The "pro-scene" is RUINING hots

Yeah, I agree. Before the HGC and the game needing to be competitive, it was better. Supports were fun to play and had actual playmaking potential, e.g. being able to clear waves and kill stuff on their own, heroes like Azmodan and Chromie had their own unique gameplay and PvE was a viable playstyle.

But all of that is gone. PvE is not allowed, all unique heroes are getting streamlined and supports are just miserable to play, because you are nothing more than a healbot.

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The best part is there is barely a pro scene, it’s completely irrelevant. You will never find the forums here or anyone ingame talking about it positively because very few people actually care. The rare topic here is one saying it’s bad and ruining the game. Blizzard is forcing it, making changes to harm everyone’s experience to keep a stagnating “”""“pro scene”"""" on life support. They forced a meta change because having certain trends is bad and needs to be stopped always!!1 It’s not about balance. In the long run they’re watering down this game to get nothing in return but people leaving because they are making the game more and more boring.

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Because Dream is a powerful way to say go away to anyone who dives Malfurion, more than just a Silence, it sends a message.

Stukov is the only one of this list who compares to Malf, and you’d take Malf for stronger sustained healing and his root mainly.

Where did they say that the pros are coming up with the hero reworks? Show me on the Stitches doll where the pros touched you.

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It is. Blizzard is so obsessesd with “pro” that they will tweak things to that (below) 1% and for everyone else, it sucks. The irony comes that in doing this, they push everyone else away. If you were to drive to the end of the road, they would have a balanced game for pros that nobody else plays.

In addition, I have to say something about the “pro” video game thing. It’s annoying and insulting to other “pros” and needs to stop. When you consider a “professional” aspect to ANYTHING, it takes years to reach. Acting, writing, sports, fishing, literally ANYTHING. These “pros” take years…YEARS to profect their craft. Not video games. 3 months in a basement sponging and you come up a pro. Stop it.

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Pro aren’t to blame for exploiting something that is broken or game breaking.
They are just playing the game with the tools they have the best they can.

The facts that those things exist in the games and stay broken for so long was the problem.

I think current balance is getting better, way better this year than others years. Last Genji and Aba changes and dev comment was a good sign of that direction.

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Fair enough. I just can’t adapt to Malf in his current state. I never really needed to take Twilight Dream back when I was playing him regularly. I had a pretty aggressive playstyle with him that is no longer viable/possible with the current game mechanics.

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wasn’t talking about any of this
in fact i wasn’t even talking about skill per say or game ballance.
i was talking about actual kids being brainwashed into thinking that they to can become a grand master and have a future in paid e-sports.
Esports is just there as a purple dragon for withless kids to chase.

This gives these kids the toxic behaviour , it’s never their fault that we lose . it’s always yours.
This is why people cry about your hero choice during draft. OOH YOU PICKED XXX HERO …LOSE!
If it isn’t the same comp as they saw on some nerds stream the kiddo’s will have a cow about it totally disregarding any actual skill you might have with the hero.
Most of these kiddo’s know litle to nothing about the game and team comps and possible synergies heroes can have other than what their they’re stream sempai told them on twitch the other day.

This is why people whine about your talent choices . even tho they can be completely valid choices for your match up if it isn’t in a guide thats in the top 2 of some tracking web site or a 1 on 1 copy of some pro players last used build during a comp than the kiddo’s turn toxic towards you.

Most of this behaviour comes from kiddo’s wanting nothing more than to rank up to achieve that dream of being a pro streamer or paid esports pro player
A dream they will never achieve anyways.

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Here I thought the dev team was ruining hots… hmmm

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what pro scene ? …

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Needless bumping, yikes.

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I believe that the pro scene ruined the game for the majority. It is the meta/demands of the pros that caused it. They called out everything as cheese instead of imbracing a diverse way to play the game.

Sadly all “pros” seem to want a generic linear way to play a game. That is the exact opposite of what keeps the majority of gamers playing and watching. We want diversity and new crazy stuff.

All new map designs got shot down by the pros. All new crazy heroes have been gutted after the pro scene showed up.

I remember playing in Alpha as Muradin having fun playing some haymaker while some future pro players harassed me all game for taking haymaker. There was no ranked just a alpha game with QM and these guys are being toxic over talent picks.

Pro scenes should be community driven and shouldn’t have any effect on what the game company does to make the game fun for the true players.

The pro community think that they are what is keeping the game afloat. It is actually the opposite. They draw resources from the game. They took millions of dollars from development and didn’t bring in new players. Instead they drove new players away and stole precious money from the development team.

Sadly Blizzard didn’t just give HOTS one more year of no pro team and go full on development because this game could be amazing.

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That’s literally the opposite of how things work. Accessibility (read: for casual) changes tend to streamline the game and strip unique and divergent play out.

It’s in the interest of profit margins to empower casual players to feel like they’re good at the game and capable of making cool and effective plays.

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Paying too much attention to pros instead of the average player ruins any game it happens to, IMO.

You know how dull and bland Smash Bros. would be if every game after Melee was just Melee 2, Melee 3, and Melee 4?

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And Street Fighter is the same game in every incarnation? Fighting games more than any other genre support my argument of how they were made super forgiving to reinvigorate the genre with cash flow. Admittedly they would be pretty much extinct otherwise. When you have no one else to blame, and only skill matters in the FGC, the casual has a hard time enjoying himself in that environment.

