Catapult change was bad... like pretty much every other change

General Discussion
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According to the Blizzard catapults being spawned after killing first tier tower was supposed to help the losing team to gain ground perhaps in case of them being able to take down barraks, causing enemy to pay attention to that lane rather than just blindly push.

But the reverse has happened. The game has become even more snowbally, when losing teams have to now divert their attention to both pushing lane that can easily kill next barracks, or fight 5v5 and even with a good trade lose a lot of structure damage, on a worse case you could lose already bad level advantage in 4v5 where enemy starts to secretly push with 1 to 2 catapults.

Like I get that specialists aren’t really good ever since the ammunition changes to turrets, but you really didn’t need to change catapults at all. The problem came from specialists being too weak against structures and pushing, with or without minions.

Why not just empower specialists instead of trying to wiggle this snowball effect and add a tons of maybies but in reality everything just further escalates the lead.

I was more happy when this game got released with the limited ammunition and a lot of variety on team combos, supports like Tyrande who could actually do damage.

Now all this has been severely made worse with FORCING supports to be healbots. Brightwing teleporting on ally heals them like 30% now, like wtf
 and there is like 0 damage talents left for any of them aside maybe level 16 where they might get some tiny boost.

Why can’t we get back into the old game where damage done to heroes actually mattered, instead of this mass aoe heal fest where everyone can chainheal half of the team to half health and unless the 5 man team fully decides to dive into lets say Sgt Hammer guarded by 2 warriors, unless team fully commits into killing a single damn enemy, then game is pretty much lost because the setup just allows free damage and objective control?

Why can’t we get the mines map back? Was it so terrible? If the objectives were too strong, why not just nerf the numbers a bit?

Overall I would gladly play on some private server the Heroes of the Storm Open Beta servers with maybe 25% health reduction on bosses and 25% damage reduction from things like Sky Temple.

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The object of a game is to win.

The PURPOSE of a game is to have fun.

I think it’s time for you to take a very very very large step back.

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Thats
 what? That never happened lol

There has been independent analysis made and then Blizz analysis with full data, both proved this is not true.

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The snowball effect came from structures giving a ton of xp to the team who destroyed them.
They removed that xp, but to compensate, they added catapults so pushing is not “meaningless”, which btw adds even more xp to the defending team, since +1 minion to destroy/wave.
The purpose was a success since the average lvl differences decreased and the match lengths got more “healthy”.

On the specialist rant: you are far from reality. Specialists are still good, the ammo didn’t hinder their performance much, plus it opened counter strategies since there were no longer passive pushes. It was super easy to drain ammo and once it was done, the structures were just decoration. It was bad design tbh.
And Azmo, Zag, Abathur, Naz are all still pretty strong with others. The problem wasn’t specialists being too weak. They were actually too strong on lane.

Healers being healbots? Do you even play them?

But why am I surprised? You are the guy who wanted your ally Zul’jin to go sololane.

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They removed instant xp boost and gave stacking xp boost over time from killing buildings.

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I still find myself questioning the duality of the threads created, to say nothing of how scattered they are.

On one hand, the OP is doing everything but saying that he should be playing for some pro team, but on the other the basic things that he’s having difficulty with and the number of things he’s having difficulty with are things typically heard from people who are still in the lower ranks
 and the response really is ‘git gud’.

Then there’s the fact that the threads title is talking about the catapult changes, but also has diatribes about the things Karabars has already listed. What’s really the problem here? Lower-level players in any game like this have a hard time sorting out what issues really are (they complain about the tank not being killable, despite totally ignoring how much healing the medic was doing) and very frequently the OP just keeps pushing their view rather than stopping for a few seconds to think about the situation.

As for the titled reason for the thread
 OP really needs to recognize that he’s not able to access the data that the developers have, nor has he been willing to look up the exact reason why the devs have made the changes. On the whole, based on the data available, the changes HAVE reduced the early game snowball by exchanging XP rewards for towers for tactical advantages. Now, a team that loses a nasty fight over an objective AND loses a fort immedately as a result WILL still have a comeback to stage, but not as big because the fort loss doesn’t widen the XP gap as further as it was. In a game where talents arrive roughly every 4 levels, and where the game gives an active notice for when a team has a heroic advantage, levels are a huge deal.

Seriously. Games are where you’re supposed to have fun. These threads are borderline temper-tantrums. Take a break, before you get banned from something and get ramped up even further.

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Because double-soak is a thing. Or lane-rotation as 4. So no need for 2 constant “sololaner”.

Who is that best healer? You mean Ana? Who is actually doing worth than WM, Rehgar, Kharazim and Tyrande based on the recent AMA?
Or do you mean Tyrande? Since when she can safely heal the frontline? Nor does she has only heals? Even Ana is more than just a “healbot”.
And based on this your argument is: there is a strong healbot therefore every Healer is a healbot?

There were a lot of changes to Tyrande and you want to say it was all the matter of decreased dmg for more heals? That’s why her most picked Heroic is the dmg one and the fact that she had a lvl 1 cleanse for a long time also had no effect on that


Zag, Azmo, Gazlowe, Naz are pretty fast at destroying structures. And their dmg was not changed with the ammo patch or anything.

On what tier list? On the last I checked she was B tier. And Sylvanas was always meant to be with allies and push with them. In which she’s still super deadly even tho now she can no longer do it passively.

Pushing ona contested lane, maybe I kinda agree, but Aba’s uncontested push is still pretty deadly.

But what about Azmodan or Naz? No attack speed boost, no “teamfight specialist”.

Considering these with the “healbot” title lead me to believe that you think it’s impossible to kill someone unless full coordinated all 5 on xy commitments.

