EPTOverall, my changes ended up being this:
- I'm avoiding Diablo at the moment. An undocumented change to his shadowcharge has made it so he knocks people back much farther than he used to. As a result, it's difficult to shadowcharge and immediately overpower/flip people back, so his basic combo is kind of awkward. Additionally this means the apoc + shadow charge + overpower also doesn't work as smoothly, so I'm just dropping the hero.
- I'm only picking muradin as a secondary bruiser now. I run with a perfect storm/thunder burn/piercing bolt/haymaker/thunder strike/stone form/rewind build. The result is an amusing hybrid tank assassin who can dish out damage surprisingly quickly at high levels. I've already killed a full-health cho'gall several times with the build through clever haymaker use, and gotten a few boss steals with haymaker.
- Let's devote an entire asterisk to Avatar. First of all, with the removal of the mini stuns let's call the skill what it is: a self-cast only ancestral for 66% of the healing. At level 16 you get stoneform, which amps that self-heal to about the same level as an ancestral. This is a powerful ability, and is probably the better skill-- but it is incredibly BORING from a game design standpoint. So, that's why I'm going haymaker on a bruiser-role muradin instead.
- I dropped Tyrande, mostly because of the nerf to diablo. However I've been given a gift in return: Rehgar. Heroleague still vastly underestimates this hero, and I've gotten extremely good results out of his lightning shield build.
- I picked up Li-Ming really fast. I prefer her over KT currently simply because her playstyle is more fun, fast, and loose. Similar to my avatar vs haymaker discussion, I'm not convinced she is more powerful.
- I have completely dropped sonya due to the damage nerfs. Raynor is still really good, though.
- I am now fielding Thrall and Butcher more often to take the place of Sonya
Despite the patch, over the last week I've also crossed a major(for me) milestone: my hotslogs heroleague MMR has gone up to platinum. I think that I'm doing a good job of focusing not only on my strategic goals(where should I be) and draft decisions(which characters I practice/field), but I'm beginning to incorporate little things into all characters I play. Specifically, lately I've been working very hard on denying hp and zoning people out of lanes every chance I get. Frequently this means ganking, but often it just means making them afraid of my character so they back off while the minions kill each other. The beauty of this tactic is how deceptive it is: the person I'm against probably thinks they are avoiding a gank, and their team doesn't know there is an un-soaked lane because that person is still on the minimap. I've noticed I can do this with E.T.C. especially well, but I also do it with Raynor on occasion.
The downside to this strategy is you have to be on the wrong side of the enemy minion wave to do it effectively. This opens you up to ganks, so I have to keep my eye on the minimap quite a bit. I have some games where I just die one or two times in the early game for nothing because I miss a step and miss that an enemy is rotating to me, but by and large I'm doing it successfully.
The last bit I want to talk about is Chen--- the patch fixed his flying kick so it will always place him on the other side of his target, and suddenly playing him is glorious. I've only played with him in quickmatch, however, because I am still very uncertain of where it is appropriate to draft him in heroleague. I'll think on this more as the week progresses since I need a few more high-hp bruisers in my rotation. If anyone has advice on when to draft him, I am all ears.
