All these people talking about “diving Towers” are being disingenuous.
This change never harmed typical Tower divers. On the contrary, the loss of the Fort and Keep slows made typical Tower divers like Illidan, Tracer, Genji, and even less obvious heroes like CS/TBF Varian, Samuro, and Butcher, better at diving than before.
The heroes actually affected by the changes are pushing heroes, heroes whose job it is to shove the lane if they can and then use the minion wave to distract the defending Towers and heroes. Those heroes, like Valla, Malthael, Xul, Artanis, Thrall, etc, are the ones most impacted by the Tower changes because they could no longer safely push.
So the whole idea of stopping Tower diving was actually undermined by this change in the first place.
That’s their job. To soak damage for their squishier, higher-damage-output teammates.
If a Fort is not defended, a 4-5 man deathball should absolutely be able to take it. You, the player, are supposed to be there to defend your structures, not the other way around.
Darak already said it. This is HotS, not some other game.
And even in LoL, a group of players can take down an undefended Turret easily if they have a Tank or Bruiser who built armor.
They basically said that already. They want to keep the structure aggro, they just want to change it to something acceptable, so not like it was before.
Their whole point was basically that they like the aggro changes and they don’t want to take it out of the game. They tested the game again without it and they just don’t see it anymore. They just want to change it to be good and not too aggressive.
Hmm. Well, hopefully they can actually make the new Towers acceptable without making them actually useless. I’ve warned that there’s a fine line between those two with this mechanic, so hopefully they’ll be able to toe it.
Tanks should be able to hold tower aggro for a reasonable period, as that is their job. Creating space for their team to kill something, whether it be a hero, a structure, or a boss, is the primary reason you draft a tank. Not being able to survive under fire from a structure felt as strange as it would be to die from tanking a boss for 3 seconds on Cursed Hollow.
I do think anything that can be tanked should require the tank to use their kit intelligently, or have a healer on hand, you shouldn’t be able to park next to something and just eat hits while tabbed out watching YouTube. Bosses, structures, and an enemy team should be threatening to a tank, but not fatal in the first few seconds.
So far, the changes seem to be a decent compromise, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a return of the slow to deter just anyone from tanking structures.
Huh… So the tower change which only punishes tanks and bruisers should stay… The classes that definitely aren’t OP for the most part and almost no one plays. The anomaly is a failure, it should be reverted or we need a base redesign to accommodate this new feature. They didn’t even think it through far enough to make objectives take precedence over heroes when the base is getting it’s butt kicked in.
The agro towers only affect melee classes and those that can’t get in and out fast… Just bruisers and tanks. It’s a stupid poorly thought out sweeping change.
This part of the patch confused me. I thought they had it just right the first iteration. It made ‘aggressive’ play more risky, instead of being spoon-fed like it was prior to the tower changes. They were a pure farce before.
But the change suddenly made aggressive play styles a bit more of a risk, that was it. If you weren’t careful in your approach, or payed attention to how much you were going in tower range you’d pay for it in quick HP reduction; and if you’re not stupid to go in deeper while that is happening you only had to step back out of range and wait for heals, or Heart back, or go for the fountain, wait a bit, and try your aggressive play again.
That was it. It never was a big deal. If anything, the game said “use your brain a bit more”, but nope. That’s asking for too much. Apparently people want matches to be over as fast as possible, they want to be free to ignore towers and play as aggressively as they want if they feel like it just because Mr Joe wants to pew pew. The complaints I read prior to this nerf usually stemmed from this sort of complaint: “Waaaaaah, I can’t dive for free and ignore the towers, they fire at me now and they project the enemy player! NOT FAIR!! WAAAAAAH!!!”. The wording isn’t exactly accurate but it was the gist of it.
Now we’re back around 50% less effectiveness. I only hope that they completely revert this nerf in the next balance patch and put it back where it was. You know, devs, you don’t always have to listen to complaints. You’re also free to… oh you know, make the game? YOU are the developer, the community isn’t.
The towers attacking people instead of minions if they hit you already make them usefull.
They may need more if they want them to still handhold you but you don’t need increased speed 40armor reducing shots on top for them to not be useless either .
Just remove armor shred and increase the damage over time. Solves everything. Tanks could still tank while bruisers and non tanks have to wait for their team to dive first
Honestly, I don’t know why they are trying to be unique here.
Why not just do what everyone else does, and make tower-specific armor debuff, so that only towers hurt more and more.
I feel that it was fine with -40… I rarely died to it and always it felt normal, my own greed and fault.
Even Tracer could tank 2-3 shots without breaking a sweat. You only died if you actually got -40. That’s like 8 shots. If you stay for this long - it’s your fault.
The problem was it really only hurt certain tanks and bruisers, a number of them were fine, or even stronger. I had no problems dealing with structures on tanks or bruisers that were primarily single target, or could easily avoid hitting heroes. ETC, Johanna, Artanis, and Imperius all felt the same to me with the tower change. In fact, it was easier to fight around structures as those heroes as they no longer applied a move and attack speed slow.
Heroes that relied heavily on armor, or were based on AoE or other attacks that made it hard to avoid pulling aggro were the ones hurt most by the change, looking at relative win rates and my personal experience. Blaze, Anub’arak, Garrosh, Diablo, and Malthael all had to play very passively, or just not bother going near buildings at all.
Garrosh and diablo had high win rates in plat+. It’s a play style player issue, not the heroes. They’re still as good as their s-tier selves when outside of tower range