Title. I just dont see a reason why to pick it, even with Black Harvest it just seems kinda redundant to get it, if I want to do big damage to tanks I would just go for W talents.
I have been getting better at Malthael even though I still think his talents are WAY outdated, especially his level 20s
I don’t play Malthael too often, generally as a counter pick.
When I was new to him I played Q build pretty much everytime.
Now I just play W build and swap some talents about depending on the situation like his level 1 and armour talent tier.
Ive never seen a reason to pick the talents you mentioned either.
W only deals dmg to Heroes.
Memento Mori deals extra dmg to minions, merc, bosses and objs as well.
So it’s good on BoE for example against the Immortals.
Also with Black Harvest and with Final Curtain, you can build up poke dmg rather well, especially against burst Healers.
I guess if you’re going Assassin Malthael in the four man with Throwing Shade or with Black Harvest at 4 (because you won’t get much value from Die Alone) you can go with Memento Mori if you’re confident about dealing sustained and poke damage (especially with Black Harvest completed).
It’s more of a case of “oh I won’t get much value from this meta early level talent so I’m gonna take another talent that promotes a different playstyle. Oops might as well go all in then” talent.
Though you usually would get Massacre and Mortal Strike anyway.
The reason to take either Trait Talent, basically, is if you are attempting to throw the game. The level 4 quest means you don’t have a Talent until it’s done, it takes some time to complete, and then the reward is highly mediocre. It doesn’t increase damage and you can usually refresh the mark on pretty much whoever you want every 4 seconds, so it’s only an extra 2 seconds of Trait damage after they’ve run away. Very useless compared to Throwing Shade (reduces Malth’s Mana issues and makes him more useful in teamfights, since you can spam E more in fights which spamming that and Q and Last Rites when applicable is his main value in fights, diving in and autoing a lot is generally how you just int on him) or the dueling potential of Die Alone.
Memento Mori is also weak, Soul Collector lets you be a bit more aggressive by increasing the drain tank effect/giving yourself much more healing over time, in addition to more damage, while Mortality is a lot of burst damage particularly vs. Tanks and/or if you have the AOE W from Massacre at 7 (since then the % dmg also applies in an area). Taking a Talent for something like Immortal race as late as level 16 is pretty troll imo, at that point in the game you should be looking to win a teamfight before racing in melee range. Since that’s punishable by the enemy team collapsing on you and having an advantage due to Immortal Stuns.
Yea, the Trait talents are niche and should be tweaked or reworked.
Sometimes you win too much and you get bored.
This actually happened to me
I got tired of winning games at Platinum and Master levels so I just went to Bronze and never looked back
The chaos is so much more fun and I had so much more freedom to experiment with talents and heroes I liked when not aiming for a win all the time
Sadly yes. When he was first released Memento Mori and Black Harvest were the go to picks. His trait was strong (because he was sold to us as a tank buster). The application of his trait was also pretty hard making that extra 2 second duration quite valuable.
With the introduction of his AA cleave and big nerfs to his trait (and Memento), these talents lost a lot of stock. Last time i checked there’s a 7% to 8% difference in win rate between these talents and the other options.
These days, Malth is now the Aspect of Minions. Useful, but meh. I completely understand why Malth performs a disinterested groan when you click him.
to be slightly fair, that’s pretty much how his D3 story contribution went: slaughter thousands of low-level mooks to amass power.
Not really, even before they nerfed it. Its useful for when you pick a team fight oriented build. Q build is great for laning, especially when there’s just one enemy in your lane, but you lose effectiveness during team fights because in order to get value you have to single out one opponent which isn’t always ideal.
Black Harvest is more of the team fight build because your in order to finish the quest you need to mark enemy heroes for 180 seconds. You could mark one hero at a time and have it take forever if you’re laning, or you could team fight, try to mark as many heroes as possible and finish the quest much faster.
The reason I would pick it along with Black Harvest is that the extra damage only activates after 4 seconds, but your trait only lasts 4 seconds. That means if you don’t consistently AA then you won’t get much value out of it. Black Harvest increases that duration to 6 seconds (once quest complete), which gives you a bit more time to get that AA in to continue the higher damage from Memento Mori before the duration expires. Plus, this means even if you only AA a hero once, it’ll take 2 seconds of bonus damage without the need to AA again.
They’re synergistic in that regard and great when paired, however I think those 2 talents should merge into 1 because of how well they work together.
I just don’t think the damage increase is worth it. I worked out some math and found out that its not that big of a difference if you pick either Black Harvest or Memento Mori separately vs if you picked them paired.
Assuming an enemy hero’s health is 2000, 2% of that is 40. The duration is 4 seconds, so the mark deals total of 160 damage in those 4 seconds and 240 in 6 seconds. Memento Mori increases that damage by 60% after 4 seconds. If you have completed the quest and marks now last 6 seconds it will deal 40 baseline mark damage per second plus 0 bonus damage because you didn’t pick Memento Mori (or 40+40+40+40+40+40=240). With both talents paired, it will deal 40 baseline mark damage per secondd + 24 bonus damage, totaling to 64 damage per second after 4 seconds. So if you hit someone with one AA, it will last 6 seconds and do a total of 288 damage within those 6 seconds not including AA damage.(40+40+40+40+64+64=288).
Now if you were to pick Mortality instead of Memento Mori (both level 16 talents), but still picked Black Harvest this is what your damage will look like. Assuming again that the enemy hero has 2000 health, Mortality will deal 8% of that which is 160 damage per W. So if you marked someone for 6 seconds with one auto attack because of Black Harvest it will look like this 40+40+40+40+40+40+160=400.
400>288. Granted, you can extend the total damage output of Memento Mori by continuously casting AA’s and extend the mark, but the CD of W is 5 seconds, so I mean the damage you can deal with the %W trait is higher than that you’ll get with Memento Mori unless you keep an enemy marked longer than 6 seconds. Over a longer period of time Memento Mori will eventually out damage Mortality, there’s just a lot more conditions to make that happen and it won’t always happen. The other thing is that Memento Mori can deal damage team wide while W does not. So if you hit 2 enemies that total damage becomes 576, 3 heroes is 864 every 6 seconds assuming they all have 2000 health and it isn’t counting AA damage or the baseline damage from W.
That’s why its important to fit your talents with your play style, not the meta. I hope my math is correct, and if you find out its not, you’ll have done the calculations/theorycrafting yourself and seen what you think would fit you best. Personally, I pick Memento Mori due to me enjoying playing Malthael in the 4 man.
I view one digit numbers as a margin of error rather than something that is drastically underperforming. I’ve recently gone as much as 80 combined matches of aram and qm before someone decided to upload replays. In the end it was me almost a week after I’ve played the last match.
With all the matchmaking issues and party stacking I wouldn’t give much legitimacy to any information because the only players actively uploading are those taking advantage of the website’s ladder system to boost their egos by selective uploading.
The other thing is many talents have been cemented as useless by the community so naturally even the competent players tend to avoid them, when in reality they all have a niche purpose. Hard to get accurate results with a small sample.