I have been playing Blaze a lot since the patch yesterday, both in QM and SL, and I think they overdid things just a bit. I love the changes, and he has a few viable builds now, but I think some parts of his kit are a little too strong. Given that his win rate on Heroes Profile skyrocketed to almost 59% over all, I don’t think this is just my subjective opinion.
Granted, it is too early to know for sure, but I think he just does everything a little too well now. Places where I could see small nerfs would be to reduce the damage bonus on Crossfire just a bit, and nerf Collision Course quite a bit. With the armor and CDR on his E at 16, you can crush team fights if they group up.
Gaining his damage mitigation talents at level 7 means he is a raid boss when it comes to trying to bring him or his team down, and he still has some of the best poke of any tank when it comes to scouting, stalling, or making space.
It will be interesting to see if his win rate settles down once people get used to his new kit, and even more interesting to see what happens in the competitive scene, where he has always been popular.
I agree all of his level 7 talents are good, but I am not sold on his trait talent, as I find I get a lot more survivability out of the armor on E, especially in the later game team fights. If you hit 3 or 4 people with one E, the CDR is amazing, and you will be ripping them apart with the damage from the level 13.
Seems to me like the main issue is he deals a bit too much damage now.
Some baseline nerfs to health and damage and a couple nerfs to some talents will probably go a long way towards balancing him.
I think Collision Course needs to have its damage converted into %-health-based damage. It gives him too much (which is really to say any) one-shot-combo potential against squishies, as lucifer has demonstrated.
For reference, that 325 damage is no less than 24% of Valla’s health, and that’s on top of all his other damage. Between that and the baseline addition of Crossfire, his W-E-Q/E-W-Q combo alone can instantly half-health Valla.
I think making it deal ~12% max-health damage instead would be a better idea, so it’d still be viable against other Tanks and Bruisers but won’t allow him to nuke squishies so hard.
I feel the armor E 16 overlaps with his trait, that’s my thought process.
I also can’t reliably hit +3 heroes.
The baseline CDR on D from Q helps to get Heat Treatment much better value.
The way I see it, even with the CDR from Q, I don’t usually have my trait available more than once per team fight, and if I took New Habits at 1, I am typically saving trait for when I need the Unstoppable as well as the armor. If I miss my E on an engage, I still have trait to get me out of trouble.
exactly, just dont group up/ spread a bit against him, like with kaelthas, just dont get clumped up to no spread the fire, same with blaze, finally his E worth for something else than a simple stun, also his E is a slow skillshot that can be kited or interrupted, finally his E feels usefull in teamfights if enemy stack all in one place deserve take damage like with kael’thas flamestrike
Crossfire is an extremely powerful mechanic that greatly enhances Blaze’s basic capabilities past being a fat target dummy that exists only to debuff enemies.
The problem with it being baseline is in its parallel streams of fire which deal a decent amount of damage and can also be used as a threatening sieging tool very early on. Mix in Incinerator Gauntlets and you will be easily able to outpush and outsustain many heroes that come to contest you. Not only will you match their wave clear but also deprive them of healing globes while constantly chipping away at their towers with your flame cannons.
The problem it has is with double dipping; everything in line gets hit and you get further benefit from reducing you D cooldown. There is no cap to the amount of targets that can be hit by the ability under ideal condition.
Ideal solution? Change Flame Stream to work like Li Ming’s Magic Missiles; if you aim at max distance, the streams are parallel to each other, but if you aim at a short distance, the flames actually hit one another and you get the literal meaning of Crossfire. This would fix concerns with him sieging buildings from very long distance while allowing for more precise damage tuning of both the ability and the bonus effect(s).
In the end player can decide what he wants to achieve and they can choose between dealing a significant amount of damage at melee to mid range, can choose to reduce his cooldowns from afar by poking the enemy, or reap both benefits simultaneously for a insignificant to mediocre effect.
i said this is another post. i was just said this was blizz way of doing things… some many things with blaze got over buffed. before his talents u couldn’t select all the same type build. now they seem to fall in line. u have base line cooldown on his trait built into his q and cross fire. that means most tf u can have 40 armor and unstopable up.
One other thing about him is how after the first adjustment (months ago) that allowed both Incinerator and Crossfire to be picked at the same time literally made him a better Xul, Nazeebo or Zagara, allowing him to perform their role much more efficiently while actually being useful in teamfights as a bonus.
At the same time when they drastically slowed down Johanna’s wave clear and cooldown reduction wheel by preventing vacuum spam and requiring single hits Hanzo-style to execute minions, they inadvertingly turn Blaze into a hyper bruiser with tank qualities.
I like the idea behind tanks being actual backbones of the group, but some characters are just becoming too versatile to a such degree that others who specialize in a specific task are getting overlooked as a result.
My other complaint is with the constant power creep. The whole xp-globe collection and denial game was arguably the most fun thing to ever happen with the game outside of completely new maps being released. The devs are constantly buffing one hero after another to a point where this fun little mini game is being completely tossed out of the window because half of the roster has instant wave-clear, and even if they miss it, they can at least collect a portion of it any time during the next 38? seconds.
They probably overbuffed him, considering he was already really really good before, just kinda forgotten because of sonya, yrel and others being overbuffed. The patch just made people play him more to test things out and they realized how good he is.
They will probably have to nerf some things here and there.