Suggest/vote for balance changes

[MyLifeForNerZuL]

I was happy to see a lot of the balance changes blizz made with the last few patches, though a few seemed like they were a bit much. I'm going to make a poll with some changes I would like, feel free to vote for ones you think are good ideas, or suggest some of your own.

[Shadotwist]

-Give tornado a fatty immolation for units, make it not channeled, and make it last ~10 seconds.
-Give mana shield a passive 4/7/10 intelligence for the naga in addition to what it does currently
-Do not buff destroyers. The problem with them is they are so good that you frequently get them even when there is zero caster to counter. They obviously lose value later on, and buffing them is the wrong mindset at fixing whatever problem you are thinking of.
-Reanimate dead needs a mechanic / rework change, but a band-aid solution would be to reduce mana to like 40.
-Hex is annoying for the non-Orc, but it's XP denial is still rich-content even if likely unintended. However imo, they should change it so that the nearby hero that isn't hexed gets full experience. Right now the hexed hero gets no XP, and not only gets no XP, but still acts like a hero nearby resulting in your other nearby hero getting only 50% XP.

[justbritto]

To fix Mana Shield, make it take damage **after** damage reduction factors: armour, weapon type reduction vs hero armour, bracers.

To fix Animate Dead, allow the animated units to use their abilities.

[MyLifeForNerZuL]

Yeah, that's the frustrating thing about hex. For the longest time I had no idea. So now I wonder, as frustrating as parts of that matchup are for undead, on average how much xp is outright denied to the heroes through the course of a game. I have no idea, and it might be negligible, but still.

That sounds good for the naga buffs, both shadow and britto.

As far as destroyers not getting a buff because they are too good even in the absence of casters, idk if I agree with that. It's relative of course, but it's a tier 3, 5 food unit that costs 300 gold and what 85 wood? And casters aren't the only thing destroyers would be aimed at countering, heavy armor units and towers, light armor units to a lesser extent, and then being the only magic immune undead unit in the case of high level aoe or mass gryphon or wyrm. They are a fairly versatile unit for sure, that at times can be abusive vs human, but some of those suggested buffs are pretty slight. The morphing/mana retention one seems like it'd basically just give you one more destroyer with mana when you do your morphing. It just seems annoying undead has to wait until tier 3 and then spend 300 gold and 5 food on a dispel and/or magic immune unit when other races have it as an option at tier 2 for less.

[Kiezel]

Imo, nerf kotg hunts. It is the only real issue tbh.

edit; btw regardless of your username; you must be an UD player considering the poll. lawl.

[MyLifeForNerZuL]

I would also be a fan of splitting burrows/watch towers upgrade into 2 separate ones. Burrows at tier 2, and towers at tier 3. And maybe making towers cost 1 food each, of course I really dislike the playstyles that revolve around tower camping expos.

[MyLifeForNerZuL]

Well yeah, the username is a strong clue lol. The undead mechanics that reminded me of protoss sorta drew me to them early in wc3. The things I find brutal for undead are like power leveled nuke, frost wyrm impact in certain situations, and previously the destroye5 timing push vs human. But the reason I hesitate to call those things overly imbalanced is they seem like edge cases. As scary as power leveled undead heroes are, I can think of a lot of hero combos that seem as strong or stronger when power leveled. Human tri hero, specifically against undead, is crazy. DH Panda, warden panda, bm sh tc, fs tc, mk paladin (especially vs ud). And then when it comes to wyrms, yeah they are strong, but they are now the most expensive unit in the game. And by the time you can realistically start making them, there are plenty of answers. Hex, banish, dhawk if you dont have web or garg, polymorph, etc. Like 90% of the units that can hit wyrms are going to be doing either 150% or 200% damage to them, or in the case of garg and hippo, they just have a base dps of around 50 so a % advantage do to damage type isn't that important. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like if you could assemble the perfect lategame army for every race, undead gets outclassed. Is this offset by them having a significant early or midgame advantage? I don't really think so.

