Version 2.0.2 Build 22726 PTR Patch Notes

PTR Discussion and Bug Report
63

Are you referring to this change? It was specifically designed to keep Heal the same, but improve the cast point for Dispel and Inner Fire.

  • Priest Heal cooldown increased from 1 to 1.1 seconds.
  • Priest cast point time reduced from 0.5 to 0.4.

And I do join my voice to the chorus of people clamouring not to break custom maps with the Orb of Slow coding.

1 Like
64

here a thing if they buff the healing further they will need to nerf the dispel.

65

dont have to talk about priest dispel. 75 mana cost too much for player who dont use archmage and often time there’s no mana for any dispel . let alone healing nonstop already drained all the mana. priest need to change dispel to cooldown instead of mana.

66

TOTALLY AGREED. especially point 4. and undead. thats how i play undead. its convenient
1 aco build everything instantly .

2 Likes
67

Frost Wyrm get a buff?
Tauren&Chimera have not appeared in the competition recently, let alone they can decide the direction of the competition
On the contrary, Frost Wyrm has recently appeared in matches and has helped kill NE’s heroes multiple times, but NE has little way to deal with this tactic
If you want a buff Frost Wyrm, you also need a large number of buff Tauren&Chimera first, and then a small buff Frost Wyrm
The huge advantage of UVN has been for many years, and Blizzard’s preference for UD, won’t NE players be dissatisfied with this?

68
  • Reverted Hunters Hall lumber cost
    • Upgrade Moon Glaives cost increased from 100/150 to 125/175
  • Upgrade Moon Glaives research time increased from 35 to 60 seconds
    Producing a huntress cost 30 seconds ,Upgrade Moon Glaives is so long
69

reverted the pala rifle nerfs wow very disappointing when the nerf was lacking in the first place

please make holy light cd 6 seconds again and increase mana siphon cost and reduce range… it’s the most unfun strat to fight against it needs tuning

70

Thank you for your active work on the new patch. Although some changes look quite radical, overall this version looks more balanced than the previous one.

It’s nice to see the changes to Frost Wyrms. I hope they don’t get reverted because Wyrms are currently the most useless unit in terms of cost/quality. And it would be great to see Frost Wyrms as often as Gryphon Riders or Chimaeras.

Orb of Slow. It might be too strong to have both changes: undispellable and stack with Sorceress Slow, maybe it’s better to just have one of them.

And I want to talk about Staff of Preservation and Staff of Sanctuary. These items seem too strong compared to Orcs and UD who don’t have such preservation items. You can buy 1 item and save tons of units or heroes during the game. Perhaps they should be consumables with several charges instead of permanent items. Or at least increase their cooldowns.

3 Likes
71

NELF REWORK SUGGESTIONS

1) Keeper of the Grove

a) Give an Innate Ability – Sprout/Tree Regrowth

  • Grant the Keeper an innate ability that allows him to sprout or regrow trees (same aoe as lvl 2 Force of nature).
  • Cooldown scales with hero level: starts at 4 minutes, reduced by 10 seconds per level.
  • Synergizes well with Force of Nature, Entangling Roots, and other tree-dependent abilities.

b) Thorns Aura – Rework or Replace

  • Current Thorns Aura is outdated and situational. Instead, provide an aura that addresses Night Elf core issues: fragility and lack of late-game mobility.
  • Suggestions:
    • Nature’s Ward Aura: Reflects a percentage of melee damage taken (e.g., 10/15/20%) and blocks a portion of it—acts like Hardened Skin + Thorns.
    • Or, Emerald Sanctuary: Grants nearby allies 5/10/15% magic resistance and slow HP regen (0.25/0.5/0.75 HP/sec).
    • If using the first option, remove Hardened Skin from Mountain Giants to avoid redundancy.

c) Force of Nature

  • Could scale better into late game. Consider allowing treants to gain passive Entangling Attack or Poison Touch at higher levels.

2) Demon Hunter

a) Mana Burn

  • Increase cooldown slightly (e.g., by 1 second) to reduce early-game spam, balancing its power.

b) Immolation – Needs Secondary Effect

  • Compared to other AoEs like Thunder Clap, Immolation is underwhelming in efficiency. Add a secondary passive effect, such as:
    • Reduces incoming magic damage by 5/10/15/20%, OR
    • Slows nearby enemies slightly (5/10/15% movement speed), OR
    • Affects air units in range.

c) Evasion

  • Good as-is. No changes needed.

d) Metamorphosis – Rework Bonus Stats

  • Give the bonus HP or Gain +10 to all attributes?
    • Ranged chaos attack remains.
    • Basic skills are upgraded:
      • Mana Burn: Increased range to match attack range.
      • Immolation: Wider AoE.
      • Evasion: Grants bonus movement speed equal to half the evasion percentage.

