Here’s the reddit thread this was copy-pasted from, thought it should be seen by everyone on here. https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/a2ythl/the_new_xp_changes_are_really_something/
This thread contains a twitch clip and a comment by CriticKitten, which is as follows.
" It’s clear what was intended with these changes and this video showcases exactly what that is: it’s meant to remove snowballs, which it mostly does. I did see a few games reach 3-level leads even in the new system but it’s mostly between 1-2 levels. Here’s the thing though: Should it be that close? If your team is making mistake after mistake and has done nothing to correct it, do you really deserve to win on a single late team fight?
Look at this game. You don’t lose all 6 forts/keeps and have a 40-kill deficit without making some pretty big mistakes. That’s an extremely lopsided match. And yet the XP lead was a mere level. That’s absurd. It basically means that all of those mistakes were meaningless, and Zaelia’s team could have won just as easily as the other team if they’d been the ones to win that last team fight. That, to me, says that 90% of the game means nothing so long as you soak lanes. That’s boring and it’s going to lead to pro teams playing way more passive because there’s no point in making risky rotations and bold plays when you can just soak yourself back into the game.
In case I’m not being clear enough (I have been accused of being “too shill” after all), let me be concrete: This patch in its current form will destroy the game, and if it goes through despite nearly universal disapproval of it, I think it’s going to be difficult for the game to recover from the fallout.
I understand that you want to avoid snowballs, Blizzard, but this ain’t it."
Yeah basically one mistake can cost the game instead of several along the way. Some games are tight enough to where they come down to one mistake, but I think the purpose is this. You know when you’re down by 3-5 levels and the objective is up? And you think, okay soak xp, grab a camp or something, maybe poke objective. Def don’t group and fight a talent and levels down. Well, this change means you always fight every time no matter what. Maybe if you’re a talent down, don’t fight, but that will almost never be the case for very long at all.
Basically the change is for the bottom tier that don’t understand the defensive posture.
The xp changes remove strategy entirely. The game is now about death balls, and the objective only serves to guide both death balls toward each other.
I have a lot of fears regarding the potential outcome of this change but what’s important to understand is that these changes are something the playerbase has brought upon themselves.
Blizzard has traditionally been a developer that listens a lot to their playerbase, as much as people don’t want to realize it. Most of their games has gotten a stigma in recent times because they’ve listened too much to players that are not interested in getting better but just facerolling to victory.
WoW is most notorious for this. The game has been stripped down so much in favor of “simplifying” the game.
HotS is now doing the same. Players are so non interested in learning how to play the macro play that they will fall behind and blame anything else around them.
It’s so common here as well with the “nerf X hero” threads or “matchmaking holds me back” threads. The simple matter is players aren’t reflective enough to understand when they are the problem, that’s why you have this insane gulf in rankings which starts around Plat level.
It’s also very common regarding heroes players percieve as bad without understanding how to play them. Genji, Abathur, Samuro, Deckard and Blaze comes to mind. These are all heroes very powerful by good players yet they are incredibly weak amongst the large majority of the playerbase because they don’t have the game sense of knowing how to utilize their strengths or even identify their powers.
Changing the game to “protect” players is a terrible thing to do in my view rather than just encouraging those players to get better.
I sincerely hope I’m wrong but these EXP changes could kill the game for me if proactive play turns out to be very unrewarding.
There are way too many requests, complaints, and suggestions going completely ignored (through action or lack there of) to suggest that this is on the players. You’re a traitor, sir.
Not really. You have to understand how much is being thrown at Blizzard but they will filter it towards the lowest commoneer because ultimately they are only interested in having as many players as possible enjoying (or engaging, whichever way you wanna look at it) their games.
If you make tanking harder in WoW you exclude the worse players. They gain more by making it simpler that even a poor tank like myself can succeed. This was not the case originally.
However if you’re bad at DPSing you can make it easier by funneling gear to worse players to compete against myself.
Again they win more by having a larger part of their playerbase happy.
So if you bring it back to HotS it doesn’t take a lot even just on these forum boards to understand where these changes are coming from. You may think it is bad, but every single day there is complaints about snowballing, OP heroes, matchmaking etc. A ton of resources is going into making these players happy because they are a larger part of the playerbase.
