So now Malthael Thrall Ragnaros and Varian are bruisers? because they have what, sustain? Varian’s comes from talents that can be avoided. Ragnaros’s sustain doesn’t compare to the rest and doesn’t have the base health or sustain to pull off being a bruiser except with certain builds.
I feel like you people are guiding your decisions for who fits what role based on what the most popular builds are instead of the base capabilities of the heroes.
You are working too hard at juggling champions between perceived roles with small nerfs at a time, I think you should go back to when you reworked talents that were close to 100% pick rate into the hero’s base abilities and combining talents and then work from there, like what you did to Abathur’s caparace ability deleting the sustained caparace talent and adding the functionality to the base ability, or with Fenix’s warp conduit talent and how you deleted it and fused it into warp warfare. There are simply too many heroes that don’t work well on competitive play without certain builds and that could be fixed with the same reworks that you used back then.
Meanwhile find a better baseline for the hp a bruiser needs to have, sustain doesn’t mean much in teamfights when they have an hp much closer to a melee assassin that can be burst down in one team’s cooldown cycle. Malthael at least is definitely not a bruiser, his damage is much higher than one, and his hp much lower.
Right, so high hp pool and defensive cooldowns are not a general requirement for the “bruiser” role. Generally, characters in this role are a second melee frontline option that can sustain in the solo lane, not in a 5 man team fight.
Malthael and Rag may not be able to withstand an enemy team’s engage the same way blaze would, but they are absolute terrors in the solo lane. The have enough sustain that, in the hands of a competent player, they would not need to hearthstone back and miss a wave of exp. They can even soak two lanes at once.
However, in the 4 man, they generally will struggle to have the same impact as a ranged hero due to the incessant poke damage, and limited opportunities to engage in lane.
When pro teams draft Malthael, they will generally put him as a substitute in this solo lane/bruiser role hoping that he will make up for what he lacks in tankiness in other ways as a frontliner. Same goes for Rag, and Thrall.
Blizzard decides the roles and they can be wrong (They wanted Blaze to be a tank, but he plays much better in the bruiser role). However, Malthael’s role was decided in the top-level meta long before they switched him from assassin to “bruiser”.
I consider Malthael a difficult hero to play since he does lack any way to mitigate burst damage, but needs to be in or near melee range to have impact. You have to choose your engages very carefully. It can be rough in Quick Match because Quick Match will rarely have 2 high health “tanky” heroes for you to attack they way pro drafts usually do.
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