3) Priestess of the Moon (POTM)

a) Searing Arrows – Remove or Replace

  • Remove Searing Arrows to allow use of orbs (which currently conflict with it).

b) New Skill – Elunar Prayer

  • Channeled ability (1.5s):
    • If target is an ally: Heals for 100/200/300 HP.
    • If target is an enemy: Deals 100/200/300 magic damage.
    • Units within 300 AoE of the target receive 50% of the effect (ally healed, enemies damaged).
    • Cooldown: 8 seconds. Mana Cost: 90.
    • Gives her more utility and “priestess” flavor.

c) Starfall – Buff

  • Activating Starfall should turn the map to night, giving Night Elves vision/movement buffs and thematic synergy.

d) Scout Owl – Minor Buff?

  • Already a strong scouting tool, but consider adding a minor passive or active effect (e.g., Gain invisibility/shadowmeld when stationary, can detonate and damage?).

UNITS

  1. Archers – OK

  2. Huntresses – I love the update about added heavy armor but it may become too overpowered since it simply adds something without a cost. There should be a trade-off. Instead of a direct armor change, there should be a toggleable skill/form.
    For instance, default huntresses lack shields, have 350 move speed, and are unarmored type. An upgrade provides a tankier version—i.e., with a shield, 320 move speed, and heavy armor type!

  • The Sentinel Owl should be placeable on Ancients!
    • Should be permanent/or give a duration but will fly back to the caster Huntress if it’s still alive! For example, place the owl in a tree for 3 minutes. After 3 minutes, it flies back to restore the charge and can be cast again!
      • Night Elf is the only race with unreliable detection! Orc Sentry Wards are the best and cheapest, Humans have tower true sight, Gyrocopters, Mortar Team Flare, Undead Shades, and Night Elf only has owls (but POTM is trash so nobody picks her typically, and Huntresses are too fragile/expensive! Imagine spending 195 gold and lumber for an owl that you can see, can only be put in a tree, can have the tree destroyed, and lasts only a few minutes. How does that make any sense?)

  1. Glaive Thrower. Give a Ballista upgrade. Glaive Thrower becomes a Ballista. Ballista has penetration power of Vorpal Blades, can target air, and gains armor upgrades.

  2. Dryad – is ok, but maybe give Abolish Magic more damage.

  3. Druid of the Claw – Make Rejuvenation dispellable but NOT spell stealable! Night Elf has no in-combat healing. Tranquility is unreliable and cancelable, requiring Staff of Preservation and well healing. But Staff is actually what makes Night Elf strong. As a race, Night Elf should rely less on these micro skills of the Staff (e.g., increase its cooldown), and strengthen their actual army, which becomes horribly weak in late game due to weak hero synergy.

  4. Mountain Giants: too expensive, too bulky, no damage, 7 food!
    Give a disable skill like Avalanche (similar to Dota’s Tiny), or Craggy Exterior, where it can randomly stun (for 1 sec) an enemy unit within 300 AoE when taking damage. OR make Taunt actually keep attacking the MG for 2 attacks (cannot be controlled).

  5. Air units are already good as they are. The nerf to the movement speed of Gargoyles and Flying Machines seems to have leveled the playing field as Night Elf is the ONLY RACE WITHOUT AIR DISABLE! Undead have Sleep, Web, Frost Nova, Nukes, Cripple, Curse, and slowing attacks; Humans have Banish, Shackles, Gyros, slow, polymorph, and Bolt! Orcs have Ensnare, Hex, Purge, Orb Proc, and Bats. Night Elf only has Dryad slows. And when ORCS and UD gain the move speed aura levels, they pretty much outrun all elf units. And HUM may be slow but they have the best disables in the world.
    Neutral heroes should not be the go-to option as this is a racial issue.

  6. Druids – Give the shape-shift skill a separate upgrade. Adept and Mastery skills should unlock spells.

  • Mark of the Claw – unlock Bear Form, requires Tier 3.

  • Adept Training – unlock Rejuvenation.

  • Master Training – unlock a Rabid buff that grants Evasion or attack speed. It should be autocastable for allies but should not copy Bloodlust. Or maybe give armor + attack speed, or Leech Seed [Plants a seed in an ally. The seed takes 2 HP per pulse on every enemy within 500 AoE of the buffed unit. The HP taken will be transferred to the allyas a heal. Pulses 20 times over 40 seconds.

  • Mark of the Talon – unlock Storm Crow Form.

  • Adept – unlock a wind skill/gust 600 AoE spell. Gives Evasion to allies inside it and more attack speed, or slows enemies and makes them miss. Channeled skill like Monsoon/Blizzard! Lasts 10 seconds.

  • Master – unlock Cyclone.

