Tychus: Master Assassin

General Discussion
21

ITR is mainly good when you have a healer on your team, as then you can take the armor talent instead.

And even against heavy sustain enemies, taking them quickly to 35% hp gives them a low enough healthpool to be at risk.

Most of the uses i currently see for MA are to aid him in QM. But not in draft. But for QM tychus is already lacking at many aspects. So a MA buff there isnt going to harm, while in draft MA is generaly the bad talent to take (or you took tychus at a bad moment).

Titan grenade. 5% of max hp, and 250 damage at level 0 values.
Zuljin has 1800hp at level 1. That is enough to deal 15% of his max hp as damage. This gives a lot of finishing potential.

And tychus without the damage bonus does still quite some damage. Its not like his damage suddenly goes below 1% of someone’s max hp. His damage against zuljin is generaly about 5%dps hp anyway (obviously a lower percentage against high health targets).

Tychus can also chase the target with overkill (which does about 25% of zuljins max hp over 4 seconds), which makes finishing a target easier than you expect.

The last 35% arent as hard as you might expect. And forcing them to hearth is often still a win situation. And keeping the enemy healer busy means the healer cannot heal other targets.
Not killing the target does not mean it is bad damage. If you negate the effectiveness of 1 player, you already traded perfectly fine. And if you negate 2 (by keeping the healer busy aswel) its a win.

Thats why TBTA is dangerous, and why the treshold reduction from 40% to 35% was a quite significant buff. It made the killing potential a lot larger.

2 Likes
22

:smiley: just asked Cris on his stream when he played Tychus, when should you pick Master Assassin.

The answer was quite short:
“Never.”

23

Who is Cris and why should we care about his opinion?

2 Likes
24

Just want to point out a few statistics:

  • Master Assassin is the least popular at 4
  • Master Assassin has the highest winrate at 4
  • Odin is the more popular Heroic
  • Laser has the higher winrate

Conclusion: Tychus is niche, but both ults are good and MA at 4 is viable/pickable.

Edit: these statistics are Master-only ofc. Checked with last 4 patches and all.

3 Likes
25

He is former pro player (Dignitas, ROCCAT, Liquid, Zealots and Roll20esports), an assassin main, a GM player for years, currently GM#2.

I like to watch him on twitch, to improve my own play with ranged assassins.
And he plays Tychus quite often.

26

While I agree with this it does not take a genius to understand that the last 35% is easier to take down with Master Assassin compared to The Bigger They Are

Thank you

This is what I’ve been trying to tell them

27

They are secretly afraid of buffing the talent because it already makes Tychus’ Odin form quite powerful due to the fact that the odin also has its attack buffed just like tychus himself. Still they need to maybe add a passive effect to it maybe a very slight increase to default auto attack range or a 10% maxhealth buff considering it is a quite underwhelming talent for sure.

28

A few additional things im interested at though.

How much does the winrate for MA compare to its pickrate. Since if its a 2% higher winrate and only a 10% pickrate in total. Its very likely its higher winrate is purely because of its pickrate.
People that are less skilled at a hero, are often taking the more popular talents.

And i also wonder, what the average level is in which such talent causes a win, but im not sure if thats being recorded in those sites/stats. Which might indicate when those talents start to show themselve. If a talent consistently makes a round take several minutes longer, but creates a higher winrate with that, it might show that the talent performs even before it becomes optimal.

And i would also wonder how often MA gets combined with odin, and if that would affect winrates. But again im afraid thats asking for too much details.

i wont blame you for that though. You already took enough effort for this post already to even look up the stats. But my experience says that plain stats sometimes dont tell the entire story on why a certain talent gets a high winrate.

Its just like (although more excessive - and note, this is an example, i havent looked at the stats of the talents and winrates) varians Shattering Throw which has a slightly inflated winrate in QM due to randomly facing a fenix and making the life of fenix a hell in that game. Even if it shows a sub 50% winrate, its very likely caused by people incorrectly taking this talent, or not being able to use it. While if its winrate is 60% in draft, its very likely caused by its hard counter potential.

29

You don’t understand how the talent works, do you ?! , What I mean is swapping the progression requirement with the final reward resulting in 1% increase per take down for 10 take downs + 15% bonus at quest completion resulting in the same 25% end result

1 Like
30

Master Assassin is 3-5% higher than the second highest.
And if the other talents are dragged down by the ppl who didn’t Master Tychus than it means that for some reason the experienced Tychus mains pick this talent despite some (even streamers/pros) say this is bad/should be avoided.