[Kiezel]

The bias is high in that one. The only high level heroes that can compete with UD heroes are the HU heroes. No discussion. Still, if you have to select a late game 35 food army to face 65 food; pick undead. Any logical person would do that. It is their niche to wreck havoc beyond proportion to the army size at that stage. But one can debate about these things; theory doesn't justify the game. There are so many nuances to be involved; i.e. vs human tri hero you are likely to also face many towers with expands and thus more heavy units with more upgrades; this leaves you with a map control issue. Versus elf in the same case however you are at fine liberty to have the map control. All the same, undead has more advantage versus the elf as your army is faster and your bases have more sustain. In prolonged fight cases undead statues, blight, unholy and disease cloud start to kick in; or as happy mentioned when outnumbered and pushed by tod; "he has the better army, but this is my base, he cannot win"; which turned out to be true, priests drained, invul pots where suspended, disease cloud started to seep health points.

I'm not attempting to say what or what is not balanced. But I have never met a non random player who appeared objective. Balance changes never nerf their own race, never buff others; or it is so marginally it is just mentioned in attempt to avoid the bias argument. Any HU player would request more sustain vs coil nova, any elf wants more HP on his buildings, anyone but elf wants to mitigate walking expansions. There is no thing as a perfect lategame army for every race. You think: what if they have a perfect army vs me? I'd get outclassed. Of course your aboms wyrms will lose to gryphon hawks. But if you'd play human you'd fear your knight caster mortar would lose vs wyrm destroyer. It just a matter of perspective and people tend to have only shine light on their own part of the pie.

[MyLifeForNerZuL]

I'd say every player has a bias of some sort, even if they play random. Even if it's just a playstyle preference, like one player likes to be aggressive, while another might prefer to be cautious, trying to get towered expansions or whatnot. Certain things will seem stronger vs their particular playstyle, but the races might have adequate answers to w/e they think is too powerful, it just happens to emphasize a different playstyle. As far as my bias though, I would note that a lot of the core pieces for undead did get some nerf either directly or indirectly. Orb of corruption nerfed, statues wyrms and destroyers nerfed, flying machines, hh, tank aa damage, orc fortified upgrade buffed, lich movespeed buffed but frost armor nerfed. If they wanted to tweak wyrm hp down more like chimera, or some nerf on the ice breath of wyrms, I'd probably be okay with that since they seem crazy. If they wanted to knock rod of necromancy down to 1 charge, that'd probably be okay, but I don't think the way things stand with undead that they are imba at any reasonable skill level. Some of my comments though are a result of a fundamental mechanic of the game: the armor/damage type interactions. I'd say the core undead units seem to be almost entirely magic/piercing. These both get severely penalized when focusing fortified armor targets and heroes. Ideally you will prioritize targeting and engagements accordingly, but it's inevitable that you will have to focus heroes and/or buildings at some point in the game. That coupled with 0 building upgrade options for undead, and arguably the weakest siege situation @ only having wagons that can't even get armor upgrades. I feel like that restriction makes sense for glaives since they are available a full tier earlier, and they just got a massive dps buff. Idk how big of an impact it would be if wagons could get armor upgrades, but it's more of the combination of those factors and the undead standard heroes dk lich offering no extra damage vs buildings unless you get d&d.

But yeah, it's fair to say people probably don't want to see the units and heroes that they like getting weaker, including me. The last few patches were really close to perfect in terms of my hero preferences. I was really surprised how spot on their tweaks were. Like the way they changed sleep and farsight, the change to heal spray, the speed changes with the exception of maybe tc and tinker since they have passives to boost speed already. The pocket factory armor change, carrion hitting mech, etc. Apparently there is pretty widespread dislike of the kotg buffs, though it worked out well since I love using kotg lol. But yeah when I'm vs that it's pretty ridiculous. And they took an above average ultimate and gave it a massive buff yet left ones like tornado and animate dead unchanged. I feel like all the channeling ultimates except mass teleport and big bad voodoo should get a 3 sec inv period.

I do think there is a discussion to be had about what heroes can compete with undead, though as you say there are a lot of variables that impact the discussion. We could imagine it in a vacuum with just the heroes, or in the context of different sized armies, different context in terms of expos or no, towers or no, what items, etc. Also depends on what we mean by high level. 5? 6? 7-10? Can talk about the ability to creep, versatility, sustain, baserace, etc. Undead heroes have high burst, good support aura, decent sustain with dark ritual, death pact, coil. Then if you include a 3rd hero, lots of options, I'd probably slot dL in there most of the time now that carrion hits mech and sleep/vamp got decent buffs, along with a top tier ultimate though as a 3rd hero that'd be like living the dream on a 3rd hero. If it's 5/5 dk lich, yeah that's gonna be strong vs a lot of only hero combos, it's gonna be strong against a lot of midsized armies, decent to kite, poor to push a mass towered base without d&d. But the dk has a trash tier ultimate, which is a pretty massive disadvantage on a standard first hero. Everything else being close, if ud vs elf drags and heroes go 6/6 for both sides, dh panda is going to make dk lich look useless. dual or tri hero orc heroes seem pretty sick as well. I'd say endurance aura is superior to unholy aura. But the rest of the discussion of course would be to figure out if undead has a harder time actually reaching their high level heroes, and then looking at a bunch of specific game situations and matchups and trying to look for trends.

