On September 10 2013 05:19 Kuroeeah wrote: I would personally just increase the mana cost of Astral, not too extreme but significant.
Doesnt do enough. E always has the potential (with luck) to create an abusive situation. Mana alone wont change much.
And if the OD is getting mech(which some of them do) they get the buckler and just spam that stupid thing in the hopes of popping the E. Really, taking some of the bite out of the int loss or lowering the time on it would help more. They could just make its steal half as much and give double what is stolen.
On September 10 2013 05:15 Kuroeeah wrote: OD wasn't worse than TA before they nerfed refraction and fixed the spill on her psi blades.
TA on the whole was a far more interesting hero to play against (and definitely a much more interesting hero to watch). Even when she was abusively strong, she was a very skill-intensive hero that made watching an exceptional player play hero an enjoyable experience (e.g. 430's TA at TI2).
I agree that OD needs to be changed but being interesting to play against doesn't justify a hero being blatantly stupid.
TA was so prevalent during the TI2 era because she just hard countered Invoker, who was at the time another imbalanced mid.
On September 10 2013 05:24 Shaella wrote: Od is just a hero whos on the knife's edge
He's either abusive and annoying or too weak in certain ways to put up a real fight
I don't really agree with that.
Honestly I really don't think that the Astral buff affected the hero that much. He actually got picked a few times in Chinese DotA 1 during 6.72, before every Chinese team started playing mass bottle-crow in 6.73 and the hero pretty much stopped seeing play. Even without the Astral buff, he'd be reasonable today on the basis of the bottle-crow nerf opening up mid for some of the more oppressive mid heroes to take advantage of their strength.
On September 10 2013 05:15 Kuroeeah wrote: OD wasn't worse than TA before they nerfed refraction and fixed the spill on her psi blades.
TA on the whole was a far more interesting hero to play against (and definitely a much more interesting hero to watch). Even when she was abusively strong, she was a very skill-intensive hero that made watching an exceptional player play hero an enjoyable experience (e.g. 430's TA at TI2).
I agree that OD needs to be changed but being interesting to play against doesn't justify a hero being blatantly stupid.
TA was so prevalent during the TI2 era because she just hard countered Invoker, who was at the time another imbalanced mid.
Well TA was also just a questionable case because most of her "imbalance" came from bugs that Icefrog/Valve apparently wanted to just keep they way they were.
On September 10 2013 05:15 Kuroeeah wrote: OD wasn't worse than TA before they nerfed refraction and fixed the spill on her psi blades.
TA on the whole was a far more interesting hero to play against (and definitely a much more interesting hero to watch). Even when she was abusively strong, she was a very skill-intensive hero that made watching an exceptional player play hero an enjoyable experience (e.g. 430's TA at TI2).
I agree that OD needs to be changed but being interesting to play against doesn't justify a hero being blatantly stupid.
TA was so prevalent during the TI2 era because she just hard countered Invoker, who was at the time another imbalanced mid.
we live in a time where this game is a spectator sport, and a casual game at the same time
Something that is boring to watch, and frustrating to play as/against cannot persist.
On September 10 2013 05:15 Kuroeeah wrote: OD wasn't worse than TA before they nerfed refraction and fixed the spill on her psi blades.
TA on the whole was a far more interesting hero to play against (and definitely a much more interesting hero to watch). Even when she was abusively strong, she was a very skill-intensive hero that made watching an exceptional player play hero an enjoyable experience (e.g. 430's TA at TI2).
I agree that OD needs to be changed but being interesting to play against doesn't justify a hero being blatantly stupid.
TA was so prevalent during the TI2 era because she just hard countered Invoker, who was at the time another imbalanced mid.
I miss Invoker. I didn't know a lot about Dota 2 at the time, but I knew he was hard as fuck to play and awesome to watch. It makes me sad that he isn't in the meta any more.
On September 10 2013 05:15 Kuroeeah wrote: OD wasn't worse than TA before they nerfed refraction and fixed the spill on her psi blades.
TA on the whole was a far more interesting hero to play against (and definitely a much more interesting hero to watch). Even when she was abusively strong, she was a very skill-intensive hero that made watching an exceptional player play hero an enjoyable experience (e.g. 430's TA at TI2).
I agree that OD needs to be changed but being interesting to play against doesn't justify a hero being blatantly stupid.
TA was so prevalent during the TI2 era because she just hard countered Invoker, who was at the time another imbalanced mid.
I miss Invoker. I didn't know a lot about Dota 2 at the time, but I knew he was hard as fuck to play and awesome to watch. It makes me sad that he isn't in the meta any more.
Something a lot of teams overlooked was that every competitive team knew leading up to TI2 about Morphling being pretty dumb. The same can't be said about TA, a hero that took western teams by surprise. In fact I think an analogy I can make is that Wisp was overlooked by the Chinese teams the same way TA was overlooked by the Western teams during their respective times
So Western teams would pick Invoker because he was a top pick hero during the time only to be countered and dominated by TA.
