Thoughts on Crypt Lord Rework? (Updated) August 2019

Competitive Multiplayer
1

I really think Crypt Lord needs a rework.

He is picked 2nd or 3rd (usually)

No one skills beetles then (enemy at tier 3). Why would you have lvl 1 or 2 beetles instead of impale/spiked?

His abilities:

Impale
I think his stun needs invunerability removed with mana cost reduced.

Spiked Carapace
Turned into flat dmg plus percent blocked like “spiked barricades”.
Armor should be changed to block dmg in %
Reflected dmg should apply before armor reduction.

Carrion Beetles
Though adding spiked to them at lvl 3 sounds good its not practical as he picked third and skillpoints go elsewhere. And rod of necro is alternative.

Removed with either "Crypt Lords Presence " or “Wave of Fear”

Crypt Lord’s Presence
Aura base ability
1.5/2.5/3.5% hp per 1.5 second.

Or “Wave of Fear” slow ability aoe wave that costs mana with higher cooldown.

(Wave of Fear provides a movespeed buff by slowing enemies; so an alternative to DK)

Wave of Fear
CD 25/23/21 seconds lvl 1-3
Manacost 130/115/100 lvl 1-3
Duration 7/8/8seconds in 600/650/700 aoe.
Slow by 15/20/25% lvl 1-3
“Non Stacking with other Wave of Fears”

Locust Swarm
As strong as it against 1 unit we must realise this is an RTS.

Therefore it either needs CD buff or more locusts and dmg per locust.

As this ability is nothing in base fights other than providing heal if CL doesnt die before duration ends.

Replicating Death Prophet ulti from DOTA

4 Likes
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CL is awful.
His mana pool is garbage and his passive is probably the worst passive in the game.
Especially with the recently buffed Rings of Protection CL passive is even worse relative to what you can find from even low level creeps.
It is just an awful awful passive that only helps protect your CL against physical (not spells) and its not even that good at it.

Impale makes enemy units invulnerable for a moment when it hits them which means every attack/spell that hits during that moment does zero damage and no effect.
Impale also can not hit ensnared/entangled/rooted units at all - no damage no stun.

Beetles are completely useless at any level in any kind of a high skill game.
They do no damage, their health is tiny, they are slow, they need a corpse (which you could use with Rod of Necromancy) and they feed exp to the enemy.

Even with the upcoming Sacrifical Dagger and Unholy Frenzy the beetles are still not worth using when you can just use Rod of Necromancy for 2 units per corpse and sacrifice them.

CLord does not have enough mana to keep re-summoning the beetles and he definitely doesn’t have enough mana for Impale and Beetles.

CL ultimate is never a factor in high level games because CL is a 3rd hero (if at all picked) and his Locust Swarm is okay but nowhere near as good as other “Battle ultimates” like Avatar or Metamorphosis.
Its mana cost is also too high for CLord.

9 Likes
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Crypt Lord should be given dmg reduction

Like 15 35 50%

Not +4 armor +6 armor etc…

Thoughts

And mana buff

And impale less wonky allowing no invulnerbality

New ulti would be nice too

Beetles buffed or removed with new ability.

5 Likes
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I mean just look at Dark Ranger Black Arrows vs CL Beetles:

  • The skeletons Black Arrows summon are equal or better than the beatles
  • You can have a ton more skeletons than the beetles
  • You can assemble an army of skeletons much faster with Black Arrows
  • They cost less mana to spawn and probably give less experience on death
  • The black arrow adds up to 20 damage in addition to the whole skeleton effect!!!
  • The black arrow has 600 range and can be used as bonus dmg against heroes (most valued targets)
  • in upcoming patch you can spawn Black Arrow skeletons from a Drain Life target
  • black arrows can even be used to completely prevent a corpse from spawning, meaning taurens can’t get resurrected by walkers and similar effects.

The beetles are so garbage that its just pointless to even talk about fixing them.
Even if they costed 0 mana and required no corpse they are still garbage units that feed exp to enemy.

6 Likes
5

Facts
Beetle should go away because too many abilities spawn underlings in WC3.
So i’ve come up with this: ROUGH idea

Crypt Lord is basically a tank so lets turn him into one

New Impale (Affects all units, longer stun 0.5 seconds, not invulnerable) This is CC

New Spiked Carapace (Already is Thorns aura, instead of armor 1/3/7 having dmg % reduction is better like stated 15%/35%/55%
Note: Dmg reflected must be before armor otherwise no point of thorns if dmg returned is reduced because of resistance from carapace.

Then get rid of beetles and have presence aura (1.75% max hp enemy per second)

This makes him important to take out in fights (Spiked Carapace synchronizes with this)

Ulti either stronger or removed with (Crypt Stasis)

Sleeps CL but gives him massive heal overtime (during duration new third deals 5% hp per second)

Stun can cancel ability (Initial 1.5 seconds invunerable) Last 4 seconds.