While yes, it's hard to pin down a perfect lategame army without specifying what the enemy is doing, but there are unit mixes that you are generally aiming for in a given matchup. It would be interesting to see a bunch of pros playing one of those custom micro arenas to see how the races matched up, even if that excludes a lot of factors like items, economy, unit costs, timing, creeping, map control, base race/harass, etc. But yeah, considering there are 4 races with so much unit and hero diversity it's really well balanced.

[Kiezel]

Yeah, random players have bias as well. Probably less then people who dedicatedly play one race. But no bias is non existent. True that some styles influence this. An orc who plays with aggression will dread the BM nerf over the FS buff, while a more defensive orc player welcomes that trade off. The patches are somewhat strange. Some minor twitches and tweaks might have been great. But they decided to rework some units entirely. Its fun to have more units available and have a more open, go with the flow, kind of style embedded, but gees, kotg hunts adjustment really tipped the scale. I doubt that is an opinion, it is so commonly shared it is more of a fact. Speaking of facts, I checked my stats. I win on average 53%. With human however, I win 43%. With elf this is up to 70%. Now I don't think HU is far to weak. I think elf, currently, is somewhat to strong but not by this margin. It is more probably an effect that my style simply doesn't suit human. My elf is probably better as my first 3k games were dedicated to elf. Fun to see tough that my orc is somewhat better than my ud. I expected the reverse. So perhaps orc is somewhat stronger than ud. On an aggregated level that is; specific matchups and maps may be needed to get it pin pointed accurate. I've tried to find some top-random players on ladder to cross check. Tough, not many random players or with very little data. What mostly shows is that some specific matchups are outliers. Orc seems to have a tough time vs human. Human does well vs elf. However, human struggles more significant vs undead. So I guess the common complains of people have some empiric basis to back it up.

I don't like test in a vacuum, they are too distant from the actual game so the results don't show much. Kinda like trying to see if your space ship will orbit the earth in the desired manner by having it fly at airplane altitude. Ye okay, we can see it moves and stays in once piece; but can we use this result for the real game? No.

[MyLifeForNerZuL]

Yeah, there were so many changes to balance across the board including tav heroes available to all races + a bunch of map changes that it might take a bit for players to adjust to strategies. After so long being used to x timing on something like entangle, strength and mana cost of treants, and kotg ultimate, tier 2 and upgrade required for sentinel, old moonwell mana rate, old glaivethrower damage, it's easy to make errors in engagements. Elf tier 1 units and kotg got a buff while their lategame meta and dh got nerfed, honestly I never was big on grinding standard elf solo so I have no idea how big those nerfs feel other than to say they look significant on paper @ dh, dott, and bear changes. Not being a big fan of mass tower strats, it's really annoying now orc can have that wildcard with tower pushes or sneak expands in tier 2 since they also seemed armed with the most annoying siege options.

And yeah, as much as I liked seeing some of the kotg tweaks, all of them together is pretty damn oppressive. Good timing with kotg hunts was already pretty dangerous vs certain things, but adding stronger hero nuking potential, more mana and base damage, and viable treants along with a crazy buff to an already decent ultimate...and then hey let's make sentinel not just available at tier 1 but just a base ability on hunts in case the elf's game sense isn't that strong they can just spam sentinels for free as they run around the map with fast moving hunts and can make an expo and uproot it, tank huge camps with aow etc. And good luck trying to figure out how to counterplay since they can go aggro entangle ambush or just aow treant creep for fast lvl 2. When I vs that, it seems like a really solid strat. If you try to go for some strong lategame counter, you risk getting bulldozed by the mass + tier 1 siege or tower push, or just getting killed because they can expo and keep pressure. A race like undead can't tank a medium creep camp with his buildings really, so it's like...am I all in ghoul rushing selling tp etc for a coinflip? As I think ghouls stats are poor, I find that less and less appealing even though with good execution it's probably the best hope.

