Finally! Good job Blizz, thanks for the patch!
What about mouse responsiveness? Now it’s the same between Windowed Fullscreen and Fullscreen?
Very nice changelist! Appreciate it.
We’ve finally landed 1.31. Asian and European Public Test Realms
Just wanted to highlight this for people who skip huge walls of text.
2 Likes
These are a lot potentially great changes! I hope you guys are gonna get enough testing information to make possibly needed adjustments.
One issue with the game right now wasnt addressed at all though:
The Orc - Nightelf match-up. Nightelf seems to be favored quite a lot right now. It would be great if a couple of little changes in this direction would come as well.
Suggestions:
- nerf wisp detonate: Give wisp detonate manaburn a max cap (maybe 150 mana). Detonate can take the ability to dispel from Orc (and human) completly
- buff lightningshield (+2 amor): shamans are used often vs NE right now, rarly in other match-ups. LS is a really cool ability, but imo has the issue, that to be effective the affected unit has to be right in the opponents army. Thus these units often just get entangled and focused down and the LS was just a waste of mana.
- buff purge (-5 mana): when you produce a shaman he starts with just a single purge and it takes quite some time to get the next one, thus orcs are very vulnerable to treants untill they have at least 3 shaman
Also to be fair, purge needs a nerf: It should not work on heroes who a currently under the effect of an invulnerability potion.
Thank you for the work you put into WC3!
4 Likes
Im having trouble with the fullscreen mode.
im running win7 pro x64, ryzen 1700x and a radeon vega 56 + asus mg279q monitor (2560x1440, 144hz, freesync) - i reinstalled PTR to be sure its not some random quirk.
when i first launch the game it starts in fullscreen mode and performance is horrible - im getting something around 30 fps - ingame and in the main menu.
in the options menu i cannot select the proper resolution - only 1080p 60 hz or lower.
when i try to set resolution and refresh rate in the registry nothing happens.
the launch -windowmode fullscreen doesnt change anything here.
using the fullscreen windowed mode offers a great experience with high framerates, nice mouse responsiveness and ofc high refresh rate (which in my case is 144hz).
1 Like
This seems like a really interesting patch looking forward to testing it! All changes seem weird overall, but interesting nontheless!
sorry, but I dont see how UD ever loses a game after this. Necromancers might be the best unit in the game now(all they needed was a cheaper Cripple at tier 1. with just that theyre already sorceresses, why did you make Unholy Frenzy so incredible? its like 6x better than Bloodlust(an already really good spell) now…and even more if you have more units) and they just got the new best item in the game…and its available at tier 1. all this to a race that was already not only the best, but overpowered. dunno why the weak Blademaster’s wind walk was nerfed so much, there goes his entire identity. at least hes a better fighter now. i wouldve just reversed every BM change since 1.26.
Hopefully you remove the UD item, or make it not work on summoned skeletons! i cant believe you even gave it 2 charges, its the best item in the game at 1 charge and its not even close to fair at 2 charges. they now have the best early game heal in the game which means they now have:
- best early game heal(DK and that item)
- best DPS
- best casters(Necromancer and Statues are IMO the 2 best casters in the game now)
- best AA(Fiends, Banshees)
- best heroes(DL, Lich)
- best antimagic(Destroyer, Banshee)
- best late game heal(new item, Statue, Coil)
- best base defense(Frost)
- best anti melee(Frost Armor)
- best debuff(Frost)
the only way to beat an UD used to be to do too much damage in the early game that even THEY cant come back. game over now. what arent they the best at anymore? please add a race thumb down on the ladder so I can just thumb UD down, till then I for one am not touching ranked 1v1 until UD is MASSIVELY nerfed.
Outside of UD and Wind Walk I dont mind the changes, wish Entangle was nerfed and DH, DotTs and Faerie Dragons buffed though.
6 Likes
Hey, I had the same problem in fullscreen, I fixed it by pressing windows + tab key one time. It’s as if the warcraft 3 windows is not focused and by doing this it focus.
I don’t know why this happens. I hope this fixes the problem for you!
Overall I like the patch. khadgars pipe still need to match archmage aura. I would give sentry wards 1 charge and some nerf to mana stone and mana potion.
1 Like
thanks, that solves the performance issues somewhat, but its still pretty unresponsive in comparison and i still cant choose the proper resolution.
Nice, but when are chat channels going to be fixed? It’s pretty lonely when everyone gets put into a different channel once it has more than 3 people.
3 Likes
By the nine… all those editor additions and all the extra potential. This was released on my birthday.
