This is in regards to the malg PTR, I’m a very passionate malganis player, but this isn’t entirely about Malg its about how you all are choosing to handle reworks and buffs/nerfs. Sometimes just because a number is high does not mean that its overtuned it means that the other talents aren’t as viable or that the situations they require are more niche. Winged Guard for example is a prime object to explain this. Winged guard only gives physical armor. Back when he had 25 armor basekit and could get up to 50 off W winged guard made it so that those really hard hitting autos didn’t matter as much. It was viable because he had such good armor already that it became a pretty strong pick into melee comps, but after rework it fell off really hard due to how prevalent the quest was. Now its not hardly picked and if it is you probably aren’t winning with it, but thats because of how he was redesigned not because it was an innately bad talent.
The newest patch chose to nerf his damage on his quest instead of making the other two options more appealing which is part of the issue I want to bring to the dev’s attention. Sometimes when a stat is high, its not the stat thats the issue, but the reason for why such a thing occurs. It is mostly because they look at things like it’s an excell spread sheet. High numbers= Doing too well or too strong/ Low numbers=bad or needs buffed.
Part of the problem is you have to consider why something is being picked rather than simply looking at pick rate. I’ll give a non malganis example. Lets look at the hero Diablo. Diablo has a proportionately low win rate compared to a lot of other tanks. Diablo’s overall wr between all modes is 40%. If you looked at that at face value you would simply conclude that diablo sucks and needs buffed right?
But thats not really entirely the case. Sure, diablo could use a bit of love, but when he gets to do the thing he’s supposed to he can be really oppressive, especially since he has dmg reduction and can bully most mages with spell armor. The reason his winrate is so low? Well if you look at the ranked tabs you will see that in gold and below his winrate is 38% plat and above however his overall winrate goes up which very clearly says that its not all about diablo underperforming, but rather the people playing diablo mostly suck. Now based on his overally numbers I would conclude he does need buffed because 40% is rather low. That being said He’s an attractive frontline tank and attracts a lot of new players specifically people that played diablo the game and as a result his wr is skewed. Do I think diablo is a bad tank? NO, but should he be buffed to compensate his weaknesses? Yeah I do. But then you look at his builds and see that firestomp is the build that wins most in fact it wins more than 60% of the time that diablo is going to win. Should we nerf it because its doing so well? NO because its fine where it is. His issue isn’t that firestomp is too strong, its that his other builds by comparison are too weak and as a result he’s a very inflexible champ. Also aside from damage reduction he’s a very all in champ which is easy to punish and he only gets one talent to fix that at lv 20 which arguably isn’t worth it half the time
2 Likes
His W build is superior to everything else he has. It is also kinda busted.
Its not superior to everything else because its so strong its superior to his other talents because they mostly all suck. For a tank that’s supposed to be all in He gets really easily shut down and stopped from escape since much like malg he has no mobility options other than his lv 20 or q if they are positioned behind you and his AA build usually doesn’t do enough to keep him alive mostly because Diablo is better at setting up kills than peeling. Not to say he can’t peel, but if you’re using q to peel then you’re not properly engaging most of the time. The reason his firestomp build is “Broken” Is because the situations its drafted in are where he shines. If I see an all spell damage comp and I’m drafting diablo you bet i’m taking firestomp because not only is it his highest damaging build, but its also his highest sustain build. This isn’t because firestomp is broken its because his other talents don’t work into a lot of comps due to how much CC there usually is on average. In other words just like the devs you missed the point I was making which is that just because a talent string has a disproportionately high winrate does not mean that its broken.
And then to top things off instead of just buffing what isn’t working they slap more nerfs and then do jank stuff like nerfing the good build while improving the bad ones only marginally or overtuning them. Its a knee jerk reaction and they need to pay better attention to why it is that things like that are happening. I’m a game dev myself I know exactly how hard balancing is, but in a game format like this balance isn’t perfect. It never is. And sometimes good enough needs to be left alone.
This is something I’ve always wondered about the balance process. When a talent outshines the others. How do they determine whether the problem is that that talent is too good, or the other talents are too weak?
I genuinely believe that buffs are a lot healthier in most cases than nerfs. There are plenty of reasons for this. It isn’t to say nerf’s don’t have their place, but they aren’t the healthiest solution for fixing problems and here’s why:
Often times when nerfs are being applied they are not being applied because they are doing too much, but almost always its based on pick/win rate. Not to beat a dead horse, but I’ll use this newest PTR malg patch as an example because I understand malg the best.
In the patch 2.5510 before he got reworked to become a dps tank his win rate was 49% overall. Now if you look at that patch data you’ll notice something a little weird. Despite the fact that vamp aura and time to feed basically have almost the same win rate time to feed is picked twice as much as the other two talents and winged guard was very clearly a loss talent because not only was it not picked frequently but it had a lower wr. Why was this the case? Because as part of his character design closing the gap was hard staying in range to auto attack usually wasn’t an option. This is reflected in all of his directly AA based abilities minus black claws because they either have a lower pick rate or a lower wr.
