Nova Rework concept

General Discussion
1

Hello all, I’ve been playing Nova for a good while now, and I think a lot of you have too. It’s no secret that she’s not a very good hero in terms of overall viability. In fact, playing Nova is not unlike playing Cammy in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: not bad, just the least good hero in the game. That’s the price she pays for having long range, stealth, and high damage all in one kit.

As the title suggests, I have an idea for a mini rework that is designed to just help smoothen out some of her edges while maintaining most of her core gameplay.

Core Changes:
Mind Wipe: All Q stacks are lost upon death
Decoy AI is improved, and is capable of retreating from enemy heroes
Auto Attack Range increased by 2
Increase the range of Nova’s Pinning Shot (W) by 30% to match the Longshot lv.1 Talent
Longshot Level 1 Talent has been removed and replaced with a New Talent:

Piercing Rounds
Summary: When Nova deals fatal damage, the attack pierces the target and either travels along its current trajectory until it hits another target, or until it travels to the end of its cast range. Can proc multiple times.

Why: Everyone will tell you how bad Nova’s waveclear is. This doesn’t give her a ton of AoE, but it helps her waveclear a bit without disrupting her identity. And yes, by “fatal damage”, I do mean ANY of her attacks or abilities. This includes her auto attack, her Q, her W, the damage dealt by Decoy, and even Triple Tap. So in other words, if you see a minion on low HP and you kill it with an autoattack, your autoattack will become a projectile that travels in a line like a skillshot and can/will hit whatever is along its path. As you can tell, this affects her teamfighting as well. If Nova is trying to eliminate a particular target, but something is in the way (a hero, minion, monster, mercenary, etc.), Piercing Rounds gives her some way of getting at that target.
The other buffs to her autoattack range and her W range should help support her identity as an actual Sniper instead of just some lady with a rifle.

This also means that Nova more or less chooses what kind of sniper she is at level 1:
Roamer with infinite mana: Advanced Cloaking (I say infinite mana because she almost never runs out with this talent unless you’re spamming your abilities)
Ganker/Counter Ganker: Covert Ops (strong slow on W, no explanation needed)
Target designator: Piercing Rounds (like I said, helps her gain access to her intended targets)

Quality of Life change to Permanent Cloak (Passive):
Nova can now press D to exit Stealth/Invisible.
Why: She no longer has to attack to exit Stealth, which gives her more control and flexibility with her abilities. For example, Nova can exit Stealth and then cast Holo Decoy, making the Decoy a non-Stealthed target for enemies if and when Nova players wish. Since this is now an activatable ability, it means that she can use it to proc One In the Chamber at no mana cost.

Change to Ghost Protocol (1):
Cooldown: 90 Seconds (increased from 60 Seconds)
Activate to instantly grant Invisible (formerly Stealth) to Nova and spawn a dead Holo Decoy at her location. Nova is Unrevealable for the first 0.5 seconds when Invisible by Ghost Protocol, but she cannot attack for the duration. After 0.5 seconds, she becomes Stealthed.
Why: Ghost Protocol often doesn’t do its job as an escape tool because most skilled players can see Nova during the stealth portion of the ability and track her from there. Ghost Protocol giving Nova Invisible in exchange for not being able to attack for the duration means that it not only works more effectively as a misdirection tool, but it keeps her from misusing the ability as well.

Quality of Life change to Holo Decoy (E):
While Nova’s clone is active, the E key can be pressed again to kill the clone early.
Why: This prevents enemy champions from getting free stacks off of her clone. Furthermore, this lets her bait out abilities with more effectiveness. It also reinforces the psychological layer that decoys create: not just “is this the real Nova?”, but also, “even if it is a decoy, if I try to attack it, will the decoy vanish before the attack hits?”

Quality of Life change to Triple Tap (R):
If Nova casts Triple Tap and kills her target before she finishes firing all 3 shots, the cooldown of the ability is lowered based on the number of shots fired, and her mana is partially refunded. Furthermore, the projectile speed of her Triple Tap is increased slightly by 7%.
1 shot fired: Cooldown is 50 seconds, refunds 50 mana
2 shots fired: Cooldown is 75 seconds, refunds 25 mana
3 shots fired: 100 Seconds, 100 Mana
Why: If I reworked the ability to say “she gains up to 3 charges, where each charge fires one shot”, then it is no longer Triple Tap: it’s basically just “Extra Long Snipe that you can fire up to 3 times”. Having her fire all 3 unless her target dies maintains the ability’s identity.

