Tyrande PTR Feedback

General Discussion
1

Tyrande is my 2nd most-played hero. Here’s my feedback on the PTR changes.

I admittedly miss the power owl olden days of yore, but her current kit is nicely balanced against itself. Most talents have a place and there’s a few fun ways for talent synergies to flow into each other. L1 you’re picking your type of damage, L4 is heals, L7 is CDR, L13 affects movement speed – everything is in harmony, a little tepid, but… pleasant.

Change 1 – Mythic Lunar Flare (meh)

· Everyone knows owl. There’s an old legend that back before recorded history a single owl sniped an Abathur, Murky, and a couple Vikings from across the map. For awesome, mythic shenanigans, owl seems like it would be the perfect pick. FanHOTS stated similar during his patch notes stream. I’m good with Lunar Flare charging up an eventually awesome owl though. I do like the mana refund on a hit idea.

Change 2 – Moonlit Arrows moved to L1 (no good)

· Ranger gets nerfed, Trueshot Aura gets nerfed, Lunar Blaze gets removed. Moonlit Arrows is now the undisputed strongest L1 talent, which will make Tyrande stronger, but there won’t be a real choice at L1 anymore. Instead of pitting damage against damage, you’re pitting a solid heal talent against weakened damage talents.

· This also doesn’t alleviate her current issue that’s getting her despised as a teamy in QMs. In games that aren’t going well, she’s too easy to bully into ineffectiveness. You’re winning? You get your AAs in and you perform acceptably. You’re losing? You can’t AA anything, you can’t heal, your team gets frustrated, and you lose hard. More CDR on the autos you can’t land don’t help this issue, easier to land CDR helps (e.g. a range increase).

Change 3 – Trueshot Aura nerf (meh)

· If you wanted to nerf Trueshot, swapping the 40% activatable aura with the 30% non-stacking passive would be better (so 40% passive, 30% non-stacking activatable aura). This would both nerf the ability and increase congruity with WC3 (which had a permanent 30% aura).

Change 4 – Elune’s Gift at L7 (no good)

· L7 was the ‘choose your CDR’ tier (consistent, un-fancy CDR with Moonlit Arrows or challenging and bursty fancy CDR with Huntress’s Fury). Replacing Moonlit Arrows with Elune’s Gift throws off that existing balance, which is a slightly sad meh.

· What’s worse is: before your Lunar Flare and your Hunter’s Mark builds synergized perfectly together (woo L13 Ranger’s Mark). Now you have 2 talents at the same level fighting for the same synergy, which is abrasive.

Change 5 – Commander of Sentinels (meh)

· An L20 to have a single extra charge on one ability… not very exciting. I think Shooting Star L20 + Mythic owl is the way to go instead of the other way around.

‘

I posted a wall of text on how to fix Tyrande in the wrong forum, here’s the core of that post. Some minor prods to her weakest talents, a few oddity corrections, and a 0.5 range increase is really all she needs. Ideas 1-8 could be implemented without risk and should be universally well received.

Tyrande Talent Tweaks

1.

What’s really bad – Everlasting Light (L4 Talent) – Make Light of Elune also heal Tyrande for 15% of its healing to allies and increase the 2nd conditional heal bonus from 80% to 85%.

· A nod to the original HotS Tyrande & synergizes with a “spread the love/can’t AA without dying” Talent theme we’ll be rolling with.

· This Talent is bad. With a potential 80%/216 extra healing every 2nd heal (a 40% hps increase if you heal a different target every 2nd heal), it is less than half as effective as Anduin’s similarly restrictive 15% heal boost & 40% CD refund L1 Talent (a 95% hps increase). Tyrande heals at L1 are awful, she needs a strong L4 to claw herself out of the dumpster depths, so this talent is even worse when compared against her other two L4 Talents. Elune’s Chosen heals 96/125(Trueshot) on a target every 0.75 seconds for 8 seconds every 45 seconds while Mark of Mending heals 56(Tracer)-121(Stitches) in an AoE every 0.75 seconds for 4-infinite seconds every 20 seconds.

· This talent is the only “do not pick” talent for Tyrande on Icy Veins.

2.

What’s dumb – Lunar Blaze (L1 Talent) – Change it from receiving zero reward on quest completion to granting an additional 15% Lunar Flare range boost on quest completion.

