 she had a talent called Kung-fu Hussle that gave the cooldown reduction when she was hit, but instead of 50%, it was 200% and worked on basic and heroic abilities. Great talent, but made her run out of mana really fast when under focus fire.
For some reason when they added the CD reduction to Fast Feet, they felt as though all her cooldowns on her base abilities should be increased by about 33-50%, so it was balanced around her always taking damage. Healing Brew went from 3 to 4 seconds, and Cloud Serpent and Blinding Wind went from 8 to 12 seconds.
Other talents got messed up as well, She used to be able to have up to 3 Cloud Serpents up at once because the duration was longer than the cooldown and there was a talent that gave herself one if she used it on an ally. Cloud Serpent also did more damage and didnât have the heal tied to it (that was another talent that got baked in) so by going for full Cloud Serpent build you actually put out decent damage and could even heal decently with the healing talent.
Blinding Wind used to have a talent that increased her spell power by 8% for 10 seconds when it hit a hero, stacking up to 40% and another talent that allows her to hit 4 enemies instead of 2, allowing her to keep up that +40% spell power by playing aggressively. Now the talent is only 10% spell power if you hit at least 2 heroes, and the talent that hits 4 is now 3 (but it now deals more damage if you hit 3, yay?)
There was also a talent that baked Cleanse into her Healing Brew, but it was kind of overpowered and I think got nerfed at some point.
The only good changes she ever got was adding a slow to Blinding Wind (used to be a talent) and having it prioritize heroes, and Jug of 1000 Cups no longer being interrupted when she got knocked back and itâs cooldown being tied to how long she was able to channel it⌠but Iâm pretty sure these changes came before her massive rework.
Azmodan was another hero I enjoyed before he got a rework that made him all about the globe and removed build diversity, but at least that rework didnât make him bottom tier. I do miss being able to buff catapults with +100% damage by casting Demon Lieutenants on them with a certain talent and their cooldown being only 30 seconds.