I’m still waiting for the maps rotation to be turned off, the limit on reports and the opening of MMR :)))
Nerfs 
I prefer buffs 
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Got reverted, lol.
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More proactive Auriel changes are nice though, I might actually enjoy the character now that I’m not totally reliant on my carry DPS being any good
Lowering max stacks for ZJ is a stupid change though
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I don’t think that’s the ideal approach. Numerically it is quite a lot and scaling potential is insane because it still generates Hope per target hit. I’d rather somehow divide that buff between Auriel and the crown subject but that could just as well potentially create another Chogall/hypercarry balancing problem. You have cornered yourself here.
Whoever thought of increasing Hope from damage to non-hero targets this much must be crazy.
Landing an optimal sweep hit on a single seven minion wave (center hit bonus) already gives 65% of your basic reservoir (before reservoir of hope upgrade for expanded capacity) and with the buff that turns into full 100%+ with a lot of excess even if you hit the minion wave in the worst way possible, at a bad angle.
This is literally too much healing on demand and under right conditions she won’t need to bother attacking heroes or worry about exposing herself too much, which in my opinion should be rewarding a significant majority of all generated Hope in comparison to mostly farming minions.
Someone also must have forgot that she exists on the battlefield infinitely, until death at least and that unlike mana, her resource won’t run out after two rounds of casts. Not to mention she would now passively generate a significantly higher amount of energy through her auto attacks.
Janitor, what are you doing?
250 basic attacks is still a lot. It’s less that they’re lowering the limit, more that they’re putting a hard cap so Zul’jin doesn’t just scale infinitely.
HotS has struggled to balance its in-combat healers. Whitemane required several reworks and the addition of a fourth skill to make her playable. Auriel has never shined as a solo healer. It turns out that tying something as crucial as healing to limited windows that are mostly out of your control makes the hero kinda bad, no matter how good said window healing is.
2 Likes
Zul’jin is my most played hero. 250 stacks does not register to me as a lot, just a nice amount. I often hit 300 when doing well, rarely above 400.
I think 300 would be an okay cap. Feels fitting since it’s double the base 150. It would be cool if it came with a quest complete reward too. He has plenty of damage, so how about a durability increase? +10% max hp. The troll gets swole after all that axe throwing.
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Zul’jin is an addictive hero. His quest for enhancing his ranged attacks gives him a strong reason to actively participate in battles early on. However, it’s only in the late game that his ability to take down frontline enemies barely reaches the level of Tychus (and that’s without any survival or mobility skills to strike the backline). When Zul’jin goes berserk, ignoring danger and standing bloodied on the battlefield, I, watching from the screen, feel the same adrenaline rush as he does. Zul’jin is truly an addictive hero—we don’t need a long-haired version of Raynor.
2 Likes
Goodbye hots. Braindead devs 2025 nerfing Auriel, a negative rate hero, needs to have their heads examined. Put the pve damage back onto searing light. Yikes. I’m done. I can handle a dead game, but a dead game where the devs nerf low-rate heroes for no reason instead of fixing annoying bugs or adding in a hots arcade to actually bring some life to this game. But no, instead of rational choices, we nerf auriel, so goodbye. You just patched Mechastrizan out of the game. Good job.
On the other side we have Uther and Kharazim who are much worse at healing than Auriel and equally rely on allies grouping up, but they go out of mana very quickly.
By the time both of them recall, wait a bit for mana to refill and manage return to the center of map, Auriel had already filled her reservoir with energy 3-4 times without any help from allies, total of 540%+pocket change.
She suffers in specific situations just like every other healer, but numerically speaking I wouldn’t say that she ever was far behind. I don’t like this 2nd Hope buff component, not one bit because Auriel won’t even have to work hard for what is essentially a 250% increase in energy generated from minions.
Actually the buff is so strong you won’t even notice how much more Hope you generate from autoattacks because you will constantly be overflowing just by using sweep.
