On November 05 2014 07:08 Serendipityx wrote: Just got into alpha, is there way to turn on smartcast?
Under options>gameplay > quickcast
I don't think illidan is ever supposed to 1v1. He's super good in teamfights as he's hard to land skill shots against among all the chaos as long as you don't initiate.
On November 05 2014 07:08 Serendipityx wrote: Just got into alpha, is there way to turn on smartcast?
Under options>gameplay > quickcast
I don't think illidan is ever supposed to 1v1. He's super good in teamfights as he's hard to land skill shots against among all the chaos as long as you don't initiate.
Illidan can 1v1 but only against auto attack heroes. Zag is not an auto attack hero.
I don't think that Illidan is good at anything, quite frankly. Heroes like him should be good in 1v1 situations where they can pick off other champs, but be far riskier to use in teamfights due to their general squishiness. Illidan is predictably bad in teamfights (he gets blown up instantly), but is completely mediocre AT BEST in 1v1 fights. He's just a bad hero as is. If you want a pure melee assassin, take Zeratul instead. If you want someone who can still dive squishies but live to tell the tale, then take Tyrael or even Chen.
So I gave this a try. My biggest gripe with it is that hero kills feel so insignificant in this game., compared to dota. Like if you focus a hero and kill him after a chase it's not even worth it if one other guy gathered coins or zombies in the meantime. Feels way more PvE and less PvP.
Skills also feel very insignificant as you just spam them and their damage is crap. There's not an equivalent to landing a 3 man stun with lion, or hitting a raze combo with shadowfiend. You land a hook on someone but they just get 50 damage and run away again as there's no followup skill.
The dragon map is really infuriating as 10 seconds of out of position and they can get a dragon. I feel like the other maps are 10x better. The moon and sun shrines should really be instantly cancel-able imo.
I'm about 30 games in and have changed my opinion a bit.
I think for what it's being billed as, HOTS works. It's a super casual alternative to the other mobas and really plays as it's own game. The animations still look terrible (graphics are very nice on the other hand), but that becomes an afterthought with so fighting going on. The lack of last-hitting, farming, shared exp, and map objectives really make for a fast-paced environment. Rotating maps is an amazing feature (although I'm obviously partial to some).
All in all, I'm finding it enjoyable. It's not like a super-rewarding game, but there's a lot of entertainment to be had spamming shit in these 20-30 minute games. It's basically akin to the Michael Bay experience.
Now onto the really bad: hero design. I'm hoping alpha-beta flushes out some existing heroes more, but I agree with FueledUpAndReadyToGo in that I'm just spamming spells over the course of the game. If the devs want HOTS to have more depth, heroes shouldn't all follow the same design of low cooldown/damage/mana spells that won't amount to much unless supported by allies. Some spells I actually put some thought into using, such as Valla's second ulti, but there's a severe lack of spell potential.
I'd like to see more expensive, game changing spells. It doesn't have to be in the realm of an Enigma "Black Hole," but even a basic spell like ES's "Fissure" can alter laning phases.
On November 05 2014 09:34 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote: So I gave this a try. My biggest gripe with it is that hero kills feel so insignificant in this game., compared to dota. Like if you focus a hero and kill him after a chase it's not even worth it if one other guy gathered coins or zombies in the meantime. Feels way more PvE and less PvP.
Skills also feel very insignificant as you just spam them and their damage is crap. There's not an equivalent to landing a 3 man stun with lion, or hitting a raze combo with shadowfiend. You land a hook on someone but they just get 50 damage and run away again as there's no followup skill.
The dragon map is really infuriating as 10 seconds of out of position and they can get a dragon. I feel like the other maps are 10x better. The moon and sun shrines should really be instantly cancel-able imo.
Just wait till you have a few hundred games under your belt. Dragon Shire is by far the best (IMO) and most balanced (fact) map.
The difference between HotS and DotA regarding skills is that skills have much lower cooldown, autoattacks aren't anywhere near as powerful. IMO this is a lot more fun and one of the gripes I had with going back to DotA after playing LoL: between huge mana costs (and low regen) and huge cooldowns, you barely ever get to use your skills in DotA. The fact that you start with all 3 regular skills and can use them frequently at the beginning of the game makes it so much more interactive. Think about a game of DotA where if you're Lion, you have one stun that you can cast twice for the first 3-4 minutes of the game. Most of your time is spent stacking camps, harassing with autos, or just sitting there doing nothing and waiting for someone to get out of position.
