Medivh's Portal hopping, 3 techniques analized and why we need a new one

Portal hopping will be defined in this text as the act of entering portal A, throwing a Q, optionally an auto-attack, then entering portal B. Repeat.

Just for clarity’s sake, whenever you enter a medivh portal, the game will forcefully move your camera so that it is centered around your character after you go through. This is a problem and on this text i shall discuss some of the techniques designed to counter it.

The most well known technique, the one explained by itsnotparadox in his youtube video, is the easiest to perform because it requires the least amount of apm:

1.- Place portals
2.- Press “L” or hold “space” to center the camera around medivh.
3.- Click portal A and then attac with Q
4.- Click portal B.
5.- Repeat.

When using this technique your mouse is basically always in the center of the screen and you only have to move it slightly to aim the Q but there is a trade off.
Since your camera moves back with you when you return to portal A, while you are at portal A, you don’t know what is exactly happening at portal B, because you don’t see there, this can easily make you miss a Q or make you waste time figuring out what’s happening and therefore increasing the risk you take.
The problem with this technique is the lack of information, basically not being able to keep your camera at portal B.

Another lesser known technique is the manual camera moving option. Based off the idea of moving the camera manually to always be able to see what you want to see, to facilitate the landing of Q.

1.- Place portals, center camera @B
2.- click A, immediatelly Q and click B, now your camera is centered @A
3.- move your camera manually back to B and repeat step 2.

As you can see this technique is more mechanically complex because you need to do many more things. The huge advantage though is that you always keep your camera centered around portal B and therefore it is much easier to land your Q, specially if you have your camera movement speed maxed.

Another technique that achieves similar results while staying at a similar mechanical level is the fixed camera viewpoints technique.

1.- place portals, center your camera around portal B and save this viewpoint as viewpoint 1
2.- click portal A, Q, then click portal B, now your camera is centered around portal A.
3.- click portal A and immediately press the button to go to the saved viewpoint 1, then Q, click portal B and repeat step 3.

This technique gives you vision on point B during the time it takes medivh to enter the portal after you click it, which is around .5 seconds, enough to make sure you land the Q.

I have played a lot of Medivh games recently and do not agree on this portal being so unnecessarily complex.

Sometimes i don’t want to play Medivh just because i think there are heroes whose mechanics are better designed.

This is how i see it: Medivh is labeled as an “extreme” difficulty hero purely because of 2 things.

Other heroes that are not “extreme” have very similar mechanics to medivh but the portal is unique to him.

If we removed this forced camera movement from the game, Medivh would be labeled as a hard hero.
If we allowed Medivh and all other heroes, of course, to enter the closest portal by clicking either, he would be labeled medium.

By doing this, Medivh’s winrate would naturally increase without him being buffed in anyway. If we make this change, mostly only low mmr players will feel a difference, because high apm is not a problem with pro players, so the winrate for high mmr would not change at all, but he would no longer have 40-43% winrate constantly @diamond elo and below.
All of this without buffing him.

I’m still salty about Whitemane btw.

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I don’t want medivh to have too much training wheels.
Let us have one or two “get good or go play valla” type of heroes in this game please.

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But not artificially so, if you want a hero that is hard, go play Zeratul, who’s mechanics are hard by nature, or Samuro, where mechanics are hard because of them being intrinsically so, not because someone arbitrarily said they would be hard by implementing a nonsensical mechanic that is more detrimental than helpful.

While i agree portal is an integral and hard part of using the hero i disagree that it is the only thing making him very hard: i see him as a whole package thing.

Another reason why i do not want portal play to be too practical is because it becomes game breaking very fast when you and your 4 mates use it semi competently.
The poor guys facing you need a break sometimes too.
I may have agreed with you if only medivh could use his portal but it is not the case.
I do feel using it has its cluncky parts intentionnally.

This is not true… not entirely.


This is me using the portal for the first time and my character is not in the middle of the screen after the teleport.
If your Portal’s other end (B) is not on the edge of your screen, it’ll leave your camera still.

Who said that Portal is complex?
It’s just harder to master than most abilities.

Then don’t play Medivh?
If there are Heroes you enjoy more, play those instead. If you think Medivh is not complex enough for your taste, play the ones you find more complex.

Medivh is “Very Hard” because:

  • his mount is unique
  • skillshot based (requires good aim)
  • team dependant
  • requires good timing
  • requries deliberation (should I use something now, or latter, since his abilities are really powerful but has long cds)

You won’t make Medivh globally easier just because you remove something that bothers you specifically.