4 Likes
6

I think I’ve seldom seen a Crypt Lord ever in an Undead game.

Maybe he’s the least picked non-tavern hero?

His only use is Impale as a third. Even then its pretty “wonky”.

Agree with the guy above it really makes no sense that during Impale units are invulnerable.

In regards to replacing beetles I say it wouldn’t hurt.

New ability sounds like Necrophos third from DOTA 2…

I wonder how that would work in an RTS? But not that bad of an idea with the new Ulti.

2 Likes
7

Maybe it is boring to copy an existing ability, but CL can have a “parasite” ability to replace his current bug ability.
After one hit, it would deal small damage over time for 5/10/15 seconds, and after the unit dies a bug would spawn. Since this is an auto attack ability, it should have a low mana cost, and it should have no limit on spawned units like the DR’s black arrow.

2 Likes
8

I’m admittedly biased here, as the Crypt Lord is my favorite hero, but I dislike the idea of removing any of the Crypt Lord’s spells (Such as his beetles, my favorite summon in the game). I get that he’s bad, but I don’t think its entirely his fault - the Undead race as a whole is pretty awkwardly designed already, and there isn’t much wiggle room for heroes because Death Knight is mostly mandatory. Ignoring the rest of his race, however, I do think he has some things that could be made better about him. After reading other ideas in the thread, I guess I’ll just list my ideas below, apologies for being verbose.

  • My first gripe with the Crypt Lord is that his base hit points are lower than everyone else’s, where he has 25 and they have 100. In other playable Crypt Lord appearances, namely Heroes of the Storm, this has become a core part of the character; he has low health for a tank but has ways of reducing damage (a shield that also grants spell armor and beetles to block enemy spells) that it ultimately doesn’t affect him that much, but in Warcraft 3 I think its simply inconsistent and a liability. Perhaps this was done to offset his passive and his high strength, but I’d much rather his hit points be increased.
  • As has been said in this thread already, the Crypt Lord’s Mana Pool is lacking. Perhaps this won’t do much, but what if the Crypt Lord now traded 3 strength for 3 intelligence? It might not end up affecting all that much, but compared with the current Crypt Lord, his base health buff and the ability trade will result in him gaining 45 mana and 0.15 mana regen at the cost of 0.15 HP regen and 3 damage per hit - with the Crypt Lord’s already generous attack speed and still respectable strength, without running the numbers I doubt this will severely injure his rather good DPS, and the reduction to his durability is practically invisible.
  • Now onto abilities! As others have already stated, the invulnerability on Impale needs to go. Not much more to say, really.
  • Someone else mentioned making the Crypt Lord’s Spiked Carapace grant damage reduction rather than armor, which I certainly think is a good way to make the ability better. However, I ponder on if it would be good to make the damage reduction (though not the damage reflection) apply to Spell damage as well.
  • Instead of replacing an ability with something completely different, what if the Carrion Beetles also benefited from Spiked Carapace? This would make the beetles tougher and provide the Crypt Lord another way to soak damage - the Beetles would seem like easy targets, but they’d be reducing incoming damage as well, thus protecting the rest of the army. This idea is inspired by the recently announced changes to the Dark Ranger’s Life Drain, where they made it apply the current level of Black Arrow so that it didn’t have an anti-synergy with said spell. While the Crypt Lord’s abilities don’t technically have this problem (except Impale, which is just clunky overall), applying a change like this would improve both abilities overall and reinforce the idea that the Crypt Lord wants to reduce the damage his enemies are putting out to his allies, whether through crowd control or through tanking himself or with summons.

That’s my current ideas for now. Everything else I can think of is simply tweaking numbers, such as with Locust Swarm, though perhaps with these changes he won’t need it buffed as badly. Granted, this probably wouldn’t make the Crypt Lord used much more outside of his wonky third pick role, which will at least be improved due to the invulnerability being removed from Impale, but short of redesigning the Undead race, I’m not sure that’ll be changed.

5 Likes
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It is worth noting that due to how the new Unholy Frenzy works one can cast it on beetles to give your units Unholy Frenzy. Now the Necromancer could do this on summoned Skeletons, however those have finite duration of life and to be present from the start in combat one needs an upgraded Meat Wagon and likely more necromancers due to the higher mana usage. This sort of interaction was mentioned in the patch notes.

If mana is a big problem with him then maybe reducing the mana cost of Carrion Beetle would help.

2 Likes
10

You see beetles practically are useless and need to go.

Lets take into considering the sad reality.

CL is first of all usually picked 3rd and maybe 2nd once in awhile.

This mean he needs 5 lvls to get beetles lvl 3. Now how oftwn does this happen?

As 1 lvl is always into impale I believe and without spiked carapace he is squishy (low hp)

For tht reason he picked third.

AND by the time he is picked (for aguements sake as a 2nd) not 3rd enemy is almost if not tier 2.

Making stronger units vs trash beetles.

Beetles have the ghoul problem. Low hp and no magic resistance.

