Once upon a time, Chromie was a unique artillery-style character with a perfect 50% win-rate balance. Then, a Blizzard employee had a stroke and decided that she should be completely overhauled because “durr durr reasons”. Chromie proceeded to become a big pile of whatever it is gnome-dragons defecate. Multiple patches came out to try and fix her… but to no avail.
“Maybe if we make it so that she plays exactly like all the other mid-range DPS, people will like her again?” disposable intern #3 asked.
“I like it! Do that.” responded the semi-recovered, stroke-addled piece of human waste that somehow still remained in charge of Chromie design decisions.
That’s what lead to the Chromie we most recently knew. She’s like the old, good Chromie… Minus extra range, vision, artillery, escapability, invisible cast marker, etc., and plus 1 extra ball of sand with her Q. Nice trade off, eh?
BUT TODAY THAT CHANGES! Chromie gets a somewhat viable W build; or at least the start of one. We’re still lacking the 15% vision range quest, but there’s an added slow and skillshot aspect that might make up for it.
I can only imagine a second stroke finally claimed the poor soul that managed Chromie these past few years, and someone somewhat competent took over his responsibilities. Godspeed, good sir. Keep up the good work.
I’ve been playing 9 games with the changes to Chromie.
My opinions:
The level 1 change to Timewalker’s Pursuit, the 0.75 second reduced Time Trap arming time, feels like a big improvement to me, as someone who loves to play aggressively with Time Traps. It changes a lot and I love it. Just this single change might have revitalized my love for playing Chromie. (might have, we’ll see)
The level 5 Moebius Loop change is a pretty nice change. The bonus damage is nice and teh slow on center hits is pretty damn useful. The downside is removing the previous parts of it, particularly the mana returning part, which hurts her mana reserves/sustain A LOT. Chromie uses a very high amount of mana, especially when you pop Loop and spam a bunch of spells.
While the buff to Here and THere is big in itself, even with the change, it simply cannot compare to Gnome Speed Ahead. Getting 20% movement speed every time you fire off a Q is huge for chasing, sudden fleeing and the constant repositioning that Chromies ought to do. Compare that to a very circumstantial and difficult to make use of Here and There or Time Out which is basically just an “OH NO! TIME OUT! HEEELP ME!” when you get caught so does Gnome Speed Ahead win.
She’s not exactly the same as before. She’s still pretty feeble and susceptible to dive or getting jumped and as such is highly reliant on a proper, competent teamcomp.
But the reduced arming time for time traps helps a lot.
I have yet to try out the new Slowing Sands. And not sure if I’m gonna. Temporal loop4life!
Edit: I think it could be really cool if they made Here and There a base ability Give it a very high cooldown like Alex’ D or Anduin’s D or something.
A little, but if it’s on the crazy kind of CD as DQ or Leap of Faith, then it could work. They could give Chromie some slight nerf in base hp or damage to compensate if necessary.
I just think that Here and THere could be a real cool ability/function to have as a base ability.
“Here and There” should be a level one talent so it can’t be combined with the extra echo quest. If it is mutually exclusive with the extra echo, then you can activate it without having to target the echo AND THAT VASTLY IMPROVES IT. Some people might complain that it would be unfair for her to be able to take both “Here and There” and the “Time Out” talent, but i’m not sure. Even if i’m wrong and that becomes an OP combo, the devs are dumb for not realizing that they could make talents unavailable based on your previous talent choices. If Ragnaros can’t take lava wave in a Brawl, then it should be easy to deny Chromie “Time Out” if “Here and There” was chosen.
But you know, balance has been garbage since 2.0 lol.
P.S. Wow blizzard, apparently you’re run by children because we cant curse on the forums. That would explain a lot though.
I sorta agree on this. The 0.2-2 seconds (Varies depending on situation and whatnot) needed to locate and click on an Echo when you need to get away is a matter of life and death.
The + side is that one can get multiple Echos and that one can target the area around the Echos in the current iteration, making it possible to choose more specifically where to teleport to.
What kinda irks me is how the level 1 quest is tied to Here and There at 11. Having a second Echo is obviously a huge bonus for when you can teleport to one at choice. A second echo is generally big for Chromie.
I wish the second Echo was just apart of a base quest. As it is now, I like taking Timewalker’s Pursuit at 1 and 50-50 of the time I take Here and There, but it feels like I’m shooting myself in the foot since I didn’t take quest at 1 and only have one Echo up.
No, it is used by children, as well as adults. And adults (parents) don’t want children to see curse words.
Quite simple really. What kind of official, public sites does not have a profanity filter these days, anyway?
My entire point is that the time used to find the echo you want to switch with and target it is the reason why the talent is underused. If it cannot target multiple echos and instead is an instantly activated ability like Guldan’s demonic circle, it would acutally be a usefull talent.
Adding an extra echo to the base quest would be extremely OP. I think it is quite fair that you have to decide between building a focus on Q, V, or Utility to reveal.
If they are too young to read “profanity” then they are too young to be on the internet.
My point with what I said after that was the positive side the current iteration. You do have more options and within those options, you have an area to choose from.
How would it be extremely OP if it’s literally a talented-quest at 1? They can easily do some balancing around it if they wanted to re-introduce a Q-quest.
Uhm. I’m pretty sure that the majority of the world would disagree with this statement.
But this is neither the place or the time to discuss that. If using profanity is so important to you, then go elsewhere… like Reddit? I dunno if Reddit allows profanity.
It would be OP to roll it into the base kit because the entire point of it being a talent is that you have to make a choice between this and something else. The only reason i mentioned that they might make a level 1 talent mutually exclusive with a level 11 talent is because “Here and There” is a survival talent and those are generally only available later on. As such, it would not make a reasonable level 1 talent. Also, the extra echo IS the Q quest. My point is that rolling it into the base kit means that either they have no Q quest, or Q has to be entirely re-balanced because it has 2 quests from the start. (But that is not to say that i think the current Q and W quests are balanced)
Then they really have no idea what kind of things are on the internet. Silly Karens.
I remember rework number one. You didnt have an echo at level 1 let alone two. Your echo unlocked after 80 stacks. 80 stacks was very rough to achieve without an afk chen on the enemy team to feed off.
Typically you didnt complete the quest until say…level 18…thats IF you even completed it at all.
You’re concerned about the level 11 talent lacking that extra echo option. Well back in the day, that echo swap talent could have been entirely useless all game let alone by level 11.
Not for me, atleast. I might have had trouble and would only complete the quest in lategame if the enemy team was something like Genji+zeratul+zagara+aba+li ming.
As long as there was a tank and healers in the game, I would always complete quest before 11. Often before 11. At times, around level 3-4, too.
Although using my experience is not exactly fair.
PS: You don’t seem to know me, so let me just shameless self brag a bit here:
Go to 2:51. Watch an aba and tyrande have a little slugfest and then…
Give it a very high cooldown like Alex’ D or Anduin’s D or something.