Chen rework feedback points

General Discussion
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At first I had a long post written detailing my feedback for the Chen rework after playing him on the PTR. I had a pro and cons list of how I felt between live and reworked chen. Going through the talent changes that were good or disappointing, the new abilities and everything. To Summarize its generally fine. Some of the new talents are interesting and some of the removed ones were disappointing. Overall nothing too bad to get used to about that even tho some of the talent changes seem questionable.

But I decided to rewrite this and focus on 1 particular part instead of a comprehensive breakdown.
One of the most fun things about chen is how fluid he plays, everything lines up and his dps combos are insanely fun and they give a great feeling of character control and feedback. This rework has added some really unneeded clunkyness to his play. There are 3 things that don’t really feel right with 1 of them feeling particularly bad overall

The first one and the one that feels the worst is the delay between Keg Smash and being able to use Breath of fire. So I don’t particularly like that these abilities are on a 1 button rotation, but to be fair its not something character breaking or impossible to get used to (why not just make stagger on the 1 key or whatever the player has that hotkey bound to). But the problem is the delay between using keg smash and when you can use breath of fire. With enough energy you could always use fire right after keg. Now there is a significant delay. After playing a ton of chen, Im sorry but this delay really feels bad and added some significant clunkyness to his existing extremely smooth and fun combos. Is there a specific reason there is such a long time forced in between using these two abilities, is it a oversight from the devs that works on this not playing live chen enough to have a strong feel for it? Im not sure but this is really the biggest thing I would like to be different in the rework, everything else for better or worse isn’t a big deal. I believe that they really need to make it so keg smash and Breath can be used quickly back to back like on live, I think that this is a really poor change and really hope it gets fixed and is the main reason for writing all of this.

The second one is the longer CD on his brew, it feels less bad then the delay on his new W. But the timing just does not feel right, it does not always line up nice with Flying kick, and with the new stagger ability, having brew on a longer CD seems counter-intuitive. It seems like the intention between stagger is to delay some damage then try to mitigate it with drinking some brew, but with the longer CD this feels weird to pull off, it just does not really feel tuned right, The new faster energy regen feels good, the smaller shields isnt really a huge deal, but the longer CD on it just does not seem to make sense with stagger as well as messing up the timing of Shield>kick combo. And also you cant use drinks back to back anymore, not a game breaker but idk again just seems like a weird decision.

Lastly Although you cant figure out everything by playing some games on the PTR but I really dont see a whole lot of improvement in his weakness to be shut down by CC. Uh yea you can stagger some damage, but a couple of his early talents that really helped his cc resistance are gone. So maybe with some more practice I wont feel that way, but to be honest it seems probably worse then before or at best about the same.

Im not sure how I feel about this rework. There is some good and bad like most reworks, but overall I just wanted to point out that a few things really change the feel and cadence of his play which has always been a big part of what makes him one of the most fun heroes to use, regardless of his standing in the meta.

Please fix the delay between Keg and Breath of fire, even if it stays on the same key people will get used to it. Having 1 button for each would be best like on live, but if that cant happen no big deal,
the delay is what makes it feel so clunky.

Did anyone else who has enjoyed a lot of Chen notice this?

3 Likes
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The day I discovered Chen, was the day he was next to level up hero for the gold grind. Currently as he sits and before his buffs he did surprise me on how much I enojyed him.
I give this hero respectful critism towards this character in this post. Two patches ago Chen was pretty bad simply because he’s an easy target to stun, DoT, stack, burst, and distrupt.
Chen made some improvements after the forward patch to Chen becoming a bruiser. I have to say I liked the direction Chen was headed. He felt better to play and I started to increase my practice with Chen. I have him up to the point I can QM stomp with this character. Unfortunately he his less niche and heavy in SL to play Chen, and in fact your best chances is to trade out a death with the enemy to even up the odds against the enemy team.
Now I tried the updated with first time new stagger ability Chen in PTR. I will reserve judgement until I people have tried him out. Though Chen still has that fun aspect about him I liked a lot. I still enjoyed him and prepped his builds ready for his final update to come.
Yes, the keg smash and breathe of fire between delay is very notable and it is a tiny bit annoying.

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Frankly I hate the delay too, but the thing I hate most is them being on the same button, because you can’t use Breath of Fire without casting Keg Smash first.

“Why would you want to use Breath of Fire without Keg Smash though?”

To reveal stealth, to check bushes, and to dismount. You can’t do that anymore. You also can’t proc BmB with two abilities anymore because of the brew cost reduction. You can’t cast W for healing from autos and then drink, because then your W goes on an 11 second cooldown.

