So yeah, I’ve been playing Tracer a lot recently and I’ve gravitated towards builds that aren’t “optimal”, which really isn’t anything new but I’m having a hard time figuring out why the top talents are picked as often as they are.
For example I almost always pick Is That a Health Pack? at lvl 4. In my opinion you get a crazy amount of sustain and staying power from that alone. In addition I don’t really get Pulse Generator. The healing is negligible, uncertain and the Blink charge isn’t that big of a deal.
Lvl 7 is stupid, just 3 near identical shades of brown. Locked and Loaded being the worst offender. I don’t think anyone enjoys that QTE every 3 seconds. And still it’s picked the most? Couldn’t the devs put Chrono Triggers there instead? It’s not like a situational and objectively worse version of Nexus Blades has any business being a lvl 20 talent.
At lvl 20 I take Total Recall, no exceptions. And that’s also the popular choice but I still wonder why Get Stuffed! is so close second. Unless you took the trap talent at lvl 4, getting some 30% more Pulse Bombs isn’t that great of a deal compared to being able to make a crazy dive, kill someone and self-Ancestral back.
Then again, I like to play Tracer like a mosquito, attacking all the time (Like all the time), only going in when I’m certain I have good chances to finish someone, and my talent choices obviously reflect that. But is that suboptimal considering what talents are the highest WR? How do you think Tracer should be played?
You most certainly aren’t going to skip Jumper so there is added value from Pulse Generator. Tracer’s health is already incredibly weak so every little bit helps, especially in duels. HP Pack is a safe choice but you will really notice the health deficit when chasing down a lone player and constantly being topped off makes little difference because the optimal approach is probably to stay behind and build up your (R) before approaching frontline. I would suggest it in a game against annoyances like Zagara/Nazeebo/Azmodan/Abathur where you are forced to go Bullet Spray in order to keep up with the wave clear.
PG+J were already considered overpowered at 25% and 8% values, so they got nerfed down to 17% and 6.5% and everyone agrees that both talents are still the supreme choice.
About the mosquito playstyle, don’t focus on anyone with medium to low mana because they will be the first to recall and you won’t get them unless they walk away from the safety of buildings. Bait spell casts so they use up their resources, watch for overextended players and don’t waste any time padding hero damage because you are near always trading at a loss.
Be an annoyance and play to distract, but don’t rely on winning by helping to create more pressure in constant teamfighting, not before you unlock Ricochet at least.
I most definitely am going to skip Jumper unless I’m 100% sure Untouchable isn’t going to work. As Tracer has pretty low damage and your burst hardly kills a minion, finishing things faster means less chances to get cc’d and focused.
I’d pick Bullet Spray even if I wasn’t forced to. The wave clear is just too tempting to pass up.
I like to harass and look for opportunities, which do come by eventually. Also those globes, innate regen and low cd well taps are surprisingly effective at forcing someone to hearth.
If you say so, but is appears very counter productive not to take Pulse Generator or skip Heavy Handed in favor of Bullet Spray as you are so in love with Untouchable. You’ve still got little to no burst even with +25% AA damage but isn’t going to mean anything if you can’t tank some damage in the process.
We can put it to a vote which is objectively better; being constantly topped off with full HP or having an additional ~40% buffer to you effective health when it actually matters, like for example when you are performing a task you were primarily designed for.
Also if you are playing LnL + Untouchable it is simply ridiculous not to go for Ricochet.
ItaHP is not a bad talent. It’s actually pretty good in QM when you don’t have a healer. Pulse Generator though can provide more value because it allows plays that you couldn’t do before picking it. Sometimes, enemies will trap you or interrupt your last blink, and you can use a bomb to get an extra blink charge and get outta there. Or you can bomb one enemy to get a blink to chase another. And if you have the jumper talent, you also get an extra shield.
Players often forget about the extra blink and don’t get much value from the talent. Or, if you are bad at landing your bombs, You can just pick ItaHP until you get more consistent.
Oh no, they are VERY different. L&L is picked the most because out of the three, it deals the most damage if you’re consistent with your activation. It also synergizes with “Ricochet”
Focus fire is the worse option. You get no bonus if you switch targets, which you will do often, and you also get no bonus if you reload. I prefer to have my talents all the time.
“Sleight of Hand” is the best option if you don’t want to use brainpower on constantly reloading, or if you’re picking “Pulse Rounds” level 10.
Then you want to go with “Tracer rounds”
When you’re playing with teamates who know what they’re doing, you should never have to worry about waveclear. And “Heavy Handed” is a better option.
