Corrosive Saliva is a lv 16 talent for Zagara
which causes all 3or4 of her zerglings to deal 1.75% damage every time they attack.
am i the only one who thinks this talent is absolutely insane?
being able to drop your zerglings half the screen away and then watch them melt someone is hilarious,
but feels ridiculously unbalanced.
for reference, by 16 a stock stitches has 5735 health.
each roach deals 51 dmg a second by default.
hydralisk deals 155 dmg a second.
add an extra 100 damage per NPC from 1.75% of 5735.
without any extra input from zagara the NPCs alone will be doing 557 damage every second to stitches. (708 if you took the quest for an extra roach.)
this just seems way too overtuned for a skill-free NPC ability.
Hunter killers have a very long CD though (16 seconds) and roachlings are very slow to move and attack after initial impact.
I do pick the talent most of the time (the rare occassions I pick Zag), but I don’t think it’s OP.
It also costs a ton of mana to spam these abilities (125 mana just for one rotation of Hunter Killer + Infested Drop), if she does that she will have to Hearth back really fast (or pick Nydus to fix her mana issues).
Then, you’ll be surprised that even when the Roaches talents are picked, Mutalisk still has the same win rate in high elo.
You play exclusively ARAM, so of course you see Corrosive Saliva as the stronger talent since Mutalisk doesn’t live long enough to get it’s full value. But, when it’s not focused by a constant 5 men, it gains decent value.
zagara is not a competitive hero so I dont mind she has some high power level talent. If you want to nerf that talent, she probably needs some buffs/rework to make her useful and relevant again.
Corrosive is the whole reason for Zagara to even exist anymore. If they nerfed that they would have to either revert the global nerfs to make split push Zag a thing again or in some other way make her viable.
the thing is, the only unit you can ensure will focus the target you want, is your Hydralisk.
Sure, there are 1v1s where Roaches will focus the enemy hero you’re fighting, but I don’t see any issue with heroes being able to tech into slightly better 1v1 situations.
And in teamfights, i’m pretty sure roaches still have a pretty basic “attack what is close” AI. (I am ready to be proven wrong). But even if their AI is “heroes first” they’re often not going to focus the target you want them to.
So it’s a talent which is strong, but it isn’t nearly as insane as your post makes it seem.
I think a mixture of a buff+nerf would be most appropriate for it, IF IT NEEDS CHANGES (and I am not saying it does). Say, Zagara’s attacks also deal % damage. But make it 1.25% or 1% for each unit.
which is bad though isn’t it?
why not make other things useful without the crutch of OP NPCs carrying?
but this isn’t really about which wins more, its just about OP spammable NPCs melting heroes.
the moment a zagara hits 16, the NPCs just carry, and unless i’m doing fast dailies in beginner vsAI, i play this game for PVP, not to spend the whole game running away from roachlings nuking me for 800dps
if zag is struggling we should buff up other things.
this talent is just way too OP.
It would be nice…but, unless you got a bare minimum of 2 brain cells, most ppl who play Zagara still don’t understand she’s not that good at split pushing anymore, so Blizzard has to take it nice and slow for those ppl.
It can be bonkers, but you basically need the stars to align and even then therer is coutnerplay (and how often those stars align…) so I’d say tho it’s really strong (in the right situations) it’s not broken/op.
I technically agree that she should have better baseline or talents. Single mandatory powerspike is not good design. However I also know how horrible our dev team is when it comes to balancing and reworks nowadays. They would either make her completely worthless or permaban material. As long as there are heroes that should never be picked and heroes that should always be picked I really hope they don’t waste resources on heroes that are still in the balanced realm even if they are badly designed. They don’t want split push Zag be a thing nor do they want her as strong lane bully. Her kit isn’t particularly well suited in 4 man till she has maw and corrosive so she would need full rework as in a lot of resources thrown her direction.
It is obviously oppressive on ARAM, however in any normal game, the roachlings don’t want a thing better than being on the closest lane. You only have to get away for a moment, and they will head to a lane. Once I hit an Artanis with the drop pod on dragon shire objective, he used blade dash (disappeared for a moment), and the little fellas left me alone, even he was in their range
I think people who say that haven’t experienced games where balancing is really bad. (And stays that way)
If our devs were bad at balancing, OP heroes would not be touched because they would think that those heroes are fine. And the huge nerfs that the community asks for are always a bad idea. In pretty much every competitive community, the nerfs players want are always overkill compared to what is actually required for balancing.
To be entirely fair the only reason to go for Mutalisk in the regard is to constantly causing lane pressure, which is not much of a likelihood to happen outside of unorganized play unless you are solely going for that as zagara with nydus worm mixed in, a 30 seconds multalisk can do a lot in pressure to causing decent amount of damage, drop and go type ability.
But the reason corossive gets more of a pick due its a nice layer of damage to her minions, Hydralisk is really essentially 40% - 50% of her hero damage for the most part and it hits like a truck while not paying attention to it, so when set up on a tank its a lot of pressure in the process, especially when roachling quest is completed.
To be honest, Zagara’s lane pressure is already an overkill, so talents that improve these situations aren’t that needed in the first place much, this is why most of her meta talents are almost exclusively around team fight focus.
I can see nydus working on large maps and for lane pressuring which in that case Mutalisk could see promising.
Also speaking of 16, Jagged Barbs is terrible, has a lot of flaws that essentially requires creep which also causes you to stick with your position to keep it even active in the first place.
The thing is, Corrosive Saliva is one of the sole reasons to even pick Zag at this moment.
When it comes to early game lane bullying there’s not many that can match her pace, but her ability to contribute to teamfights is inverse to her dueling capability.
Nydus gives her strong global presence but even then she’s a very squishy body and her sole form of protection is movespeed on creep. There’s a lot of other heroes with strong lane presence that still provide something more valuable to teamfights and objective while Zag often just feels like a really bad Valla if her minions don’t live long and her creep tumors aren’t sticking.
Saliva makes you an actual threat and turns your poke into ranged death and does wonders to your damage output, so even if your roaches are melting you still get a good 7-15% damage in with a simple button press.
Zag’s AA talents have some really good numbers but the issue is she already deals good AA damage, banking on autoing uncontested a whole bunch is a dangerous gamble when you have a +sized Tank hitbox and the HP pool of 2 (TWO) Murkys with no sustain talents outside of that one Hunter Killer lifesteal. Not to mention you usually want to have a lot of creep spread out and that’s not always going to happen for you.
Zag herself is oppressive in ARAM. I’ve gone quite a few games where we don’t even hit level 16 because she can chip away at towers and forts for F R E E.
Oh yeah sure just nerf the only teamfight quality she has left to oblivion. Genius move. OP NPCs? Please, they die to a random Cassia Q. Maybe try moving instead of standing still and face tanking all 4 (even if she completes her 7 quest).
Seriously. I never thought I’d see the day someone makes a Zag OP thread these days.
