Idea that sounds ok on paper, works horribly in practice.
When I heard you guys were introducing xp orbs, I thought it was going to be “oh, sometimes minions will drop orbs that will grant bonus xp to your team.” I didn’t think you guys would be this… “experimental” to force teams to rely entirely on collecting these orbs that you have 3 seconds to grab.
Sat through 3 matches today and I don’t even know if I’ll do one with Deathwing. Needing to be relatively close to xp orbs to collect them feels like a punishment and counter intuitive for ranged assassins/healers who rely on positioning (and no, we shouldn’t have to rely on melee being in our lane just to be able to get xp for minion kills).
Shouldn’t be risking poke damage just to be able to collect xp.
Once again, idea’s cool on paper, but this shouldn’t ever be put into practice.
Pardon my french, but how the #!@* am I going to grab exp orbs in 3 seconds with Erik, Baleog or Probius against any other laner in the game who can kill my hero by sneezing at them?
And they think this change will become permanent. Cant wait. Hots will be way more fun to play and watch.
Gonna be watching streams for sure! Now it wont be nearly as boring. Too bad we dont have HGC (or whatever it was called) anymore, gonna be fun watching!
Fun for tank mains who can soak the poke damage with not much issue, yeah. My point still stands that this is ridiculous. I haven’t seen a single moba force you to collect orbs just so you can get xp.
Interesting is a good word. My initial reaction is negative, but I’m…curious to see how this all plays out.
Will there be more emphasis on Ranged Assassins to have good mechanics and bully melee Heroes out of the lane so they can proceed to collect the globes safely?
Will this ultimately have a bad effect on players, because now if no one is soaking bot, you have a forgiveness window where any enemy minions that died to towers now drop a globe? Before if the minions died and you weren’t in range to soak them, that XP was gone forever.
Either way, if it ends up being horrible, I’m sure it will be gone after the season. But it’ll be a long season. All I can say is: I’m super glad that I main Thrall…
It’s a humongous buff to any lane bully
The meta will be more than interesting, many will drop to F tier and many will rise to S tier.
As a ranged assassin main: Oh crap… I should one trick Fenix or Tychus
Agreed. The idea is sound - it pushes focus back to laning, which means individual player skill matters more again.
Problem is, heroes without decent waveclear and sustain were already dubious, highly-comp dependent picks at best or just flat out bad at worse. It just makes them even more dubious, highly comp dependent… or makes them flat out non-viable (D.Va is the first that comes to mind)
I’m currently watching a streamer and he is saying how it’s impossible to freeze a lane and ranting how he’s losing a lane not because he is being outplayed, but because of a stupid mechanic that he has no control over. I have to agree with him. It’s one of the commentators that has a very good grasp of the game dynamics.
Biggest problem with this change is that Blizzard wanted to emphasise the importance of soaking the xp. It somehow backfired and it now forces everyone to mindlessly brawl all the time without any tactical thinking of how to out sustain the opponent in a long run.
It’s not in an interest of a mage player to randomly throw out spells on a wave mid-lane when he knows he needs to expose himself to a melee player in order to gain the xp. Most melee characters have some kind of early game healing. This type of game play results in melee walking up to your front wall with a full minion wave and you’re juggling between losing out on xp or taking constant structure damage. Mage would previously clear the wave and prevent push even at risk of not getting the healing globe. These mechanics have a drastic effect on the power level of certain heroes in a solo lane.
You dont need to hug minions to get the globes. I just did some games and there is a range were the globes goes to you if within that range maybe within 1.5 to 2 meters.
Regardless of distance, can you not see how this affects the overall game balance and play styles that some heroes rely on? You’re forgetting that different heroes have different size or collision radius that they were balanced around to offset some of the power they have elsewhere and make them vulnerable somehow.
Honestly think that someone will go soak as an Azmodan? As soon as he steps out of position he can be body blocked to death by literally anyone. Not sure how this translates to Deathwing and what his unit size is really, but once you consider how vulnerable he is to % damage effects, playing him won’t be as exciting as you may think. It will be frustrating and awkward.
Maybe it won’t be as horrible as I imagine it, but then you put up a PTR earlier and encourage testing of new game mechanic. The problem with the test realm is that it’s just a hero spotlight platform, and that after tomorrow, no one will be able to find games on it because no one will be playing anymore. There are little to no patch changes except for the new hero addition and no one will take interest.
Most people that downloaded the PTR uninstalled it 5 min shortly after trying out DW in Try Mode. This is just last minute bug hunting and one big advertisement for their latest product. I doubt that they’ll take any of the criticism over the intended changes seriously before they ship it to live realms. Even then it might take a while for them to realise how something may be bad once more eyes focus their attention on it.
I’m not trying hard to be a negative Andy here, I’m just speaking from previous experience from this and their other games (namely how they deleted WoW-beta forums and all the valuable feedback which resulted in a mess of a game for the first 9 months).
