Tyrande PTR Feedback

General Discussion
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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 doesn’t help this issue, easier to land CDR helps (e.g. an AA range increase).

Change 3 – Trueshot Aura nerf (no good)

· 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 burstiness of 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 bugs me 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. If there’s no hope of keeping Shooting Star, then adding an additional CDR mechanic (e.g. CDR on an owl miss, CDR on AA, or a simple 2 second CDR reduction) would actually increase the total number of owls seen, thus matching the Talent name of “Sentinel**s**” better, and feel slightly more palatable.

‘

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 max potential 80%/216 extra healing every 2nd heal (a 40% hps increase), it is barely half as effective as Anduin’s similarly restrictive 15% heal boost & 40% CDR L1 Talent (a 76.3% hps increase). Tyrande heals at L1 are awful, she needs a strong L4 to claw herself out of the dumpster depths, which makes it 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 30 seconds while Mark of Mending heals 56(Tracer)-121(Stitches) in an AoE every 0.75 seconds for 4-infinite(L13) 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 Storm League 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…

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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.

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No, the whole update sucks. If I wanna play quests I d play Diablo.

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They are buffs (stronger than the ones I suggested), and I like T buffs, and more dings are always fun, so those aspects I agree are great. However a buff in one area comes with a cost – a loss of buff, or a nerf, to another area. Blizz’s buffs addressed her overall underperformance, which is good, but they have some negatives…

· The buffs didn’t address her feast or famine situation. A buff applied to more AA CDR at L1 (as opposed to buffs targeting other areas) is going to make her feast harder but still fail hard. When she loses, she gets rolled out of AA range and loses hard, which is frustrating for everyone involved. She has no real Talent choices to significantly counter this scenario in-game. My self-survival themed buff recommendations to Everlasting Light, Kaldorei Resistance, Quickening Blessing, and base attack range would provide a higher impact in a losing situation, where she’s getting rolled, than in a winning situation where she’s rolling.

· The buffs don’t address inconsistencies with her original WarCraft character and comparative aspects. Why can’t she baseline shoot as far as herself (or a normal NE archer) in WC3 and match the likes of Hanzo? Why is she out-ranged by the AAs of a SC marine and high templar? Why is the leader of a race that emphasizes mobility slower than Alexstraza, Ana, Anduin, Brightwing, Lt. Morales, Malfurion, Uther, and Whitemane? Why doesn’t she have 20 spell armor? She heals off Marked targets, why doesn’t Mark of Mending benefit her?

· The buffs didn’t increase usage of one of the most iconic abilities in the game, Sentinel. The opposite happened, as L1 Moonlit Arrows trumps L1 Ranger in every serious game, owl’s +1 pierce takes forever to generate, and L20 Commander of Sentinels, aside from being bland, can’t compete with the other options (Eyes of the Huntress doesn’t exist).

· The buffs created more of an imbalance between Talents, instead of reducing that imbalance (they slightly improved the L4 Everlasting Light situation, but we’ve lost choice at L1, L13, and L16).

I’m also a fan of any form of T buffs and flare build was my favorite build as well. Outside of never seeing L20 Shooting Star again, flare build was buffed though… The damage and utility largely remain the same while healing was increased. But placing a solid healing talent against 2 nerfed damage talents isn’t a choice and owl build, which was already the weakest build, got weaker compared to alternatives, so variety was reduced.

Spell Power synergizes the same with L4 Mark of Mending and L4 Elune’s Chosen as it does with L4 Everlasting Light, so there’s nothing special there making healing unusually massive. Starfall does synergize with Everlasting Light, but that relationship hasn’t been impacted by the patch. The new L1 Moonlit Arrows uniquely boosted Everlasting Light a bit, but this isn’t going to take Everlasting Light out of “do not pick” tier. Single-target burst damage healing/prevention is vastly superior to a talent that only offers improved disbursed healing. Most Abilities/Talents show this benefit ratio at about 2 or 3 to 1 (50 targeted healing = 100 or 150 disbursed healing). Everlasting Light does nothing for single-target healing but it’s hps benefit is still multiple times less than its L4 competitors, which do increase single-target healing. To compete with Elune’s Chosen in hps, at a 1:1 ratio, Light of Elune would need to be refreshed every 2.25 seconds, at a 2:1 ratio we would need a CD refresh every 1.125 seconds. Mark of Mending, healing only an allied Tracer, at a 1:1 ratio, would need a refresh every 3.86 seconds and a refresh every 1.92 seconds at a 2:1 ratio to compete. It takes 7 uninterrupted AAs and 5.5 seconds to generate a CD refresh for Light of Elune (6 AAs and 4.5 seconds with L1 Moonlit Arrows).

I agree this was an overall buff and having L1 Lunar Blaze baseline gives that great ding fun to every build, which is great. But a healer going for damage talents instead of a heal talent likely won’t be the optimal talent pick nor viewed well by the team outside of top Storm League. For the niche Storm League use, you’re looking at delayed access to 30% Lunar Flare range, much delayed access to +1 owl pierce, slightly lower Lunar Flare damage, and a weaker L20 in exchange for extra damage via the nerfed versions of Trueshot or Ranger. Still an overall boost but I wouldn’t call it a silly-leveled boost.

I agree that L20 Shooting Star was out of balance, in every tourney broadcast I watched with T, it was universally picked, even without the other Lunar Flare talents to support it. Increasing base AA range by 0.5 and subtracting 0.5 AA range from L20 Shooting Star would have encouraged the same effect to make L20 Celestial Wrath and L20 Iceblade Arrows viable picks.

That is a synergy I initially missed, moving CDR to L1 means it can now interact with L7 Kaldorei Resistance, keeping it up for a greater percentage of time on targets. So thanks for pointing that out (I love me some synergies). Kaldorei still has problems though.

· Tyrande’s current meta niche at top Storm League levels is to lock down and burst targets and prevent burst. These exchanges happen in a few seconds, getting a quicker refresh (unless you can get it in 2 seconds to refresh the Kaldorei duration), after the exchange has already been completed, isn’t going to bring much additional value (my Kaldorei recommendation would have been a massive consistency boost at the cost of peak performance).

· She has no other talents that reward you for spamming heals on a single target, so there is no real synergy. Everlasting Light, Quickening Blessing, and Celestial Attunement all promote the opposite, they encourage tactical dispersed heals and their benefit is mostly or entirely wasted if you spam heals on one target (hence my recommendation to change Kaldorei into another dispersed healing talent, which will add synergy, weaken her current high-end meta niche, and open up other areas for buffs to improve her for regular use).

· T already has a hard time with the numbers game & Spell Armor doesn’t show on the stats. Getting locked into a 2nd non-visible utility talent when she already has weak output isn’t fun and increases the risk of frustration when your team is losing. “You only healed for half of their healer!”, “but I reduced damage by 20% during important moments!” =/ So I’d rather see buffs go to other areas instead of Kaldorei.

Yeah, I absolutely agree this change was bad. Someone else posted she currently sits at #12 of 16 in healer AA dps, which is just dumb =/ Reducing the aura to 30% and keeping T’s permanent 30% AA would have been more tolerable.

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Personally, I don’t want a pinnacle quest on a damaging stun.

But that’s just me.

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