There is none of that downtime in HotS because you have all your skill combos (minus ultimates) at the beginning of the game, and at 3-4 minutes in, you've probably already had at least 1 teamfight and are level 6-7.
The downside is that when you have skills that you use more frequently, they HAVE to be less powerful. It's all about teamwork in HotS, and no one hero has the infinite lockdown of something like a Rhasta, you actually have to layer your stuns. So like your Hook example, by design, Stitches doesn't have a stun (except the .5sec one if you talent slam) because being able to hook and then stun someone would make him far too powerful in the context of other HotS heroes. Instead he has the Devour skill, which gives the opponent's team time to come to his rescue, but also lets you do some cool shit like blink behind walls and trap him.
Apart from Assassin on Assassin violence, the time to kill is much longer in HotS than other DotA games, and that's also by design: it promotes teamfights and acts as a small anti-snowballing check. I really don't have a problem with it, though I can understand why some do coming from DotA and LoL where a late game carry can 1-2 shot any support hero in the game.
Edit: RE: Above - I do agree that the hero design is somewhat simplistic, but Azmodan and Anub'arak, the 2 most recent heroes, are a step up from a lot of the base heroes we had at the start. That's definitely something that can get fleshed out as the game progresses and I really hope it does. That said, it's nowhere near as bad as you make it out to be. Have you ever landed a 5 man ETC ult into Abathur 5 man ETC ult? That's like a 5 man refresher Black Hole right there. There are TONS of high impact ultimates that have the potential to win teamfights on their own, but there are a fair share of useless/dueling only ultimates and ones that are conceptually fine but need work in execution (looking at you Shadow Assault).
if you're Lion, you have one stun that you can cast twice for the first 3-4 minutes of the game.
What
Given mana pool level 1-3 you can cast Impale 2-3 times, you don't take hex early typically. Drain Mana can help if you're in a trilane and they can't punish you when you're sitting there draining a lane creep, or somehow have enough stuns to get the channel off on a hero.
Again, in pub games this can be different, but competitively (played as 4-5 support), yeah, it sucks. It really bothers me (especially after playing LoL for so long) that I can't use my skills frequently to do chip damage and have to save them for combos.
On November 05 2014 12:18 trifecta wrote: longer cool downs, range, and mana costs improve the legibility of fights which is important for play and spectating.
Not for playing, definitely yes for novice/non player spectating. It IS part of the reason I don't enjoy watching Heroes but love playing it.
OK, I've played about a hundred games of Lion and you're in a bad place if you can't cast spells on a regular basis. But your point (even if your example was honestly a bad one) does not go amiss. This is definitely a design decision with up and downsides.
I was a main tank in WoW going back to the olden days when UBRS was progression content. And I was pretty damned good at it. While warrior went through many Awesome Warrior Changes, the majority of my time when I was not pirouetting huge mobs into place or herding groups of small ones I was SMASHING KEYS frantically. Now I was good enough at SMASHING KEYS that we did BWL without threat meters and quite easily because my threat generation was above reproach. But most of my SMASHING KEYS was doing only that: generating threat. Every once in a while I'd have to use a survival cooldown but this was really 95% of main tank life: PIROUETTE, SMASH KEYS.
Despite all of these lovely abilities I had (far more than any moba to date, even in vanilla) the individual key presses held very little meaning with the exception of encounters where extra abilities had to be used or rotation abilities had to be saved. Then I had a second life as an enhancement shaman and my life became DODGE FIRE, SMASH KEYS. Now I had a lot of keys, most of them macros for one dumb reason or another (like yes if I cast flame shock I also want to be attacking that target). But for the most part I was frantically smashing keys now to MOAR DPS. Occasionally there were fights where my PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER macro had to be saved for specific junctures but mostly...you get the idea.
Take the other end of this and you have Dota, where there are decisions to make on most heroes at level one what spell you're even going to have *at all* and this is an important decision. You will later have to choose between leveling/maxing a skill and having another skill *at all*. These are incredibly important decisions. And while some heroes are more spammable (some heroes only have two active skills at all, "clickies" notwithstanding), for nearly all of them spell casts have significance. As the game progresses you will go from either not casting at all for long periods to spamming abilities and item clicks (again, depending on hero).
