Regarding contemporary patch and "hotfixes"

General Discussion
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I’m a bit dubious on the regard of the term hotfixes. Hotfixes to me implies to fix technical issues. But they didn’t. And hotfixes don’t imply balance changes, but they did change the balance.

For bug fixes, I’m really missing the fix that huntress with heavy armor upgrade generate the sound of a spirit tower attacking. Map vetoes is unclear to me: it always has been the design that you can veto half of the maps, minus one. This ensures overlap with any other random player. This is why 1on1 usually has much more map vetoes than 4on4: prudence is much more needed in 4on4 to ensure 8 players all have at least 1 map available in common. I’m really unsure why blizzard started to deviate from this. Tournaments still clunky as hell (not related to the patch though, still a persistent issue since introduction of the automated tourneys), people crash out of 3on3 games since this patch. See nothing on these open doors

Human nerfs are weird. It still won’t fix the issue with pala rifle. Bloodmage doesn’t support it because the siphon mana is cheap. It supports it because siphon mana is good. Pala changes virtually have had zero effect in game. Oddly enough, huntresses are not even addressed and those are just insane. Even more so is likely the wisp gather rate increase. It is bonkers OP. Elfs just throw heroes like they do, can be outmined with thousands of gold. But hey, spam heavy hunts and you’re good! Whoopdiedoo.

Undead having access to dispel is fine. I can even argue why they get 4 charges at high cost: it plays well into them only being able to buy it with an expo and needing this post expo but pre destroyers to bridge notably vulnerability in their play. What isn’t fine, is that there is not a single second cooldown on this ability. Spam away is insane. It is much faster than priest dispel, on which the dispel ability for UD is clearly based.

I’m not a fan of the Tauren change. Oddly enough, it seems to mostly make Orc mirror a lot less fun. Equally, the buffs on wards is insane in team games, especially when supported by an archmage. I know balance mostly focusses on 1on1, but even 2on2 is still suffering notably on these changes. Games literally turn into a pala + hunts or pala + tauren like game. Tauren walker already was the strongest combi one could have due to link + res. Its even more bonkers now. Luckily, unlike hunts and even more so pala rifle, the tauren take some time get online.

It is an RTS. We shouldn’t be able to spam one unit from beginning till the end on every map versus every race. The game should rely on a good mixture and timing of specific units. Not a braindead “one size, fits all” type of approach. Additionally, the map pool for 3on3 team games it terrible. Duststorm. Really? Really? REALLY? Upper kingdom still there, still. Still no shop on it though.

I honestly think when discussing balance or patches we should fully ignore this patch and just start from prior. It is easier to oversee.

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If you think that doubling the cost and increasing the cooldown of Mana Siphon by 33% aren’t huge nerfs your idea of balance is way out of whack. Those are massive nerfs to the ability and Bloodmage’s power in PalaRifle. Humans aren’t doing Pala Rifle in high level play every match since the nerfs, it’s not as good as you think and this will help more.

Huntresses are a bit of a problem but pros are finding ways to beat them, maybe go study up. I agree the wood is crazy.

Priests have AOE dispel and you often have 3-4 priests in an army. Undead has single target dispels they pay for at home. A single priest dispel can do more than the 4 dispels that undead have in the right situatons. It’s called tradeoffs and you are comparing apples to oranges here. Hilarious to complain about a totally fine thing from the least played and weakest race though lol.

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hotfixes just means it was a patch made in response to issues that came up after a patch release. Usually it means they aren’t increasing the main version number. It really has little to do with the actual content of the update itself.

This is really just mincing words though

This changed quite some time ago for 4v 4 specifically, which at one point only let you veto one map. Originally that rule was used such that it wasn’t possible for the players in a game to veto all maps, thereby ensuring that the map selected was one everyone was okay with. Now, they threw that out the window and if all maps are vetoed, it just picks the one with the fewest.

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You do know that large percentages on nihil numbers mean nothing? This sounds like the headline: “deadly flesh eating virus claims 50% more victims this year!” - 3 instead of 2.

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The term hotfix doesn’t concern what’s contained in a patch. At the most fundamental level, a hotfix is a patch that can be applied to a live environment without disrupting operation. For example, applied without requiring a restart, or without needing to bring a service down, or having any other sort of downtime.

For any WC3 patches, if there was no downtime of any sort (both server and local), then it can be considered a hotfix.

That said, the term does get used more loosely than that within the industry.

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