3 Likes
(8)NerubianPassage
- New map from Hive Workshop
- Small changes made from original author’s version to make it ladder ready
- Nerubian Passage has been added to 4v4 ladder
Many thanks for including my map, Blizz! 
11 Likes
2 Second windwalk CD after initial hit and giving blade back his old crit strike is technically a buff to BM again who’s still very good in the meta. (DUMB CHANGE). If you’re going to do that, keep it at 4-5 seconds after initial hit.
A BUFF to hipporiders??? Have you not watched almost every UD Vs NE matchup with massive amounts of hiippos/faries vs UDS?? Even awful NE’s can give a decent UD a hard game because of that meta and you give them more HP??? LOLOLOLOLOLOL. I’m a NE player BTW, so I’m not biased.
7 Likes
I loved pretty much everything so far, thanks for making this game more alive!
May the updates and balance changes continue! Storm hammers, for instance, are still desperatly waiting to be reverted back to its glory days, or buffed somehow ![:wink:](https://dou48tnq0ocoa.cloudfront.net/en/warcraft3/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")
1 Like
Hm why still every race can dispel on t2 exept undead ?! mb consider the roc dispell item on the shop again ?
4 Likes
There are a lot of very good changes in here. There are also some scary ones that could break the game a bunch. While I agree with the sentiment of tweaking necros and BM and so on, you have to consider all the scenarios. BM just gained a MASSIVE ability to burst down heroes quickly. When he’s partnered with a shadow hunter, he went from being able to deliver 2 hits of +100 damage during hex, to 3-4 hits. It will burn through his mana, but deliver that much damage that much faster. And when BM is already a strong hero killing right clicker, that’s a scary prospect. A level 5 blademaster with +6 claws and gloves of haste can dish out a ww hit on every other strike, for 7 hits in the 6 seconds of 4x ww after breaking invisi that deal a combined avg 855 hero damage- up from 642 in the same scenario last patch.
I’m not sure that a 15% damage buff upgrade can rectify the inherent flaws of knights being a featureless heavy melee unit that’s gated behind T3, dies horribly to T3 heavy air, and lacks any abilities. Abominations are already bad and they at least provide a passive DoT just by existing- but Bears have a 25% damage buff and rejuvenate while Tauren both have pulverize and receive reincarnation.
If you really want to fix knights, give them an upgrade or ability that would give them more mechanical utility, not more statistical edge. I know its not feasible to give them defend either in terms of thematics or the missing animation, but they really need something akin to defend. Heck, just a ‘charge’ style effect wouldn’t be bad.
2 Likes
i’ve played some games with the new necromancers and i really dont like them at all.
i’ve been playing necros for quite some years now and this patch kinda broke them for me on several levels.
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unholy frenzy on t2 or early t3 was pretty niche but very strong when combined with a timed push.
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unholy frenzy with adept saves money and time for actual army units. frenzy is a really strong spell, but what makes it bad for undead is the weak army at the stage of the game. now frenzy is late t3 - what would i rather have? wyrms, aboms with disease cloud, destroyers or master necros - they dont do a thing all alone. necros are still extremely weak vs dispel, and late t3 to gain their most useful spell doesnt really help here. i dont like the idea of necros being necrowagon only.
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unholy frenzy isnt targetable anymore - thats the worst part of it. sure - it can potentially buff half the army with one spellcast, but its extremely clunky to set up and chances are unholy frenzy hits units its not supposed to, with the effect or trigger spellcast missclick on something valuable.
i just had a game vs nightelf and the taunting mountaingiants made it impossible to precisely frenzy my units - i dont always have expendable units to throw away to get frenzy near the units that need frenzy on. and even worse: some necros got caught in the frenzy aswell and slowly died away in my backline.
running into the enemy non prepared? setting up frenzy in that situation is insanely difficult.
also it was oddly hard to frenzy gargs for anti air purposes. to do that now you will have to gather gargs around a skeleton, push them together with repeated move commands (with an enemy around youd even have to hold position), and then sniper the skeleton beneath the flock of gargs - if you have more gargs than AOE you gotta repeat that with the remaining unbuffed gargs.
its so so so clunky. i would not use frenzy anymore because the user experience is so bad.
frenzy needs to be a targeted spell due to its effects, and it needs to be directly castable and it needs to be available late t2 early t3.
novice - cripple + weak raise dead (1 skeleton)
adept - old frenzy
master - stronger / changed version of raise dead (stronger or more skeletons)
could be interesting, too.
the ghoul frenzy buff is interesting, but at that stage of the game ghouls become pretty irrelevant due to their low health. either make ghoul frenzy weaker and available at t2 or make t3 frenzy give them some archer like resistance vs magic and spells. nova, impale, shockwave, breath of fire, acid bomb, blizzard and thunderclap just decimate ghouls, no matter the quantity. sure, they’re cheap, but at that point the undead is just throwing free xp towards the enemy.