Buildings

  • Tree of Life/Ages/Eternity can summon treants (2/3/4 treants, cooldown 2 minutes, duration 2 minutes, cost 30? lumber). Like Force of Nature, but doesn’t need targeting trees because, well, they are trees. This also ensures that the Nature’s Blessing upgrade can be used for treants even if Keeper is not summoned.
  • Ancient Protectors can hurl boulders to stun?
  • Moon Wells refill with Tranquility, and Ancients heal from Tranquility for 25% of healing. (Too overpowered though.)

ITEMS

  • Nerf the cooldown of Staff.
  • Orb of Venom stacks with POTM or rework Searing Arrows.
  • Anti-Magic Potion: make it undispellable and allow it to have charges (max 3 in hero inventory).
  • Moon Stone can have charges too (in hero inventory).
1 Like
72

what race are u using? u cant beat pala rifle ? its so easy to beat.

73

orb of slow is just acceptable . would you exchange orb of lightning with orb of slow?
lightning orb is the best orb so far. 100% death rate and no escape.

sorceress suck very bad. u have speed scroll and those are just useless.
sure if u want to exchange staff of sanctuary with tiny town hall.

tiny town hall should be human items.

1 Like
75

flamestrike is useless. always kill own ally units, slow to cast. easy to dodge. and still cost alot of mana. instead of 125 mana. make it 100 or less. unlike shockwave, carrion swarm, impale . they are 100% hit. 100% damage. why cant flamestrike improve better? any pro player can dodge flamestrike easily.

and footies reflect 25% is acceptable but this unit already so weak. die easily. its almost an exp feeder to any melee hero . 1 shockwave or 1 carrion swarm, they are done 50% damage and a few hit they die. can make them tougher and cost more? either make them higher damage or more hp.

spell breaker have shield, it should also benefit from the defend upgrades from footies.

1 Like
76

Humans already have powerbuilding)) And it’s funny that you think that I’m Orc. But my main race is UD, so I don’t have neither staff of sanctuary nor tiny town hall. Even healscrolls were removed)) All I have is huge nerfs during the last patches.

Anyway, I said what I said, I don’t want to argue with anyone. I only want devs to read all of our texts and make professional conclutions about balance problems.

3 Likes
77

This is a bad solution. Making a new ability for the orb is gonna prevent a lot of custom maps breaking.

If you go through with it, the maps that still have editors might be annoyed at having to rework their custom spells etc.
The maps that no longer have editors or are complete and don’t get updated anymore will be just broken forever. Many of these maps are protected and can’t be editted by anyone else but the original author.

So please just make a new ability for this, it’s a little bit of extra time that will save you a lot of complaining from the custom community later down the line

6 Likes
78

You are breaking the custom maps because of your ignorance, not because you need to break them. When you change the war3.w3mod\Units\AbilityData.slk for melee, you could keep the old version of the same file in _balance\Custom_V1.w3mod\Units\AbilityData.slk which is automatically used by custom maps unless they go out of their way to specify the usage of unstable, constantly changing melee balance data.

A lot of World Editor users are telling you to “copy the ability” but that idea is a World-Editor-centric way of thinking. It works well if you write more C++ code.

I am on vacation and I can’t look at your PTR yet, but the space aliens gave me the source code, purely for their own amusement. In the War3 source folder, at Source/Units/Ability/CAbilityOrb.h there is a C++ class called CAbilitySpellEffectBonus. This ability is spawned from AbilityData.slk if the code column of the spreadsheet is set to AIsb. You don’t care about that and aren’t changing C++, right? Because you just want to play the game, right? You didn’t change the C++ so you don’t actually need to add an ability to World Editor. I assume you changed AIos in the UnitID column of the row labeled with alias key column (first column) as AIsb. And now instead of AIos you are using some Shadowstrike based thing, which is a row you can add by choosing a new alias and using the code column again as AEsh for the new row, and then putting that new alias as the UnitID column value of the row for AIsb.