I had written a long post explaining why every single line of your text is wrong (except that the camera is inconsistent of course) but i instead write this:

Just go play him and see for yourself.

I want Medhiv nerfed so I can’t comment on this.

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My Medivh is lvl 50 so… how about the long and detailed (real) reply instead? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Me too. By the way, nice post!

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Well, of course the portal does not always move your camera, that depends on the distance between the center of your screen and the portal you are coming out from, but that only makes it worse because it adds inconsistency and makes it basically not a good idea to try to get the 2 portals in such a way that when you click them, your camera moves for 2 reasons:
first, this creates the same problem as technique 1 where you dont get to see much around portal B.
Then there’s the chance that you miscalculated the distance by a bit, which is very easy to do and not always obvious and after clicking either portal, your camera moves, so you may miss a skillshot if this catches you by surprise.

The portal is complex artificially just because of it moving your screen, we need to come up with techniques to counter the detriment of your camera moving without you being able to do anything about it, it is hard to master precisely for this reason, and this reason only, there’s the argument that the game needs heroes that are hard to master, but it simply feels stupid that the mechanics you need to master are hard just for the sake of them being hard and not because of the nature of the mechanics.

Take Samuro for example; you can fake backing with the clones, fake taking an objective, bait cooldowns, fake that you are really one of the clones, you can do all these things at the same time and more if you are good. You have to control 3 units at the same time and you have to be good to fool your enemy with this. It makes sense that Samuro is a hard hero to master because you are using 3 units, it’s obviously going to be harder than playing just one.

Medivh on the other hand has this one mechanic that makes him be hard, the portal…
Which requires this many actions every 0.5 seconds if you want to be optimum about his playstyle:

  1. move camera, place portal B
  2. move mouse, click portal A
  3. move mouse, Q
  4. auto attack, click portal B (happens at the same time as step 3 and the AA has to be manually targeted otherwise you may lose the kill)
  5. repeat from step 2

compared to what would be if the camera didn’t move and we could click either portal to enter it:

  1. move camera, place portal B
  2. click portal B, Q, AA, click portal B
  3. repeat step 2

It’s honestly so much of a difference that it is ridiculous to me that it isn’t already this way, not because i want to make the game easier, because honestly i don’t have any problems with doing that many actions per 0.5 seconds and i could do more but i find it simply stupid that we have to without ANY reason other than making Medivh difficult for the sake of it.

Now instead of going through all your points one by one explaining why your explanation for Medivh’s difficulty is blatantly wrong, i will condense my answer.

His mount is unique: Dva, Rehgar and others have unique mounts too and they are not extremely hard.
Skillshot based, requires good aim, team dependant, requires good timing, requires deliberation; That’s literally every single hero in the game.

And about the last line you wrote; i think it’s a nobrainer that if we reduce the number of actions you need to do to execute a character’s combo, the hero becomes easier, i don’t think theres a need to even argue about that.

And as i said, Medivh’s portal moving your camera is such a bad idea and so detrimental for him, that i can only believe it was not intended for him and is just carried from the general mechanic from the mines’ entrance.
On that map, when you entered the mine it made sense that your camera moved with you and placed your character at the center of your screen because you were entering another map basically.

I think that mechanic simply carried over somehow to Medivh’s portal. Oversight. Needs to be fixed asap imo.

How is that even possible?
You told me to play my main and then you tell me that you don’t even feel the Portal’s range?..

This whole Portal switching “combo” was never hard or a problem for me tbh, so I don’t see how this makes Portal “hard to master”.
You need to constantly reposition your screen with every Hero (that’s why pros suggest Camera Lock disabled -something I personally don’t likecto do-), so… what if you need to do this for a max ranged Portal?
And then when you enter the Portal your only extra you need to do is press spacebar. But if you say that makes it complicated I have to laugh, because pressing extra buttons (like Alt for selfcast) is also pretty common for every Hero.

These are the reasons why Portal is not hard to use. It’s hard to place correctly.

It wasn’t clear enough, so mb, I guess, but Medivh’s mount is unique among the unique mounts. Since Medivh is invulnerable during his, which makes it hard for ppl to know how much time they should spend in it and how to scout as the Raven while not putting themselves in a bad position if suddenly they need to cast their abilities.

First, almost all your Medivh complains are about you missing your Q so either you’re bad only with Medivh or you know that he’s a lot less forgiving than other Heroes on a miss, making the aim-dependent point even more true to him than to the average Heroes. Medivh has only 1 dmging ability and he needs to (almost) never miss to get enough value from it.

