I think it’s time we address the elephant in the room: the Paladin + Riflemen strategy. Let’s be real—it’s absurdly overpowered right now and is completely wrecking the balance of the game. What was once a game of timing, micro, and creative strategies has devolved into a one-dimensional meta where everyone plays Human and spams the same no-brain strat.
Why It’s a Problem
Zero Skill Ceiling
This strategy requires almost no micro or game sense. Just spam Riflemen, keep them alive with Holy Light, and laugh all the way to victory. There’s no need to scout, adapt, or even have a proper game plan.
Unstoppable Early/Mid-Game
The sustain from Holy Light and Devotion Aura combined with the sheer DPS of mass Riflemen creates a death ball that’s impossible to break unless you’re already far ahead.
Lack of Counterplay
Sure, there are “counters” in theory, but let’s face it—most of them are either too late-game, too situational, or require perfect execution. Meanwhile, the Paladin + Riflemen strat is low-risk, high-reward from the get-go.
Meta is Becoming Stale
When half the player base is just grinding out the same strat, the game stops being fun. Part of what makes Warcraft 3 great is the diversity of strategies across all races. But now, it feels like if you’re not playing Human, you’re playing at a disadvantage.
Why This Matters
We all love Warcraft 3 because of its depth and the skill it takes to win. But when an overpowered, easy-to-execute strategy dominates the meta, it takes the soul out of the game. Let’s bring back the creativity and diversity that makes this game a classic.
What do you all think? Have you been running into this strat nonstop like I have?
Let’s fix this before it ruins the game for good. This post was generated with chatgpt which still tooks more effort than Paladin + Rifles.
There’s no doubt that “Paladin+rifle” will be nerfed, but this strategy is not as OP as you said.
“Paladin+rifle” depends on opponent micro. Suppose an opponent doesn’t focus fire paladin and doesn’t spread damage on rifles then yes. The only micro Hum has to do is just healing the damaged one.
This strategy depends on a strong economy, especially wood.
At game early game every resource is on a count. To build enough rifles Hum has to sacrifice towers to defend their base. So you can just harras hum wooden economy. No wood = no rifles.
I wonder why people are not using AOE damage or mass damage. Paladin can’t heal everyone at the same time, so spread the damage and also you could focus the paladin. Possible heroes for counterplay could be Tauren Chieftain, Far Seer, Demon Hunter, Warden, Keeper of the Grove, Dread Lord, Lich e.t.c
Such a thing will happen with every meta no matter what devs nerf.
As a result: spread damage on rifles, focus paladin, harras his wood economy
I also struggle versus “good” pala/bm/rifle players in certain games. The pala heal cooldown or rifle armor could be nerfed a bit…just without nerfing too much.
But in general i think it is more finding the proper strategy and good timings to beat this strategy.
False. He has made tons of good points over his time posting here and when mistakes have been made he’s owned up to it. The biggest criticism he can be accused of is being stubborn on occasion.
Meanwhile you created this post with ChatGPT. If you can’t even be bothered to make your own post about it, why would anyone believe that you’re being serious about this combo being OP?
And it’s also how I feel about anyone who feels the need to take stabs at others for literally no reason.
Like… we’re practically all in agreement with this thread. If you want to be angry at me in a thread, cant you at least make it relevant to that thread instead of just making random personal attacks?
And if there’s one thing I can guarantee for everyone it’s that I’m an actual person and not some poopy AI powered chat bot.
If you read the post, by which I stand, and can make an argument of substance related to the case we could actually have a conversation. As of yet, pretty much nobody actually addressed the contents, the substance, of the post.
Feel free to do so.
I’ll kick off with a few suggestions:
People on W3C magically gain 100 to 300 ELO when they start playing Pala rifle. How is that possible?
How come Pala rifle players typically have insanely low winrates in human mirror?
How come specific match are complete upsets, such as starbuck beating happy, the moment pala rifle is introduced in the game?