I always go back and forth between solo 4s and 2s sometimes, but that mk for human seems like it gets out of control now with the larger clap radius and damage + faster movement. One saving grace for dk vs human, or just in general was his movement speed. Well now the slower heroes like panda, naga, paladin, mk aren't as far behind. While I assume those buffs were sorta aimed more at addressing how brutal dh/bm were and the disadvantage of going for those slower heroes first vs standard dk/am/bm/dh strats, that dwarf can drop some serious damage now, and considering he already was afaik viable even as a first hero in a lot of matchups, I'm not really sure why he needed that buff. Similarly with serpent wards too honestly, even though I like using the sh and wards. In some games now I feel like I'm probably underestimating those things in battle and getting hammered. Also disease cloud. It's probably not imbalanced given it's a tier 3 upg on aboms and wagons, but the fact that it's 180 damage you can't dispel as soon as it's on is a pain if your army lacks efficient healing. There might be some fun or funny strats utilizing that instead of just incentivizing like 1 abom or 1 wagon in armies to take advantage of splash poison.

As far as stats, yeah idk how to track for random race stats. I do remember seeing there was some undead guy on one of the servers rocking a crazy win %. I forgot who, but the account was like ilovenecropolis or something like that. Which suggests at least undead can compete if you're good enough, of course I think I saw somewhere ppl saying of the pro level players, human, elf, and orc each had like 12-15 pros each and undead had like 7 or w/e. I'm not sure I could even name 20 current pros thought lol.

While it might sound silly to just pick 2 units and compare them because the balance of the game and the races specifically is more of a totality thing. Strengths in some areas weaknesses in others with a ton of variables from building/unit costs down to their econ mechanics, it becomes murkier trying to speak on balance when you broaden it. Because if you go by player stats, you have variable skills, some players might just naturally be stronger with x race or w/e, or if it's a large sample of games they probably play a different strength opponents. That might even out statistically though and be negligible, but idk. But yeah, with 2 units, I can look at hard numbers. This one has x costs, y dps, etc. And then try to broaden it to say well here are some other factors. Oh paladin vs dk, holy light is cheaper, 1 sec less cooldown, instant hit vs coil's non-instant hit...divine shield I'd say better than death pact, but then paladin was slow in the past, and his aura seems weaker, plus holy light is only a nuke against undead stuff. But if we restrict it to ud vs hu, holy light is basically slightly better death coil on a hero with a better ultimate and a more reliable source of manage regen @ brilliance aura. Now if we look at the winrate alone, we miss other things. What were item drops like? Spawns? We would probably have to really dive in and examine exactly how undead was winning, or losing, to comment on it. A lot of destro timing pushes probably most of the wins. Maybe some other timing pushes with like orb fiends etc idk, or really good early game coil harass or something. If 90% of the undead success vs human hinges on like 1 or 2 all in timing pushes (at the pro level anyway), it might not tell us very much about whether the dk or the paladin are "balanced" relatively, or the ghoul and the footmen, or w/e. We'd assume the humans that are meta are the strongest, and if the paladin is only like a 2nd or 3rd (or skipped) option, it doesn't necessarily mean he isn't strictly stronger than a dk in the mu, just that he isn't the strongest option human has (vs undead doing w/e the standard is). Thematically, and for variety and fun, they probably nailed it with most things. Having holy light instantly descend from on high and only damaging undead stuff of course is perfect, paladin being more focused on healing while the death knight being more focused on killing, and his spell coming from him instead. And death pact makes sense, just as dark ritual does. But it just adds a cost to the spell that most others don't have (divine shield for instance). I wonder if it would be imbalanced if death pact and/or dark ritual had 0 mana cost. that'd be a pretty big buff relative to what they are now...but comparing it to other skills, would it seem unfair? I mean, it costs a unit to be useful. But it's like...what I rather have dark ritual or brilliance aura? Clearly the aura. Divine shield or death pact? Shield. Has that strength been mitigated in some other way, like destroyers are really strong and versatile vs human? Or dk/lich have strong synergy and burst while am not as much burst and elems are weak to devour magic? Maybe, but idk, those flying machine buffs and rifleman buff I think more than made up for the masonry upgrade nerf, plus destroyer nerf. Maybe DL is the goto now vs human, idk haven't really watched many pro replays to see how it's trending. All that stuff aside though, I think the number of viable strategies each race has should also be considered. Like if one race is stuck with 1 or 2 realistic strats, heroes, etc in a given matchup, and the other can pick between a number of diff ones, seems it'd be harder to prepare for/play against the one with more options. But I would be curious what some of the pros who did try all races say on balance. Like Grubby, idk if I'd heard him speak extensively on it, but he seems to play enough with different races to trust his opinion.

