I thought stealth heroes were supposed to be made competitive by the stealth changes?

General Discussion
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Valeera and nova were supposed to be made viable picks after the buffs, but they were overtuned for a little bit then nerfed into the ground and ignored ever since.

Valeera is incredibly niche and only really viable because she has a point and click silence

Nova is just worse than every other burst damage hero in the game due to being extremely squishy and not even having particularly good burst damage.

Can blizzard stop pretending these heroes don’t exist? They need changes. Patch after patch plenty of heroes who don’t really need balance changes get them, but nova and valeera remain totally forgotten. Seriously. Just try SOMETHING. Minor numbers buffs. Maybe boost the damage on eviscerate by 10%. Give nova a slight hp buff. Buff underpreforming talents. ANYTHING. Even if you’re not prepared to try something more extreme, give the heroes a helping hand as they’re pretty obviously underpreforming.

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Not saying these are any good, but…

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I would agree with the statement in the post, but nova has been getting consistent buffs in her talents for awhile now. Granted they dont really change much but its something

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I’d say I prefer a slow and steady tweaking and buffing that they’re doing right now (atleast with nova) than a drastic buff which will most likely get overnerfed. Be patient and optimistic, Hail.

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They haven’t been doing that to valeera, though. The last time they actually buffed valeera was 1/24/18 which is nearly a year ago. And that was just drastically overtuning sinister strike talents so the hero remained playable.

If her base damage values werent so terrible those talents would be unspeakably broken.

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What are you talking about Willis?

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It had nothing to do with making them competitive.

It was so that people would stop complaining.

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So they decreased Valeera silence duration by 0.25s and people suddenly got happy with it. Still cant stop laughing at it.

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The problem is that stealth characters were always a bad idea. They were soul destroying cancer in an uncoordinated group and weakish in higher level play.

Zeratul is the only one if I’m not mistaken that saw much higher end use.

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They significantly nerfed her damage on the silenced target as well.

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From AAs. So basically DoT when you have to actually do something. And nerf was fine.
At the same time, bringing back Cold Blood, so basically point&click burst is good idea.

Im missing something here. Reminds me lcd thread when he said instant burst gives enemy team better chance to react than AAs on silenced target, lol.

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Valeera is always going to be niche due to her reliance on her openers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If they were to buff her, they’d need to nerf the openers and buff her regular abilities, which for all intents and purposes is not what she was designed for.

Nerfing her openers would make her less viable than any other melee assassin and if they buffed her too much, she’d could essentially be an unfun gamebreaking hero, so I’m sorry to say this about what I assume is your favorite hero, but Valeera is niche for a reason and needs to stay that way.

As for Nova, she’s been bouncing back and forth in and out viability for awhile, like Anub’arak, she’s not an evergreen hero who’s going to be good in any situation. She’s got her niche too, but when she works, she works incredibly well, especially with the right player behind her and a good comp.

The problem with Nova, as with other stealth heroes, is how easily weak players can abuse the stealth to get rewarded for poor positioning and/teamplay. Maybe they’ll wait out until a teamfight is nearly over, risking the lives of his/her teammates just to secure a kill, instead of actively participating in it for fear of being focused. Or maybe they’ll sneak into the back line of the enemy team, gank the healer, and walk away in stealth Scott free from a team that just happens to have no skill shots or reveals to counter her.

The stealth changes from last year, from how I see it, was to reduce their reliance on stealth and put more power into their actual kits so that they’d be more willing to participate in teamplay, rather than play selfishly just for the opportunity of an easy pick that could have been achieved more easily if the stealth player was actively participating in the teamfight in the first place. For a time, the changes were relatively successful, since both Nova and Zeratul had both vastly improved from where they were before. That’s not to say that they were non-situational, but they were a huge step up from where they were before.

You just gotta accept it, no matter how many times they buff stealth heroes, they’re ALWAYS going to be situational just due to having to balance them around having the stealth mechanic.

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Kagome alt detected.

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There is nothing further to say on Valeera as you already made a thread on her with regard to her viability, she is fairly competitive in her own niche (and her winrates reflect this higher up):

You also have other topics in that vein and again you are met with disagreement there with regard to Valeera. I don’t see the point in you trying to push your agenda further when this is beating a dead horse.

And it is also genuinely dishonest to generalize stealth heroes as not being competitive since the change when in fact you are only looking at two heroes (one of which is competitive) , since obviously Samuro and Zeratul don’t fit your narrative. Samuro had among the highest winrate for the longest time, until the nerfs and more importantly the loss of half his popularity (from 6-7% down to 3%) although his crit build still works fine. Whereas Zeratul still continues to see strong success.

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The hell is a Kagome? I’m just giving you the truth. Stealth is a cheap mechanic that rewards scrubs for playing like cowards.

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Care to expound upon this? I read your other post but it contains no information as to how Stealth constitutes an “abusive” feature.

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Their stealth might just be too good, maybe the balance team doesn’t even see them?

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Not every hero has to be viable for every situation, comp and map.
Blizzard already said they are more than okay with niche heroes as long as they are balanced in their niche.

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Stealth is technically unavoidable, meaning you really can’t prevent it or won’t always have the tools to counter it, such as reveals or meaty skillshots. Some players will use this shortage of direct counterability to make incredibly risky plays that would normally be very easy to punish, but since they can’t be targeted, they have to try fishing them out by throwing skillshots at them, and even when they do get caught you can either chase them leaving your team exposed or let them get back into stealth continue to chip away at your health. It’s these players who abuse this against other players to be rewarded for poor play. Like I said, they might wait for a teammate to die before they participate in a fight instead of participating from the start and winning the fight anyways.

If you need additional elaboration, I’ll be around.

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Oh the irony coming from you.