Ionic Force Field has been replaced by:
Apollo Suit
NEW: Available at level 13
Reduce the cooldown of Permanent Cloak by 2 seconds. Nova has 25 armor while Stealthed and for 3 seconds after leaving Stealth.
Why: I never pick this talent, even when I’m facing enemy teams with strong assassins. I saw WereElf’s “Pinnacle Nova” rework concept and decided to throw this one in here. That means there’s room for another level 20 talent. Furthermore, this lets Nova gain access to the extra survivability offered by this talent earlier on in the game when it actually matters.

Level 20 Talent: Psychic Strike (NEW)
Activating Ghost Protocol while Holo Decoy is active causes Nova to gain Invisible for the duration of the Decoy instead of 0.5 seconds. Additionally, she gains full control of the Decoy, increasing its damage by 60% and resetting its duration. The real Nova is Unrevealable and cannot move or attack until the Decoy expires. If the Decoy is killed, increase the cooldown of Ghost Protocol by 30 seconds (120 seconds total).
Why: This lets Nova actually employ real misdirection against her opponents instead of just using a Decoy and praying that it tricks someone. It also gives Nova a roundabout way to gain access to the enemy team’s back line by casting a Decoy into the back line and gaining control of the Decoy.

1 Like
2

This rework is supposed to smoothen her edges… and yet:

This change just makes this ability more frustrating.

How would that work and why even add this? Would it not just make it lose on damage?

This change makes her outrange STRUCTURES.

How exactly does this “smoothen” her edges?

This is not only extremely confusing, but would also require ALL of her “projectiles” to have its own hitbox, which is just asking for bugs.

But in what situations would this actually help?

You are gutting this ability by making it not spawn an actual decoy.

Heroes.

Now this is a decent change.

Ever heard of people complaining about Samuro being impossible to catch? This talent enables something similar. You cannot just move a Level 20 talent to Level 13 AND make it stronger.

Why is this a Level 20 talent on a 90 (120) second cooldown? Most game winning heroic abilities take less time to recharge.

3

Something tells me that your criticisms have less to do with my word usage or objective game sensibilities and more to do with our differences in opinions.

  • Mind Wipe is one tool that I used to budget some of the new power that I’ve injected into her kit. There’s lots of ways to go about doing that if she turns out to be OP, so there’s no need to freak out over this.

  • The Decoy’s total lack of backwards movement is a dead giveaway that the decoy is not the real Nova, even before you deal double damage to it, and even before it deals its miniscule 10% damage to you. It doesn’t have to move backwards all the time, maybe just while it has low health/if enemy heroes are nearby.

  • An auto attack range increase is a pretty drastic buff; it doesn’t need to stay. If anything, it was the first thing I could think of to keep the temporary AA range buff from her Longshot talent, which I removed.

  • She’s a sniper that gets outranged by a lot of other ranged heroes, plain and simple. Like I said, her ultimates are the only time she gets to be long ranged, and Triple Tap is the only time she actually gets to be a sniper. A range increase on her W is pretty modest; I actually think you are overreacting.

  • In terms of coding something like Piercing Rounds, see Cassia’s Charged Strikes lv 1 talent or Tracer’s lv 16 Ricochet talent for an idea on how that would work.

  • Some of the things that I’ve come to love about Nova are the little details. For example, I love how putting your Decoy down in front of a minion wave will cause the wave to immediately prioritize attacking the Decoy over your wave. For that to happen, your Decoy must be visible when you cast it, and so, you must be visible when you cast it. And to do so, you need to autoattack or use an ability in order to leave Stealth. So, let’s say you’re out of autoattack range of an enemy minion wave while it is about to crash into your turret, or maybe you just don’t want to give away your actual location to the enemy team. You certainly don’t want to Q if there’s nothing to hit, and if you’re not in autoattack range, you almost certainly aren’t in range of your W. Well in this case, you could Destealth, cast Holo Decoy on the wave from a bush/Fog of War, and soak the damage from the wave that way. Not to mention, you can combine this with her lv 4 talent Holo Stability for even greater cast range. Imagine, then, that you are freezing mid lane, and your whole team is bot lane while top lane is being crashed into. You could hold the freeze mid, walk up towards top lane, cast E, freeze top, and either walk back mid or go top. And to be fair, I did mention proccing One in the Chamber as well.

  • This is easily explained by looking at the difference between Stealth and Invisible in HotS, especially since Nova would keep her Unrevealable status for 0.5 seconds. That being said, I was debating keeping the Decoy from Ghost Protocol, because why not. With all this talk of wave management, it helps. On the other hand, Nova is not a Summoner; her identity should not be “summon a bunch of clones”. In my mind, spawning a dead clone and then having Nova become invisible at the exact same time has a much higher chance of tricking an enemy into thinking that they were attacking a clone and not the real Nova.

