Dear Blizzard,
The critical issues regarding the night elf race vs. human matchups need to be addressed. Most particularly, a well-timed rifleman with paladin/MK push is quite nearly impossible for a NE player to defend if the push is well-executed. Similar are UD pushes against NE using mass fiends and death knight and Orc pushes against NE using headhunters and TC. The culprit is that archer hitpoints have been reduced, treant damage has been reduced, and ancient protectors are just, overall, still much too weak to defend these types of relatively early attacks even in light of recent changes.
I am not making huge requests here, just overall tweaks to a few key issues that need to be addressed. I am requesting consideration to make some small changes to the night elf to help combat this serious issue. My recommendations:
- Fix Ancient Protectors: APs are, currently, the worst tower in the game of any race. They consume the worker unit and are the slowest towers to build. They are also by far the most expensive towers in the game. This is a problem because they really are no better than other towers, especially when say, human towers, are upgraded. Compared to any other tower in the game, their overall high cost and collective long build time is insane compared to their comparative overall weak strength. They are just far too weak given their high cost and the consumption of the worker unit.
- Recommended Fix for AP: AP build time has been reduced by 5 seconds (50 seconds instead of 55 seconds). AP rooted attack cooldown is decreased from 1.7 to 1.6.
- Nature’s blessing upgrade now grants 3 armor to protectors (up from 2) for a total of 4 armor (up from 3).
I don’t think these changes are major or are out of line. These are very reasonable requests given the absurdly high cost of the ancient protector, the collective long build time for both building the wisp that will be consumed and the AP itself along with the high cost and research time for nature’s blessing justifies these changes. Though small, these changes would go a long way to help protect NE bases and expansions from early pushes.
- Small Tweak to Elune’s Grace:
- Elune’s Grace now grants archers 25% damage reduction from spells and magic attacks (up from 20%) and 38% damage reduction from ranged piercing attacks (up from 35%).
Archers are weak units and should easily fall to normal attacks and melee (which they do). But, they still should be effective to counter ranged units. This is not a major change, but it is necessary given their now insanely low HP.
- Druid of the Talon:
- Attack cooldown of Druid of the Talon is decreased from 1.6 to 1.3.
- Changing in and out of night elf and storm crow form costs 35 mana – down from 50 mana.
DoTT are pretty useless at present. Even when upgraded, they are arguably the least used caster in the game at high levels of play. While the DoTT has the potential to be a very versitile mid-game unit, it suffers from a number of problems, including (a) cyclone costs a ton of mana and is easily dispelled, (b) storm crow form is entirely redundant (and much weaker) than hippogriffs (the later which benefits from the same upgrades at the huntress hall and are made at the same Ancient of Wind), © the mana cost of moving in and out of storm crow form is too high, (d) faerie fire is the weakest autocast spell of any racial spell-caster unit in the game, and (e) the DoTT has low hitpoints, even when compared to other casters (only 380 at master level).
Giving the druid a modest boost to its attack speed in NE form would go a long way for the unit to be used for added ranged base defense while lowering the mana cost of moving in and out of NE form would benefit use for hit and run (fly in and fly out) tactics.
Other requested changes:
- Riflemen
- Long rifles upgrade now grant a 15 range increase for a total range of 65, down from a 20 range increase for a total range of 70.
- Riflemen attack cooldown slightly increased – 1.4 seconds instead of 1.35 seconds.
Why are long rifles so powerful? They literally grant double the benefit of improved bows. It seems over the top.
- Keeper of the Grove
- Thorns Aura now also grants 1/2/3 armor to all nearby friendly units in addition to granting the 10/20/30 percent damage returned to melee attackers.
- Priestess of the Moon
- The mana cost of Scout has been changed from 50/50/50 to 75/50/20.
- Searing arrows now grant a 5/10/15 yards to the attack range of the PoTM (autocast).
- Chimera
- Chimera hit points increased to 1100, up from 1000.
I understand all these changes are small , but they would at least give NE players a chance. And, yes, I can think of many other things I would like “tweaked” – but these seems to be the most urgent.