First, thank you to our janitor that kept things alive all this time and continued to work on the game up this long and thank you to Blizzard for bringing HoTS back.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the new Hero and genuinely look forward to whats coming down the road. Easily the best moba and here’s to hoping for a long life of support!
As for that new hero, over all she’s moving in the right direction with the last batch of changes, but there are a few things that need tweaked.
Lv1. Talents
“Anchored Core”
+25% Radius
+25% Duration
Damage bounces 2 times from the primary target to nearby enemies.
Our very first talent for [W] Dark Heart Ritual is pretty much the free Bingo slot of opening talents. I haven’t seen many Xal players taking the other options, and pick rates from Heroes Profile are consistent with my anecdotal experience.
Heroes Profile Data
“Anchored Core” - 61.35% Winrate / 78.22% Popularity / 1,462 Games
“Void Adept” -------- 48.15% Winrate / 13.00% Popularity / 243 Games
“Cloak of Shadows” - 62.80% Winrate / 8.77% Popularity / 164 Games
Three Potential Solutions - The intent is to pick one of the options below, not all three happening at the same time.
Option #1 - Remove the +25% bonus radius increase from “Anchored Core”.
Many of the frustrations associated with Xal’atath, and this ability and talent in particular, would be remedied by reducing how seemingly ever present the [W] Dark Heart Ritual AoE radius is in many matches. It can be large, or it can last longer, but maybe it shouldn’t be both.
This would be my pick as it raises the required skill floor for the hero to be played well without changing too much else.
Option #2 - Remove the +25% bonus duration from “Anchored Core”.
[W] Dark Heart Ritual already lasts 10s baseline, and has a cooldown of 15s.
Does it really need more time on the field with an already high effective uptime?
Considering that with later on talents, [W] Dark Heart Ritual can offer AoE damage, bounce cleave damage, player shielding, enemy AoE silence, allied Spell Armor or an AoE slow, and ground-hazard AoE damage underneath the base AoE damage and everything else.
It’s an -incredibly- dense ability talent stacking with so much to offer that Falstad’s [W] Lightning Rod is jealous. The numbers themselves aren’t too crazy, I don’t think. The bonus duration really just throws it over the top with everything else available.
Option #3 - Reduce [W] Dark Heart Ritual’s base duration by 2.5s and the damage of over time pulses by 12%.
“Anchored Core” talent unchanged.
This takes away some power from the base ability and makes the talents feel more like a deliberate choice instead of just “more better all the time”.
“Cloak of Shadows”
Activating [E] Void Step grants 50% Movement Speed and 25 Spell Armor for 2 seconds.
This bonus refreshes each time Xal’atath teleports.
While considerably less popular than “Anchored Core”, it’s winrate is actually a little bit higher and that makes sense. 50% is a LOT for something that shows up at the beginning of each match, and even comes with a built in duration refresh and Spell Armor.
Once people catch on with this, Xal’atath will be nigh unkillable in any MMR above Platinum in QM or Ranked.
There’s not much to say here. It’s simply far too strong for such an early talent with no conditional requirements beyond ability activation.
Two Potential Solutions - The intent is to be picking one of the options below, not both happening at the same time.
Option #1 - Reduce the bonus Movement Speed granted by 25% and Spell Armor by 10. Duration refresh with each teleport unchanged.
Option #2 - Reduce the bonus Movement Speed granted by 25% and Spell Armor by 10.
Successfully attacking enemy heroes with basic attacks from Void Volley will refresh the duration of these effects and grant an additional 10 Spell Armor.
I don’t believe there’s any version of this talent that should left remaining at 50% movement speed.
[E] Void Step
This teleport ability is tied for strongest part of her kit alongside the [D] Void Volley active.
Through some testing in custom matches with friends, we’ve found that it has particle split, or attack cancel, on some abilities and some basic attacks if the attack is mid-air but has not yet arrived on Xal’atath at the time she teleports.
Under the game’s hood, this probably means the teleport mechanically functions as an “untargetable” state like Genji’s [R] X-Strike, or Fenix’s [E] Warp where they are temporarily no longer in the game world. I am unsure if this is intentional or not.
Consistently getting this effect to apply is also kinda dodgy, sometimes behaving like bug, and sometimes very easily recreated. Worth investigating.
When accounting for talents and that the teleport has -zero- delay before repositioning Xal’atath, it is by far one of the strongest mobility spells in the entire game and definitely needs additional tuning.
Those seem to be the worst outliers for early game in terms of power and popularity, but there’s a clear trend with other talents later on with some of them being picked at such an exclusive rate that it makes “Anchored Core’s” pick rate seem modest. Looking at you, Level 16’s “Fractured Reality”.
For late game, y’all know what you did with the Harbinger’s Consumption and Rift Invasion upgrade talents. They’re silly and very busted. Very fun, but very busted. They don’t need an explanation.
ps. Arthas model rework + Dwarf Wc3 Rifleman unit Hero / Hemet Nesingwary Hero soon pls