If you believe what you say, it’s because you don’t really understand depth, or just don’t give a damn about it.

You can look at something as iconic as the Diago moment 37 when he executed a flawless sequence of 15 parries each in a 1/6th of a second window of execution. It’s a genuinely remarkable display of skill and knowledge of the game. It’s something that, even being a very strong FG player in my wheelhouse games, I could never hope to legitimately emulate in the high pressure circumstances that he did it under.

Yet today, in SF5 that same act is a trivial exercise for even a casual player. Things like this were literally done to dumb the game down, take skill out as a sole deciding factor, and make casuals feel good about playing them. Under the name of accessibility. The goal is profit. It shows in how wildly unstable the pro scene is.

Well they did change nova because how annoying she was in quickmatch vs novice players

My thoughts exactly. I’ve seen games balanced around the lowest common denominator (Hi, Dead by Daylight) and it’s always terrible for everyone, even the bad players because once they finally improve they find themselves unable to handle the good, decently-balanced stuff at higher levels of play.

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What’re you on about now? The Stitches rework was bloody fantastic, and so was Ana’s. Heck, even Chromie’s was pretty damn good (and likely to be better with her tweaks this patch).

I kind of feel like you’re blaming the pros for changes you personally don’t like, which is simply dumb and shortsighted. Don’t be dumb and shortsighted, it’ll get you nowhere in life.

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Yes, this x100. Nova was the first hero I played and got good with. Highest lvl hero to this day that I have and I haven’t touched her in years besides a few scattered games.

I miss the old Nova who could recon and punish people out of position. I miss decoy dancing under forts after launching an ambush and then having a suspenseful trip to safety while the enemy is on my heels. I miss the suspense of her kit.

I used to have to watch the way people moved to gather whether they could see me or not since it was not constant and sometimes, you’d get that guy who would pretend not to see you, based on his movements, and then surprise you by catching you in a critical spot.

Talk about butt puckering days. Now, every hero can be relegated to a general SOP.

Everything unique about the game has become less pronounced. All those whiners who cried for nerfs are no longer here because even they are bored by their own suggestions. That’s what happens when you approach things subjectively.

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I agree with pretty much everything you said! The game doesn’t feel as epic as it used to for a number of reasons so kindly forgive the following nerd-rant lol.

If I may digress, there are still people vehemently against the global/non-unique talents like Executioner but those were the things that added some consistency and a chance to synergize with your team. I feel like it encouraged more team play actually. As an Illidan with Executioner, I loved ganking people with Jaina and Nova because of the slows! Even though the unique versions of these talents were fine at first, they’ve slowly become more watered down or have disappointing exceptions to mechanics that end up making it feel useless and underwhelming. So rather than re-working or buffing the under-performing heroes to be competitive with the heroes that were more “complete”, we got the never-ending nerfathon that slowly degraded everything about this game that made it truly amazing!

Back to Nova though, she certainly used to feel more engaging/powerful even with her survivability issues back then (and now). Currently, I feel like she’s punished entirely too hard for missing a snipe or attempting to solo lane at all. My primary gripes about her current state are:

  • Decoy is almost useless. The AI is terrible, Lethal Decoy means no Crippling Shot (same tier now), and it doesn’t seem to “taunt” tower/minion aggro like it used to so you get blown up anyway.
  • Her range is underwhelming for a SNIPER. Ana, is a friggin healer, and she feels more like a sniper than Nova! Then we have other heroes like Chromie, Hanzo, and others that put her range to shame. I’ll never understand how an archer with a BOW can out range an elite Ghost with a C-20A rifle and still have better mobility/escapes. I could understand her range if it were maybe a Spectre like Tosh since they have more of a melee/infiltration prowess imo. Then we have Raynor, who for some god awful reason has a similar range, but a much higher sustain, waveclear, etc. He is supposedly scared of Nova in the lore but in HotS he just hits you with PR and Banshees and you’re dead.
  • No reliable escape. Ghost Protocol should last at least 1.5 sec, maybe with invulnerability to give you even the slightest hope of a chance of reliable escape.
  • Stealth in general is underwhelming so 3 seconds to re-enter stealth is kind of ridiculous. Apollo Suit would kind of make sense if it were a much earlier talent and/or combined with Advanced Cloaking. What I’m getting at is that we shouldn’t have to take 2 talents to make stealth somewhat useful.
  • She burns mana too fast even when trying to conserve resource since she has no wave clear or decent mana recovery. I feel like the mana regen mechanic for Advanced Cloaking should be baseline or at least combined with Apollo Suit as I said earlier. It would actually allow her to have more time in the field and allow her to do more.
  • Her burst should be improved and reward engaging combat rather than piggy backing off team mates. I get that the snipe stacks were supposed to encourage it but missing a shot cripples your damage output so it makes engaging combat more irritating (especially with the improved range talent much later in the game). I feel like it would be ok if they just remained stacked until you die or lose one stack for missing so you can take riskier shots. The mana recovery part of Perfect Shot would be awesome if it were baseline since it rewards you for hitting a hero with it.

Anyhow, I’m pretty salty about Nova’s current state (especially compared to others) so I tried to get my thoughts on her in a somewhat coherent chunk of words lol. I’m not saying everything I suggested needs to happen but I think some or all of it would help her shine a bit more.