Crypt Lord is mostly used as a 3rd hero in 1v1 to provide Impale along with his passive that helps him survive the big army clashes.
Maxing his Carrion Beetles is a fairly gimmicky build generally used when the undead player wants to troll around by playing Crypt Lord as the first hero.
Even in this case the beetles are severely under-performing, easily being killed by the enemy and feeding them exp (not to mention costing mana and spending corpses which can be used for Rod of Necromancy).
So a synergistic and thematic improvement would be that Carrion Beetles also get the current level of Spiked Carapace that the CL himself has.
Blizzard can even reuse the same “Crypt Lord spikes” animation on the beetles so that they visually show they are upgraded.
Frankly i doubt this can create any kind of balance problems since the Beetles don’t have much health and are easily dispelled.
But it can add a nice thematic detail to CL, buffing the value of both his summons and his passive.
While it sounds cool, it would only force the combo for one to be worth it. Carrion beetles should be able to stand on their own if someone decides to go impale/beetles.
I also really don’t get why spiked carapace is 3/5/7 armor and not 3/6/9 when evasion is a much better skill in the first place.
I agree carrion beetles should be able to stand on their own.
But due to mana restraints on the CLord you usually either have mana for Beetle spam (since they die fast) or for casting Impale - meaning you almost never take Beetles and Impale (without passive) simply cause CL doesnt have enough mana.
And since summon skills require fast leveling (such as getting lvl3 on AMage) to remain competitive it is utterly unlikely that high level beetles will be a real strategy in 1v1 meta due to CLord never being a first or second hero (outside of gimmicks).
Carrion beetles would need massive buffs to be anywhere close to treeant/waterElem/FeralSpirit levels of power.
My suggestion for Spiked Carapace is more about theme and flavor - it wont make beetles competitive but it will be a cute bonus and will make the beetles look spiky and cool
On the topic of CL armor passive frankly i really find it underwhelming to begin with.
If we compare CL to a “similar” strength hero like TChieftain or MKing they have better spells AND better passives.
The TChieftain passive skill is so powerful that even if it only affected TC himself (not aura) it would still be more useful than CL passive.
Other strength hero passives like Bash or Drunken Brawler or Engineering (tinker) or even Devotion Aura are still much more useful than CL passive.
Because it also reflects damage back at melee attackers. Further more what is not made clear is it reflects the damage back before it gets reduced by armor. Hence the additional armor does not reduce the amount of damage reflected per attack. Due to this interaction, technically the amount of damage the Cryptlord can reflect with the skill increases better than linearly with skill level since not only can the Cryptlord survive more hits, but also reflects back more per hit per level. Hence level 1 needs larger numbers to make it meaningful and growth must be kept back to prevent over inflation by level 3.
As for buffing Carrion Beatles… The solution would be to greatly reduce their mana cost and possibly trade some more HP for lower damage. This would give them similar damage absorbing utility to Spiked Carapace while not eating from Impales. It is all a matter of juggling numbers to make it work, no need for major mechanic changes.
Spiked Carapace reflects normal weapon type (not damage type) melee damage before it is reduced by armor type and armor. The damage is reflected as spell type damage (not to be confused with magic, it uses spell just like all other abilities) and so reflected damage is not subject to armor reduction but can be reduced by armor type (heroes take 75% spell damage) and magic resistance. Magic immune units take no reflection damage from Spiked Carapace.
A Cryptlord with 1000 armor will reflect as much damage as with 7 armor while taking considerably less damage in the process. Hence Spiked Carapace must not have a linear growth otherwise it will either start out too weak or end up too strong. Reflecting 35% of melee damage is not trivial as it means for every 3 melee attacks the Cryptlord takes, effectively one is given back in the form of a spell.
Yet it’s still bad, nobody cares about spiked carapace’s thorns effect, it barely does any damage in a whole game. It’s pretty much just flavor tbh.
Frankly i would much rather the CL passive give Health Regen in addition to Armor, and have it affect the beetles.
For example if CL passive gave 2/4/6 HP regen and 3/5/7 Armor to CL and his summoned beetles that would be a nice and thematic interaction.
I mean take a look at Tinker’s passive, it gives bonuses to his spells AND provides powerful passive effects.
A grunt hits for about 25 damage depending on upgrades.
Rank 1 CL passive will reflect 15% of damage which is 3.75 damage
Rank 2 CL passive reflects 25% which is 6.25
Rank 3 CL passive reflects 35% which is 8.75 damage
Keeping in mind that CL passive is not maxed out first which means the 2nd rank is obtained by level 4 CL and 3rd rank is obtained by level 7 CL.
Frankly speaking the melee reflect seems really pathetic… the effect itself is not useful and the numbers on it are way too low and it is only functional versus melee units…
When compared to literally ANY other passive in the game the CL passive is by far the worst.
To cause further issues the rest of CL abilities is also sub-par:
the Beetles are the worst summon in the game, lacking health and damage to do anything (even when maxed as first), and CL’s pathetic mana pool cant support repeated casts of beetles which die very fast…
the Impale cant hit rooted/ensnared/webbed enemies plus it gives enemies brief invulnerability which protects them from launched ranged attacks/spells AND it costs more than half of CL mana…
the Locust Swarm is a useful but mana-expensive ability that the CL will never get to use because he is played exclusively as a 3rd hero which means that the highest he realistically ever gets in 1v1 is lvl3 or lvl4.