AND terrible pathfinding which doesnt help.

Thats why I suggest corroding Aura instead. Even with 2 lvls at lvl 5 gives CL importance and he can spread his abilities.

Beetles usually die way too fast before having impact. (See above Boganov89 post) no point of giving a beetle spiked plus hp.

Magic aoe very strong and ranges will melt before they get close.

Unless you want to create one strategy like with POTM like mass archer build.

If your idea is taken then this is only valid strat.

Mass ghoul + quick jungle to beetle 3.

End undead rush style with tanky beetles.

Idkk bout my CL baby having tht style of game…

With new corrode aura CL is threat even before 6 at mid-late game as he does hp% does more dmg to tier 3 units and tankier units.

Now he has a reason to be picked against lets say MG mass. Especially if he gets new 6 (OH BOY

2 Likes
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For the sake of this thread im going to test stronger beetles and buffed (hp/mana) in World Editor and report my findings.

After testing I found the following:

Beetles at lvl 3 are basically equivalent to a maxed out ghoul but are one hit weaker.

Still usually a third pick CL never gets to lvl 5 (rarily) usually levels used for stun.

I buffed Locust Swarm by having 1 more locust and faster attack rate of the spell from 0.2 to 0.1 and buffed locus hp steal from 20 to 50.

The result was basically Death Prophet ulti from DOTA 2. Not bad pretty good

Impale stun duration I increased but found retarded because (like above) units are invulnerable.

Beetles would need spiked carapace or magic resistance buff like 40%
Sometimes pathfinding give me heaache.

CL having mana regen higher is better than more mana pool.

Reducing CD of Ulti creates better impact (180scs - 120scs) found new ulti does high dmg to solo target but in base fights really low dmg.

So cooldown reduction would be nice.

4 Likes
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But how would a stronger hp and tankier CL work with DK or DL.

Both have good aura and DK has big heal.

I think if balanced wrong CL becomes way too tanky.

But if CL has corrode aura then hes strong tier.

Otherwise he will be ignored in fights.

Plus now human have new orb.

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It very hard to go with Crypt Lord as a first hero and use beetles (summons) to creep and get some dominance.

First of all you need corpses, which require time to be generated by the graveyard: 15 seconds per corpse. Graveyard itself takes 80 seconds to build.

Second, there is 6 seconds cooldown per beetle. So once the Crypt Lord is out, to summon five level 1 beetles, you have to wait a lot. Not good at all.

Conclusion: beetles have to be reworked.

2 Likes
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I love how that’s ALSO another FACTOR of why Crypt Lord is TRASH.

Are we also forgetting that Crypt Lord Locust Swarm also misses targets who move out of the way!

The list keeps growing.

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well…it’s a space-creating ultimate…and moving out of the space is the way to avoid taking damage…just like starfall.

crypt lord isn’t trash, DK is just too important a hero to start with. unless you can add the amount of healing a dk does to another ud hero, i don’t see crypt lord first ever being better.

3 Likes
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Buddy didnt even read the post…

Lmao Starfall cant even be compared to Locust Swarm. Because Starfall actually does aoe dmg thats noticeable.

Crypt Lord Swarm is easily healed especially vs well any race like orc shadow hunter.

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CL isn’t bad.
The other options are just better which is not CL’s fault.

The only thing that should be fixed is impale invul and making impale work on webbed/snared units.

2 Likes
18

they can’t be compared because they’re two completely different types of spells. the locust swarm plays into the crypt lord’s bulky strength based hero type to make him harder to kill…it heals him, not supposed to be a flat dps ultimate…please tell me you understand that. so yeah

1 Like
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It lasts 30 seconds.

Its not even that much of a heal unless you hit enemy units.

Who stands in a locust swarm?

Plus it trails behind CL not on him mking it worse when chasing.

My biggest request right now is the stun fix with its stupid mini invunervability buff.

Then its beetle as a whole.

Carapace and Locust swarm are more of eequests

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Remove the invulnerability given to enemy units during Impale and perhaps make its AOE wider.
Also let Impale stun/damage units that are ensnared/webbed/entangled (right now it can’t).

Increase CL mana pool or decrease all mana costs on his spells.

CL armor passive should provide % based damage reduction, and perhaps give 2/4/6 HP regen per sec to CLord.
With the Ring of Protection buff in 1.31 CL passive became even worse compared to what you can find on even the lowest lvl creeps.

Crypt Lord ultimate needs some buffs but it sees so little use that its almost a mystery how well it performs at high skill levels.

The beetles are just hopeless honestly.
Pathetic health, awful damage, no useful abilities, needs a corpse and costs a lot of mana to respawn beetles (for a CL mana pool).
Easily killed by dispel and spells which makes them just feed EXP.
The beetles are like ghouls (which are awful) but even slower and worse at lvl1 and 2.

Every other summon in the game serves a clear purpose but the beetles are awful at everything.

2 Likes