As an Artanis main (not the best, but hey), I do agree with Hoku pretty much in every regard.
However, I think another big problem with Artanis is that for a character that’s built around being a dualist, they loaded all of his amazing talents to back end. As a result, his early game talents (with the shining exception of Amateur Opponent on certain maps) are kind of just ‘there’. Some are ok, but most are just awful and almost never factor into the end game.
Come level 16 and level 20, Artanis actually becomes a MONSTER to fight against. 13 has good picks too, but 16 and 20 is where Artanis really comes online. I really sometimes wish I could approach Artanis’s early laning game with the same vigor as the late.
Let’s not kid ourselves here.
For artanis to be usefull at the highest levels he would either need :
to be at a further level of retard proofness than jimmy except if it is applied to a melee hero it would break the game and then he would be brought back to current levels or worse.
have a new kit requiring a brain which would upset most of the profiles of players playing that hero who just want to right click and push W on cd to victory and then get a new round of complains of “unnecessary rework”.
My opinion: let’s not touch what isn’t broken for most.
No I really mean the original Artanis.
I know charge wasnt baseline.
And yes he had problems with engages and could be kited to oblivion.
But if he was attacking, it was unable to kill him. He excelled in duels and against some compositions he could go 1v2 or even 1v3, surviving for long time before they finally killed him.
I dont think buffs but lvl 1 talents needs a 2nd look.
Amateur is still the best. Parry also good but veteran is bad
Maybe if his auto attacks did bonus dmg to minions as a 2nd passive? I played him a lot but the reason i switched is because I lack the speed to clear waves
I just want a viable trait shield talent build for artanis, I want a fantasy of a sustained energy shielded warrior with a global ultimate that blinds (I hate hard cc so blinding is fun for me) the enwmy
Artanis isn’t a bad hero by any stretch of the imagination. The reason he doesn’t see much use by “pros” is for two reasons:
Artanis is all-or-nothing. Many other Heroes have access to escapes or disengagement tools, but Artanis does not. At a skill level where getting caught out likely means death, a total lack of escape or disengage is a major hurdle to overcome.
Artanis is very counterable. While Shield Surge can get Cooldown Reduction from Blade Dash, the vast majority comes from Basic Attacks. Anything that prevents Artanis from hitting people is going to drastically reduce his durability by extension, and it just so happens that most Blinds are easy to land and hugely effective.
If Artanis’s team is built for all-in hard engages and the opposing team lacks Blinds in any significant amount, he can be unstoppable. However, such situations in high-level play are rare, so unfortunately he doesn’t usually get much mileage. In lower leagues where drafting strategy isn’t as well-known or in Quick Match where team compositions are a roll of the dice, Artanis has a much better chance of flourishing by virtue of being less likely to run into his hard counters.
Well Artanis together with Rexxar are the only heroes in the game with enough wave clear and camp taking effectiveness to be able to kill a minion wave, kill a mercenary camp, then come back to the wave without losing a single minion. Which is veeeery advantageous while still being able to solo the boss without being put in this very vulnerable state like tracer or lunara and not taking very long either.
So i would say that Artanis is better compared with Rexxar in this sense; anyway, the way i see it, Artanis is at the moment limited to PvE content the whole game and macro gameplay instead of team fighting if you want to maximize your win chance. Which is not very fun tbh, but it’s existence is appreciated.
Artanis is strong at low levels. Heroes that are strong at low levels will never be buffed to viability at high levels of play. That is blizzard’s balance philosophy and has always been.
There is a reason butcher is in his current state, and there is a reason twinblades varian, although already a really bad hero, just got a nerf.
Artanis and twinblades varian are kinda similar in some ways, and if blizzard can nerf twinblade varian when he’s already that bad there is no way they’re buffing artanis (artanis is better than varian right now actually, better waveclear at least, though are pretty bad)
Lots of heroes have CC on their Ults, including Healers and former Specialists.
Of that list, Imperius is the only hero who stands out from the other Bruisers for his CC potential. Most Bruisers have a small amount of CC, even Artanis has displacement in the form of his swap.
However, other than Imperius and maybe Yrel, none of them can match actual Tanks in CC output. Almost all tanks have at least 2 CC basic abilities, Bruisers rarely have more than 1.