Second, if you say every Hero is team-dependant, you failed to understand what I tried to say with that point. Because, yea, this is a teamgame, ofc everyone is reliant on their team but there are Heroes who are designed so much around their team that they are pretty dependent on them.
Aba, TLV are also team-dependant and listed as Very Hard (but making arguments based on the ingame difficulty is dumb, you shouldn’t do that, everyone knows it’s not really objective and thus seems ro be flawed for almost everyone).

Third, Medivh’s abilities are lifesavers, so again, it’s true that every Hero should try to time their abilities, but Medivh losses more, fails his team more, if he messes up. His abilities doesn’t generate passive value (like FoW vs let’s say Tass’ Shield).
So Medivh needs to learn what to let dmg their allies, how much to hold on FoW just to get the most value from it, because his cds are not short.

That combo doesn’t require much actions.
Your list is misguiding. Ppl could do similarily long and detailed lists for other abilities as well.
Pressing Spacebar whenever you enter Portal is not hard to do and not much to ask.

Samuro can only control 3 units if he goes IM, that’s why he’s not listed as Very Hard like TLV.
(Also, nope, Sam can’t fake that his clone is him, or at least not reliably against decent enemies who will quickly check its dmg or hp or reveal it and move on.)

I have written why it is a bad idea to press the spacebar while using the portals; you obviously answered to my post without first reading it because you think that i am saying that pressing space bar is hard, i am not; I am saying it is dumb and you should not do it. I have given analytical reason.

I will not repeat myself and if you don’t care about this conversation enough to even read the whole thing before answering, then there’s no purpose in me answering either.

My final message… Goodbye.

Not true, I read it. The whole, long boring posts.

You did not.

Is this your “analytical” reason why you shouldn’t press the spacebar?
It’s dumb, and not true. Why wouldn’t you see what’s happening near Portal B (or A), why did you place it without knowing what’s there in the first place?

But I see a pattern here… Both this, and your “give a vision talent for E” is asked for for the same reason. You have a problem keeping track of your surroundings and you mess things up thanks to that and thus you search for a “fix” from an outside source.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against your suggestion that if you disable Camera Lock your screen shouldn’t teleport to your Hero after a big distance (like: portal, blink, demonic circle, knockbacks). I just think this “problem” shouldn’t even be a problem and that feature is actually for the better on the bigger scale and your suggestion is actually dumb. And that this thing has nothing to do with “making Medivh hard”. (But I hope you realised that once you read that it works the same for Knockbacks (like Junkrat Mine) or Teleports (like Demonic Circle or Blink).

P.S.: Just don’t place your Portals blindly.

The most well known technique, the one explained by itsnotparadox in his youtube video, is the easiest to perform because it requires the least amount of apm:

1.- Place portals
2.- Press “L” or hold “space” to center the camera around medivh.
3.- Click portal A and then attac with Q
4.- Click portal B.
5.- Repeat.

When using this technique your mouse is basically always in the center of the screen and you only have to move it slightly to aim the Q but there is a trade off.
Since your camera moves back with you when you return to portal A, while you are at portal A, you don’t know what is exactly happening at portal B, because you don’t see there, this can easily make you miss a Q or make you waste time figuring out what’s happening and therefore increasing the risk you take.
The problem with this technique is the lack of information, basically not being able to keep your camera at portal B.

Just go away plz.

That is not an analytical reason nor an answer to those I said. Should I also accuse you of not reading? :thinking:

Since I said that this shouldn’t be the case and this is a big “you problem”.
I also said that it’s not true. Why? Because your screen is a lot bigger than the range of Portal. It’s hard to create a Portal where you get blind for one side.

Even in your screenshot, which was taken with the line between portals at a big angle with respect to the horizontal, even if the camera didnt move after clicking both portals, A and B, which i doubt it didn’t, in your screenshot you don’t know exactly what is going on at B, you just don’t have enough vision.

Compare the vision of your camera angle and then compare it with the vision you would get if your camera was centered @B or better even, if portal B was at around one third of the screen from left to right.

You are simply losing too much vision, it’s a bad idea.

Doing it like you propose, you will lose value, for example, you will get hit by chromie’s Q sometimes because you didn’t see her cast, you will get hit by li ming, or will have to use your shield against that kind of thing just because of your innability of being aware of your surroundings.

If you use the other 2 techniques, you can instead watch the enemies cast their spells and throw them right in the trash from the other side of the portal without having to pay your shield to not die.

Edit 10,000 years later: I have found a new one, ladies and gentlemen and it is glorious.