[Kiezel]

ILoveNecropolish is Happy. He streams and appears the be the only UD, or professional for that matter, who pulls of these stats. He is an anomaly and as an anecdote not useful for overall balance. He doesn't play much tournaments and if he does; he does not win them. It says more about him than about the race. Grubby seems to have a distant cool regarding balancing issues. And lets face it: in 99% of the cases one can win if he would simply made less mistakes. But does imbalance define how often a strategy will make one win, or how much effort is needed to win? I doubt bears dryad a-click really wins more in the games where it matters, but surely in a wide spectrum many people can execute this strat reasonable well and similar opponents of different races need to jump head over heals maneuvers to defend against this.

Grubby did signal that current elf meta is OP tough. When an non wc-3 viewer said "I don't know this game, but it looks really skill based", Grubby responded with "That is because it is, unless you Elf with Keeper". I couldn't find the video, but there is definitely more of this. Also games he watched and noted many, many mistakes from the elf who still got toe to toe with an opponent who executed everything much more neatly. I believe that even Keeper jokes were made at Blizzcon. That is what keeper has become in the shortest time possible: so imbalanced that literally jokes are made at blizz HQ to emphasis (or hide) how messed up that dude has become.

[MyLifeForNerZuL]

Right, wasn't suggesting that his stats are in any way average lol. And yeah, most of the time there are things that could have been done differently to give better chances to win. But as you say, imbalance alone doesn't always mean any given player will win with a certain race or strategy. It's more like if everything else is relatively equal in terms of skill/performance of two players in a given game, one side can win easier or more often on balance alone. I'd say context matters, like if we're talking about 2 ppl aclicking, or the other extreme of 200+ apm people who are extremely well versed with their races. Certain units, races, or strategies could be incredibly effective if used correctly in the right situation, but get smashed otherwise. Like destroyer mass vs human. First, if a player doesn't chain morph in a timing push, they are missing a fundamental part of it. If they are really late, and especially now with all those flying machine buffs, they could have lost before the fight. But yeah, sometimes you feel like you play fairly clean, good micro, decent choices, decent item drops, and you even see the enemy making what look like big errors, and yet you end up losing because say a human gets to insta lvl 2.5 on tm and they get like some insane item drop at the lab in like 4 mins or w/e. Or like you have advantages in a lot of areas with undead, but then you missed orc sneaking up some tower mass expo and it's a nightmare to counter it or play a macro game vs orc siege options/bm or wolves. And yeah, it's easy to say just don't let that happen, or harass the human creep or w/e, but sometimes it feels like certain strats can still pull out a win even with mistakes that would sink others. Some of it goes back to how hard it is to pull off certain strats, and also how many choices a race has when choosing strats. Because if they have a lot of choices of viable strats, it should be an advantage because you have to work a bit harder to counter them.

And yeah, I'm not surprised people are saying kotg is overly strong with these changes, some of his weakest points @ treants and entangle strength vs heroes got buffed, and one of his strongest points in tranquility got more than twice as strong. On paper he still has late game vulnerabilities because treants and entangle are both countered with dispel, but it might be too late at that point, especially for undead at tier 3, idk. In some ways, it makes sense to focus more on improving one's own play and the things in your control than complaining about stuff that is mostly out of your control. I think some would say it's the mentality of a scrub to chalk all one's losses up to "imbalance" or to have some self-imposed rule against using "cheap" strategies. Once you're in a game with whatever race, the state of balance is fixed. So the only question is whether you want to switch races in the future, or if you have some way to influence balance patches. Alternatively, if you know the "imba" strats, at least you will know what to expect and can do your best to counter whatever it is. Where some oddball strat could surprise you, a cookie cutter one probably won't.

Do you think dark ritual or death pact would be broken if the mana cost was eliminated? It would be ironic if for a decade everyone has been using the dk incorrectly going aura instead of death pact, since 200/300% hp sounds good.

[MyLifeForNerZuL]

Also I just saw Happy streaming, that guy is a monster.