While I agree with your initial analysis, there is one important detail that needs to be added:
Artanis is a hero that is innately full of logical contradictions.
Until he gets to level 16, Artanis relies heavily on attack speed without having attributes to support an attack speed heavy build. (Ex. Attack Speed relies on “uptime” on the target. Artanis has very poor uptime due to *lack of range and *lack of raw mobility / disable)
In addition, Blade Dash is also a contradiction because it has many uses, but does not have the ability to be cast multiple times. (Blade Dash has 4 innate uses: damage, swap combos, dodging, shield c/d reduction, this is roughly twice the number of innate uses most other abilities have.)
To make it worse the innate uses of Blade Dash are also contradictory. For example, using Blade Dash to “dodge” an attack is directly counter to “shield cooldown reduction”, while the two can overlap it’s generally rare.
At the moment even if you’re going for auto-attacks you’re extremely vulnerable to roots or slows.
Being able to dodge out of the root and avoid incoming damage doesn’t push you toward Q build. And if you have Prism up, you could use it to continue auto-attacking, so there would still be reason to go the other talents.
It already reduces the cooldown of his trait base-line, so a buff that’d prevent him from being instantly interrupted before he can do so would affect him as a whole, not just his Q build.
You’re right that a second charge would help him quite a bit, probably more than unstoppable would, and would still allow him to deal with the situations where he is interrupted before it can do anything.
It opens different windows, would be stronger in some cases and weaker in others.
I do think he can keep his identity and not require a drastic talent overhaul with one of these two. I think his dependence on Q paired with its unreliability are his problem.
Good against a team of squishies, but bad against everything else. He has no way to peel himself out of hard engage due to a lack of escape, and that to me is his biggest drawback. Even someone like Ragnaros can E away; it’s not a good enough disengage, but it’s still better than Artanis’ complete lack of disengage options.
Some of the people in this thread complaining that Artanis sucks also complain that Alarak is too strong. At this point I think they’re just Khalai spies.
The best disengage he has is to Q to the enemy (or better behind a wall) and swap with the tank so he has better chance to not get cced & bodyblocked by the tank lol
Twin Blades does exactly that, though. While it’s not a traditional Attack Speed buff, it provides an extra one to two attacks every four seconds (depending on if you abuse the Basic Attack reset or not).
An ability having a wide variety of applications is hardly anything new. Take for example E.T.C.'s Power Slide, Blaze’s Oil Spill, Varian’s Lion’s Fang, so on and so forth.
I could live with Blade Dash getting a cooldown reduction to 8 seconds to make Artanis a little more fluid and less focused on Basic Attacks, but an extra charge is way too much. He’s not Genji.
Artanis being all or nothing is basically why he is bad, I am not expecting all viable heroes that have dashes or hard cc or just really tanky, but c’mon a bruiser that relies on AA but without any good survivability or escape or hard cc or initiating abilities or poking or peeling or… faster respawn?? reduced disadvantage in dying?? Ofc he is a at least a bit weak right now.
Let me clarify, since I didn’t get the point across clearly.
I’m not saying he doesn’t attack fast enough. I’m saying that because he relies on a fast attack rate (twinblades included), he lacks the attributes required to utilize a fast attack speed.
Do you understand what I’m saying now? Fast attack speeds require uptime, and only two (three depending on definition) provide uptime.
Range and constant superior mobility. Artanis lacks both constant superior mobility and range.
Secondly, you’re ignoring the bottom half. Some abilities do have multiple innate effects. Power Slide has stun, mobility, and damage. Varian has slow, damage, and heal. Blaze has two charges(go figure) so he actually supports what I’m saying.
Using those abilities are not contradictory. A stun, mobility and damage? He’s doing all three at once while also lining up a perfect Face Melt. Varian’s Lion Fang works perfectly fine unless he’s at full HP. Blaze has 2 charges, so good example for me.
Artanis’s Blade Dash does not share those similarities with ETC and Varian. Dodging is not often shared with shield c/d reduction. Blade Dash damage is lost when a target is swapped. This makes each innate use distinct from the other, whereas with ETC’s power slide these innate uses are not distinct.
I dunno why you think he’s useless, I see him in ranked all the time.
He doesn’t get to have top dps or top CC bcos he has the ability to SWAP AN ENEMY HERO FROM A SCREEN AWAY lol what more do you want?!