If you looked at the stats as a whole on malg you’d see its not that his other builds are winning too much because until 20 they only influence his WR by about +or -2%, but you’ll very clearly see that his auto attack build basically wasn’t viable. Now lets look at the new patch where they stripped his armor.
In patch 2.5516.96 plat and above his quest is picked almost 94% of the time yet only wins about 6% more than time to feed and winged guard drops down to 44% where it previously was 48%. This already without looking at any other talent tells you that people feel he now needs the damage otherwise he is too squishy to play. Granted it wasn’t out very long and some people probably just picked it because it was a quest or new so some skewed results would come in, but in this patch it paints a very clear picture playing aggro is the way to play malg.
Now the newest patch 2.5516.97 They nerf his damage on quest. Its pick rate still only drops slightly, but guess what changes? Even though winged guard got buffed its pick rate drops down to 40 because people are finally realizing its basically useless and TTF now shoots up to 66% in wr despite having a 2% pick rate. So as you can clearly see here having a high pick rate has nothing to do with how strong a talent is, but rather how much people feel that its neccessary.
Sorry this was a long message TLDR: Basically unless a talent has both a high pick rate and a high win rate that is so significant it dwarfs the other two talents by comparison devs shouldn’t nerf it and should instead focus on making the other talents more usable. BY nerfing what works on talent tiers where there is clearly one main pick being chosen all your doing is making the overall character worse instead of elevating them. Because by their logic even though time to feed has a 2% pick rate it should be nerfed because it wins 66% of the time.
I’m not convinced buffs are objectively better than nerfs.
For most new heroes, devs go on the side of making them stronger rather than playing it safe. And new heroes almost always came out OP, requiring several rounds of nerfs.
I remember when Stukov was released. I read the talent description for Pox Populliand immediately though “That talent is getting either changed or nerfed” (It used to refresh the duration of healing pathogen) It doubled his healing output. He also had growing infestation that gave him a hige AoE silence with no drawbacks at Lvl 1
Buffing other tanets instead would not have been good.
Samuro, who used to have unstoppable on Bladestorm which was problematic. Plus more health, lower ooldown on mirror image , and mirror images benefited from most talents. Buffing less picked talents in that case would have been disastrous.
I do want buffs in many instances. But favoring buffs almost all the time leads to power creep. (Most cardgames are a great example of this) As when you want to bring lesser picked heroes on par, you have to make them stronger than you normally would havebecause the baseline is higher. And it will only keeo getting higher.
power creep is inevitable in these games because each interaction changes the value of every other interaction. When you result to nerfing/banning something from being used all it results in most of the time is create a hatred for the results and weaker champs overall. What i’m talking about isn’t just applicable to talents. I’m saying instead of nerfing what’s working right now fix what isn’t. Example. There are at least 10 champs who are massively underperforming right now regardless of rank. Nova is one of them. Instead of changing a champ that basically has a 50% wr, but is a little weak buff the champs that aren’t working instead. Or instead of changhing how malg works and entirely reworking him, remove the problem talents FRENZIED ASSAULT and replace it with something useful.
I don’t agree that powercreep is inevitable. You can improve something without making it stronger by simply changing its functionality. Like when they gave Malthael cleave on his AA, he stopped constantly running out of mana. His AA damage was reduced by 35 points. But everyone considered the added efficiency in waveclear an improvement.
In the case of Nova. They don’t buff her not for balance reasons, but because it makes games not enjoyable for players, especially at the lower end. Like, about one third of complaints on the forums used to be about Nova. Valeera won’t get buffed for the same reason. Zeratul gets left alone only because his power is mostly in the late game, and because he’s much more difficult to play.
A hero becoming weaker is not inherently bad. The game is much more enjoyable now than it was when Zera, Val and Nova had true cloaks. People stopped playing the game solely due to the existence of these characters. And I don’t think anyone is sad about Samuro’s nerfs.
It’s hard to say whether a rework is necessary or not, because the devs may very well have tried other changes before deciding on it. Unfortunately they don’t put patch notes or explain why they do what they do anymore.
I don’t know. For one I don’t really pick tanks for damage. Claiming mal’ganis needs a damage buff is insane considering he gets 3 short range dashes, a knockup/stun, and a speed boosting sleep cc move that grants phasing and can potentially be used on the entire team. He has one of the most busted kits on a tank period, and you’re calling for a buff because he doesn’t do diablo things as good as diablo?
The fact that he has to attack twice to get his stun is not an advantage. He’s sending you a letter ahead of time to tell you “I’m going to stun you” giving you ample time to interrupt him.
Mal’Ganis is expected to stay alive mostly through life drain. So if his damage is lower, he dies more. They had removed his armor on W because they figured extra damage would keep him alive well enough. It didn’t (HotS des. are historically bad at managing Tanks)
I don’t think we can call him busted as he’s never gotten really great results. And players usually don’t want to pick him.
Weakest engage of all tanks and 2 crap ults. Not great survivability, and not even an unstoppable (even with talents). I guess he’s supposed to be the high damage tank that protects his allies by doing damage… but it’s not happening yet.