It only damages when the cryptlord is hit. The damage is split between every -melee- unit. There’s really only a few melee attackers used in the meta lategame.
An abom hits for 36 damage per hit, it takes 9 damage per hit from a lvl2 carpace (the best you can hope for), and that’s before any damage reduction from armor…
Compare it to a carrion swarm lvl2 which deals 140 AOE damage. It would take the abomination 16 hits to do the same damage to itself with spiked carapace before it takes similar damage to carrion swarm lvl2… The abom will have dealt 576 damage by then. That’s also all before armor reductions of any kind. Odds are if your abom hit the cryptlord 16 times, there were 16 more hits from other units as well nuking him and hes dead.
Spiked carapace reflect is a nice flavour, but it’s garbage in terms of it doing any damage. Funny part is it reflect 35% at lvl3, while thorns aura is 30% on the entire army and is also considered worthless, except maybe in some niche FFA scenario where you fight hippogryph vs hippogryph where the dps output of units vastly outmatches their health pool.
You cannot compare these two because Carrion Swarm level 2 consumes mana to cast.
Spiked carapace reflected damage is only reduced by armor type because it is spell damage. It also reflects the damage dealt to the Cryptlord before any armor type or armor reductions.
It also adds armor to the Cryptlord which is several hundred more damage it can take from non spell sources.
Nothing is wrong with the concept of Spiked Carapace, however it might need balance tuning. For example if it reflected 300% at level 1 it would probably be quite OP.
It sounds like what the Cryptlord needs is to be a more attractive first or second pick rather than a third pick. This might require nerfing other heroes or buffing the Cryptlord skills in general.
The beetles rather lack in terms of utlity, I wish they had another ability, something like exploding banelings or they gain 5% movementspeed per attack, up to a maximum of 30%, or 50% spellshield … something like this.
For spiked carapace, I can’t see any other solution than making it a good synergie for every other of his spells, otherwise its to easy to ignore. and the same effect for the beetles won’t do the trick, imo.
I reallly doubt they should add more power to the reflect, it only affects melee hits after all, it’s too niche IMO. It’d be dumb if melee units got devastated while hitting a cryptlord while ranged suffers no downsides after all.
In the end, all I suggested is to make spiked carapace 3/6/9 instead of 3/5/7, it’d just make the ability more on par with evasion, and unlike the reflect, it affects ranged too.
Giving CL even more armor is unlikely to improve him enough.
CL without DKnight has no way to heal himself, unless he wants to sit on blight for 15 minutes.
Demon Hunter can just drink moonwells so his evasion gets a ton of use over and over.
Once CLord is down to low health there is no way to quickly heal him without having a Death Knight, which makes all that armor pointless until CL is healed.
Give CL passive a big Health Regeneration bonus (2/4/6 or 3/6/9) along with the armor bonus - you can remove the reflect if needed.
That way CL can actually be used without a mandatory Death Knight.
There is nothing wrong in a hero having a single mandatory skill.
The problem arises when a hero has TWO mandatory skills, which makes the 3rd one unwanted.
CLord has low mana and both Impale and Beetles are mana intensive (beetles consume a ton of mana since they keep dying rather fast).
It makes perfect sense to pick one of those along with the “mandatory” improved passive.
This can only serve to improve the CL and give new ways in which he can be played (the passive HP regen would make him less bad as a first hero).
I just wanted to point out spiked carapace just doesn’t match up to evasion in damage soaking potential, it’s also werid that it’s +3/+2/+2 and not +3/+3/+3 armor.
Undead definitely needs a combat heal to help non-dk heroes to be viable as first heroes… Undeads have cannibalize, but it’s weak, costly, and isn’t available for fiends, and it can’t be used on heroes.
I think cryptlord has a strong skill set though, his beetles are indeed kinda weak and very suceptible to aoe dispel, on top of requiring corpses. Perhaps a buff to them on top of not requiring corpses could be nice.
Stat buffs could work well with him too. Imagine if the cryptlord became a super tough, high damage hero similar to a demon hunter? I could also see him having more movement speed.
Such “fighter” heroes only work if you can heal them quickly and reliably.
DHunter has moonwells, as does Warden.
Blademaster and Tauren Chieftain have the Tier1 Healing Salves (best shop item).
Mountain King has the equivalent Tier1 healing item from the human shop which can heal both the hero and the entire army.
Neutral Heroes are capable of benefiting from all of the above mentioned healing mechanics.
Undead does not have a tier 1 healing item in the shop and they do not have an equivalent of moonwells.
If a Crypt Lord suffers significant damage his only way of healing quickly is through a Death Coil from a DK. Even a level 1 CL would take over 5 MINUTES to regenerate from low to full just by standing on Blight - so Blight is no quick healing for heroes.
So Crypt Lord is in this weird situation where he is an un-healable tank with which you want to avoid taking damage because you cant heal him.
CL can take damage but any damage he takes is almost permanent without a Death Knight.
A tank without any adequately fast and powerful source of healing is simply a more durable unit, but the enemy can easily waste his HP and make him too weak to be in battle.
