I see your points and those made by Volun. My expectations for HOTS are kept in check by reminding myself that it’s now considered to be a classic game and no longer has a dedicated development team as they work on all the various classic titles.
I understated people will think differently, but after them dropping events, brawls, extending seasons, Christmas in June, my expectations are that problems won’t be addressed quickly. The last few patches have had bugs and other issues that normally wouldn’t have made it past QA. This has become expected at this point, rather than the exception.
I’m not saying that to be disrespectful to the Devs, as I said none of us are privy to the specific situations and challenges the Dev team is facing. While it might be true to say it’s a quick and easy fix, none of us are in the know to pass judgement with any certainty.
So unless they let us in on it, I’ll stick to this line of thought:
And I am a former QA head at what was a decently large software firm back in the 90s, before they got bought out.
Coding stuff may be easy, preparing it for release, especially internationally, is not. Programming is just the first step of a process, as anyone with experience in the industry end of things can tell you. Hell, just getting the builds made for each platform can take a fair amount of time.
A bit disappointing that it took a whole month to disable her.
On a more serious note, I’m worried that the direction of nerfs will make her undesirable again. In general baneling damage threat to heroes was never truly an issue except in ARAM. All it needed was a nerf in damage against monsters, bosses, mercenaries and STRUCTURES (as you’ve done with LiMing in the past).
For the majority of the game she is relatively powerless when caught out of position, but what made her a threatening presence was the ability to carpet bomb your front wall from the opposite end of the lane at basically neutral to no significant mana cost.
Kill her sieging potential and you can compensate by making other parts of her kit more powerful, which ultimately might result in an overall more versatile hero. Mind you she already enjoys “disabling” keeps with Roaches, even without the CDR from Nydus, because this in combination with creep speed boost and ability to somewhat reliably dismount players with Hydralisk ends up in frustration.
What about the siege? You need to tank them there and its not just the bannelings. She can maw + bannelings, there are a lot of close areas too where you wont have a good time dodging them (is aoe dmg btw) and her rest kit has zergs following you around (they hit hard will you spend your time focusing them? late game they melt).
That all makes her incredibly safe while being the best lane bully and damage dealer.
In no way different than fighting KT, KTZ, Maiev, Guldan, Azmodan, Medivh. Some abilities will completely shine in a tight corridor under specific conditions, and can easily find ways to draft around it.
The only problem is when a certain hero is better than everyone in all performance categories, at which point vision hack and movement speed boosts become become too much of an advantage.
One other issue I have with Zagara is how all of her abilities provide vision, which is unarguably the most viable information you can have in this game, on top of creep tumors. Her summons chase the enemy to a potential ambush spot or proceed down the lane, even when your own minions are absent.
A complete overkill is that banelings provide a small scouting radius as well, which makes them very useful on maze-like maps such as Infernal Shrines where you usually wouldn’t be able to see what lies past a smoke-vent. This is a general concern with how all abilities work and certain spells like Azmodan’s orb will maintain vision on an area for two seconds before impacting, but everyone can probably recognize how existing mechanics accentuate all the advantages that Zagara enjoys even further.
Essentially same thing. Its the fact you wont be able to react and you will get a huge amount of burst “for free”.
Vision and speed yes can be pretty pretty strong. Still, pure numbers combined with her range in all kind of dmg while being in a safe distance makes her a just a better >insert any assassin< .
Most of the posts are reasonable. Using one person that is miffed to excuse the entirety of their absence is giving them a mile when they really don’t even deserve an inch.
Hummm… well. I get it but… I’m 99.99% playing Vs A.I.
How is this affecting Vs A.I. exactly? With the A.I. reading inputs and having full map awareness there’s a lot worse (especially on Elite) there than just one particular Hero’s balance being an issue.
Anyway, normal reaction on my part since I’m a Zag main, she’s level 138, I like to play her. And I played her long, LONG before these changes. I started back when her Creep hadn’t been nerfed yet (few years back by now).
I don’t think you guys should have disabled her in Vs A.I., but oh well.
Side question, what made you decide to do this after so long but before the next patch? Also does that mean the next patch is close? I’m guessing it’s still a while away if your doing this mid patch?
Edit: After seeing some of the negative reponces I don’t mean my questions in a negative way, I’m actually just curious is all. I actually like that you have taken the time to do this and wondering if this will happen more with OP reworks/New heroes etc.
Plus the fact you posted here (instead of reddit) is the cherry on top
the main problem about baneling isn’t their damage, the fact that she can throw them from 2 screens away without revealing herself is kinda ridiculous imo. Do you really think banelings are the only problem zag has?
The most important thing is not to overdo it with weakening. Such a property of the mind, to rush from one extreme to another. I would suggest to the developers the principle of the “golden mean”: thou have the current numbers, thou think “- let’s weaken it so many and so many”. In summary, thou have two types of numbers. Then, take the average of these two options and voila! And this will be the “golden mean”.
