With balance changes occurring more often again, I thought perhaps we can post some talent changes that don’t amount to full reworks to heroes
I will do some for Alarak, as he is the one that I have the most played time as.
Overwhelming Power: Reduce either the bonus attack speed by 10%, or reduce the healing by 15%.
It is the most dominating part of his tier 1 and is responsible for some of his other talents having such a high winrate, and thus deserves some form of nerf.
Extended Lightening: New reward at 10 heroes hit: reduced the cooldown of Lightening Surge by 2 seconds.
Show of Force: reduce the time window to 1.5 seconds.
Dissonance: Bonus Silence duration reduced to .5 seconds. Now also reduced the cast time of Discord strike by .125 seconds.
or
Increase the area of Q side hitboxes by 50% in addition to the silence increase of .75 seconds.
Pure Malice: This talent needs A LOT of help, with its main problem being its a losing talent, as it only activates if allies are dying.
Increase the passive maximum sadism gain from kills to 60%.
Only lose half of bonus sadism from any source on death.
or option, rename it to Soul Absorption:
1: Also restores 15% of Alarak’s health and mana upon a hero takedown.
2:Alarak gains a shield for 5% of his maximum health for ever stack of Soul Absorption he has.
Counterpoint: it’s strength is exactly that it’s a ‘losing talent’. It absolutely should NOT be better than the other 2 talents on same level (or even equal), even if used at max potential, unless there’s at least 1-2 other talents in game that are designed around increasing your winning odds with terrible players/bots/trolls/feeders (as far as I know, so far, pure malice is the only one).
Alarak is already one of the best solo carries (if not the best). In games where pure malice is viable (teammates die a lot), I don’t think alarak should get a ‘carry the nobs’ card. In fact, I am willing to bet buffing pure malice will explode Alarak’s winrate; with enough skill playing alarak, teammates are the only ones who can turn the game into a loss.
I didn’t check alarak; if he’s doing that badly in losing games (again, you’ll have to provide numbers from heroes profile or some other source), giving pure malice a small, very small defensive buff might be ok (definitely not raising sadism cap), but a damage buff would make him become the new nazeebo: at least 1 in every game, sometimes 2 of them.
It’s the lowest pick rate of the tier with a 40% winrate. It’s still lowest pick rate in QM with a 41% winrate. It’s a bad talent that you pick when your losing, but even than, blades of the Highlord stack fast enough that you can build it back up after death easily, along with it having the same sadism cap as Pure Malice.
Problem is, it’s the only such talent in the game.
(About winrate) Can we really say the talent is bad, or are most of the matches where it’s picked bad? I think it’s a point worth considering, since, as you said, you pick it when you’re already losing. I’d add that pure malice being close to 50% wr would actually be OP, supposing most people pick it in bad matches; it would mean alarak can solo compensate for 1 or multiple people dying a lot.
(About pickrate) I think it’s ok for it to be low(er). It’s a situational talent for bad matches, just like I’d say rite of rak’shir is a situational talent for good matches.
You made me curious though; I don’t know how big of a timeframe did you use to check on heroes profile. I checked for about the past 30k games (if I use this correctly), and I get far better numbers for qm: 23.70% pickrate, 45.27% wr). https://www.heroesprofile.com/Global/Talents/Alarak?timeframe_type=minor&timeframe=2.55.9.93640,2.55.9.93613,2.55.9.93565,2.55.8.93382,2.55.8.93357,2.55.7.93151,2.55.7.93054&game_type=qm&statfilter=win_rate&build_type=Popular&mirror=0
For comparison: rite of rak’shir has 30% pickrate, and almost 64% wr, and blades of highlord has 46.28% pickrate, 55.11% winrate. Overall alarak supposedly has 54.45% wr (all games, not necessarily ones that last to 13, but we can expect most do). Looks to me like ‘blades’ has roughly Alarak’s average wr, and the ‘greedy/already winning’ pick has about 10% more, while the ‘safe/ game is lost’ pick has about 10% less. Looks unironically balanced, in relation to the hero; even the lower pickrate can be partially explained by alarak’s over 50% wr (he’s quite the carry), so he avoids
some terrible games by smiting enemies first. Just my 2 cents though, i am no game dev.
I suggest adding another comparison here: alarak lvl 13 talent tier vs tracer lvl 4 talent tier. I’d say pure malice falls in line with the ‘fast reload’ from tracer; it’s lowest effort talent, therefore it deserves to be weaker (tracer’s strongest level 4 offers 2x as much dmg as the other one, due to being higher effort).
So, mostly everything seems fine. Some talents look better, but are easier to use.
The one that strikes me is Pure Malice. Wow. What a dump this talent is.
I suggest the devs to make an other fun talent and interactive like the other ones at lvl 13.
It’s a good point, but Sleight of Hand isn’t her pitfall (<45%WR) like it is for Pure Malice.
True. The comparison was only worth in terms of power budget; the talents are entirely different design-wise (sleight of hand is the easy talent, pure malice is the ‘try to take back the game’ talent that also happens to be easy to use in the right conditions, but hard in others).
I took a look at your data though; considering the data I posted earlier, I see pure malice is (to me) doing better than rite of rak’shir, if we look at bigger picture. Despite being the high risk high reward talent, in high elo, it’s defeated by blades. I’d call that quite underwhelming, since unlike pure malice, it’s not gatekept as hard by the game being in a certain situation by level 13.