Typically speaking worse players will be significantly more loud than good players because people normally voice concerns over something they’re happy with. This has been a problem amongst Balance Druids in BfA who believes the spec is underpowered without understanding how their kit is balanced around their utility nor how to abuse it’s strength. Those complaints have been voiced a lot on Wowhead likewise as specs such as Elemental, even though I’ve personally seen Elemental Shamans doing just fine DPSwise.
The problem isn’t as black and white as you percieve it to be. There are grey areas everywhere, but I will stand by and firmly say I’m against artificially changing the design of a game to accommodate for the lowest level of skill. It will do nothing but push away players interested in getting better and eventually you have an entire playerbase circlejerking that Samuro is underpowered and Mal’ganis is overpowered.
65% in Plat 1, Samuro is fine, the players are underpowered, you hit the nail on the head there
But if this patch goes live as is and the games start to feel like my macro decicions and early-mid game mean nothing, ill stop playing.
The attraction of the game for me is in the strategic side of timing everything just right and forcing the enemy team to make the hard decicions, not the 5v5 brawls mid.
And when it comes to the bad players being vocal about the changes i havent seen one pro or a GM player yet to say anything good about these changes, only critisism of how it stales the gameplay to only soak lanes most of the time.
Bad players really love brawling if you have ever seen the difference of silver and diamond+ games, Silver players will chase the Murky off the map if needed…
I’m going to pretend you handled Laparo for me. I have no idea what his point is other than it’s the player’s fault? Somehow? Makes no sense. Blizz does what they want to do. They take in feedback. PRocess it behind closed doors. Regurgitate it into some kind of work they did, and we’re supposed to go… yeah, you listened.
I think people are misunderstanding about what HotS is. It is win by map objective, not win by snowballing. If you take down their structures, it is very difficult for them to contest objective, therefore you win the game. But if you lose to them despite having this advantage, it is on you, not the game. I am tired of all these cries from these players who just want to maintain their easy way to win. Just win first team fight and now you win the game by snowballing since the opponent can’t do anything with levels and talents behind. And if you are good you will win anyway, like the game you watched on Zaelia’s stream.
Well you are not a representation of the playerbase. I find myself to be very good on Artanis and I blasted through up to Master at a 70% winrate. This doesn’t mean that any Artanis player will do this. You’re a good Samuro so you understand his strengths, but the vast majority doesn’t.
However the Pro Players have never really been heard as far as giving feedback is concerned. This is nothing new to any of Blizzards games. It was funny back in Sc2 that the Swarm Host wasn’t nerfed until a lot of Pro Players quit because the playstyle was so awful to face.
Same goes for WoW. Influencers and top players are more or less ignored.
Same goes for HotS. We’ve seen a lot of Pro and high level players play much less or quit entirely because it’s no longer fun to play in this fashion. We’ve been vocalizing Tracer/Genji changes for a year now but they keep nerfing their damage numbers. Only now did Genji finally receive a range nerf to his AA’s but it might be too little too late.
At the end of the day the masses of worse players make up a lot more of the playerbase. It makes more sense from a business standpoint to cater towards that style of play.
Also @DashDashDot, reread my post. If you are unable to understand it, either because you don’t know how to look at different perspectives then you really shouldn’t talk so smugly towards others.
My point is that as much as some players have a healthier idea of how to continue with the game it won’t benefit the zergs of players who don’t like to learn and improve. If you actually understood that you’d realize we’re fighting from the same side.
Ive had plenty of comebacks even in the system that exists.
Last game the enemy dominated us in the early game, made a bad boss call after 1 kill, died on the boss and started feeding 1 by 1.
Game before that was the same, we were lvl 15 vs 17 and a man down, got a couple of kills and came back through that.
Its not like winning early is a free win.
Edit: To win the first objective is also not about the teamfight, its bout how you get to the teamfight.
Good players time the camps to create pressure away from the objectives so they force the enemy to have a man down in the fight, its not just about a blind random brawl like you seem to think.
And if both teams are decent they both get split pressure and are on the same levels but usually the one playing macro better wins.
If you have destroyed all forts and keeps and you have catas threatening their core they constantly have to deal with, you already have a strong macro advantage. Do you really need a 3 level advantage as well?
