I have been watching a lot of Grubby’s videos over several months and something has finally occurred to me: the mercs are virtually always the same: Forest Troll Shadow Priest, Forest Troll Berserker, Mud Golem, Ogre Mauler. Only a handful of tilesets are used, and those are the ones where you can plop down a Lordaeron Summer Merc Camp.
I do not quite understand why the map pool is so, well, shallow in this way. Why would you not want to have a variety of maps with a variety of merc camps to see what the pros can really get out of those? It cannot be a racial fairness thing: Shadow Priest is basically just a neutral Priest. Why would you not want a chance to play with a neutral Necromancer/Crypt Fiend using a Northrend map in the Nerubian Webspinner? You can use a Frost Revenant for a bit of neutral AoE too.
Like, did the community just decide back in the day that only certain mercs were desirable and thus every map should have them, or was it just unlucky that so many of the good 1v1 map layouts were Lordaeron Summer, Village, and Sunken Ruins?
There are underutilized features in this game. Sure they are about to have an opportunity to add new stuff in, but should we not be trying to do better with the old stuff too?
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I agree, it seems odd.
Also, there are always the same creeps (ogre, troll, golem, dragon, bandit)
But there are son many things you can do on a WC3 map. I wonder why we never see gates, destructible bridges, teleport gates, explosive barrels, etc…
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I totally agree with that . I’d love to see good northend /icecrown maps in 4v4
Because the game isn’t actually that great as an e-sport
I’d love to see more different tilesets including changing the creeps.
Regarding mercs though you have to be careful. When Terenas Stand was first introduced it had different Merc Camps (Village Tileset I guess). These Merc Camps included the Murloc Huntsman (Ensnare that could only target units, not heroes) and an Assassin (including the poison DoT). Pretty much every game on this map was about getting these mercs early on to get an advantage and if you were able to get the mercs from both Camps it was basicly gg after a couple of minutes because you could just snipe pretty much every unit of the opponent in early game.
That is interesting to know. I do not think the Northrend camp would be OP, at least not in the same way. Nerubian Warrior is just a melee attacker that spawns two baby Nerubians when it dies. Ice Troll Berserker is basically a reskin of the Forest Troll, though it is inexplicably slightly faster on its feet. Nerubian Webspinner is kind of just a Crypt Fiend and a Necromancer rolled into one, and since Crypt Fiends are Tier 1 and Rod of Necromancy is Tier 1 I do not think that would be particularly game breaking. And Frost Revenant, with its 6 wave 15 damage AoE would not, I think, be game breaking either.
Yeah, having some variation would be great and I am not at all against different tilesets and merc camps. It could make for some fun to play and watch games to see different Mercs getting picked up, if they manage to keep it balanced.