1.30.3 PTR Notes

Greetings Raiders, Tinkerers, Harbingers, and Wardens,

We’ve got some balance updates and bug fixes for your enjoyment over the holiday.

GAME INSTALLATION

BUG FIXES

  • Damage mitigated by Hardened Skin will now correctly be reduced to 3 at a minimum, up from 1
  • The second pulse from the Taunt ability will no longer fire if the Mountain Giant is dead or affected by ability disabling effects

BALANCE UPDATES

Hero Balance Changes

Keeper of the Grove
Entangling Roots

  • Cast range decreased from 800 to 600

Developer Notes
Entangling Roots is of high utility to the Keeper’s kit. This change is intended to add a bit more risk to its use without reducing its effectiveness. The spell now has the same range as the Keepers auto attack, which should increase the opportunity for counterplay.

Alchemist
Acid Bomb

  • Level 1: Decrease primary damage from 8 to 6 per second (Total damage 120 to 90; Secondary damage 5 to 4 per second)
  • Level 2: Decrease primary damage from 13 to 11 per second (Total damage 195 to 165; Secondary damage 8.5 to 7 per second)
  • Level 3: Decrease primary damage from 18 to 17 per second (Total damage 270 to 255; Secondary damage 12 to 11 per second)

Developer Notes
Alchemist provides awesome AoE healing, has high hit points, is powerful enough to pick off units, and debuffs opponents effectively. Heroes generally shouldn’t check every box for potential roles… Reducing Acid Bomb’s single target damage better focuses him in a support role - recent tweaks to Healing Spray cemented him as a great alternative healer for any race, and those effects have been positive to gameplay.

Human Balance Changes

Defend

  • Piercing damage reduction increased from 50% to 65%. The in game tooltip will show this as 50% damage taken to 35%.

Developer Notes
There has been a drop off in the use of Defend after changes with the 1.30 balance update. This change is intended to restore usage. Its original behavior relied on RNG rather than a flat damage modifier. We anticipate there may need to be adjustments to the percentage, so we will be keeping an active eye on how the new Defend performs.

Night Elf Balance Changes

Mountain Giant
Base Stats

  • Food cost increased from 6 to 7
  • Cargo size increased from 2 to 4

Developer Notes
Mountain Giants are imposing, disruptive, heavy tanks with great siege potential. That potential becomes absolute in large packs. They were never intended to be a massed unit. Increasing food cost will make adding additional giants past the first few cut more heavily into a player’s army makeup as well as push them into higher upkeep faster. Additionally by increasing cargo size they will match the Siege Engine, a fellow high durability siege damage unit.

Glaive Thrower
Vorpal Glaive

Developer Notes

The Vorpal Glaive upgrade has been bugged for some time:

  • The main target of the Glaive Thrower always takes full damage

  • The area of effect from the Glaives changes from a circle into a line

  • Glaives can kill trees

The main target takes full damage, as if the projectile were a homing shot, but the Glaive doesn’t follow said target. Instead it hits the ground like it missed, and does line damage where it impacts. If we fix Vorpal Glaive to adhere to reduced damage of siege weapons to units, then researching the upgrade feels like a nerf when it exchanges radial damage for line damage.

We want to address these issues by having the projectile correctly track and impact the main target of the Glaive Thrower. This embraces a distinctive behavior from other siege weapons, helping with our goal of pushing each race to have their own identity. We hope to have Glaives tracking their targets and ready for the next balance patch – though the updates are not included in this PTR.

29 Likes

You could ve released it to live along with bugfixes… i mean the real bugs like AT invites, CG desyncs etc…

28 Likes

Can we get some sort of fix for chat rooms please. It doesn’t make sense that when you log in you end up in an empty channel. Please revert back to the original system with everyone in their countries channel. Mine for example was Warcraft III GBR-1

16 Likes

Man I’m loving the speed in which updates are being released

13 Likes

Thanks for the update! Can we expect the Arranged Team issue to be fixed any time soon? I miss playing with my friends.

