They’re awful.
It made no positive impact on any game I played that wouldn’t have been accomplished in another game. What’s worse is it made ranged damagers less significant and Abathur borderline useless for lane soaking unless he’s dedicating his top hat.
This change was REALLY poorly thought out.
For certain heroes this change makes them unplayabe, However the good news is that now you can go to a lane and collect exp even if you weren’t near minions.
I mean it’s not a big upside, but hey it’s there
I wouldn’t mind them so much if they increased the soaking range (so that ranged assassins don’t have to be practically kissing the lane to grab them) and if summons could grab the XP. If summons could grab XP, Azmodan and Abathur would be fine again.
I guess my favorite slots are about to change. Hello dehaka my old friend. So long azmo and abba
Split pushing is much slower
Grabbing a wave on the way to the objective is much slower and probably not worth it
The quality of life nerfs alone make this entire change not worth it. The XP changes not only make match quality worse, I’m legitimately not having fun with it; they literally increased the tedium.
I hate to talk to the dev team directly because I know it’s discouraged, but guys… stop trying to make the game like League of Legends. You are never going to convince League players over… they already have League. Stick to fun. Make a concept fun, then worry about balance. The core of your audience is likely casual as it is; they don’t need tedium.
Just make exp globes a visual change.
Keep the old radius and give us an option to disable the exp visualization
In fact it made negative impacts to both the exp balance of teams and more than anything to people who actively gank and ambush.
You can’t get exp from a brush because the globes don’t gravitate towards people in brush.
You can’t get exp from behind a wall from the normal range that we used to while waiting to ambush, because the range is shorter.
Now because you are forced to be in the open all the time when soaking, you are visible on map almost all the time.
If i had to guess, this was made to counter people who spend most of the game ganking. To help people with lack of map awareness.
Now that i think about it this doesn’t just hurt Aba TLV and glass canons who are laning 1v1. This hits everyone who has a sight ability for ganking like lunara (wisp talents), murky (fish eye/egg hunt), tassadar, medivh.
It even hurts stealth heroes like Nova and Zeratul.
Besides this destroys the meta and changes it into “the more bruisers and mages you have the better” mages because they can virtually combo kill anyone who tries to rush the globes, bruisers because the more the easier it is to soak each lane and snowball [edit] as well as denying.
I disagree. I love this change as it pushes more active play for soak.
This is why 3 ranged assassin comps were a plague. When a squishy ranged assassin can soak and trade damage with no downside why play any bruiser?
Aba is fine. AFK body soak was bad for the game. He could literally sit behind towers and soak full waves while providing value in other lanes. This pushes more active play and more teamwork instead of AFK soak for the win.
The xp globes are hardly more visible than the numbers that apparently people couldn’t see. In the QM games I’ve played I’ve been top XP on every hero (including healers), the other players seem to be soaking less, which I didn’t think was possible.
If anything I’d say make them more visible, I watched many players who didn’t know they were there. I talked to a few about it, many said they couldn’t see them. lol
If a bruiser is letting any ranged hit them without punishment in the offlane the bruiser player is bad and needs to learn how to control the lane.
Abby can soak 1 wave behind the gate then the lane is reset, thats also why at high level play you bteak the side walls before the gate/towers - vision and accessibility.
Fenix and Greymane are the only ranged that can properly solo lane, the others can only anchor, and its still a rock, paper, scissors matchup.
Nah, just leave last-hitting on. Then mages in general wouldn’t be useless for gathering exp.
Ranged assassin is the safest hero choice in the entire game. It’s been that way for years. There has been a series of developer changes aimed at making it a less safe pick or less easy to deal damage with no risk. It’s a healthy choice for the game honestly.
Explain safe, becuase beyond reworks that remove outdated design philosophies such as generic talents and sustain at every tier, no HERO is safe unless they are currently overtuned.
If ranged assassins were really running amok we would be drafting 5 of them.
That was the big tradeoff you got by taking Abathur though. He’s barely present in team fights until 10 but makes up for it by being able to get you there quickly. Now he can only soak as much as any other hero so there’s functionally little reason to play him outside of gimmick comps with heroes like Illidan or twin blades to jack up attack speed.
You… understand that the meta has been 2 tank or 1 tank/1 bruiser basically forever now, right?
I just played a game as SGT Hammer, the change was unbearable. Sieging a tower meant I got 0 minion XP for those minions that died. Anything I killed at the edge of her range I could forget about. I took hover on that game rather than graduating. I can’t even imaging how bad that would make it. In order to have a real shot at collecting XP I would have to park the tank in the middle of the wave. It literally took away her defining characteristic.
Whether this is a good change or not it was supposed to make things harder for everyone, of course people would complain.
Were you honestly expecting something else?
You know how to safe soak right? You can just sit back in soak range and poke damage on the enemy hero. Most bruisers can’t trade damage like that with an assassin.
Any ranged assassin can safe soak and trade damage with a bruiser in the old exp system. The range was way too big and there was no risk for them.
Aba is much better now. You can be present in any gank or fight at a moments notice. The same goes for any unattended lane as he can pop in with hat and soak. Macro is the name of the game with Aba not AFK early game for chunks of exp.
Not in my games. The big reason I stopped playing ranked this last season was I kept getting games with 3 assassin comps. I would be the only tank with no bruiser and that’s it. The exp change finally gives more value to bruisers and forces more active play from ranged assassin for soak.