3 Likes
You could try isolating the necro and skeleton in a selection group, move command the skeleton under gargs and cast unholy frenzy through the UI. I heal units directly clicking the icons in my UI.
1 Like
Here’s my thoughts on some of these changes:
I really love the changes that “Smooths” the transition to upgrades like tauren and animal war training, those upgrades felt too mandatory.
Blademaster
I think the windwalk change was way overdue, as much as it changes balance, it made no sense design wise to let this kind of abuse going. I think the return of crit damage is bad though. Item stacking was just adding too much ridiculous RNG to the game, and now you’ve brought it back. You should buff the Blademaster in another fashion to compensate for this nerf.
Spiked Barricades
This ability was always poorly designed IMO, nothing is really interesting or fun about getting melee units damaged by attacking a building. The base damage still heavily discourage the use of tier 1 melee units, I’d just get rid of it. 50% Attacker damage seems excessive too.
Knight Upgrade
Feels like a really small buff honestly. Is this 15% more damage or 22.5% more damage coupled with the bonus damage vs medium? I guess it’s a cheap upgrade for when you’re food capped. I doubt that it’ll be any good vs mountain giants, they are simply too tough and can be easily staffed away, the only counter vs them is to ignore them…
Orb of Fire
I dislike this change. All orbs are good 100% of the time, but this has become a very situational item (Pretty much only vs UD, maybe orc…), and when it’s situation happens, this orb is clearly overpowered as it changes some dynamics heavily. I don’t think this was the right direction.
Gargoyle
I think the gold cost reduction was warranted, but the movement speed improvement seems a bit much. Surely this will revitalize gargs vs NE, and perhaps vs other races (Except orc because bats hard counter light air without any chance), but the game of peek a boo on wisps isn’t exactly exciting gameplay for the receiving player as it doesn’t promote much exchange aside from mass towering or sitting in your base, and nightelf has nothing to fight gargs in their units as they can’t catch them, or are awkward (Hippo vs garg… Dryads getting countered by gargs) Plus, breath of fire and demon hunters both got nerfed, which were the main garg counters.
Necromancer Changes
While I admire new changes to necromancers, I feel like the change here are almost all inappropriate in some form.
Cripple is excessively powerful. 20seconds of 75% slow on heroes? 1 minute? It can definitely work with number adjustments, but the spell will probably just become purge #2 or sorceress slow #2, not that it would necessarily be bad… As long as it’s worth it.
Unholy frenzy seems really awkward to me. It being applied on casters is just a big negative as they’ll end up with half hp and add no damage. Having to kill a skeleton is also pretty clunky. This new unholy frenzy also breaks teamgames and FFA: Not having UF in large fights will be an insane downside, and FFA won’t have access to skeletons easily, and wont be able to pre-buff UF withotu some awkward ghoul suicide. I’m sure you can make the spell acceptable for solo without hitting other gametypes hard.
I think more brainstorming should be had on the necromancer, riase dead could be a great intiate spell if it didnt require bodies, making necromancers able to summon skeletons at the start of a battle just like all other casters blanket units in buffs/debuffs.
Ritual Dagger
Undead needed something like this, but this item seems so clunky. So, if you make a non-dk hero, you need to buy a rod AND the dagger. If you have to buy dust you already lost 3 item slots right away. The whole “requires a sacrifice” part seems like just clunky flavour on the item. I do think the part where it can make it easier for undead to deny kills is interesting though. Personally, I’d just remove it and make it so blight skulls put a non-combat heal over time on units that stand on the blight that appears.
Cloak of Shadows
Unsure about that one, I would’ve just removed it from the game honestly. I’ll give it a try first though.
Crystal Ball
Great change, but it’ll still be frustrating to get a ball instead of pendants of energy (I think they are the same level?) Why not make it so it has some passive bonus like extra vision or +2 all stats?
Other Changes
Otherwise, I think the rest sounds absolutely great.
PS: I really hate your ctrl+f feature that overwrites the normal ctrl+f feature on browsers, i can’t just search a change in a post anymore.
3 Likes
One change - namely Cloak of Shadows is going to be definetely OP in comparison with other 1st level items. Removing Tome of Exp = ok, less random, “we should prepare for battle”. Returning crits to bm = more random., how do we prepare for a random crit?
So, overall I don’t understand what way in game design do they follow. But anyways, the time will show.
2 Likes