Congratulations. You have officially removed specialists from the game

General Discussion
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As if the 2018 update wasn’t bad enough you introduce the 2019 update and decide to make sure that specialists no longer have a viable role in the game.

Removing ammo, and now removing siege XP? Just delete every single specialist from the game or change them all into assassins. It’s clear you don’t care about split pushing being viable in the game.

I want my 2017 HotS back. Not this shallow shell of a once great game.

I started in the alpha and LOVED the depth this game offered with all the multiple dimensions of gameplay. You keep on removing dimensions to favor bad players instead of letting people git gud over time

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half the Specialists were assassins anyway, they removed the name not the actual play-style, hammer still sieges, murky can still push. xul can split, the only lost depth is that you’ve given up on a game thats trying to bend itself to a bunch of people who just complain that everything they do is bad.

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Except you’re down a hero in team fights and you can’t make up for a lost team fight by taking out keeps and towers as a specialist.

Its win more if you’re already winning. It’s a means to get back in the game if your team loses in teamfights though.

What happens now? Fall behind a few levels and you can’t push buildings to get back in the fight? The merc camps thing is designed on the idea that people will take camps anyway when they can just deny you XP by not taking camps and murdering you as soon as you try to.

They effectively invalidated multiple mechanics with this change.

God I hate activision.

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Here’s the thing - Towers/Keeps didn’t really DO much to “make up” for it (Taking 2 towers AND a fort just BARELY came close to losing an even lvl teamfight at lvl 1, and it just got more and more ineffective as the game went by), and in any skilled game, you wouldn’t be able to TAKE towers/keeps after a lost teamfight anyway!

What happens instead is…

You lose teamfight, probably lost 1-2 ppl at best.

Enemy team goes to nearest fort and takes towers, you cant stop them since its 3v5.

Enemy team then ganks the pushing spec, getting even more XP, spec takes maybe ONE tower which is immediately worthless because spec died.

So, current XP allows teams to get ahead more when winning, since you ARENT taking forts/keeps and whatnot when you are losing. New system lets you get more XP values from camps, giving you SOME amount of comeback XP, while the enemy team doesn’t get an XP advantage taking your forts

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That’s called getting punished for dying. You caught back up by being smart and getting the right kills at the right times. Heroes were also weaker at the start of games so this issue was resolved in regards to “PvE” without effecting early game PvP

“b-but the spec died because he lacked map awareness”

Oh well that’s his problem. Maybe he should GET BETTER

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Oh no, whatever will you do now that their role names have changed! Also, do you REALLY want all these hero picks to just rot away and never be relevant? It’s a MOBA, things are changing all the time, its good that things like Sylvanas could actually see play outside of low level cheesing.

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Pushing is fine for a strategy but pushers aren’t.

Pushing as a strategy requires team play. Solo pushers break down team play so the loss of specialist as pushers I think is a great thing for a team brawler.

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9

gonna let you in on a magic hint here; removing ammo doesn’t effect specialists for split pushing. Raise of hand: how many specialists can still cheese tower agro when they want to push?

The only two that were ‘hurt’ by ammo loss were abathur (for passive threat of eventually taking a fort) and azmo, both of which could be better actively involved to attain the same goal. all the other ‘specialists’ don’t really care about ammo; at best, they might cheese multiple towers across all the lanes, but for a dedicated push? Its pretty much a non-factor.

outside of what the role rework does for slyv, most of the specialists were recast awhile ago to ‘fit’ into the game and be more than just split-lane gimmicks, but well, fancy that, some times it takes players longer than afk-laning to realize there’s a couple more options to how they play a hero to see them be useful to their team.

zag and azmo still pressure lanes globally and can still assist in fights; gazlow and probius still put pressure on chokes and holding points; zeebo still has self-sustin non-cc cc, and so on.

Your complaint is an impulsive rant at the idea of a change, but hey, here’s a wild question: where’s the concern regarding the execution of your claim? Have you now magically put in even 100 hours to find these ‘changes’ now suddenly made all these heroes obsolete and incapable on contributing.

Doubted.

wanna talk old alpha split-push strats for cheese siege xp? Then you’d wanna hit up supports. What’s that, massive damage reduction and healing on the unit tanking the ammo shots while more minions pile up to help take the fort? Hi promote, hi minion healing, hi talents that had boosted effects or reduced costs when cast on non-heroes :smiley:

Here’s a magic idea: what point of reference do you have for now to indicate said heroes are ‘no longer viable’ outside of just claiming that to be the case. Cuz well, if you’re not sure why you’re so convinced that it is the case, you might find others not keen to jump ship with you once they get past the superficiality of what they thing has ‘changed’ in this regard.

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They want the game to be a Team Deathmatch with a sprinkle of MOBA elements.

If you don’t like it, Blizzard aren’t interested in listening to feedback, we already know that. Just go, I did.

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Then why are you posting here if you are "gone’? If it was team deathmatch picks like Nova would be god tier since you guys would have us all believe clearing/macro/mercing properly is completely dead and all thats left is 2 deathballs going at each other.

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Oh no apparently leaving the game means you lose access to the forums! I didn’t know must be a bug or something.

I’m not saying its completely dead right now, but they are working on killing it if the reworks and the Blizzcon changes are any indication.

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Its like people commenting on a TWD forum that they’ve hated the show for X number of seasons and that it sucks. If you don’t care about the game, aren’t playing it at all then why would you come to the forums of said game that you say you left to post about it when you’re not actively playing which means your feedback/position is dated?