And yes, sadly HeroesProfile can’t fill more of your(/our) curiosity.

1 Like
31

That’s not what I’ve experienced. Some heroes just don’t want to die. They keep on living on the brink of death. So I rather not risk it with TBTA.

32

Exactly

Sometimes just getting them to low health is not enough

33

The reason most tychus players win those games is simply because they are a better tychus. Maining a hero can easily cause you to get a 10% higher average than the rest on that hero.

When they take MA, they might be less likely to lose such match. And compensate a lot on that. But at the same time, it could be that plenty of players are just dragging the numbers down.

I suspect that MA on those tychus mains is a talent that still performs less optimal, but not as bad as when a non tychus main would take it. As for MA you need to be sure that in the midgame you can still cover your weakness while you are working on obtaining that 25%. And a main can definitely force that (especialy at master level).

But its a result i did expected on that. And 3-5% is not excessive in both directions.

Also, heroesprofile actualy has the average gametime stat. Which for tychus barely varies acros the 3 talents.

Im more amazed at how many people seem to perform bad with TBTA despite its popularity. That talent is in most cases 4% behind the other 2 (ITR is acros many skill levels somewhat equal towards MA), while having a pickrate well above MA. But then, neosteel coating has that similar issue.

Im guessing that people are too blindly resolving towards talent orders, where they are incorrectly advised to take TBTA in most cases (If you have a healer ITR is usualy better as you arent going to depend on TTS, but at the same time, maybe thats also why its winrate is low). And adding to that, TBTA makes you unable to finish off a tank and restricts you to the lower health heroes on that, while i would suspect many to take it because they can deal more damage towards those heroes.

Only when you include silver/bronze, it appears that MA is starting to get overtaken by ITR (while TBTA cripples to an absolute horrible winrate… although, im not surprised there considering that people often dont know when to run away there)

But yes, thats speculation. By the stats there MA seems to perform better on average than i expected.

34

from the budding point from Alias it sounded like you were either implying make the quest 10 takedowns for 40% attack speed gain(which would get nerfed) but i assumed you had said to reduce the requirement from 15 to 10 and make it 10% with a 5% bonus upon completion… making a 15% bonus AS. So I misinterpreted what you were saying.
I do understand how the talent works but i didn’t understand what you meant. thanks for clarifying.

1 Like
35

Tychus Master Assassin feat is, without a doubt, the WORST TALENT EVER.

36

I’ve seen teams reach 13 without a single kill.
I’ve ended games as TLV/Murky without a single death.
It’s relatively easy to complete in ARAM, possible in QM, but rather unlikely in SL.

Doubtful. That extra second is usually wasted, as the enemy doesn’t often stick around for the full base trait.
MA also affects normal attack, and attacks against non-heroes.
It’s bad because of how hard it is to increase, not because the reward isn’t good.

Thankfully.
You don’t have much of a window to use your trait, so you better be able to get value out of his other abilities. I rarely use it, except to really punish bad positioning. Focusing too much on it just puts ME in a bad position.

Overkill does 552 base damage to the target, that’s like 2 Tracer Pulse Bombs.
Add in Frag Grenade, which itself does near Pulse Bomb levels of damage, and you can easily destroy people without using your trait at all.

I’ll still sometimes take MA, simply because I often open with Minigun/Grenades because they’re far safer, which reduces the value of TBTA, and ITR is just kind of just bad.

2 Likes
37

I rarely play Tychus outside of a few times in ARAM so I’m only here to say that I have nothing to say.

Yes, this post is entirely pointless.

1 Like
38

These situations are the exception and not the norm especially in Storm League

Not entirely

Seems to me like you felt left out and wanting to say something out of loneliness

You can only amuse yourself with your Mirror Images for so long Samuro :stuck_out_tongue:

39

No not really.
You always want to minimize your deaths (and that’s why I tend Longboat rather than Play Again)

People die less often in Storm league so your comment seems even more strange.
You’ll get some games where people die immediately, but those are the ones that aren’t so common.

1 Like
40

I feel a passive buff would help the talent. Perhaps a hp boost or even a CDR to one of his abilities.