To put another way. Is a game compelling because your opponent either got lucky early, or your team made a mistake early, and then your opponent gets more and more of an advantage by virtue of not doing anything stupid to throw it.
Its seems that the thrust of the complaint is “Us winning the early game doesn’t give us a significant EXP advantage.”
Sure, so what? It does give you AN advantage, just not an XP one.
The EXP is by far more important than structures. It is true that structures is an advantage, but sometimes you’re unable to close a game because of lategame hero scalings.
The 2 most obvious examples of this is Lunara and Nazeebo. They have some of the best lategame scalings in the game and does rightfully cripple their teams in the earlygame because they are unmatched later on. What typically happens if you play an earlygame comp and get a temporary EXP lead (level 11 to 9, for example) you’re punishing yourself in the long run by effectively removing 1 lane worth of EXP from yourself. This will become a big deal next patch when soaking will be the primary way to gain EXP.
This means that typically earlygame leads and snowballs have to end the game at the level 16 talent lead because in the long run they wont reach 20 before the enemy due to the pushing waves making soaking too dangerous.
I’ve been on both sides of this scenario. A winning team will stagger levels around 16-18 because there’s nothing to soak while the enemy is soaking 2+ lanes. What you rely on here is them being too busy defending so you get an objective, let’s say the Dragon Knight. This is not indefensible depending on damage output. You can repel a 17vs18 DK with 2 keeps down.
If you manage to do this you’ve secured level 20 before the next DK, and with decent lane management you will be able to hold at least 1 shrine and force a fight around it.
There’s already a huge risk to make proactive early game plays because you have to end the game around 16 since you simply cannot compete EXP soaking to 20, alternatively if both teams hits 20 the early and midgame was all for nothing.
It’s easy to speak from a hypothetical scenario. However in my experience I’ve always valued an EXP lead over a structure lead simply because character power is more useful than strategic victories in games where you’re working with strangers.
There’s been so many times I’ve won a game we’ve been 2 keeps down simply because we got 20 and swept them in a fight despite playing terribly for 15 minutes.
Likewise I’ve lost games my team and myself played very well but we couldn’t close it for various reasons and ended up losing 1 fight.
As a sololaner, if you win the lane and delete the enemy fort you can just freeze the minions close to your own fort so you can soak the lane safely still.
With the catapult change the lane will push into the enemy keep walls where you cannot soak the lane safely, anytime the enemy has 1 player missing from the minimap you have to drop soak and run and waste your time if you get too far from your fort or die in a gank.
Killing a fort isnt beneficial really if you cant soak after it and not something ill aim to do in the future, just kill the towers and the well and soak after.
There is an option to kill the fort of course and just take all the camps after that so youre getting XP while the enemy has to defend the catapult every 1:30, probably only viable on the largest maps where the split pressure matters.
As a Samuro player though, soaking under an enemy keep isnt really much of a problem but any other sololaner that lacks reliable escapes its out of the question.
Edit: on small maps it could actually be advatageous to let the enemy kill the fort if their sololaner is someone like Artanis, making the enemy unable to soak the lane.
Edit 2: Killing a fort puts you at a XP disadvantage, so everyone will just soak the lanes and let minions kill eachother, only sololaners that can soak a lane far in the enemy side of the map should ever kill a fort.
While this isn’t something I see frequently I can understand the benefits. Typically in my HL games there’s simply no time to freeze lanes in the current version of the game because if you are freezing a lane to soak you forfeit the rest of the map.
Normally what happens is a rotation occurs to push the lane and reset the wave, or the opposing team threatens 5 man ganks/bosses and so on on the other side of the map.
But I think it’s still bad to remove this entirely as a strategic option because no games follows identical patterns, there’s changes that occurs which is what makes it interesting. Honestly I think the removal of fort EXP wouldn’t be a big deal if it didn’t spawn catapults at all.
Personally, i stand behind my own minion wave mounted and just look at them die if i cant force the enemy sololaner to back off.
Usually forcing them to back is easy but sometimes they have skill, i have even sololaned against others who simply saty mounted and we spray at eachother most of earlygame and only clear the lane if we wish to go take a camp at some point.
The most important part of sololaning is soaking the XP, winning the lane is a bonus and killing a fort is a victory.
