We've reworked Bloodmage Thalnos, made some adjustments to under and over-performing Minis, including Vultures, Headless Horseman, Dryad, and Swole Troll, and fixed a few bugs that made some Minis less desirable.
Blizz has stated they want to reduce the meta of stalling in PvP, and I agree and have a suggestion.
It seems from my experience that many teams in PvP will stall, go through the entire fight without making it to the enemy barracks, and then hit it with spells a few times to win when the bases lose health due to time out.
I think a great change to reduce this tactic would be to change the mechanic of the time out barrack health reduction in the end of the game. I’m not sure the exact formula for the barracks going down right now, but I’ll use it goes down by 10% of total barracks health a second, starting at 10 seconds remaining. What if this was changed to 10% of (total barracks health - barracks health lost by spells). This would have to be coded to be recalculated every tick to prevent someone from just hitting with a spell after the first tick to still be able to pull a win.
This would have a few side effects
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First, it would mean that a player could not win unless they do damage to the barracks with minis. This might be addressed in the future with players using unbound minis to try to do some damage to the barracks, but this could be addressed, and has some protection currently, by the proximity that they can dropped to the barracks. These would also separate the unbound minis from those that would be defending heavily, weakening the ability to stall.
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This would force these stall teams to stray from the hard stall style that much of the fan base dislikes
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This would not reduce the spells use in pushing as they would still do the same damage to barracks as they do now, and will equally help to finish, or damage a barracks in the regular game time equal to today, preserving their strength for everything except sniping enemy barracks in attempt to stall to the end game tie breaker 10 second mechanism.
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This would highly reward teams that can chip damage around the current stall meta, causing mini damage to the enemy barracks, but not enough to overcome the enemy only doing spell damage to own barracks.
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This would also leave the opportunity for stall to be an effective tactic, but it would have to change to do minimal damage with niche minis instead of with spells only, requiring more strategy when creating teams and timing when playing the minis.
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Spell focused teams would still be strong and could still do massive damage to buildings with spells, even completely destroy barracks with spells with certain leaders and modifiers in place, just as they do today.
On a personal note, it has been frustrating to hear that Blizzard wanted to reduce this stall type play, but then they introduce the ultimate stall leader. I really liked that leader when released, but then playing against 60% plus LK stall teams with chimera and deep breath made me not enjoy playing against them, or playing them in the first place. I think the nerfs to his summons and purgatory were really helpful to balance the leader, but I don’t know if the answer to stall in PvP would be more direct nerfs to specific minis in this moment.