Thank you for the input. I probably should mention that I didn’t intent this to be a very serious thread. and every once in a while it’s nice to have a discussion other than someone hating mirrow ARAM or the matchmaker. I’m just having really mixed feelings about some of her talents and in particular lvl 20. Like are the low picks actually decent or as much trash as they look like?
Never said my builds weren’t all over the place . Ricochet is nice, sure, but I dislike how it draws aggro when you try to finish a building.
The requirement to play a mind-numbingly tedious minigame kinda kills it for me. Just because the damage is better doesn’t make it a “good” talent. I much prefer the simpler faster reload as I’m under the impression that the Bomb charges with attacks, not damage dealt.
I’m a low ELO QM player (Probably should’ve started with that in the OP…), I trust my team mates to hit minions about as far as I can throw the Pulse Bomb (I never go Pulse Rounds).
Tracer’s Lvl 20 are weird. Chrono trigger I’ve always considered to be a bad talent. No one should waste blinks to get a damage buff. Though it should be mentionned that it does NOT have anti-Synergy with Focus fire. If you picked Focus Fire, even though you don’t reload, your 10th bullet will be treated as your last bullet and be empowered (But you still shouldn’t pick Focus Fire)
“Get stuffed” can be the talent you want if you picked “Pulse Rounds” at 10.
You may also want to pick it if your bomb keeps getting countered by shields. In which case, they can’t do it after 20 since it detonates on impact. The displacement also gives you access to new plays. Like when I get fed up with a Medhiv’s crap. I stick a bomb on him as soon as he’s out of his portal, and push him into my team, and he never gets to touch that doorknob again. You can also use it to peel for allies. In a double healer comp, I think I’d always go for this.
Also, if you triple blink, push an enemy back then recall. They should be pushed about where you teleport back to.
Total recall is my usual pick, because it fits my playstyle and I consider it one of the best 20. It mitigates Tracer’s biggest weaknes. her healthpool. You can trade with an enemy and let them think they’re winning, then recall and reset your healthbar. You stay in fights longer, and you require less babysitting by your healer.
Composition B kind of synergizes with Sticky bomb. But it’s kind of weak for a Lvl 20 talent. And without CC, the 2nd bomb almost never hits.
I don’t feel that is is a must pick. Ricochet has the downside of having the forts and keeps always target you, because your shots will always bounce to a hero, and structures give you a CRAZY bounce AoE. So you actualy lose dps by having to back off constantly.
That’s correct. That why I was saying that “Sleight of Hand” Synergizes with "Pulse Rounds" (I accidentaly typed Locked and Loaded instead of SoA, will edit that.) If you Do have Pluse rounds and Get stuffed though, you’re throwing bombs all the time.
Personally, there are so many times where I use recall without being in melee range of an enemy hero, plus the fact that due to the trajectory, the bomb often doesn’t hit, even when you’re hugging them, that I would often not get value from it.
When playing with non-clueless players, Tracer rounds increases dps over all because everyone on your team can keep attacking a target that would usually be out of vision.
And Double W is great for everything except scenarios where the enemy team has so much CC that you can’t stay engaged long enough to connect two Ws.
(My usual pick is usuallyOne-Two punch, but Tracer rounds actually holds the highest win rate among non-potatoes.
At 4, everything except Pulse Generator is under50%
I was surprised, but Sticky bomb actually wins quite a lot more than other options. 58% WR.
At 20, Composition B actually has the highest WR. but is is NOT picked very often lol. (More than Chrono triggers though)Get stuffed and Total recall have about the same WR. Though recall is picked more.
Well, that stat is too high to be a fluke. It’s over 486 games. I admit I default to Quantum spike so often that I haven’t played it very much.
It doesn’t matter, you still have twice your HP, while removing poison and such. It has the same win rate as get stuffed so we can’t call that noob bait. These numbers are from Plat, diamond and masters only.
I’m preparing myself a Tracer breakdown post rework that is been stuck in the drafts but I can certainly chime in to give my perspectives.
Healthpack is very safe but also weak in combat situations which the other does pretty exceptionally, if you are concerned about health restoration too much then out of combat soaking is enough to restore a large chunk without the need to go deep on regen globe or fountain farming, this talent used to be in my opinion only beneficial when Tracer players wanted to exploit a bug with vehicles getting healed by the regen globe when collected (which is insane health being instantly returned).
Pulse Generator does a lot of things if you can think outside of the box and get creative with it, first of all Pulse Rounds (level 10 upgrade) makes it so you can reach targets with a 4th blink to instantly kill (with level 20 melee) or apply pressured DPS to make sure they die from the damage, your range threat becomes bigger, flexible and easier to utilize.