20 Likes

A step in the right direction indeed…

though i am quite sceptical how glaive thrower missile chasing enemies now is a good thing for a siege unit …

the night elves always had the better alternative of chimeras and mountain giants for siege damage.

i understand the glaive thrower is a siege unit but does it have to have siege damage ? why not take on the liberty of giving it pierce or normal damage ? all siege unit’s are not exactly specialized to destroy structures … perhaps this can change the way glaive throwers are used. (or even meatwagons)

i’m not a constant melee player so don’t take my word too seriously, i just shared what i thought to be somewhat interesting.

4 Likes

Good for begin. Lets see how this works out (:
Btw. the thing that if you start custom game and it goes into countdown and someone (even an observer) leaves, it stops the countdown is a wanted stuff?
I can understand to have it for player’s leave… but man … having obs game and being stopped immediately after someone’s leave/join … sigh … not even speaking about the 100% bug that you cant write into chat after this happens (looks like game thinks that you are pressing ALT? )
Otherwise really good job, love that! Will test asap :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes

What about fairie dragons, they need to be touched a little… or now that keeper and alch nerfed they won’t be so op vs ud

4 Likes

and not nerf the undead one shot? coil and nova? and keep nerfing the NE? undead can kill 1 hero in 1 combo…

4 Likes

Missing the forest for the trees.

FFA WAS KILLED IN THE LAST PATCH. PLEASE FIX AMM AND MATCHMAKING ASAP. THE COMMUNITY IS DYING.

WHEN YOU KILLED THE BOTS, YOU KILLED FFA.

With bots we could play instantaneous FFA games across realms with no lag, on any map and with as many players as we wanted.

Now, we can’t find a single game even on the most popular realm for FFA (Northrend). After searching for hours we might find one laggy game and then instantly disconnect.

You are losing players by the busload. And this isn’t even counting all the custom games that were broken by the patch too.

PATCH the AMM and MMR ASAP. Make crossrealm possible. Or let us bring back the bots.

You destroyed a game that many of us have played and really loved for 15 years in one mismanaged patch.

17 Likes

My God, FINALLY! Although i think entangle nerf is too small but the patch is definitely a big step in the right direction in terms of balance.
If you could consider reverting moonwell regen buff that would be great. Remember that’s the only way of free heal at T1. It can’t be too good.

Also my suggestion is to take back Spirit Walker to Spirit Lodge. Troll Witch Doctors and Shamans are still picked so rarely. Before that change Witch Doc was often the main scouting unit in late game. After recent buffs Shamans would be picked much more often if they only shared the same production bulding with Spirit Walkers.
Taurens are still used extremely rarely. Having 1 unit that nobody use is better than 3.

Edit: Very nice to see explenation under every balance change. I hope this will continue in the future.

3 Likes

Still no nerfs to retarded orc t4 masonary aka fortify armor, so with this patch ud >hu still back to orc craft .

2 Likes

Move Obsidian Statue into Temple of the Damned please!!!

8 Likes

So go keeper warden and do the same … Ne are cheat now ! Open your eyes

5 Likes

I like all changes and I like the comments on them. Good Job Blizzard this time.

4 Likes

Can you just revert all balance changes back to version 1.28? Would be the best decision to make. You messed up balance and you cannot fix it anymore.

8 Likes

blade master and t3 are op, the blade master can kill 4-5 units alone and run away xD

Good changes!
Also, hipporider HP is BUGGED. Archers used to have 240 HP, and the hippos used to have 525 HP, meaning that the hipporider used to have 765HP.
But then a previous patch increased the archer HP from 240 to 245 while the hipporider HP remained 765, instead of being 770.
In 1.30. archer HP was increased from 245 to 260 and the hipporider HP was increased from 765 to 780, which means that hipporiders still have 5 HP less than they should. Do the math.

6 Likes

Good move with the developer notes, a move in the right direction!

4 Likes