  • Pedantic.

  • And here I was thinking that I couldn’t do anything right.

  • People complain about Samuro because he’s Samuro. His mobility is what makes him difficult to deal with more than his stealth. What I can do is move an absolutely useless level 20 talent on Nova and give it a buff (at least for testing purposes) to see if even works. After all, we’re just here to explore ideas, not force our opinions on other people.

  • I might have gone overboard with the cooldown, but it’s a very strong ability. With this, Nova can essentially “teleport” via her E to the enemy back line and just start dealing significant damage with little risk to her safety, assuming that the enemy doesn’t know where the real Nova is. I’d want to see it in action at the very least.

4

I think this would play out less frustrating. I lose stacks all the time by things dying the moment before the shot would hit them. More realistically though, pretty sure I miss more than I die—so this would be a boost to most players.

For decoys, I’ve never liked the idea that they do any damage, but I guess they have to to make them not so obvious. If I think of them as summons, then I’m more okay with them. Summons are okay because I know if I can get to the caster, I can stop the flow. Decoys are different. They are suppose to be fakes to distract you from the real danger. The only acceptable boost I can think of for them would be if you can get a talent where it makes Triple-tap look like it’s being fired from your decoy.

5

I think that could easily just be a feature of Decoys listed right in the ability description:
”While Nova is casting her ultimate, her active Decoys mimic her actions”.

6

I am not sure how exactly these things are related.

I didn’t “freak” over it, I said you made an already annoying part of her kit (Q barely does any damage until fully stacked) more frustrating.

You are not using Decoys to “confuse” enemies in the first place.

But do you understand WHY it is a bad idea?

Every Hero gets outranged by Chromie who throws sand with her bare hands. I am not sure how this is an argument.

Something tells me you do not actually know what “overreacting” means. This buff is unnecessary. There is a reason why her W has the same range as her AA.

This is completely different from just making attacks (and abilities) splash.

Not sure why you decided to write this wall of text when this was the only part of your concept that I agree with.

Which just makes that talent the only option on its level.

This does NOT explain why you decided to gut this ability by both increasing its cooldown and removing the decoy.

Why do you want to make Nova into a ranged Samuro so much? Her decoys exist to increase her damage output, scout area, and block skillshots.

Except that it is not useless, it is just competing with stronger talents. Also, creating such concept IS forcing an opinion on other people. This is the whole point of creating your own changes to the game.

There is nothing strong about an “escape” tool with a 120 seconds cooldown making you stand still and controlling a “clone” that deals slightly more than half of your damage while still taking double damage. Again, Nova is not the “trickster” character, it is Samuro.

Boost to what? This change does nothing but make the already questionable quest worse.

7

The average stacks for more players would be closer to 5 for more of the time played.

8

Here’s what Grok came up with:

  • Mind Wipe: As far as drawbacks go, not entirely bad since players have more agency over whether or not they die as opposed to whether or not they miss their Q. More likely to affect lower elo players than higher elo. Warns that it could be seen as punitive, but could be worse.
  • Decoy AI: Good idea. This means that Decoy now has a synergistic effect with the changes to Ghost Protocol.
  • Autoattack range increase: Unnecessary.
  • W range 30% increase: Decent change, makes way for new level 1 talent.
  • Piercing Rounds: “10/10—Game-changer, gated well,” helps address “godawful waveclear, worst in class”, but should only proc once as opposed to unlimitedly to keep it from adding to the amount of OP waveclear that’s already in the game.
  • Permanent Cloak: Subtle change, may need to keep it from proccing One in the Chamber in case it turns out to enable OP burst.
  • Ghost Protocol: Huge; actually gives Nova reliable escape. Also suggested having the Decoy spawn if Nova uses the ability while her HP is over X%, and if under X% HP, it spawns a dead Decoy instead. This way, it can be used for both wave management and misdirection. And with new Decoy AI, the Decoy spawned by Ghost Protocol is capable of running away, which could lead enemies away from the real Nova, who can walk away/into a bush/etc.
  • Holo Decoy: Perfect QoL change.
  • Triple Tap: Perfect QoL change.
  • Ionic Force Field: Grok suggests keeping this talent as-is, since Icy Veins reports a good percentage of players taking the talent.
  • Apollo Suit: Grok suggests keeping Apollo Suit and scrapping Psychic Strike, but suggests that Apollo Suit could have another effect that increases the time that Nova is Invisible during Ghost Protocol.

Thanks Grok.

9

just give her the lore-accurate 2nd mode, with a shotgun. Now that I think about it, deathwing’s design suited her better. And the switching could be one of her ults.