With the changes, the usual strategy would be to just soak and kill the towers that still give XP and the well but leave the fort alive until you push the keep as well with the objective.
This is wrong. I don’t understand why everyone is so hung up on soaking - literally the most low-skill thing to do in the entire game. You don’t need to soak much in HotS and even less as the match goes on because a minion wave awards a smaller and smaller fraction of a level’s XP.
I don’t think people are realizing what getting a fort down while keeping your own up does for you. You can build up a couple catapults and make a push that cannot be ignored – 1 or 2 players will need to respond or lose their Keep and get an even more time-consuming disadvantage.
That gives you map control to rush a 5v3 or capture the objective or steal mercs or another fort.
But if everyone is so afraid to do anything that they get kills and stubbornly wait for an XP lead they cannot farm up any longer, they waste their tempo, they waste time, and you get that goofy match where the losing team had 40something kills.
XP is only a means to an end and if you think you absolutely need a level advantage to win, you are low skill. Even levels should be good enough. One level difference is only 4% in stats; still winnable.
Clever, decisive play is going to be the best strategy and slow players who don’t know what to do are going to stay salty.
So got out of a game tonight my group of 4 + one pug vs a full 5 man premade so having the pug for us was a disadvantage to our team. But we crushed that 5 man in the end I think we hit level 16 or 17 and on their core by the time the enemy finally hit level 12 .
This was GoT btw and the first few levels the enemy did get some kills on us but it was the Nova pug dying the most. She went bot lane up against Gul and Sylv and once I noticed, I took my thicc dragon butt to bot lane to babysit the Nova and a good thing too because all game she was being a hyper aggressive melee Nova. She got herself killed face tanking the two but it wasn’t the biggest lost to us since I was still there soaking.
Once the Sylv and Gul’dan started pushing hard after that kill I just let my team know this was happening and my best bud came down and pushed their faces in.
I never saw the enemy help in the lane their laner lost from being killed and that started their slide into a snowballing loss. for the first two team fights over seeds neither team was 10 but my team never lost any of the TFs over the first 3 seeds. I was never pressured into going dragonqueen for any of them and I only went dragon for the last one to make sure we got it and by then it was level 11 to level 8.
We were put against a 5 man it wasn’t like it was 5 randos and we were not in queue so long as to it just garding anybody to start a game. One thing is for sure that team didn’t know how to fight against us even with a melee Nova on our side.
So who’s fault is this to the point everyone on every level of play needs to be punished for it?
Is it my fault for having the foresight to go and lane with our wild card Nova?
Is it my teams faul for knowing when to back off, get chased all the way back to our towers and turn around and kill them more?
Should I have just randomly used powerful cooldowns when the enemy team never engaged us hard enough to justify it?
Is it the fault of the enemy team for letting two die bot lane and never sending someone to cover for it till after we threaten to push it in?
Is it the enemy temas fault for having the gall to be put against us?
C’mon this is clearly someone’s fault so who’s to blame?
If i let the enemy Artanis kill my fort and let the catapults push to my keep walls where i kill them, the enemy cannot extend to soak that lane at all, reducing their XP gain from 33 to 50% from minions.
The catapults arent that threatening that the lane needs more than 1 player who would be there in any case.
1 player who is sololaning is already there responding no matter if theres a fort or not but when the fort is gone the enemy cant soak that lane anymore.
You cant rush a fort 5v4 and doing so would be foolish as you would not get any advantage doing so, only lose more XP.
Stealing a camp is an good idea unless the enemy sniffs it out and ganks you b3cause youre overextended, the same reason you cant soak the lane makes stealing a camp a bit of an bad idea.
Being overly aggressive and not soaking is anything but clever and the village idiots who jump off the roofs could be described as decisive.
Playing it slow with strategy in mind is the clever way to go, which is safe soak while denying the enemy any, thats why freezing a lane and chasing an enemy sololaner outside of the XP gain on the sololane is an actual high level play strategy even now.
Enemy shotcaller forgot how to strategy, you win if you have better macro play and shotcalling.
Future will give the enemy same levels as you even if you did play better the early game and give them a chance to win even if they suck at soaking and shotcalling if theyre just good enough at brawling in the late game.