Frozen Throne already solved the problem you’re facing. The entire purpose of _balance\Custom_V1.w3mod\Units\ folder is that when you make an slk change like this, the campaign missions and the custom maps stay the same because they always use the duplicate file in _balance\Custom_V1.w3mod\. But the people who worked before you in 2020-2022, who have since been sacked, also struggled to understand this system and often did it wrong. Because they [and/or you] did it wrong, custom maps were incentivized to flag themselves as Melee maps and use the latest balance instead of the stable one. This is wrong and the proper way to help those maps is for you to better maintain the _balance\Custom_V1.w3mod\Units\ folder and not for all custom maps to flag themselves as Melee. For example, if you were copying CAbilitySpellEffectBonus class to make a new ability class in C++, similar to how CAbilityHealMultiplier was added to Source/Units/Ability/CAbilityOrb.h in the last 5 or so years by other new people (you can see this on your git blame stuff, I’d imagine – it wasn’t in the 2005 game), in that case if you make a new C++ class then you want to add a new row to war3.w3mod\Units\AbilityData.slk to declare an ability alias for that class functionality. But the people who worked here before you, sometimes when they did that, they forgot to also add the ability alias row to _balance\Custom_V1.w3mod\Units\AbilityData.slk for the customs. And that is because they were ignorant. If you look at the Firelord hero added in a 2005 patch to the 2003 game, the way his abilities such as Volcano were added, after these are added in C++ in Source\Unit\Ability\CAbilityFireLord.h then the alias row for ANvc (“Volcano”) was added to war3.w3mod\Units\AbilityData.slk. But these were also made available in the _balance\Custom_V1.w3mod\Units folder. The difference was that the link to the new alias was not provided – so Tavern would not sell Firelords in custom maps, and they wouldn’t change, but newly made custom maps on the stable balance could create Firelord based characters, or copy the ANvc row’s “Custom_V1” stable balance equivalent. In a similar way, the recent California kiddos added that CAbilityHealMultipler class in C++ that I mentioned before, and then they added a row with alias='AIf2', and code='AIhu' to both of war3.w3mod\Units\AbilityData.slk and _balance\Custom_V1.w3mod\Units\AbilityData.slk. And then they also added a new item ofr2 to be this new version of Orb of Fire, and this was added in both war3.w3mod\Units\ItemData.slkand also _balance\Custom_V1.w3mod\Units\ItemData.slk, but then if we look at HumanUnitFunc.txt in both of these two folders, it seems like someone changed hvlt the Arcane Vault to have ofr2 on its Makeitems= property, even in the stable balance file _balance\Custom_V1.w3mod\Units\HumanUnitFunc.txt and this seems really wrong, since the link to change the lowest level (which version of item is sold by shop) should have only been added to the melee file war3.w3mod\Units\HumanUnitFunc.txt.

So, I wrote this on mobile, I’m not at my Windows PC, space aliens probably aren’t really the ones who gave me the C++ source it was probably somebody’s AI intuition, but what I’m saying is nevertheless accurate. Do not change 'AIsb' row in the Custom_V1 stable balance folders, only change it in the melee balance folders. If you cannot do this, the problem is not that “the game is complicated,” rather in such case, the problem is you. In such case, if you want to know how I really feel, take a look at the file encoded in the game at Units/Human/Peasant/PeasantPissed1.flac.

11 Likes
79

Human: Arch Mage now has a chance to 1:1 Blade Master without taking damage. Debuff Militia Armor and Defend are good balance for all other races. Flying Machine is still the strongest flying unit ever if the price or population is not debuffed.

Orc: Tauren now has a chance to be seen in the match. Reduce Wind Rider level is good when VS UD, but is it too much?

NE: Huntress can now replacer bear. We will not have late game. Just buy some healing scroll and rush!

UD: No one will spend 150 gold to dispel a lvl2 water element. Anti Magic Shield debuff again? Why don’t you buff Abomination for late game? No one will use Wyrm while Flying machine is still the strongest unit.

Overall: They buff HUM and debuff UD every time. I will be glad to see Happy become a HUM player.

80

I’ve just had a question to Blizzard (feel free not to respond) - has the creep rebalance been influenced by the GoodGame All the Randoms tournament? That’s where the creeps have come to the fore. Would be super cool if true!

@Retera Huge, I hope your voice is heard, you are god.

2 Likes
81

No.

  1. You need roar
  2. You need rejuvenation
  3. Bears are way more effective limit if you don’t need a lot of melee units (especially vs air lame for example like gargs)
  4. staff has cd, it is better to tank dmg and then staff 1 unit, staffing dryads very inefficient for example
  5. staff on the bear means that he can heal himself usually

Even without direct “whosbetter” bears are way more versatile.
Probably Huntresses better then bears in like 80 vs 80 melee units fight (they are i think) but this isn’t the case.

2 Likes
82

heal scroll is not a nerf. in fact its a buff. u got the dispel item. and u can always get heal scroll from the shop.

human power building cost alot of gold and lumber. unless they only deduct either gold or lumber as a single reason cost to build it. often i try to use 1 peasant to make expo but it took like forever., reason is because power build cost alot of lost in gold and lumber , especially lumber. then i try to test it and i find out ridiculous.

-undead gold mine 1:45min
-orc great hall :2:20min
-human town hall :3min
(speed build is 1min but it cost extra gold and wood)

83

Btw human can power build without losing resources and bad players like Starbuck abuse this a lot.

that is just one of many reasons why human is so broken

You can google it by “power build without resources warcraft 3”

Starbuck used this vs Happy in the finals yesterday.
Tbh he has to be banned forever but whatever - he still lose because he is bad.

1 Like