Revelade
BattleForums Member
Before you read this, keep in mind that a forumer named xE.Dragon wrote this, NOT ME. So without further or do... enjoy.
I agree with many of his points. Frankly, roys raiders and fs wolves need nerfage. Units like steam tanks, dragonhawks, and some heroes like Tinkers need boost. I'd like blademaster to get his WW really. It seems 3/4 of the time I vs orc, it's always BM harass, which means I keep my hero in base, or prepare to lose acolytes and slow my tech down.List of problems in 1.18
1) Many heroes are way overly used.
# Archmage – Water Elemental and Brilliance Aura – infinite mana is just too powerful
# Far Seer – Feral Spirit and Chain Lightning – making Feral Spirit not as useful for scouting would be a good way to address this and it would make Far Sight more useful
# Demon Hunter – Mana Burn plus his late game combat abilities make him Night Elves best option by far
# Death Knight – Unholy Aura and Death Coil are too powerful and he is too fast
2) Many heroes are rarely or never used.
# Dark Ranger – Her abilities do not make up for her poor combat effectiveness
# Pitlord – His awkwardness and inability to tank makes him too much of a liability
# Goblin Alchemist – His abilities do not make up for his poor combat effectiveness
# Goblin Tinker – Cannot deal with air at all and is not very useful in combat
# Bloodmage – Too micro intensive and Brilliance is just too good for humans to pass up
3) Many hero skills are too useful and are always chosen.
# All Auras excluding Thorns and Devotion
# Water Elemental
# Storm Bolt
# Holy Light
# Death Coil
# Mana Burn
# Frost Nova
# Feral Spirit
# Chain Lightning
# Shadow Strike
# Lava Spawns
# Quilbeast
# Cold Arrow
4) Many hero skills are not useful so they are never chosen.
# Healing Spray is too difficult to use to ever be effective (Suggest nova style healing instead)
# Cluster Rockets inability to hit air makes the Tinker useless versus air, so he is rarely chosen
# Soulburn is dispellable
# Mana Shield does not make the Sea Witch a tank so what is the point?
# Far Sight could be useful if it had a longer duration or greater area of effect
# Scout could be useful if it had a longer duration or greater area of effect
# Frost Armor is inferior by far to Frost Nova
# Death Pact is inferior by far to Death Coil
# Bash is not used because the Mountain King always has full mana (Brilliance) so he can use Thunderclap AND Storm Bolt
# Force of Nature costs too much mana
5) Human and Orc towers are abusive/build too quickly
# Turtling strategies involving mass towers (either reinforced or masonry) – Orc players use the Blademaster to perform hit and run tactics while massing bat riders (any NC.Dude replay will show this) and Human players tend to mass enough air units (often with inner fire) so that with their infinite mana + healing their army is basically invulnerable
# Inability to stop a early expansion/straight tech against human if they manage to get 2 towers up even with a full rush strategy
6) “Ranged units†like Headhunters, Rifleman, Archers, and Crypt Fiends die too quickly against “Air Units†like Gryphons, Chimaera, and Frost Wyrms
7) “Melee Units†like Grunts, Footman, and Ghouls die too quickly against mass “Ranged Units†like Headhunters, Rifleman, Archers, and Crypt Fiends
8) Heroes make units counters fail
Part of "6)" and "7)" have to do with this problem. Counters in War3 are often negated by heroes. The most obvious of these is AOE making ranged units die vs air. Humans can get Blizzard at higher AM levels and Thunderclap and so if their opponent gets Headhunters or Archers to counter their air units, their AOE damage kills the hhs/archers so fast that effectively the counter does not work - making the Human army nearly invulnerable.
9) Many units are not used.
# Spirit Walkers – They are not effective against casters because in both forms they take extra damage from magic units and can be affected by the very spells they would be used to stop (ie Cyclone, Polymorph)
# Banshees – curse is not as good as Bloodlust, Heal, or Slow
# Necromancers – these would be seen more if they didn’t have such an investment. Along with the Meat Wagon upgrade they have 5 upgrades! That is way too much.