You can also use it to escape better if you need the extra blink, if you avoid damage its certainly far better than counting on health pack, in general, this is borderline must pick 99% of the time becomes it enables Tracer to do a lot of things at the risk of actually hitting it, and if you do you have your opener.
Level 4 AA giga situational where you are ironically playing a solo lane an assumption where you are coordinating in SL for such thing too.
I agree, level 7 is garbage, but you also got this entirely wrong, very very wrong.
Locked and Loaded does the best DPS for Tracer and does a lot of damage for little to risk, the catch? Click literally after ~0.375 seconds.
Sleight of Hand does the best Pulse Charging if you need a lot of bombs more and less AA, also damage increase is ~24% not 20%.
Overall Locked and Loaded does a lot more because it has better synergy with Ricochet which means you get 1.4 * (average) 1.6 results in healing from AA by 225% from none buffed auto attacks which does a lot during combat.
Focus Fire has the highest DPS potential if one condition met: You have 4 stacks on Untouchable. But a lot of this damage is extremely conditional and Focus Fire suffers from a lot of anti-synergies to benefit its full potential, and tunnel visioning on one target usually does not help in keep this damage efficiently.
Get Stuffed keeps being noted as one of the strongest level 20 talents in the game for a very good reason, it nullifies an ultimate that is easy to counter to immediately become unpredictable while doubling how much charge you are getting and put people out of position for easy kills, you might as well get your next pulse bomb so quickly without them knowing because of this, it does so much at once it can be picked in any of the builds regardless.
Total Recall is fine if you feel you are being focused a lot, but it has the habit to bait recall earlier, too earlier, normally its the pick when you notice unnecessary burst damage or lack the healer to compensate for such burst. In general if you play and kite well with her and play flanking points (as in not with the team, but from the side lanes) really well to a point you force the enemy to use their abilities and get them wasted then there’s legitimately not a lot of reasons to pick Total Recall over Get Stuffed because you are doing your job.
Composition B is a very bad talent, I’ve tried giving Chrono Tigger justice but unfortunately does legitimately nothing great to make it worth picking, sure you don’t reload for 1 second meaning your DPS going from 5 auto attacks per second (because of reload time is always fixed 0.75) to 8 auto attacks per second is a lot of damage with the assumption that you are attempting to kite, dodge the attack and counter attack by using that window to keep attacking which is very unrealistic.
Wouldn’t say I’m that wrong. LnL is inarguably the most damaging talent but I take issue how unfitting it is in a MOBA. Obviously Gears of War has been an influence here but there your magazine lasted a bit longer than 2 seconds. And then there is also the opportunity cost. Humans can only do so much and react only to so many stimuli. If you are constantly engaging in tedious busywork to eke out a few more bits of damage you are more likely to miss something important, that might get you killed even.
The point I’m trying to make is that giving the choice to gain more power at the cost of being miserable is more suited to Faustian stories than game development. So I’d rather have LnL goand be replaced with Chrono Triggers. Bad talent goes to give a chance to another.
Also, tooltip says SoH is 20%, but I don’t mind it being more if that’s the case.
I suppose we could explain this with low sample size skewing the average. Or maybe contrary to everything said it’s actually sleeper OP?
I’m sorry to sound harsh, but it sounds to me like a you issue more than something that would justify that LnL needs any sort of help for any QoL changes. Just practice it on a Custom Games (not try mode, try mode has no server lag) and you will get used to it eventually.
I don’t think that’s particularly harsh as this most definitely is a me issue since almost everything I’ve written are opinion pieces and are backed by no evidence other than pure conjecture.
If you think LnL is fine in it’s current form and you enjoy using the talent, I respect that opinion as it is equally valid.
That being said I have no intention of using LnL in the foreseeable future as it lessens my enjoyment of the game more than I value my chances of winning.
A big slow will raise your dps, because you get to attack your target longer, and so does your team. It also gives you a peel tool. Your team mates not dying also helps you win more.
Me too. I love it. I play a lot of QM which doesn’t always have a healer. This keeps me in the game.
Screw the haters, i pick focus fire. The number of times i dont trigger the focus fire bonus, is about equal to the number of times ill fail to miss the reload on Lock n loaded. Yes it’s a me problem, but 35% dmg vs 40% is worth the downgrade to not have the stress.
Im a Get Stuffed kinda guy. Blast back aside, the extra 10% charge per hit is very noticeable. I like that Total Recall is a late game talent because it allows me time to ask the question, “Have the enemy team actually been a threat to me?”
. Ricochet is nice, sure, but I dislike how it draws aggro when you try to finish a building.