On September 10 2013 05:24 Shaella wrote: Od is just a hero whos on the knife's edge
He's either abusive and annoying or too weak in certain ways to put up a real fight
I don't really agree with that.
Honestly I really don't think that the Astral buff affected the hero that much. He actually got picked a few times in Chinese DotA 1 during 6.72, before every Chinese team started playing mass bottle-crow in 6.73 and the hero pretty much stopped seeing play. Even without the Astral buff, he'd be reasonable today on the basis of the bottle-crow nerf opening up mid for some of the more oppressive mid heroes to take advantage of their strength.
On September 10 2013 05:15 Kuroeeah wrote: OD wasn't worse than TA before they nerfed refraction and fixed the spill on her psi blades.
TA on the whole was a far more interesting hero to play against (and definitely a much more interesting hero to watch). Even when she was abusively strong, she was a very skill-intensive hero that made watching an exceptional player play hero an enjoyable experience (e.g. 430's TA at TI2).
I agree that OD needs to be changed but being interesting to play against doesn't justify a hero being blatantly stupid.
TA was so prevalent during the TI2 era because she just hard countered Invoker, who was at the time another imbalanced mid.
Well TA was also just a questionable case because most of her "imbalance" came from bugs that Icefrog/Valve apparently wanted to just keep they way they were.
I feel the buff to Astral was quite relevant. Obviously OD has always had a huge advantage against INT heroes stealing their int but the buff made it so with 3/4 I don't quite remember, practically all STR / AGI mids cannot cast any of their spells. Before IIRC you should be able to get off say a void on NS but post buff your max mana pool is below the cost so you literally have 0 laning presence.
Oh and aside from the base damage nerf to Invoker, the whole being able to EMP tornado'd units was hilariously dumb.
Before the nerf, half the players in a team playing against Invoker (QuasWex was dominant) would start fights without mana. In fact some teams even had mass arcane boots to counteract EMP lol.
On September 10 2013 05:39 Nub4ever wrote: I feel the buff to Astral was quite relevant. Obviously OD has always had a huge advantage against INT heroes stealing their int but the buff made it so with 3/4 I don't quite remember, practically all STR / AGI mids cannot cast any of their spells. Before IIRC you should be able to get off say a void on NS but post buff your max mana pool is below the cost so you literally have 0 laning presence.
The DotA 2 bug where OD can steal bonus Intelligence from items actually has a far bigger impact on this than the Astral buff.
Without that bug, any hero can keep mana for a particular spell anyway by having enough Intel from items to cast it. But in DotA 2, you can steal Intelligence that comes from items, not just base Intelligence.
Now that I think about it, all that needs to happen is that this bug and the bug where Astral stacks falling off doesn't return mana properly need to be fixed and the hero will be fine. No need to nerf, just fix bugs.
You could even give him back denied creeps giving 0 XP to Astral-ed heroes.
On September 10 2013 05:45 BlitzerSC wrote: That was a dota2 bug though.
No it wasn't, it was the same behavior in DotA 1. It was specifically changed in 6.74 in both games.
On September 10 2013 05:00 BlitzerSC wrote: I would make OD start with zero armor tbh.
Revert the buff to Astral's Int steal.
OD was already like top 3 solo laners in the game before that change, the change did nothing other than make his 1v1 unnecessarily oppressive. It affected his overall strength quite minimally but just made a specific aspect of the hero a lot more painful to deal with.
Or you could buff some counters to him, like giving Viper +8 base int, a change that would do absolutely nothing aside from making him much better against OD (and an even better Meka carrier for all those ppl that stil go vanguard on him )
On September 10 2013 04:09 NB wrote: Trying to learn LC skill builld next. I have never played this hero or seen it be played before.
Depends if laning or jungling. Jungling max the passive first, followed by the heal, leaving the nuke until after those 2 are maxed. Lane you can level the nuke earlier and prioritize the heal.
The strength of the hero in pubs is that you jungle like Axe (based on passive proc), except unlike Axe you bring your own sustain to the board because you have a heal and a lifesteal passive. You can pretty much rush a naked Blink dagger at like 7-8 min with only QB+Stout and then use it to set up ganks because most pubs don't expect Blink-Duel ganks that early. You can transition into fighting items after that.
Pubs like Lothar a lot on that hero over Blink, but it takes a lot longer and due to the nature of the ult you want that hero snowballing as early as possible.
EDIT: Two YaphetS LC games, 1 lane one jungle:
That video made me realize the pub buff that AM got in dota 2. I forgot about the image pointing to where he blinked.
On September 10 2013 05:48 Kuroeeah wrote: Valve deciding which bugs to fix or not is apparently as significant as a major balance patch from Icefrog.
Yes, there are a lot of heroes/mechanics that behave differently enough between DotA 1 and 2 to drastically affect the power level of the heroes involved.This has been demonstrated in several cases, with TA being one of the aforementioned cases.
EPT
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