Thoughts about Maiev's Cruel Chain changes

Greetings.

As from patch notes:

Cruel Chain [W]

  • New functionality: Umbral Bind grants 25% Movement Speed for 2.5 seconds, and its pull damage is increased by 30% for each tethered target beyond the first, up to 120%.

For me this seems like a straight nerf to W build. Looks like the end for the most fun build she has.

I am by no means Maiev main.

I just recently, about 2 weeks ago, started learning to play her and really enjoyed the Cruel Chains playstyle. The new version of the talent just does not have the same potential. Especially in 1v1 or 1v2 situations, where the damage increase is miniscule, where before you could manage to stack full 150% increase under the right circumstances.

From dev’s perspective, they think that this change is a buff to the talent.

Developer Comment: While Maiev is a terror in the hands of the more elite portion of our playerbase, we don’t want that to be a reason to not improve talents that we feel could use the help. Cruel Chain and Vengeful Knives have parts of their functionality that didn’t feel particularly impactful, so we’re adding more clear and useful benefits to each of them, which should make them more usable.

I rather they left the talent as it is.

What are your thoughts?

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I think the developer comment is much more about the knives talent, in stead of the cruel chain change.

I think the cruel chain talent was nerfed a bit to hard, and should have been rebalanced, to where it does more than previous against multiple enemies.

Say, make it 40% per hero hit, instead of it’s now 30%.

That still makes it weaker in a 1v1/enemies who are spread to play against Maiev’s AOE damage, but it means when you get a full set of heroes it does more damage than before.




I think it would also be interesting to add an additional bonus if you hit all 5 enemy heroes. Although that might make the talent to much of a “noob slayer” if the bonus is meaningful. And if the bonus is not meaningful, well, why bother.

Huge, huge nerf… they compeltely removed what was special from maiev

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You can no longer one shot Squishies. Oh the humanity.

Personally. I’m not a fan of the change I just think people are overreacting to it

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No it is not over reacting, because it’s the whole playstyle of the hero that changes. i know it sounds weird for someone who isnt familiar with the hero, but it is the truth, her W 16 talent made her so unique and fun, no since you can’t play it anymore, the whole hero build (and so playstyle) has to change, and not by a bit, but alot

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One shotting squishies with W was never her playstyle…

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She was meant to counter high mobility heroes like Tracer, genji, valla and so on (Valla has even 2 stuns on her ult so Maiev has to be careful with her) but anyways, She now cant even counter high mobility heroes… why? because she just deals no damage anymore. she is an assassin, sure she needs follow up in 5vs5, but she is still an assassin. like tracer and genji who can 1vs1 heroes Kel Thuzad

Her playstyle is locking people with her W, getting resets on Q and shining against multiple targets. That’s it. She was never meant to one shot a ktz with her W. Even if you don’t like the change, you should be honest about how Maiev is played.

I think the damage the talent does now is bad and needs a buffs, but the change is quite good. It focus much more on big teamfights and that is what she was meant to be good at. Blizzard can just buff the damage now.

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At some point during these years, Cruel chains became her playstyle. Now it is such a large part of her playstyle, that you cannot simply take it away.

Noone complained about the talent. Even dev’s stated that they see this change as a buff.

At the same time, every true Maiev player sees this change as a significant nerf that completely removed a certain type of play from the game.

Which also happened to require the most skill while granting the largest reward for it.

Basically, it is the most fun talent removed.

For me, she will now gather dust in my hero collection from now on. No point to continue to learn her.

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The old cruel chain was the crux of the W build. There’s no point to taking the new cruel chain at all since you won’t be able to get value with it. This change also makes the level 1 bind quest pointless too.

Now Maiev has nothing to be threatening with. All her potential is now tied to how badly the enemy plays by tightly grouping, rather than the Maiev players skill. Only in potato leagues is anyone going to group up enough for Maiev to get anywhere near her previous value.

It was a native talent. As a matter of fact, It was intended to burst ppl as every melee assassin should do. Additionally, please stop comment thinking you know the intrinsic functionality maiev must have or she was created for. Im just a bit annoyed to see “maiev it was not created to do that” comments by several frustrated players.

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I mean, that is not even the default pick for her best build at 16. Armored Assault is the default since her release.

Cruel chains was just default for her W build and even then you could just take W at 1 and go standard with the rest of the talents. Cruel chains was just one tool for people who didn’t like maiev for what she is, which is big teamfights and fighting more than 1 enemy at the same time.

They never said it was a buff. People should really speak the truth when it comes to what the comment said.

They probably had data showing that these talents needed to be make simpler to use and understand. They never called it a “buff”, but just easier to understand and use.

Like I said in many posts, I do see that it needs more damage, but now it is way more straight forward if you pick it.

While this is true, they can always buff the damage.

Which may have been the reason to change it. They probably saw that most people didn’t bother to take it because it was way harder to pull off. As we all know, Armored Assault is the default pick and it is probably way more picked than anything else on that tier. Devs saw that and wanted to help those other talents be more picked.

I mean, fun is not really an argument and is something really personal.

You can always play her best build. It’s not like she is dead. She is still tier S and her standard build is still tier S.

I bet you didn’t play Maiev just because of 1 talent.

We won’t stop cause people who play maiev are not talking the truth. She was never created to one shot people with her W.

She was created to get as many Q resets as possible (which is her main source of damage/burst) and to lock people down with W. That’s it.

It will still do that, they just need to increase the damage to 40-50% and it’s all good.

3 Likes

From what I saw in game, and saw from replays, organized/topkek play generally favors naisha + armored assault over chain build. Maiev being a threat there for the pull isolating a target and getting focused down regardless of a quest stack or snapshot pull damage. If she gets a snap + roots or something to follow-up on two targets, she’d get more dps with knives and aa bounces than the ‘burst’ on chains. However, if I saw cruel chains, it was for the movement speed and not the snap.

For pugs/solo scrubs, scripted stompers and bigshots, cruel chain could stand out for increasing damage to one target, but about any other situation would be favored by using maiev for locking down 2 targets for resets and focus instead: it just makes use of more of her kit.

With the change to have the damage boosted for more targets pulled, that potentially increased the direct appeal for chains for mass aoe compared to limited aoe for knives + bounces or +hp damage.

For those that want the speed, the talent is mostly unchanged; for those wanting to tote solo-spikes, they may have been better off with another build, but caught on the feel-goods of a single number.

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Seems funny how players that do not even play Maiev define how she is supposed to be played.

Sure, in pro league they focus solely on team wombo setups, where all you need is just the pull part of chains, putting her more into support role. That is like 0.01% of playerbase.

The rest of Maiev players are either Storm League or QM players that really enjoyed the old Cruel Chains.

There was no reason to change talent. Now it is just obsolete and, as you said, now you just pick other talents instead like Armored Assault.

You yourself proved that they screwed up her talent diversity.

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After playing her about 15 games after this awful change, i still go w build, with some talent change (cause i just simply hate the aa one or even the e one)… but yeah she feels so underpowered now. now hitting lvl 16 is just like “yay 2.5 speed buff great, no dmge now”

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if you think what i said “proof” to be she was screwed up, then you might wanna reread it.

We played w build for about a year and now you tell us it was never her playstyle. OK :confused:
Maiev could not 1shot squishies. It was not a 1shot, it was combo, and any cc could break it

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Exactly, thank you for clearifying it! =)

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There’s talents in the game that have nothing with the hero’s playstyle and they are still there for more than 2-3 years :man_shrugging:

but this has everything to do with her playstyle and thats the problem

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