I’ll look over the other heroes, maybe there’s another talent with a similarly bad winrate, preferably on a tier where all talents provide similar effects.
I set it to the last major balance patch for the data
You mean her level 7, and sleight of hand has equal pick rate or even greater than locked and loaded, while also having an above 50% win rate. It is not comparable to pure malice in the slightest
It is a left over from before his rework when it was the only means to boost sadism.
Again, it was only about pure malice not deserving a buff, while we look at it side by side with blades. But I support completely replacing it with something different (for a different reason than you, though; I just think it’s atrocious game design to have the only comeback talent on the hero notorious for being a pain to play against while he’s ahead).
You keep repeating about the winrate and pickrate. Nerf Alarak, so he has more bad games, and you’ll increase pure malice’s pickrate.
Seriously, can you be more specific? Are you against situational/niche talents in general? Do you think Pure malice should have a bigger winrate? How big and why? What’s the thought process behind wanting pure malice buffed…or are you just asking for an alarak buff lol.
For me, it’s pretty clear that a talent that is supposed to be picked only in losing games, will have and should have under 50% winrate. How low should it be? I’d say given that the Alarak has already seen his teammates get wiped at least twice, 45% is quite generous; 50% would mean pure malice statistically counters any and all comp disadvantages (considering trolls and feeders even out on both teams) that might cause your team to lose (since it’s qm). It would just be OP, unless they add more such talents to other heroes.
Maybe alarak could get a non-sadism related talent? a slightly faster q cast speed maybe, or slightly larger q, or some other stuff that could complete with other 2 talents without making them obsolete/ without ending up in a similar situation as we are now.
But, if I were to join the delulu train, here’s another buff to pure malice that will increase its winrate: make the bonus permanent (since, in losing games, alarak is more likely to get resetted, making even pure malice useless). Should increase Pure Malice winrate a bunch, giving Alarak a 40% damage buff (compared to base stats).
I offered nerfs to the talents that directly resulted in Alarak’s above 50% winrate, before they made Overwhelming power he was below 50%.
A niche talent would have a low pickrate but a high winrate, neither of which Pure Malice has. In no condition is pure malice better to pick than either Blades or Rite.
Each ally death grants 10%, it stacks to 40. It will only take 1 wipe for it to occur.
20% damage buff, he has already has 100% bonus from his base trait, every subsequent point is a .5% increase to his damage to heroes.
The problem is not so much of it being a losing trait, in that it exacerbates Alarak’s cowardness. His other talents all encourage him to be aggressive and to fight with his team, while Pure Malice encourages him to play far saver in fear of losing his bonus stacks that can’t be regained as easily as his other level 13’s.
It would have to be able compete with either a potential infinite bonus damage increase, or a far easier 20% bonus increase. The only thing that would be able to compete would be some form of survivability
…Weren’t you complaining about pickrate being low? Its niche is literally ‘being picked in worst matches’. It would be cool if they temporarily disabled it for a few days/maybe a week, to see how the other talents’ wr changes (very unlikely for them to do this). That would prove whether it is always worse than the others, or it actually improves terrible games (again, you can’t have it improve terrible games too much, or you get an alarak in every team of every match).
Yes; but as we both said… you pick it in a losing game. If your team isn’t getting stomped repeatedly… why would you pick it? For that reason, I said team getting wiped twice (or more). Means you’re not winning (any) teamfights so far.
I am not an Alarak main, but I think you underestimate the situation; Alarak is likely not getting much sadism at all in a losing game. If you can land 20 auto attacks faster than your teammates die 4 times, you’re lucky (and not in the niche for the talent). Whether people get repeatedly picked off, or Alarak’s team gets killed in every teamfight, the enemy likely has an xp and stats advantage to steamroll, and outnumbers Alarak in every teamfight. On 100 sadism, Alarak’s damage is not that much; if you somehow got some sadism (not pure malice, but from kills or the lvl 4 talent), and you die, you’re unlikely to get it back.
Long story short: if the pure malice stacks are harder to gain than the other lvl 13’s, it wasn’t a pure malice game. (caveat: don’t compare 1 stack of pure malice =10 sadism with a single stack of other 2 talents, worth 2 or 3 sadism).
Touche. Yes, it’s 40% of the damage in ability info, but 20% of his 100 sadism base stats. You’re right.
His strongest build right now is E, followed by Q which in my biased opinion is rather unpickable in most situations and needs better worthwhile choices that aren’t increasing the silence or size of it, maybe the damage reward from his Q4 would be a good start.
As for Pure Malice, this happens because its a losing talent, but also a losing talent… Asking you to lose more to get that inherited value, super counter productive, should be removed IMO because even kills past level 13 really change how people approach a fight.
Chaos Reign’s has the highest possible base damage bonus for Alarak’s combo, the problem is, SoF damage scales and has an innate possible bonus sadism bonus of 20%. By level 17, SoF damage is more than CR’s 15 hit and 2 hit. Its only if the 3 hit happens that it actually does more than SoF for the rest of the game.
The only talents I can think to give it are to reduce its cast time, maybe cause it to do damage overtime equal to a percent of the damage dealt, or a new level 20 that replaces the silence for a reduced stun duration.
The other time to pick this talent is if there is a Murky, TLV, Leoric, D.va, or Rexxar. Maybe Auriel if she picks resurrect.
Regardless, if it wasn’t for SoF, I would suggest replacing it with a talent that gives sadism for doing a combo, maybe one for hitting heroes with the center of lightening Surge?