10) Staffs can be abused– NE and Human players can buy a Staff of Teleportation and a Staff of Preservation/Sanctuary and can have nearly unkillable heroes – mainly top NE players doing this
11) Many units are overly used.
# Wind Rider – They are the only effective option versus casters and air and they are effective at force fire
# Destroyer – They can cripple players by abusing the drain mana combo with statues. (ie –They often run in and destroy all Orc Burrows within 10 minutes into the game)
# Druids of the Claw – They do an awful lot of damage to buildings and can be produced very quickly – rejuvenation might also be a problem
# Druids of the Talon – Mass cyclone is the major strategy for NE at the moment
# Gryphon – If a human player gets 8+ Gryphons the game is often over for Orc (unless they have a 2x-3x economical advantage
# Sorceress – Mass polymorph is popular and slow is the best innate ability
12) Summons other than Feral Spirit are too expendable so they are overly used
# NE mass ranged “dotts/archers†and get a DH first to harass – but quickly add a Beastmaster and Firelord for mass summons
# Human masses sorceresses and get Archmage and Beastmaster for infinite mass summons (Brilliance)
13) Orc have no solution to mass summons – Spirit Walkers and Shaman cannot compete with Brilliance, Moon Wells, and Statues allowing for near infinite summons
14) Items should be adjusted as many are not on par with others and costs should all be the same – otherwise getting an Ankh means a free 400 gold, whereas a Mana Stone gives only 225 I will provide my list of item suggestions/comments:
# Healing Wards moved to level 5 from level 4
# Amulet of the Wild moved to level 5 from level 6
# Ice Shard moved to level 5 from level 6
# Infernal Stone moved to level 7 from level 6
# Mana Stone moved to level 3 from level 4
# Potion of Divinity moved to level 4 from level 5
# Potion of Greater Mana moved to level 2 from level 3
# Potion of Restoration moved to level 4 from level 5
# Red Drake Egg moved to level 4 from level 5
# Scroll of Animate moved to level 5 from level 6
# Spiked Collar moved to level 3 from level 5
# Boots of Speed moved to level 4 from level 3
# Claws of Attack +6 moved to level 1 from level 2
# Cloak of Flames moved to level 4 from level 5
# Crystal Ball moved to level 4 from level 5
# Kelen’s Dagger of Escape moved to level 5 from level 6
# Ring of Protection +2 moved to level 1 from level 2
# Ring of Protection +4 moved to level 5 from level 6
# Ring of Regeneration moved to level 2 from level 3
# Staff of Silence moved to level 5 from level 6
# Ring of Protection +5 moved to level 6 from level 7
# Tome of Power moved to level 7 from level 8
# Clarity potion, Greater Rejuvination Potion, Lesser Scroll of Replenishment, Greater Scroll of Replenishment, Scroll of Mana are now valid creep drops
# Scroll of Healing cost increased to 300 gold from 250 gold
# Wand of Lightning Shield as a creep drop is a problem versus human
15) Buff and Debuff spells appear to be inconsistent toward mechanical units
# You can slow a mechanical unit, but you cannot bloodlust one. This makes slow better than bloodlust. It seems that it should be either all mechanical units are not targets for all buff/debuffs or all mechanical units are targets for all buffs/debuffs
16) Runes could be put back in if they were a creep drop INSTEAD of items rather than IN ADDITION to items as they were before
17) Offensive towering is still widely done and is annoying as ever
18) Mass NE expos are a problem.
They just mass them all over the map and win based on a purly economic advantage. It seems like their lack of needing to get them operational after the tree is done entangling might be the reason they can do this, because currently if they are caught expanding they simply destroy their tree and thats the end of it. But other races often lose 5 workers and have to cancel - a much greater penalty...
19) All orbs are not equal
# Orb of Corrution is overpowered - most UD tech to tier 3 for Destroyers and for this item
# Lightning orb can be game breaking if you "get lucky" and it goes off on a weak hero. This luck factor can often make for pissed off players who happened to lose because their opponent got lucky...
