Tired of Aba locusts being in every QM game. Not coming back till he is nerfed.
Also, idk what discussions y’all have internally at Blizz, but randomly making a hero OP for a patch is not fun and never has been. It was never fun being forced to auto ban a hero in ranked and it’s not fun to always have the same over tuned hero in every QM game.
For everyone still playing, they may as well all go into ARAM.
You are not alone in thinking that the locusts are over-tuned. I’m sure they will be dealt with in a future patch, but I think they were trying to get him some time in Storm League, which I can support.
They are working to adjust the meta which has been long overdue. It’s tough to hit the mark with how many variable there are, so there will always be the need to tweek a hero, post rework.
Yeah, even IF you can deal with the locusts, it’s just annoying. It takes way more skill awareness, and wave clear ability, to respond to the locusts than it does to just release them. Even if I have the situational awareness to make the decision to abandon my teammates and respond to a locust push, I now have to also kill them, which not every character has. So the fact that lower skilled players can now flock to Abathur, and get decent results, also necessitating a pretty conditional counter is making QM games rather monotonous.
As with so many of the new janitor’s many bad instincts, let’s just ignore the lessons of the past from the intentional redesigns of former specialists to tune them away from just afk pushing by… strengthening the afk pushing non interactive ability.
Granted Locusts and mines needed reworking, but this way is both low skilled and doesn’t promote prosocial kind of teamwork and behaviors. I’m not against simple straight forward buffs, especially if they’re linked to abilities that require enemy/ally interaction. But again, there’s a reason why Blizzard added a lot of conditional bonuses on doing something right, to add more skill expression.
The locust (and I’d argue mines too) ability in and of itself as well as the talents just don’t do that.
I agree with Volun.
As much as I appreciate the legacy janitor keeping up with the balance patches - their understanding of HotS balance is partial and flawed.
It’s unfortunately very lacking when you compare to the extreme attention to detail and PTR data collection by Dustin Browder, before he even dared to release a reworked talent or heroic when he was directing HotS.
I guess that’s what you get when it’s no longer a real game director involved with the process but a warden of sorts who is just another enthusiast, not a designer.
Janitor, if you read this, give aba a mythic that makes each locust AA to give abathur a stack. Every 50 stacks, locusts get 5% more of every stat, and 5% less cooldown on aba’s passive spawning them.
Also make a talent that blocks hat but buffs mines. All charges refill at same time, and their damage and aoe is buffed.
in QM aba can’t do much , because aba players can get bad team comps in which locust build is useless , in ranked however he is annoying with a good draft . Those abathurs you faced on QM were probably in a stack , cause with random players and with a bad random comp it is hard to play locust .
I have played against a locust aba on QM and won because the enemy aba comp was bad and not appropiate for locust , they needed the hat damage buff build to stand a chance. the enemy team had azmo,lich,nova and malthael and my team had genji,azmo,alarak,raynor . the heroes in my team chose good damaging builds and my pressurized glands build boosted their damage even more . i think if raynor went the split pushing build ( the exterminator talent) , we might have lost but still , since the enemy aba was too busy split pushing and not hatting the enemy , we were killing them all the time due to my buffs and they lost . so as you can see QM aba locust is mostly a matter of luck or premade teams with a plan , but on its own that hero can’t do much .
This is the opposite of Aba in QM.
In QM Aba provides more value than most heroes.
Hence why he is overpicked in QM and players think they are gods when playing him, and enter ranked just to lose.
Aba thrives in environments that are unstructured, and the least structured mode is QM.
Just the passive push on lanes is too much for QM players to deal with him, having him provide teamfight value and be able to push any lane while the rest of the chaotic players run around trying to kill each other or run for objectives they shouldn’t makes him the perfect QM hero.
Aba has always been one of the, if not the strongest hero in QM, and after his buff he got even harder to deal with there.
Aba compared to TLV forexample, Aba doesn’t require your team to play correctly, and can easily adapt without being much punished.
TLV on the other hand can provide TONS of global value, but has to then rely on his team to not devalue them by soaking in their lanes, or spending too much time on top of the vikings, forcing them into fights they don’t want or taking away their ability too soak, that’s when you devalue TLV and just sit there with a bad hero and not a strong global menace.
The core of the issue is that the locust push is just too strong. Especially when Aba pushes locust right when an objective starts. It either results in
It’s just too punishing either way, and the clone will still come out in scenario 1, regardless if enemy breaks away or not.
i do agree they did a bad job the cd is nice, but the healing from them is aburd mercs have trouble dealing with the with a creep wave due to the heal. the 20% 100% needs to be nerfed its just to much health back. its better than old azmodans old ult with demons. which blizzard nerfed only to bring it back with locust lol, literally forcing someone to go have to stop that push. thats blizzard for you though these days.