Basically title. She feels absurdly weak currently. It feels like half the heroes in the game have at least one ranged ability that is incredibly punishing if it hits, and hammer’s central mechanic is immobilizing herself for an autoattack range that is functionally only slightly longer than heroes like Raynor. It feels like she pays way too much for the ability to outrange structures, which are still not really possible to siege without minions. Just attacking a keep alone takes so long that you’ll get easily taken out by the enemy team before doing significant damage.
She can do okay sometimes, but I feel like she never really excels, but can get countered hard by even one of very many heroes in the enemy’s comp. This is technically only a big problem in quickplay, but I can’t imagine ever using hammer in draft either, since she is so easily countered for not particularly much payoff when not countered. I really think she needs a rework and rebalance.
I cant say the weakest. That role goes to nova
Hammer is special. She has too many counters but when being picked if the counters are not picked she dominates
Very difficult to balance.
Her whole spiderbuild feels meh especially after 20
I honestly have no idea how you can think Nova is the weakest hero in the game. Her damage potential and range are still absolutely incredible even despite her being a super old hero.
As I have mentioned in a lot of ARAM discussions involving her, the issue is that she is easily hard countered. A large hitbox, immobile glass cannon hero makes an easy victim to someone like Li Ming, Chromie, Guldan, Kael, Jaina, Kel Thuzad, Orphea and the like. In ARAM there is a chance you might not get one of those high priority pick heroes (RNG did a number on you), but in draft modes you can always pick a counter.
From what I’ve played with her, it feels like most team compositions in quickplay have one or two heroes who easily shut hammer down, and since quickplay is mostly random, it really feels like there’s a lot of heroes who can counter hammer. Either that or they’re just used more, but that’s another issue.
i just get hammer in a loot box jesus christ, and yes hammer is one of the worst heroes, u can see the AI hammer playing is just terrible
i dont know man, i cant agree with that, because i have seen some main novas playing in GM (i watch some grandmaster streamers like fan, leonblack and other) and nova is usually played, also there is a GM main nova (wich name i dont remember) and he usually get top dmg and top kills in gm, wich says a lot, but you will never seen a hammer in GM (i´ve never seen hammer unless someone pays a streamer to play her) so i can say hammer is worst than nova
well, yeah both are equally in the same spot, i´ve naver seen a hammer beeing played in SL, but yes with a nova (i think is a guy called droplets who plays nova in gm), but someone told me a while ago that hammer was played in competitive, maybe because you need to make a build around hammer in order to work with her in a very coordinated team, but man i never have seen more hammers in SL rather than novas
Now I have not seen CCL for a while but I know for a fact that Hammer where picked and banned a lot in HGC. Mostly on Dragon Shire.
I have in the past been beaten by 5 stacks that had a babysit comp so we had no chance to reach Hammer at all with our team and got rect out of the map in 10 min casue they just hard pushed the same lane with old Sylvanas.
I would say that zarya is the weakest. I mean seriously her pick rate is like less than 3% and her kit is dependent upon taking damage. If everyone stops attacking her she does piss poor dmg. Yeah she can mitigate damage and her ults nice, but she can’t do hardly anything solo. Next up i would say nova considering her toolkit sucks for laning, but she can have consistent dmg without her stacks, its her lv 7 that deals 5x dmg and drops armour making the next shot do 15% more. Combined with her armour drop at 13 and her clone dmg at 16 she’s far from weak you just have to know how to captialize on it. Nova does however do really poor with teams that are bad at laning. In that instance your only “laning” option is to collect kills when they are freely available. Sure triple tap can be situational, but when applied correctly nova herself can also team wipe. I myself have gone 27 and 1 before in a match simply because i timed my triple taps right
Hammer & Azmodan are my mains and, my Hammer is a Beast! I’ve brutally gunned down many teams and, it’s common for me to end a match with 100k+ Dmg.
The problem is, she has low health+low mobility. So newbie Hammer’s will die quite easily and, suffer countless crushing defeats until they get better. It’s all about developing that “sense” of knowing when to go in, or siege up, and when to get up and run. It does take a while.
Also knowing the RIGHT talents! Hammer has some talents that really do, “look good on paper” but…in reality? They are actually TERRIBLE and will get you killed. Her Lvl. 7 talent, “Hover” for example? Is pure trash. Only Pro-League Hammer players can pick that and get away with it (because they’re surrounded by great team mates they’ve played with for a while, playing around them). Otherwise, that talent is total garbage. Lot’s of Newbie Hammers who don’t know any better, will pick that and proceed to LOSE horribly.
Graduating Range & Powered up mines are the LEGIT viable options at Lvl. 7.
the sort of players that gravitate to playing her tend to not be good at the game, so they bring down her performance and appeal
Her mine build is better than players usually realize.
Players tend to have mix priorities, bad anticipation skills, and a generalized laziness in the hopes good things happen to them, rather than them making it happen through their efforts.
Hammer having extra range doesn’t mean she can sit afk and win, and assuming she has to ‘set up’ to contribute means she spends more time trying to adjust where to be, rather than actually attacking. Other heroes – summoners – can occupy towers to enable a push while her sitting outside of tower/objective range is neither unique (long-range casters) nor is it more powerful than other heroes.
A key part of understanding hammer is knowing that she could/should draw focus; if peopel are going to focus the hero, then they can plan for it, and counter that. The general assumption of many players is that the ‘tank’ has to draw agro, ‘peel’ for allies, and if they don’t it’s their fault at not knowing the class. However, player vs player is not pve – surprise, i know – so ‘agro control’ doesn’t work the same way, which either leaves player eating avoidable damage, or getting to far ahead from their team as they don’t know the different between opportunity hits, and actually getting focus fired.
(note, a key part of games ‘snowballing’ is one team has 1 hero at a time taking damage, dying, and people running away at high hp while the other team spread out the same damage dealt across several heroes)
So hammer is functionally better as a ‘tank’ then just homophonic puns. Other heroes have similar gimmicks – such as valla – in wanting more than 1 hero to empower that, however, a key part of hammer is that she isn’t good at chasing enemy heroes to finish them off, while other ‘hyper carry’ heroes can do that. So a key part of playing hammer well is learning how to use her to shape the tempo of the game (get the enemy team to react to you) rather than trying to react to the enemy team, and always finding yourself out of position, late to the party, or frequently caught alone and dying way too often.
I haven’t run number comparisons, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s been power-creeped out (ie, other heroes outright have better numbers) but I think the biggest issue is some players go in expecting a lazy/easy hero, and hammer really isn’t an afk bot, even if she can park and outrange a good deal of stuff.
If you watch Khaldor’s streams/VoDs, Hammer is still picked every now and then, usually by HasuObs as a counter to The Lost Vikings. Doing a core rush through a single lane is a good way to beat them.
she certainly isn’t anything special anymore, over time heroes like chromie and ming have been added who can do hammers job without the need of toggling into an immobile state.
add her to the big pile of outdated heroes who need an update!
(i also see no reason why she shouldn’t come back to aram right now.)