How Medallion has shaped SL meta

General Discussion
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Hey just a rando master/GM type person not a CCL or anything dropping some feedback here about Medallion and how it’s shaped the current meta what’s good and what I see as not fun about it.

Current meta in SL feels like it’s got a pretty tight range of heroes that are easy to fit into the game right now. I think a big part of that is how Medallions have shaped how we play in SL…

We’re running a lot of insta-gib compositions. Basically this is our answer to two things that’ve really happened this season. 1. Medallions, and 2. Increase in the power of Zone deny(think the massive buffs to AoE casters like Chromie, Tass, or Gaz’s grav bomb.

Medallions effect is obvious. If you don’t gib your target in a CC chain they press Medallion and walk away. One of the main reasons we see CC chains like Sleep dart to Imp Spear or Stuntanks to Poly. And that’s really the main reason we’ve seen such a rise to power with bwing in general. We need it to prevent medallion use.

The 2nd effect I mentioned was the buffs to zone deny and AoE punish. This means you really want to kill your targets quickly then space out as fast as you can. Cause of the zone deny that you’ve buffed up Chromie, Gaz, Tass, and after scaling Orphea. You see if you don’t kill targets quickly and you’re funneling to kill a target you put multiple people are risk to these now very dangerous AoE punish options.

And that’s what’s really lead to a very binary DPS check we’ve had at least in SL. Ideal right now is some hard CC chain and enough burst to kill the target. It’s really heavily shaped the types of DPS we use now. We’re using heroes like Greymane, Cassia, and Banshee-Raynor that have very high single target burst options.

So the medallion has lead to more situations were players are going full to dead without getting a chance to do anything. It’s made gib compositions the play.

And it’s also showing how limiting it can be on your hero designs. Particularly choreographed CC have suffered here. Examples are things like Qhira’s E or Xul’s roots.

And the feel of using medallions might have felt skillful earlier on. But now it’s just not that special anymore. Now if someone doesn’t use their medallion when dangerous CC is coming at them it’s consider a failure of mechanical skill. It’s not nearly as much of a positive anymore. And it’s still a slap in the face to someone that’s using a CC ult or making a hard skill shot and they just pop that medallion and walk away.

I really I see this as a road that has already been tread before. So I’m going to paraphrase for a second cause I don’t recall the exact words. This was a conversation from something like 9-10 years ago. “I hate it. I want to remove it. It limits so much what we can do now. But I can’t cause we’re already up to millions[of players] and it’s been in too long.” That was a dev from the same genre talking about a very similar set of mechanics.

I think the longer you leave this thing in the harder it is for you to remove it. And it’s going to hang over you as you design new heroes and skills. And I’m getting worried. I see you trying to put in burst options in this patch to have heroes like Tychus and Lunara potentially to fit into this meta shift based on just working around medallions. Please reconsider.

19 Likes
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This is the main problem with medallion. Proper chain cc counters medallion, that’s kinda silly

But I hope the devs continue experimenting with tools against chain cc (e.g. tweak the medallion and change it rather than just remove it). Being stunlocked and bursted really isn’t a fun experience and is too common right now

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I am not master player, but I still don’t know how this is an arguement against GM. If I play Xul and I can bait a GM with my roots I am happy about it, because next time I can do it again… Same goes to Malfurion, who raises in power with his baseline aoe roots to bait this ablity out, because a good root of him and proper focus can otherwise kill the target.

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One of the things I thought early on when they barely introduced the medallion was “how can it stop stun locks if you can’t cast it while stunned?” Its not like Uther is going to stun you while Imperius has you impaled. While the purpose was to stop CC locks, if you do happen to get stunned you’re still susceptible to follow up CC which really defeats the point of the medallion in the first place. In that regard, its useless.

This resulted in having hyper mobile heroes be buffed because they can pop the medallion and be gone whereas heroes like Jaina, KTZ, KT, and such are not as quick to escape so even if they do happen to use the medallion, they can still get caught. Its helped them in lane for sure though because they won’t be completely helpless in a 1v1 situation. But in team fights, they still suffer while hyper, or even non hyper but still mobile heroes can escape even easier.

And now its hurt heroes that are more reliant on CC to be somewhat successful. Not all the time either as the hero cooldowns are much shorter than the medallion, but when it matters most and you need to land that stun to peel or kill, someone can use the medallion and ruin it.

Blanket solutions are never good unless everybody suffers from the same issues. Genji, Valeera, Zeratul, and Tracer do not suffer from CC before the medallion. They have easy escapes and require a lot of CC to handle properly, while most non mobile heroes are devastated by just one stun. How is a blanket solution going to solve that problem? Its just going to make catching hyper mobile heroes even harder while not even really helping non mobile heroes.

The solution to the CC problem will not come from a blanket solution. It will come from the devs adjusting CC to make it less powerful, while adjusting hypermobile heroes to not be able to roam free. If they lower CC, they have to nerf the mobility of hyper mobiles since their counter is CC.

