State of Merc Camps: Forums Take

What’s the community’s opinion on the merc camps these days? Any that stand out as under/overpowered or needing tweaks.

IMO the Starcraft bruiser camp, especially the raven, doesn’t feel that strong, but it could be a situation of “doesn’t feel strong, but actually is fine”.

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The invocator (don’t know the name) on diablo’s maps are too annoying and have too much HP in my opinion. Otherwise merc seems fine to me.

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I wish all health of objectives (immortal) and camps and boss was buffed. Especially for boss, make them as strong as baron Nashor in LoL, who seems weaker than he was years ago😭.

Boss could be so strong that the full team needs to participate to get it. If even one person is missing, a higher health could take longer. Maybe make more aoe and damage on his attacks too, and if he hits you, you lose armor and spell armor. This allows for the good ol’ strategy of the enemy team waiting until the boss is 25% hp, then rush in when you’re half hp as the boss would do more damage, you have reduced armor, and your abilities are down

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I find them fine.
I would not mind having the knights give armor instead of just spell armor to help push structures if those stupid armor reducing shots stay.

The Sentinel on Hanamura still feels a bit too strong, especially for how easy it is to take it. A number of heroes can solo it in the early game. Some bosses still feel too weak, too. The ones on Alterac and BhB come to mind.

The merc camps seem fine as they are. It still boggles my mind how many people insist on fighting just outside of the spell armor aura, though.

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The Shaman camp, is meant to be picked before an objective, or strategically as split, forcing your enemy to have two issues to deal with , as you cannot ignore it for long. It’s easy enough to deal with, but but there is a time cost.

The trade off is that it’s hard to take as well. Most heroes will die if they try to solo it.

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The Samurai is still very strong, agreed. Hanamura’s Mercs are so important xp wise it feels like the hero pool for that map is shrunk to whoever can clear Samurai well.

Wouldn’t mind if they reduced the health further down from 7200 to the 6000’s. Still feels like you are capturing a boss every 3 minutes.

I am much more worried about the samurai destroying our entire fort/keep than the enemy pushing the cart to win the objective.

20 total armor would probably be too strong and would force a meta of fighting around the armor aura. If done correctly one team would basically do 20% more damage than the other.
The spell armor allows some counterplay(use physical damage).

Poop.

You pick them because enemy team picks them and you cba to clear and then go do the obj. Yay exciting.
Shame they nerfed them so fast after the buff.
Should be better while pushing with heroes, for example taking tower aggro instead of heroes around.

What😩 I don’t think objectives are strong enough to defend themselves. Maybe make the untaken samurai harder to kill but leave the converted samurai the same as now?

That wouldn’t help much because now some heroes can just spend 1 Bribe stack on them and get the equivalent of a boss. Many heroes don’t even have to fight the samurai to capture it, unlike a real boss.

time to recode that…

You cannot bribe the Samurai camp, but you can bribe the vision and turret camps.

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Pmuch, I don’t remember the Samurai camp ever being susceptible for bribes. Bushido stronk in them, it seems.

Personally, I feel that camps give too much benefit by their passive push. They are too strong, and they contribute to the snowball of hots. Once one team gets ahead, they start taking all the camps and it becomes really hard to contest anything, because you are constantly pressured to defend lanes.

I think it is an interesting game mechanic, but one that is near impossible to balance. In LoL for example camps are merely points of income and xp that power up the characters. Even herald is basically a “deal a lot of tower damage” ability that needs to be used correctly by the PLAYER.
But in HOTS the camps can do things on their own. Which means that a player is free to be elsewhere. It basically puts an additional point of pressure on the map which requires player attention.

Think of it as temporarily adding another unit/player to your team, while the enemy still has only 5 units to respond to your 6

You think they should follow the player who captured them around the map? What other mechanic should they do? Permanent health or damage boost? Damage to the nexus even when they’re invulnerable?

I don’t think any of those things - I’m not designing hots. It is not a question of just snapping my fingers and coming up with a perfect solution. If it was that easy - I’d be a millionaire or we’d have dozens of top tier games each year.

I am criticizing the current system. Not offering solutions.

Thinking about it, I would probably make some mechanic to let them die naturally without causing too much damage if they dont have a player support. Something like morale buff that deteriorates if a player isn’t near.
That way a camp will always do only certain amount of damage if left unchecked and unattended. And not just result in accumulating 3 waves of minions and pushing to core.

Weird, I was sure I bribed one earlier. Must have been a nightmare.

Now that you mention it, even Hots wiki says supports and sentinels can’t be bribed.

Thinking about it a bit more, here’s what I’d do, off the top of my head.
This is probably full of things I missed or didn’t think of, but still…

The problem:

  • Minion camps are too powerful and contribute to snowballing too heavily.
  • Minion camps can deal too heavy damage if left unchecked, up to pushing the lane to the core in some cases (shaman tends to do that)

Solution:

  • Limit merc solo power while preserving their push assist potential

Method:

  • Leave HP and damage as is.
  • Mercs start with 50 morale stacks
  • After encountering a non-player enemy unit for the first time*, Mercs lose 1 morale per second
    *this condition is to prevent them from dying before engaging in combat on long or pushed lanes.
  • when morale reaches 0, the merc dies.
  • If an ally player is within range - stop losing morale
  • if an ally player is within range, regenerate morale 1/sec up to 10 morale

What this does:

  • It reduces merc solo-push potential, giving the defending team an ability to ignore them in exchange for some, but not too much, siedge damage.
    This allows the team to focus on a higher priority tasks without getting too far behind.
    Currently, if a camp is pushing a lane and an objective spawns, it feels like you just can’t win. Either not clear and lose a lot, or clear and lose the obj 4v5.
  • It will reduce the snowball potential of taking all the camps in lower ELO
  • It will likely not affect high ELO at all, because teams don’t tend to get so far behind or have trouble with clearing or stalling objectives while someone clears
  • It will not reduce push potential, as the mercs will stay alive for as long as you are around.
  • It will not diminish defending importance by much, as you still have an incentive to not ignore them.

Again, this is what I sucked out of my thumb in an hour on my way home. It probably has flaws, but it was a fun exercise.