Please do something devs, this is really not good. Literally just put Stagger on 1 and separate Keg and Breath again, keep the CD, it doesn’t matter that much, but having an ability completely gated behind Keg Smash ruins its utility that actually had a significant place in his playstyle.

Also I feel you on the flow… the flow is very different right now. I’m thinking I’m kind of getting the hang of it with EoT, Drink W AA Q AA/W AA etcetc, but this “same key” crap is killing me. An 18s cooldown does not need to be on E, it can be on “1”. “But Stitches Devour is on E” and he also has no other abilities he needs to worry about, Chen just lost Breath of Fire for all purposes outside of damage. You can’t even cast it alone to finish a target before they get through gates. Please revert this change. Keep the CD, w/e, but revert the double-W back to W+E.

6 Likes
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I agree with your points Jamuro, you wrote alot of points I had in my original post before I decided to make it shorter. I completely agree it stagger could have its own button and it sucks to lose some of the utility of having keg/fire on different keys.
But I guess what got me to write the post was pointing that out as well as the delay between the abilities, and that personally I if I had to choose between between fixing one or the other I would choose to fix the delay.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to have it the “right way” with stagger on its own key and his other abilities split like before, I wonder why they chose to design it like this.

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They gave an answer here:

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I wasn’t expecting that answer. The W does kinda annoy me when engaging an enemy now. Enemies can get away far easier without it, which mean you might have to think twice about engaging, and safe Chen is not my kind of play style. I don’t think we should do any of those enemy~clap by the towers anymore boyz, they’ll just slip through that 1 second.

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Also from that thread, apparently Chen deals the Stagger damage to himself, rather than tracking the target’s damage. This means spell-power buffs on Chen make him deal more damage to himself.

So Ana can now troll an allied Chen with Nanoboost.

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I felt the delay to be annoying as well. I think it would be a better QoL change than anything else.

That being said the drench state is most extended if the ability is staggered to its highest degree that being nearly 3 secs. Doing it one after the other actually minimizes this.

I don’t think it is going to be a big deal because I do feel his ultimates are improved as well as his late game potential for damage. Early game though is worse than before which I don’t like as much.

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Not true.

Stagger makes all the damage received for the next 3 seconds become a damage over time for the next 5 seconds, but only 75% of the damage received. Spell power on Chen doesn’t affect anything.

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I think I might call out the weakest talents I have not found a good use for:
Level 1:Stormstout Secret Recipe looks like it might need a buff, it’s pretty terrible early game, and hitting multiple targets is not as easy as it sounds. Especially with the W 1sec CD Breath of flames like that. The 2% late game doesn’t seem to worth it compared to his other level 1 talents.
Level 4:Withering Flames 4 seconds is a long time to lock down a mage or heavy ability hero to null 30% of the damage. Is it worth it? Like stated above, the W is a little slow upon entering combat to have the 30% reduction to take effect, and by then your enemy might already bursted the damage into you.
Level 13*: Touch of honey you get that 20% bonus slow and then after the 1.5 you get the full juicy 50% slow up to 3.5? I might be wrong. As the unaffected talent W (again) has that CD problem and it’s already doing its job as it sits which makes this talent unappealing compared to the others.
Level 10: The Storm, Earth, and Fire I like how it turns into burst, what I don’t like is that I have to wait a full 1 second and my mobile target gets away. Good in TF’s but very bad at being a finisher. The level 20, it does get better but for team fighting.

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It was mentioned in the reddit thread that it is actually affected by his spellpower. So much so that if D.va defense-matrixes Chen, he deals 75% less damage to himself. It’s a little wonky atm, definitely don’t think that’s the intended interaction for him

https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/bzizex/the_new_chen_w_feels_clunky/eqtbfz0?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

yeah… yeah. That W range is not big, so you are gonna be tanking hits before WF procs. Also agree on SSR. Seems really weak. I mean the possible synergies with Combo Attacks make EoT seem insane if you’re tryign to kill a squishy. Even so, later on his tankier talents may well end up being the way to play him because of the potential problems he’ll face with surviving, and it looks like he has some good options outside of BmB being ultra clunky atm. He’s always gotten the most value when he can play hyperaggressively and bait people into hitting him when he’s in EB/now stagger (barring kiting build with flame/keg). We’ll see if that holds true. Celerity looks really good (so does Combo Attack), Enough to Share looks really good… really good… but it costs him waveclear (that he should have a lot earlier tbh being someone who by his role typically needs to be somewhat responsible for it)

Plz go live Chen I wanna try it out for real

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Oh boy, the coding for this ability must be a mess then.