There’s a really good NA tournament coming up starting next Tuesday that should help solidify the pro scene post-Blizzcon roster shake-ups. I’m pretty hype to see Bob Ross Fan Club take on the established names (Cloud 9, Tempo Storm) and to see how the Arthelon <> Fan trade pans out for C9/BRFC, not to mention that 3/5ths of the Tempo Storm roster is new.
Oh, thanks for the head’s up on that!
holy shit that tourney was insane.
Bit disappointed in the hero pool, but it was fun to watch. I’m glad BRF pulled it out, that was a really exciting final series.
Fun to see all those Falstad plays, too.
Also, ya’ll play that Graymane yet? What a stupidly fun character, and I suspect he’ll end up a much higher tier than my girl Lunara.
i appreciate your perspective here, but i find how hype the casters get to be intoxicating and i always end up pretty hype myself xD
Greymane seems like a lot of fun. Not sure how viable he’ll be in general, but he’s a beast (heh) if you take someone like Uther or Kharazim as your support. He has the most brutal lack of self-sustain for someone who wants to be going in and getting in melee range in the current meta. Good support players will make him as dangerous as anyone in the game, but it’s nice that you can build for human poke (that Q build tho) if you don’t have that kind of coordination or support.
Regardless of his weaknesses, he’s gonna see a lot of play because 5 seconds of vulnerability is amazing.
Of course, I still don’t quite understand what the problem with Artanis is, so I’m probably not the best person to be making predictions.
Having played support for a lot of Artanis’, I can tell you a lot of the problem is that he’s pretty crappy before 16. At 16 he becomes more or less a bruiser god, but why not just take Sonya instead, who is solid all game long (and arguably better in general)? His E is gamechanging, but more often than not I see Art’s swap places and then get detonated as opposed to the swappee. His Q is neat but risky. Overall he just doesn’t have the sustain (e: he has good sustain, but he generally will get focused because the low health bar is so tantalizing - in this meta he can’t survive stuns, as he has no escape whatsoever) or chase potential that other bruisers have. He also needs to be at less than 50% health for his trait to kick in, which is counter-intuitive to supports who aren’t familiar with him.
Oh yeah it’s totally me being miserly but I hate being pandered to! So that’s on me
Li-Ming is a ton of fun to play, but I kind of expect her to suffer the same fate as Lunara: the health trade-off for her damage is just too high, and I don’t know if Blizzard can really fix it. Maybe her poke build will make it work? Girl’s mana management is pretty amazing, considering she’s a mage, but her damage feels a bit weaker than Jaina’s in teamfights after having played like 30+ games with Jaina in the past few weeks.
I suppose it’s probably due to how her trait changes things if you can get kills early in a fight, huh?
Update: Her lvl 20 on Wave of Force is game changing. Top tier.
I guess we have differing opinions on her. I think Li-Ming is easily one of the best heroes in the game. I fully expect some sort of nerf on her. Her poke is absurd for how safe she can be while dealing it. She outranges towers on both Q and W (and Disintegrate). Her siege is unreal. She can 1v1 most heroes. She has massive outplay potential with blink on a short CD.
She’s silly powerful, IMO.
I just played a Hero League game where a Li-Ming sat in the bushes the whole game-ending teamfight and chucked max range orb+missile combos. Absurdity incarnate (We lost).
I mean, she’s my new favorite hero, I just think she can be countered relatively easy. Like half the tanks are decent soft-to-hard counters.
I mean, ‘We let her sit in a bush for a whole teamfight’ is not the most compelling argument against her ability to be counter picked/played. I suspect this is a situation like when the Butcher came out and he seemed hilariously dominate until people figured it out and now he has a place in specific team comps.
Glancing at HOTSlogs also reinforces my belief, because the talent picks that are getting wins right now are quite unoptimal.
We didn’t let her sit there! My point is she can sit back at pre-nerf Kael range and safely do absolutely absurd poke. I honestly don’t even know if she was in a bush or not because she was wrecking from the fog of war. That’s Azmodan type shit right there, except on a viable assassin.
Time will tell, but my money is riding on Li-Ming receiving a few nerfs eventually.
I almost hope she does because if she does, it’ll be her orb and I prefer playing super aggressive anyways.
We should totally play some more. Are you still experiencing computer issues?
Damn, that felt way too much like a sentence I would type at my job.
E: damn, looks like Browder is getting out ahead of me
I’m pretty casual when it comes to playtime and skill but I would be up for playing sometime.
Miskatonik#1841
My computer works fine now, but my bedtime moved up with my new job. I’m still on pretty much every night, from like 8-ish-12 central.
I’ll back down a bit, I wouldn’t be surprised if they change Li-Ming’s trait to not work with her ults because that gets pretty silly with wave of force.
I stopped taking Ess of Johan pretty early because 25% health for takedowns is crazy and allows you to do dumb things like wipe 1v3s. That said, it’s a super good talent and it’s kind of dumb to have a counter like that for channled abilities and such (especially, as he said, because Wave of Force is already right there and you should be taking it anyways because it’s stupid good).