I don’t go to the Hearthstone forums and flaunt the fact I stopped playing last year and then act like I have any idea how the game is currently playing.

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Why, so you guys can sit around and nod in agreement at how perfect Blizzard and HotS is? Just go to reddit if you want that.

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forums aren’t about everyone agreeing everything is great, forums are about a given feedback that has a better purpose than just mindless repetition. chronic doomsayers hang around to ensure that they’ll eventually be right, no matter what else happens, or how out of the loop they’ll be.

ever bothers to look over old-old replays of when the game was ‘good’ and look for gaping holes that would be exploited by meta-shifts of later periods in gameplay?

Of course not; you’ve got an agenda to post, context to ignore, and yourself to feel better about being cuz well, you don’t seem to have much better else to do, or well to compose yourself to do.

quality crisp, quality crisp

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We’ll check back in with you in about a year and see what you say then. My guess is, starting with Sylvanas this year, most of those heroes you just mentioned will be a shell of their former selves.

You don’t just announce changes like this (which they did haphazardly, with little explanation) unless you want to fundamentally change the game. They’re banking on your ignorance until they make the changes and deal with repercussions later.

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I’m not talking about doom, the game won’t die, it simply won’t be a MOBA anymore, it’ll be more like a WoW BG. I’m just saying I’m annoyed that the game I originally liked is going away.

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… All that changed were the labels. That’s it. No stat adjustments, no talent tree re-works, just a NAME CHANGE.

That’s it.

Literally every character has the exact same abilities and characteristics that they did with the old names. The only thing changing is how you DESCRIBE the character, and apparently that’s enough to ruin the game.

It’s like no one wants to use their brains to actually come to grips with what the characters DO and want to insist more on the roles… Ya know, like getting upset that the Kharazim on your team isn’t keeping you specifically alive in a big teamfight just because he’s listed SUPPORT.

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Haven’t you been seeing the Tower Ammo changes, the reworks to make objectives more important? The rework to make Azmodan a straight up stack your basketball to win teamfight?

Then you get to Blizzcon and they tell you Tower/Fort XP is being minimized/removed. And then right after, guess whos the first on the list for reworks? Sylvanas.

If you can’t see what’s coming I don’t know what to tell you.

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for me i know that occasionally i will go back to games i left to see if any progress has been made to make it into a game i like again. some games actually work toward that too.

like for instance there is city builder sort of game called Aven Colony. i played it as a Beta Tester. well, during that time i had a few issues you know it was beta and they mostly agreed that they would look into fixing things. this one particular thing though with batteries for the solar plants they said they were happy with. like it was totally unrealistic because the game is a futuristic game, yet a common UPS like irl works better which was totally immersion breaking. they refused to fix it though because they wanted you to have to interact with it. it was a silly reason to be stubborn about. so i refused to buy the game on release. well i went back probably a year later and they decided to fix battery management to the way i had said back in beta. bought the game, re-reviewed… good stuff.

…but some games arent like that. like Diablo 3. it is just ruined. i think i went back over there maybe a year and half ago. possibly i posted one or two posts. which is practically nothing and havent been back. i mean i was seeing if Diablo 3 did anything new and interesting. even though i hate what they did to the game i still want them to fix it in some way.

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Yeah, I can see what’s happening. People who can’t adapt are getting pushed out.

The ammo changes I was skeptical about when I first heard them, yeah… but when I saw what the reason was. I gave it a chance, and then I actually played games with them. Prior to the changes, you could just constantly wear down a tower to make it an inevitability even without staying in-lane to apply pressure. It wasn’t a question of effort, of tactical choices, just a question of whether you just kept those towers firing. AFTER the changes, you have to be deliberate with your efforts. Abathur can’t just sit on a distant lane and passively take a camp by reducing the ammo count faster with his little minions, no, he has to dedicate effort to pushing the lane.

The devs made taking towers/forts more of an action that you have to do DELIBERATELY, and by taking away ammo, they made the towers more dangerous. What’s more, they also removed the ‘extra’ tower to compensate for the increased power.

As far as the XP is concerned, by then, I learned my lesson. Read what the explanation is first, and the explanation is one that the community on these very forums have been screaming about for a long time now… They are re-tooling the XP in a way to reduce the snowball effect that can come from knocking over towers/forts early game. In exchange for that, they are changing how the catapults are deployed in order to compensate, so, you aren’t going to see the dramatic shift in the balance of power between teams when towers fall, BUT losing towers will still have pressuring effects on the team that lost them.

As far as the sylvanas rework… I welcome it. I recently just picked her up, and she’s powerful, but I still find that she’s too shallow of a character. I feel like I’m really only there to spread the dark-purple effect to minions/creeps, and then randomly fire a volley of arrows at an enemy hero that wanders too close. I feel like there is more that I should be doing, and I think the devs concur with that. What’s more, I’ve enjoyed the re-works of Hammer and Raynor, they have stayed very close to the original template of those characters (Hammer serving as powerful artillery in siege mode, and Raynor being a relentless AA-based assassin) while really opening up a great deal of tactical options with the things that were changed.

So, again. The reworks are there to increase depth, and I’ve constantly found that the people who gripe about them are the same sort that were going to gripe about something sometime, and largely because they are losing their shallow tactical/strategic options and being forced to adapt… despite changes being constant in any MOBA.

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