· This is one of the hardest skill shots to make, getting the “wooo! you completed the quest!!” message, when the result is your Lunar Flare just lost its ability to grow stronger, is dumb.

· Blizz references Tyrande as the “leader” & “most deadly warrior” of “a … race that emphasizes mobility, ranged firepower”.

3.

What else is dumb – Eyes of the Huntress (L20 Talent) – Give Tyrande 30% move speed while stealthed from this ability.

· Want to pull off an awesome, coordinated team hunt? Have fun doing it at base move speed. Casting knocks her off her mount, remounting removes the stealth, which is dumb. Let her run around at mount speed while stealthed with this L20 talent. The other L20s will still be the better choice ~99% of the time, but can throw noobs a small bone when they make the wrong choice.

· The “leader” & “most deadly warrior” of “a … race that emphasizes mobility, ranged firepower”.

4.

And what else is dumb – Mark of Mending (L4 Talent) – Have it heal Tyrande the same amount (4%) it heals her allies (a 2% increase, since she already has a base of 2% on marked targets).

· She’s already healing off autos, having this talent affect everyone but her just feels odd.

· Elune’s Chosen is the go-to talent for this level (and it will still be).

5.

What’s bad – Kaldorei Resistance (L7 Talent) – Change it from 10 stacking spell armor for 2 seconds to 10 non-stacking spell armor for 4 seconds and permanent 20 spell armor for Tyrande.

· This matches Elune’s Grace’s 20% magic damage reduction on WC3 NE Archers.

· I realize this talent already gets picked at top levels for its anti-burst potential, so this change would dilute that niche usage, but it would increase general usefulness at other levels.

· Fits our new “spread the love/can’t AA w/o dying” themes and her original “less efficient to heal self” mechanic.

6.

What else is bad – Quickening Blessing (L13 Talent) – Increase the permanent 5% speed self-buff to 10%.

· 12 of the 15 other healers have better movement-speed boosting talents.

· You can take the 5% move speed from giant-antler-headed-old-guy’s L13 insane 24%-30% speed boost.

· The “leader” & “most deadly warrior” of “a … race that emphasizes mobility, ranged firepower”.

· Fits our “spread the love/can’t AA w/o dying” themes and her original “less efficient to heal self” mechanic.

7.

What interferes with gameplay identity – Sentinel (Ability) – Decrease mana cost from 50 to 35 (or give a mana refund on a miss).

· Her owl is one of the most iconic abilities in the game and should be seen more.

· Rexxar’s bird only costs 40 mana, does 17.5% more damage, adds a 30% slow, and starts with infinite pierce.

· Noobs don’t watch the mini-map and pros know where everyone is without needing vision. Vision isn’t un-useful, but in most situations this is a 50-mana, Ability-slot-occupying, skillshot Auto Attack on a 15 second cooldown. The value given doesn’t justify the cost.

8.

What’s not consistent – Attack Range (Base Stat) – Increase from 6 to 6.5.

· In WC3, the average hero Attack Range was 6. T2 Night Elf archers had 7. Tyrande’s/PotM’s T2 Searing Arrows had 7. Bump up her base Attack Range to 1 higher than the average HotS Attack Range of 5.5 for consistency with WC3 numbers (and to match Hanzo, Nova, Ana, Raynor, & Tass) then nerf Shooting Star’s (L20 Talent) Attack Range bonus from 1 to 0.5 (it gets selected too much).

· Talents that boost range are common, allowing the majority of ranged heroes to outrange Tyrande with their autos (and spells…) until she hits 20.

· The “leader” & “most deadly warrior” of “a … race that emphasizes mobility, ranged firepower”.

· FanHOTS approved.

9.

What makes for awesome moments – Ranger (L1 Talent) – MOGA. Bring back the infinite pierce and make owl great again.

· Adjust Harsh Moonlight (L13 Talent) and Empower (L16 Talent) accordingly, as owl would be broken with them in their current iteration (maybe reduce Empower from 6% to 5% bonus damage and make Harsh Moonlight reduce Spell Power only, instead of reducing all damage – this would fit NE lore with their distaste for magic and create an anti-caster theme when paired with Kaldorei Resistance). You could also increase owl mana cost (+15?) and/or reduce the radius bonus with Ranger or make base owl harder to land by slowing it down.

