Imperius is, currently, a well-designed hero.
He has three skill-shots, requires significant mana management, has well-known counters, and varying degrees of success on his baseline abilities. (From total failure, to one hit, to multiple hits with the same ability which can be seen as a “critical hit”.) In return for these Imperius is given exceptional bonuses against other heroes. Exceptional bonuses which are overly focused upon instead of what leads up to those bonuses.
That said, while Imperius is within the bounds of balanced heroes (currently at 52-53% winrate at Masters + Diamond using the balancing metric) his popularity is exceptionally high (22% pick rate with 44% ban rate) and will need some adjustments.
I believe, out of everyone on the forums, I am the most qualified individual to talk about changes to Imperius. I have been very accurate of my assessments of Imperius in the past, and my predictions of the effect of changes to Imperius. I care about Imperius’s hero design, but I am also objective with my assessments of him.
If the game designers wish to minimally effect Imperius’s gameplay/winrate, while diversifying talent choice and reducing popularity I strongly suggest following these changes:
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In game design, designers have to look at qualities versus quantity, (utilities vs magnitude) if the designer wants change with intricate control over the outcome, focus on quality.
First two changes will be quality based:
#1. Flash of Anger - Elephant in the room. After last patch’s nerf, Flash of Anger’s popularity predictably dropped from 90% to 95%. /s
Nerfing the magnitude of FoA will have no effect on its popularity, except eventually making level 7 a tier of 3 low winrate talents. This means magnitude nerfs only negatively affect a balanced hero instead of provide talent diversity. To affect FoA’s pick rate, you will have to change its quality.
The quality you must change is to remove FoA’s area of effect damage. No change to damage, no change to shield, just the removal of AoE. The AoE is invisible damage that has much stronger impact than players realize.
Using this famous Imperius clip, you can see at 00:50 that the AoE allows him to kill two additional targets. Without that AoE damage to simultaneously attack Azmodan and Greymane, it is unlikely Imperius would have been able to win that 2v5.
#2. Holy Fervor - The honey badger in the room is Holy Fervor, sitting at 3% popularity with 30% winrate, somehow he keeps escaping discussion.
Remove all non-hero damage. Holy Fervor now only damages heroes, this brings HF directly in line with Flash of Anger. Next, increase HF’s damage depending on the number of heroes Imperius cleaves. There’s multiple ways to do this, I’m confident in Blizzard’s ability to do so.
As the designer you need to send a message to Imperius players; Flash of Anger is for single target, Holy Fervor is for AoE team fights. Imperius players will pick up on this.
This also has the benefit of diverting Impaling Light players from auto-picking Flash of Anger.
#3. Impaling Light - Finally, a talent that Narha and I both agree has its issues. While some players insisted nerfing Flash of Anger’s damage was the fix, Impaling Light’s popularity curiously increased from 50% to 75%, seemingly as if Impaling Light is a strong talent on its own.
Meanwhile Burn the Impure is sitting at a shockingly overpowered 48% winrate, even dipping to 44%, from its comfortable 51% winrate before the FoA nerf.
If only someone had mentioned these issues multiple times.
Anyways, this change will be based on magnitude because this talent just has too much potential power.
Impaling Light now reduces the cooldown of Q from 10 to 9 seconds. The bonus cooldown reduction is reduced from 1.25 seconds to .75 seconds. The change in cooldown reduction per Valorous Brand looks more like this:
Brands___________10 ____________9
1(1)_______________1.25 _________1.75
2__________________2.5 __________2.5
3__________________3.75 _________3.25
4(2) _______________5_____________4
5__________________6.25 _________4.75
6__________________7.5___________5.5
7(3)_______________8.75__________6.25
8__________________10____________7
9________________________________7.75
10(4)____________________________8.5
11______________________________9.25
12_______________________________10
13(5)
10 is current, 9 is adjusted, ()'s are minimum players required. This allows for the mythical 5 man stun instant reset, while adjusting the talent to provide significant stun reduction, but not as many “stun resets”.
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Note that these are only first-round changes, naturally what I would expect to happen is Impaling Light would fall more in line with BTI, and Flash of Anger will finally share some popularity with Holy Fervor (depending on how Blizzard does it; I’m partial to Brands Consumed dealing AoE damage.)
All data comes from Heroesprofile as of today’s posting date.