# Orb of Fire is not even worth buying currently
20) Sources for Mana/Health Regeneration are typically too powerful. (Statues, Brilliance with Priests)
The two major "cookie-cutter" strategies for Human and Undead revolve around massing a ranged army and adding never ending healing. This combined with endless mana = abuse. The reason this is a problem is that if players do not focus on getting infinite healing/mana they lose every time. With good micro, human players can invisible any units/heroes that are hurt and undead players can also burrow fiends or run them away due to Unholy Aura. Typically a discussion of reducing the effectiveness of this style of play is met with "OMG then UD/HU will have no chance!!!!" But as long as the other races' imbalances are addressed this would not be the case. Nerfing Brilliance or Priests and also nerfing Statues' skills would be a good start to fixing this. Another might be to make the Archmage or Statues less desirable through other means (ie nerfing Water Elemental or making statues more expensive or vulnerable).
21) Many auras are overpowered. (Unholy, Brilliance, possibly Endurance/Vampiric)
This potentially goes along with the point above, but it also touches on another. Auras are often the reason the end-game of War3 always gets into a "cheese-fest." Players with a level 4+ Death Knight move so fast that counters start to dissolve. Also players with high level Brilliance can become invulnerable to whole armies due to micro, mass healing, and infinite spells/hero skills. In addition, these auras are typically used every game (meaning that its quite possible that the auras make other hero choices less viable). A look at 3 of the 4 races' hero choices reflects this: Orc usually get TC 2nd, UD always get DK and often a DL, HU always get AM. By making certain auras less powerful, more heroes might be chosen instead and players will likely develop completely new strategies and styles of play. =)
22) Orc has no solution against magic damage(all other races have spell/magic immune units)
This one is a big problem. Humans mass air/casters against Orc, NE mass dotts against Orc, UD mass destroyers against Orc… Anyone see a pattern here? Orcs need a solution to magic damage so that they can do something if their opponent masses casters/air units… An obvious solution would be making Spirit Walkers spell immune like dryads/destroyers/spellbreakers in corporal form. Because Spirit Walkers already hit air, this change would help against both casters and against air units.
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I'll continue to update this. Feel free to let me know if you need a replay showing you the particular problem --- I should be able to find them.
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Suggestions of non-balance changes/additions for 1.19
# More maps for every game type. I don't think you need to make any more maps; simply add more of the already made maps to ladder - and if you do this on westfall beta ppl can point on tweaks that they need to fix the maps.I don't know why you'd want to waste the 50+ maps that are just sitting in the map folders...
# Add a few items that are similar to the items in the game, wands/staffs/powerups/etc for various levels - once the other items are balanced a bit more, having additional items helps check the rest of the items of that level in terms of balance and makes the game a bit more interesting. Wand of Slow? Bloodlust? Fairie Fire? Inner Fire? Stasis Trap? etc. Some hero/unit skills are items, others are not - lets add the rest and make the game more interesting. Even adding 10 new items would drastically improve the game - and give it a fresh and new feeling.
# 2500 and/or 10000 win icons would be a nice addition - people like to have some crazy thing to always strive for - and its cool for the few who actually do so.
# Merge the east/west or all 4 realms if possible. It might be a technical issue, but the big issue I see is that the AMM works best with a larger pool of players and I'm sure people would love to have less wait time for games. The ladder would also be more interesting as the top players would be the best IN THE WORLD - right now its hard to tell who the best in USEast because asia or europe players play there too. Might as well make one super ladder instead.
# Change the hotkeys to turn terrain on/off, turn creeps on off, and switch player coloring, to different hotkeys - not using alt. Its very annoying to constantly switch them around because you were highlighting hp bars around the same time you hit a hotkey. Good players hit alt every 1-2 seconds during battles, so its not unusual for this to happen, but it is annoying. Maybe just make a new gameplay option to switch off this sorts of hotkeys while in-game...
# It would be nice if their was a "Overall Ladder" that ranked players across all of the ladder types; Solo/Random Team/2v2 AT/3v3 AT/4v4 AT/FFA. The ladder would give a factor to each ladder and then would rank the players. This would be cool for players who play lots of different game types and would encourage players to play the less played game types (eg FFA).