6 Likes
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I fail to see how nerfing CC and mobility is going to change anything.
If you nerf CC people will still stack them to still kill someone within a rotation.
You nerf divers mobility but then there is less CC to catch them.
It either does nothing or make them so useless they get buffed back or get so much hp in return they may not even need to evade anything anymore and then another issue arises.
Also from whom are you going to remove CC from?
Healers and tanks without CC are deemed almost useless already by some people.
And CC from dps often are ults.
If the answer was that easy it may have happened already.

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It keeps hyper mobile heroes the same vs CC but makes non mobile heroes less helpless against it. That’s the difference. Its not to change the interaction between hyper mobile heroes and CC its to change the interaction between non mobile heroes and CC.

You don’t need to remove CC, but you can lower durations, raise cooldowns.

Also riddle me this. In the last 3 patches before the GM (Master/Diamond), how is Stitches (with very little CC) sitting at 49.44% WR while Garrosh (with a ton of great CC) sitting at 49.62% WR? Are you saying Garrosh is just as useless as Stitches? I highly doubt so. Even Arthas, with no stuns whatsoever was only 4th from the top.

Now if you look at all the patches after the medallion (Master/Diamond) Garrosh is at 51.93%, a 2.31% increase with the Medallion. Tell me again how high CC heroes are even being affected by the Medallion. I don’t see it. Mei, Muradin, ETC, Diablo, Anub, who all have tons of CC are still sitting above 52% WR with the medallion and are basically unchanged from when there was no Medallion. Care to tell me how the medallion is even working?

If its purpose is to make CC less impactful how is it not affecting these heroes and has made Garrosh perform better with the medallion? It failed.

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Usually because at high lvl there are less fights and since you failed to engage/initiate, there might won’t be a next time.

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how many times a game is a Xul actually getting the chance to root a high value target though? if its more then once or twice a game, you probably aren’t playing in high ELO games

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sounds like we need a super medallion that self-cleanses stuns then :expressionless:
you’re not taking away our medallion, buddy

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We finally locked down Zeratul! …oh wait nevermind he’s gone, and sent our backline to the altar of storms.

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“oh well. it only happens once every 5 minutes. we’ll get em next time” :expressionless:

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Will you though? I doubt it.

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I would love to play in this playground, where people more concerned about playing the map and less to brawl 24/7 like in ARAM. :joy:

Sure you have a point, you could miss the chance in high elo, because there are less fights, but also it’s not hard to imagine for me that high elo players can win a game without kills being made, because it’s already a win, if you let enemys retreat, because both actions gives you an advantage in time.

While bad players can’t even use this time advantage to their own most of the time, we bad players even struggle to make a good call when to boss or to finish the game. :joy:

Fixed.

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How is it a positioning issue when Zeratul has a billion blinks to dive and escape the backlike super easily. Nice Try as uther fails to lock down Zeratul

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How? You know that Zeratul is a melee assassine with basically rather high cooldown on Q and relies on his autoattacks?

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If you think Zeratul can’t do that then your knowledge of Zeratul is sorely lacking.

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This is natural. When you introduce a one sided, hard counter for something, like the medallion, the other side will have to react equally. This leads to an arms race between the 2 sides, essentially creeping power.

And this is really nothing. If the medallion becomes permanent, blizzard will start balancing new heroes and reworks around it, meaning that CC will eventually become more powerful and more prevalent. Which is ironic, since CC is the reason we have the medallion in the first place.

The only way you can “nerf CC” (if that’s even a concept in a moba with hyper mobile heroes lol), is to stop giving everyone a CC, and stop making heroes that can only be countered by CC, like tracer/genji/orphea/fenix etc, and gradually phase out those problematic heroes out of the game through redesigns. This will require a deep rethinking of the entire game.

But this is essentially a non-issue. The only reason we have the medallion is because someone at blizzard thought it would be cool to cater to bronze 6 AI farmers who get killed with a CC chain when out of position.

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Or you wish Zera has some hidden superpower and it make him beyond every balance and not others who makes mistakes. :joy:

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What kind of noob Zeratul’s are you playing against?

Here’s what good Zeratuls look like:

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If mobile heroes are kept the same against CC how does it changes anything for non mobile heroes?
Non mobile heroes are not supposed to have CC reach them in the first place, they are on death’s door if they get caught by CC anyway.

It would affect the lower end of the players true but how is it going to change how the top plays?
It will cement the " stack CC and CC and kill someone on the first occasion you get" even more.
Top players are so hard to kill , hard Cc blow up typically is how pro players get killed in the first place, it is not going to change, ever.

Not saying medaillon did not have a hand in this but you ignore the enormous buffs he got.
Garrosh finally stopped sucking past level 13 with stronger talents at 16 and 20.
His W healing instantly already was a huge deal.
You can’t just ignore this.