With how the game has evolved through balance changes, after watching Khaldor’s competition over the holidays I have not seen only a single healer played, which was Tyrande, and observing how perfectly executed the CC chains were even among the semi-pros, I’m more than convinced that she’s is by far the worst healer in the game, judging by mechanics and limitations. Needless to say, she is the easiest to counter.
Respawning with no energy is like the least of your worries, but there’s no reason to allow the same hero to fill the energy bar from 0 to 100% with a single spell cast, by not even DAMAGING A SINGLE HERO.
Do I need to remind everyone here why Rehgar’s lightning shield mana generation per target hit got HALVED?
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‘nerfs’ were done for a reason, might wanna work on firing up your own ‘brain’ to read into that.
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Most of the patch is bugfixes and “arcade” additions.
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Is anyone supposed to care that some alt account – likely an imitator – is coming around to claim they quit after not having been around at all?
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It’s ptr, not a patch. Feel free to use the actual outlets for feedback that influences ptr for being a ‘test realm’ instead of the typical lazy complaints that – generally – just turn into lies.
There’s several reasons:
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Solid-energy hatted Auriel’s aren’t affected by the change since they already get energy, so it’s a boost for situations that have her struggle.
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Relying on Q sweeps for energy puts her heal turn-around at a similar rate to other heroes, and while they have ‘mana’ to spend when they use those heals, they aren’t going oom from that single cast.
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Healers can feel overly punishing and stressful to play as is, so raising the floor may improve the numbers of healer picks, talent variety, and overall game health.
Lightning shield doesn’t provide the same opportunity cost as Auriel’s sweep; it was a simple token on an overloaded hero that is both successful and popular: Auriel isn’t either of those.
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You still need a minion wave, though. That’s not guaranteed, especially on BHB, Warhead Junction, Hanamura, or even Dragonshire when one team has pushed a lot. She’s still reliant on outside factors. Auriel literally cannot heal for any amount outside of specific windows.
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Uther has Armor (making him better for proactive bursts) and the best CC in the game.
Kharazim has a group 25% move speed buff and some of the highest burst damage in the game when played correctly
Of course, neither function properly in ARAM where poke and sustain are king, but that’s due to flaws in ARAMs design, not in these characters.
2 Likes
if only there were a way to enforce healers in qm, right? 
The initial changed of Searing light did not only take away her wave clear but also her extra energy generating, so Devs compensate her with her baseline one instead.
Keep that in mind landing a sweep on minions does not guarantee, as you state, 65% of her energy due to
- it may not be all getting center hit.
- Minions HP may be lower than full value of her sweep, thus the energy gained will be lower.
She still does need to attack heroes; I’d agree with you if minions present outside the lanes, you can farm them prior to TF somewhere and even TF happens to be in a lane it’s doesn’t always mean there’re minions nearby, near enough with healthy condition to gain her energy optimally even.
Unlike healers with mana, that can fill their blue tab with
- Fountain
- Globes
- Base
- some abilities that give/giving back mana
Auriel needs to invest finding any target to attack in order to gain energy to certain value to heal with that value, which could range from 0 to 475(at lv.1), unlike other healer that always get full value of their healing, which less convenient than other healers.
Both of their early game performance prior heroic tier, in term of healing and supporting, is better and more flexible than Auriel’s.
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Uther has 2 healing skills, it means he can heal 2 allies in 2 different places if they’re not clump up, plus the dmg prevention through 25 armors of both physical and spell, an on-demand point & click stun, later talents also optionally offer him to access CDR, mana refund and a cleanse.
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Khara with green trait give him extra heal, his W also grant movement speed to ally, later on comes with a spirit ally, also more heal and movement speed after.
What Auriel has prior heroic tier in term of healing and supporting? bigger area of sweep? higher number on sweep? farther or minor slow of pushing a hero away? (if it hits) or easier ways to gain energy?
Her healing may be AOE, but it’s her one and the only heal, that can miss and gone which after 4 secs may or may not have enough energy to fix her team, if ppl is wiggle/got replacement/poor aim, most healers has at least one skill that no matter what will heal their team.