Many human core strategies exist, this is just one of them, The paladin’s skills are easy to play around, most people even like to argue that his Undead equivalent the death knight is better in basically every way, and DK+crypt fiends > pally+rifles.
No conversation is needed here, the overall win rates for each race speak for themselves. At all levels of play combined, Human is very close to 50% vs all races. If we limit the stats to the highest levels of play, Human is actually behind the curve against all races except Undead by at least a few percent. So it is very clear that Human is not in an overpowered position at the moment- any “overpowered” strat is clearly only so at levels where players lack the mechanical skills to micro and respond to enemy behavior correctly.
Based on your previous post I thought you are a human player. Now I think you are a 900 human elo player.
the overall win rates for each race speak for themselves. At all levels of play combined, Human is very close to 50% vs all races.
This is not at all how statistics work, lmao. Imagine: player A changes to a fully OP strat. Gains a whopping 1000 elo. Now faces people he struggles with, thus plays 50%
Your logic: well, its 50% so balanced. You’d need a priori data for your null hypothesis and then t-test in the concurrent sample size.
Insulting him is not going to make your point any stronger. Quite the opposite.
This does not surprise me - when you play against better players, the strategy that worked so well in the lower rankings ends up not being as effective. That’s just people playing better. The strategy itself was never overpowered, it was people not having enough skill to deal with it.
Either player A starts performing the strategy even better so they can keep climbing to higher and higher ELOs until they hit the 50% winrate point, or they start thinking of different strategies that work better against these new people he faces. That’s how you get better at the game.
Insulting him is not going to make your point any stronger. Quite the opposite.
Just returning the favour. Being nuanced doesn’t work well in communicating with the feeble minded.
The rest of your post is self contradictory. You acknowledge a strategy may boost a player his ranking substantially and then claim they improve due to skill improving. That is of a later concern. The concern I raise is that people will significantly boost their ELO buy just switching to pala rifle play. I know people who off raced this strategy and broke their ELO PR.
It is insane, that shouldn’t happen. In return, these people get obliterated the second they play a different strat. Way more so than when other people switch to a broad spectrum of other strategies. It all signals what is going on.
These are not mutually exclusive? As they get better at the strat, their skill improves. And as they get more ELO, their skill will either continue to grow or they plateau and they need to switch to a different strat to continue winning, which means having to learn that new strat.
Yes, that will hurt their ELO and win/loss ratio but that’s par for the course. That’s just apparently more pronounced with Pala/Rifle, yet this doesn’t speak of an issue with the Pala/Rifle combo, it speaks more of peoples general skill at the game when it comes to handling focus fire. That’s not the combo’s fault.
Actually, it is exactly how statistics work. But I guess you’ve never heard of this statistics concept known as “sample size.” You can’t base an opinion on 2 games the way you just described. You need more data to reach a conclusion. The reasons why you win or lose are largely irrelevant. If I have a sample size of 10000 games, the data is going to be reliable, at least in comparison to your sample size of 2. Your argument is fallicious because there isn’t sufficient information available to to draw your conclusion.
Those win rates are based on 1000s of games played by many people. it is absolutely valid data as collected by War3Champions. Which, I generally don’t like to refer to W3C but they have the only publicly available data.
In fairness, the samples in a vacuum would be “equal” - identical skill-levels, strategies being the same and ingame RNG of dropped items and such being the same everytime, which isn’t gonna be the case-
You honestly argue that people that play pala rifle magically gathered more skill the second they start playing the strat? Equally lose a bunch of skill the second they stop playing the strat? Is that genuinly what you are saying? Or why do people despite effort not increase in elo, but magically do when they play pala rifle for one day?
Your data set can be millions of games. If you have no clue how to test it. Which seems to be the case. You completely failed to address my point: data itself doesn’t mean jack sheisse if you can’t compare it to an other group. My argument is simply. Find X player to play pala rifle, and compare their elo after a bunch of games with their elo before their games. Do the same for pala rifle players, make them play an other strat and see their elo drop. You’ll notice statistical significance between the change in the groups.