My analysis is that don’t do 1v2.
Jaina alone vs Valla and Morales?ƱSuch a stretched example so you can act like you are right.

(Sidenote: first “barracks” are called “forts”, second ones are called “keeps”.)
It’s less of an impact than instant xp and unlike instant xp, catapults can be countered. Pushing back a lane gives you time to not care about those (btw every third wave) catapults, plus you can get camps.

But why should I explain to you anything when the data (plus my personal experience) showed that the xp and lane changes made games more fair and snowballing harder?

The data says, snowballs happen less often and less severely. So
 nope?

And nothing changed on the playerbase, they soak as much/less as they did before the changes. So every data (which still show improvements btw) works with that phenomenon in mind.

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Exp change was pure garbage. In terms of win-rate it didn’t really make it better or worse if you look at hotslogs for example team who first killed fort. It used to average at 76% roughly, now most maps are still within that range. Four maps have 2-4% higher number, two maps 1 and 7% lower so it really didn’t change much at least on average. Also much less games played makes it less accurate compared to back then.

What exp change did was give you short window of few minutes when you are still even if you lose structure. Now if you manage to get enemy structure within that time you stay practically even. If you don’t you can’t catch up to enemy so you gotta pray enemy makes a mistake. In terms of what this change was set out to do it actually did that, it prevent instant gap being created between teams when killing structure. The downside was long term it got a lot harder to get even if you miss that window which forces significantly more passive play. Before this structures were exp banks, they would grow interest. Killing one early gave you small boost while killing it later would give bigger boost so team that was behind could push another lane to catch up which made it more active comeback mechanic. The longer enemy has more forts than you the more enemy gets exp via multiplier other team can never have as opposed to cashing in on that bank that kept accumulating exp.

To me worst part about the changes they made were killing forts no longer feels rewarding because it’s small passive trickle of exp in the background compared to instantly visible reward. Secondly killing fort feels bad for both teams due to catapult. Catas in early game do no damage so they just help enemy freeze lane while providing nothing for their owner. Having the lane frozen deep means team with catas cannot soak safely making them have negative effect. For late game it feels really bad that killing a keep doesn’t provide that much pressure if enemy has killed fort as that cata every third wave actually does a lot in terms of depushing so it doesn’t require anywhere near as much active play and macro from defenders.
In terms of effectiveness it was rather strange change. For pro level it no doubt made game actually better because it made deathballing harder(since no instant reward and other team would get forts to come back like even before the change). For regular games it made garbo team mates hurt less because passive exp would still trickle and lanes wouldn’t push as hard despite them not clearing properly. Sadly for the active players who had awareness this made them have less of an impact which is something HoTS has struggled with since beginning. it’s something that still needs to be done but you simply don’t get punished as much if you don’t do it.

To be fair I think only good change devs have made in terms of laning were buffing mercs which were next to useless for years. Lowering tower damage and removing ammo were just another thing that helped the bad players at the cost of impact from good ones. It made solo lanes and 4 man push much less impactful/effective which truly is a shame. Anyhow, it’s not like we can expect much to change anymore. Game is on skeleton crew so what you see is what you will likely always have till servers shut down. :disappointed_relieved:

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Dude karabars is a known troll, i dunno why you make a conversation with that buttclown. Hes just gonna disagree with you no matter what you say. Even if you agreed with him on certain points, hed still disagree and change his points. The guy is insane lol He has like 2500 posts on these forums. Basically that says he scans these forums for bait all day to make people feel horrible about themselves. Dont give in to his chicanery.

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Lmao

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How can you say karabar is a troll ? The guy is one of well respected people on the forum .

I fit more the categorie of a troll more than he does . ( mostly because i want friendly fire in the game but thats beside the point lol )

Typically he debates his ponts using logic and facts / stats that can easily be found .
Calling someone a troll because facts can be inconvinient is just a way to make you feel better when unable to have a proper conversation or debate over a topic.

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Lol.

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It’s threads like this that really make me wish we still had downvotes. Surprise, surprise, the same 3 as always upvoting these stupid rants.

Ah, I see we have the same word-of-the-day calendar! A man of culture, truly :cut_of_meat:

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What

Structures xp never scaled with time. Wtf

This is literally the most embarassing thing Ive read here in a long time. Someone tell me my english is that bad and I missed something.

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The Catapult changes are fine. I don’t have an issue with that because in some ways it speeds up the length of the games and gives wave clearing a little more meaning.

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https://heroeshearth.com/b/ghostdunk/read/what-statistcs-and-machine-learning-can-teach-us-about-the-gameplay-changes-in-heroes-of-the-storm/

XP changes fixed getting stomped, but Blizzard could have done the same thing by reverting the “More Meaningful Early Game” changes from Blizzcon 2017

As bonus, since it will make many people mindblown

If you’re the best player on your team, you still have the most impact on winning; a good player is more likely to lift up their team than a bad player is to drag them down

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Zul’Jin actually is pretty decent at solo laning though. It depends on the matchup of course, but against the typical laning bruiser he does pretty well. Regenerate lets you outlast most opponents, and you can stack well enough on a melee enemy that has to stay in the area.

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Many heroes are good at sololaning. Valla is one of the best, in 1v1. The problem is rotation, why beefy bruisers ruled solo lane meta for so long.
The reason why Fenix is so good is because he got tp as a gank dodge. Shields are actually just an (admittedly important) bonus.

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This paragraph makes no sense to me. I don’t know if you got the terms wrong or if you misinterpret what actually happens. Also, punctuation would help. Unless someone interviewed a Blizzard Catapult. What do you mean by barraks?

Actually, results show the opposite.

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Yeah I agree with you bro, he plays a lot of Zul’jin he has him like level 28 and they keep feeding him stacks smh. :ok_hand:

:thinking:

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