you’re only meant to play THIS HERE GAME ever, doi
Seriously industry wisdom right now is to make every possible attempt to consume lives for as long as possible
it’s exhausting just to design
you can still buy skins with gems
apparently you might be restricted from buying any old skin unless they are FEATURED but this is not entirely clear at this point
seriously though i just want skins without having to pay. i have zero skins.
wait a minute this new character just passively has 65 armor if she’s moving what the fuck is this. they really like this hard counters thing right now don’t they
on the plus side her pirate skin is pretty sharp
65? the fuck, she better have like murky health
It’s interesting to meet people who are 100% OK with giving themselves up to the one true game. They like the idea of getting years out of the initial purchase even if the game chips away at their will to resist cosmetics.
also her E is exactly pantheon’s E from league, right down to doing bonus damage to heroes
mobas have a more interesting loop than a lot of other “infinite retention”-minded games in that the skill ceiling and quantity of possible game knowledge is astronomical (and ever-expanding), so you’re always improving in some way or another. that’s why i like it, anyway. it’s like leveling up in an RPG, except the leveling up happens in my heart
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it’s physical armor
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CC and mages
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she’s not a sturdy as you think she is
I know it’s physical. it’s probably not going to make her broken (though maybe it will!) but it’s certainly a boring mechanic. I pick valla. enemy team picks johanna and javazon. I don’t get to play the game. yay. I pick javazon. enemy team picks malf. I die. yay. too much emphasis on drafting. especially in a game where if you dodge the game basically uninstalls itself.
my concern is not with balance, which can be easily tuned numerically
my concern is with how hard of a counter she is to other stuff, as neggy alluded to - i like fewer hard counters and more flexibility within the talent system
does hatred stack if you attack while blinded?
if you attack illidan using evasion or chen using elusive brawler?
the thoughts that keep me up at night (because i’m too (rightfully) lazy to run experiments)
she seems to counter melee heavy teams or gets a good boost from situations where heroes clump together, especially if you go Ball Lightning or heavy into Fend talents. at the same time, i don’t know if I would say she’s any better at it than KT
having Avoidance seems to be the boring way to balance her because she has negative escape and if she’s caught out in anyway, she dies
if that’s what they want to do they can at least make it an active with a CD, or something that builds stacks or give her a shield for hitting heroes with her E, or anything
I just looked this up because I was p sure it doesn’t but I didn’t know if greymane’s W did so I wasn’t sure. apparently greymane will stack while blind and valla won’t because reasons
she kinda gets this, one of her talents is a quest that gives health regen while it’s up and bonus health when it’s stacked but you give up a ton of sustain for some late game hardiness (but then you can go the other avoidance talent that turns you into a suicide bomber because you can actually go in on people)
all you really need to know is that Ball Lightning is hilarious. go Ball Lightning.
go download the PTR and play three (3) games and they give you enough gems to buy her.
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how do I play probius
I love the idea of playing just rando units from starcraft but I don’t really know what to do with probius other than build my shit and use zoning Ws
maybe that’s all I need to do who knows
also @geist I’m interested in what you think about blizzard dota now that you’ve been playing it for a few months considering you’ve played LoL for a while now too
my brother used to be big into LoL and was high-ish ranked and when I introduced him to this game he kind of laughed it off as just something to do when he wasn’t playing LoL
but now this is all he plays, so something happened there
What happens is, the minute you turn 25, if you play LOL against a 17 year old you actually die in real life
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my brother is actually 25
I’ll preface this by saying two things: 1) I sucked at league, and I suck at hots; 2) I know a lot more about league than hots.
league feels a little more dynamic. characters feel smoother, the game is generally faster; not faster paced, mind, hots games are obviously much shorter, but you move faster in league, abilities are snappier and more impactful, and character power curves are more variable and steeper. because there are no items in hots, it is harder to adjust to something in game to compensate for how the game is going. talents aren’t nearly as diverse in that sense, and in general I don’t think blizzard does a great job with talent diversity. not only do most characters have one build or one build with slight variations that are just better than the rest, but the build choices don’t often change play style much if at all. sometimes they do, like with li ming, but usually your choices are “do I want a little more damage or a little more survivability; do I want a little more wave clear, or a little more team fight power?” and that’s about it. are their usually standard item builds for characters in league too? yeah, sure. but the nature of items means you can respond better with them because everything is available to everyone, and best item builds change with the meta pretty regularly. tweaking items is also another balance tuning option, which can have unintended effects as well, whereas in hots blizzard is stuck tweaking each individual character.
the lack of flexibility responding to problems coupled with relative lack of laning also forces team compositions more than in league, because your win conditions are more narrow. in hots, you need a healer and a tank. if you only have one tank, that tank should usually be one of only a few characters, because the rest of the roster can’t meet team fighting demands by themselves. because the game forces these compositions and because league has double the characters hots has, sometimes in hots you just get tired of shit that is constantly played. malfurion is picked or banned every game. picking ETC is never not correct. because of armor types and larger hard counters, each game has a narrower hero pool than it should. in league, the only thing you need is an adc so you can kill towers. you don’t need a tank because you can punish an enemy tank in lane, or you can outscale with a splitpush carry or you can get someone with an earlier power curve to control objectives in the mid game, or you can poke/sustain the other team out. supports are more varied. only two heal with any regularity. sometimes the meta favors tanky supports. sometimes you can play mages in support roles. variety in how you approach the game strategically is the biggest advantage league has over hots. one of the ways hots tries to counter is with different maps, but I don’t like it. I know the map in league works. in hots I don’t want to play on blackheart bay because it’s a stupid map. braxis holdout is kind of fun to play, but it’s not a map with any depth. that’s not strategic diversity.
on the top end I don’t think hots has anyone as fun to play as, like, lucian or [insert your favorite league champion] , but in general I like the way blizzard designs their characters more. you have real outlier stuff like abathur, vikings, medivh, and murky. you have stuff like molten core and sylvanas’ trait that, while strong in hots, would be completely broken in league. medivh in league would be beyond broken. in general there’s more variety in hots kits than in league, and that’s without all the overloaded complicated kits that riot loves so much. hots seems more balanced to me. team comps are forced and hard counters crowd out characters, but when you do actually get in the game if you didn’t fuck yourself over nothing ever feels useless. win rates in hots are a little more compact, and even aside from that league is filled with characters that riot has to dumpster because their kits are toxic when tuned properly. they have a lot of characters that they don’t know what to do with. they take a long time responding to things that are clearly poorly tuned or that are oppressive enough in some respect to have a negative effect on the way the game is played.
I think league is probably the better game, but it’s not better by much. and league takes a much larger commitment to actually play.
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