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We already had that in the past. Just look what happend. People keep lying they can wait extra 10 min for a balanced match. Then when it did get added it was back to complaining about having to wait anyway.
And it was even worse on dead servers. QM with long waiting time just ruin the game mode. Its supposed to be fast games not balanced. Thats why unranked was added. So you could get balanced games wiihout caring about ranks. But that is now dead aswell.
Cause everyone expect QM to be both QM and ranked at the same time which is a dumb idea.
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What do I gain from making these numbers up?
a tryhard hit
minions traveling in line
318/495=0.642
https://i.imgur.com/qmmmCkd.jpeg
bronze medal sweep
center bonus damage to one target only
192/495=0.387
https://i.imgur.com/M1UNCdd.jpeg
You won’t need to worry about a perfect angle to cast your sweep and you’ll be averaging ~50% energy as long as you catch all 7 minions with your ability. After a 150% increase (Samisha’s screenshot), generated energy will exceed basic 100% capacity under every circumstance.
Without any talent modifiers, you’ll be getting same % results at all levels because your basic ability damage and energy cap scales at the same rate of 4% per level. No doubt that Increasing Clarity (1) will work in perfect synergy with Reservoir of Hope (16) and lead to a significant increase in solo energy generation.
Now just to put things into perspective; autoattacking a minion will give you ~7% of basic reservoir per hit while attacking a hero is only slightly more rewarding at ~10%.
However, if you think Energized Cord (7) is still a meme after granting a bonus 1.1 attack range, it’s actually quite the opposite and no doubt that this talent will see a lot of play depending on map choice and your team composition.
It buffs the energy numbers from autoattacks to 10% vs npcs and 19% vs heroes. Just to enlighten you all how bonkers this is combined with her attack speed; if you’re constantly hitting a hero target and spamming Ray of Heaven [4sec cd], you’ll be excited to know that you’ll be firing a heal at 95/100% capacity without any supplemental damage, without the need to even use your other two damaging abilities, but most importantly, you don’t even need to to worry about crowning a teammate because you’ve been made entirely self-sufficient.
They’ve made Auriel so much more versatile but at the same time they turned her into a complete monster, because frankly, her output is now insanely strong. Thumbs up for making her noob friendly but the numbers scaling feels terribly inappropriate.
If you’ve reached this paragraph, you will come to the same conclusion that energy generation is through the roof with at least 150% overflow that will unfortunately be of little to no use, which doesn’t sound scary for her opponents, but indicates that her entire resource economy is terribly messed up and requires more playtesting to arrive at a more acceptable conversion percentage. It also creates a new problem, by making Reservoir of Hope (16) a guaranteed pick.
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I recall the Dev’s did say queue times increased, but as you say, it wasn’t anything approaching 10 minutes, unless (perhaps) you were playing on a dead server.
What I do remember clearly is that many people complained match quality went down, as sometimes the MM had to use (or throwaway) more MMR averaging to balance both teams. Specifically, people would complain that the MMR of the tank/healer assigned to their team, was often hundreds of MMR points lower than the rest of the team.
Forum complaints often circle back to the matchmaker, and specifically requests to somehow make games perfectly “balanced”, and smooth over all issues, when often, other factors are a problem.
Just to get this on record, I don’t consider the MM in any mode to be close to perfect, and yes, it could be improved. Yet, even if Hots had an active playerbase in the millions, individual hero MMR, and (somehow) a system that perfectly matches different roles 1to1, the feeling that there is a lack of “balance”, will still persist for many players as it’s easier to blame something like MM, than look at where you as a player have fallen short.
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I’m sorry, I thought I had been clear.
Individual hero MMR would be welcome and probably help MM balance somewhat, a larger active player base would alleviate many issues with the MM. Yet, for a minority of players, no matter how many refinements made to the MM, they would still come here and complain about it not being “balanced.”
No MM can be perfectly balanced, as there are pesky human factors that are out of its control, you know, like some days I just happen to play many ranks below my normal skill level.
2 Likes