· Or could make owl a Mythic quest! +1 pierce at 30 hits, +2 pierce at 60 hits, infinite pierce (and owl CDR on miss?) at 100 hits. (Mythic owl is FanHOTS approved too). Ideas ideas…

· Those 4-5x owl hits from back in the day were exciting when they happened.

· This would also mesh with our “can’t AA anything without dying” build theme (big owl plays for CDR).

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Yeah, I’m also quite unhappy with the changes. I think they could’ve made her a pinnacle hero with owl, flare and aa or heal builds, chosen on level 1, instead of giving her a baseline flare quest, which for some reason also improves the owl…
I kind a started writing a rework concept around that idea, but was mostly writing individual talents, which sounded cool and didn’t really have an overarching vision for the whole thing, so I stopped to think of a more coherent concept :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m quite optimistic about her changes personally.
At first i was upset that flare build (my main build by far) was nerfed. The more i thought about it tho, the more I warmed up to it and the massive boost in build verity I think this is gonna give her.
Spell power + Everlasting Light and Starfall is going to be some massive healing. Flare talents being baselined means you have have that and Ranger at level 1 which will make from silly follow up damage from a healer. No longer needing to take Shooting Star at 20 means your now free to grab upgraded Starfall or Iceblade Arrows, both of which were awesome talents that just fell short of Shooting Star in my opinion. Being able to take Moonlit Arrows along side Kaldorei Resistance is also a great consistency boost to the spell armor.

The only part I’m still not onboard with is taking away Trueshot Aura’s passive attack damage boost for Tyrande her self. I also feel that an extra owl charge at is pretty meh.

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Saying all of that when her Owl is supposed to be used for scouting is truly something…

5

Starfall is definitely at the tops of broken upgrade that can change games really fast, disgusting 60% slow like damn.

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It’s a style of writing where you attempt to mix in a few curves here and there to showcase wit in an effort to keep readers engaged for longer periods through walls of facts/numbers. The tip-off was citing the Ability adjective of “bird” as pertinent, as whether or not an ability is related to birds is irrelevant to gameplay.

A legitimate deep-dive into a number-based factual analyses of the value of Sentinel would be… difficult. Not only would you need to directly compare other innate pure scouting abilities (e.g. Sonic Arrow, Wisp, Eye of Kilrogg), but you have scouting talents you can spec into (e.g. Flare, Oracle, Timewalker’s Pursuit), and then you have abilities whose primary purpose isn’t scouting, but still can provide significant scouting if used as such (e.g. Toxic Nest, Time Trap, Mirror Image, Holo Decoy), and if you just want to bush check, a common use of owl, Magic Missiles, Sand Blast, and 30+ other abilities are good enough to get that job done.

So instead of attempting to provide a thorough, mind-numbing, post-derailing breakdown of the value of owl, I went with “that bird is better than this bird”. Which is using different words and a single comparator to state that the ability underperforms.

The most direct serious comparison of abilities might be Hanzo’s 50-mana scouting ability (Lunara’s is free), but Hanzo does good damage despite it, while Tyrande’s damage is currently slightly above average for healers and her healing is around worst in class. Hanzo doing damage and being able to scout is unilaterally accepted, but if Tyrande is brought up the reason frequently argued for her lack of numbers is, “But she can scout!!!”. Another way to evaluate it: if you dropped in any Ability in the place of owl, would Tyrande be more valued on a team? With almost anything, the answer is yes.

Everyone knows Tyrande scouts, her owl is one of the most iconic abilities in the game, it’s her theme, it should be visible. Adding value to one area of a kit means value needs to be taken out of another (assuming the kit was already balanced). Reducing the mana cost of Sentinel (directly or via a conditional refund) is the simplest and least impactful way to make her owl more a part of the game without creating a risk of imbalance within the game.

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Unless you get a kill with it. Then it resets and you can do both.

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I also do not like the nerf to trueshot.
Blizz please consider reverting the nerf to tyrandes Huntress’s Fury talent. The splash dmg to minions/mercs helped her fill a gap in her team if they lacked wave clear, or if tyrande had to solo lane.
I also miss tyrandes quest that increase the duration of hunters mark after autoing heroes.