Now, I hate smash buttons. I am fucking tired of smash buttons. I did that shit for years and it was simultaneously intense and usually mind-numbing. I do think there's a middle ground one can achieve between the Dota model and the WoW model (even WoW devs declared a lot of "ability pruning" was going to take place for WoD; I haven't kept up so I don't know how that's gone) but for my taste I don't think I ever want to have buttons to press just for the sake of pressing buttons, not any more. And I will take the Dota complexities you get in exchange over that, which is a qualitative preference. So I'm not saying that one is objectively "better" (or "harder") than the other, I just want to put out there the reason that this is subjective.
On November 05 2014 12:32 FHDH wrote: OK, I've played about a hundred games of Lion and you're in a bad place if you can't cast spells on a regular basis. But your point (even if your example was honestly a bad one) does not go amiss. This is definitely a design decision with up and downsides.
I was a main tank in WoW going back to the olden days when UBRS was progression content. And I was pretty damned good at it. While warrior went through many Awesome Warrior Changes, the majority of my time when I was not pirouetting huge mobs into place or herding groups of small ones I was SMASHING KEYS frantically. Now I was good enough at SMASHING KEYS that we did BWL without threat meters and quite easily because my threat generation was above reproach. But most of my SMASHING KEYS was doing only that: generating threat. Every once in a while I'd have to use a survival cooldown but this was really 95% of main tank life: PIROUETTE, SMASH KEYS.
Despite all of these lovely abilities I had (far more than any moba to date, even in vanilla) the individual key presses held very little meaning with the exception of encounters where extra abilities had to be used or rotation abilities had to be saved. Then I had a second life as an enhancement shaman and my life became DODGE FIRE, SMASH KEYS. Now I had a lot of keys, most of them macros for one dumb reason or another (like yes if I cast flame shock I also want to be attacking that target). But for the most part I was frantically smashing keys now to MOAR DPS. Occasionally there were fights where my PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER macro had to be saved for specific junctures but mostly...you get the idea.
Take the other end of this and you have Dota, where there are decisions to make on most heroes at level one what spell you're even going to have *at all* and this is an important decision. You will later have to choose between leveling/maxing a skill and having another skill *at all*. These are incredibly important decisions. And while some heroes are more spammable (some heroes only have two active skills at all, "clickies" notwithstanding), for nearly all of them spell casts have significance. As the game progresses you will go from either not casting at all for long periods to spamming abilities and item clicks (again, depending on hero).
Now, I hate smash buttons. I am fucking tired of smash buttons. I did that shit for years and it was simultaneously intense and usually mind-numbing. I do think there's a middle ground one can achieve between the Dota model and the WoW model (even WoW devs declared a lot of "ability pruning" was going to take place for WoD; I haven't kept up so I don't know how that's gone) but for my taste I don't think I ever want to have buttons to press just for the sake of pressing buttons, not any more. And I will take the Dota complexities you get in exchange over that, which is a qualitative preference. So I'm not saying that one is objectively "better" (or "harder") than the other, I just want to put out there the reason that this is subjective.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of Prot warriors, all monks, and rogues who are notoriously smashy smashy all the buttons. The thing with HotS is that it splits the difference in a way that I like between DotA and WoW. Pretty much all of the ultimates in the game act like DotA skills where you have very important decisions to make on when you pull the trigger and you must land them or face the consequences of long CDs and probably losing the teamfight. On the other hand, you can still pull off sweet combos with your other skills as early as level 1 and have impact with them.
I honestly stopped playing serious DotA around the time PotM came out, and have only really played DotA 2 in small doses in private games with friends. I will admit that most of my recent experience with Lion (who was one of my favorite heroes back in the day) is playing the Lion clone Witch Slayer in HoN. At level 1-2 you can get 2 Impales (Graveyards IIRC) off before running OOM, and at level 3-4 it goes up to 3.
Let's compare that to Anub'arak's Impale, which is based on the same exact WC3 skill (though the hitboxes are different). His Impale is 1.25 sec stun, 12 sec CD, 65 mana at lvl 1. Starting mana pool, 500.
Lion's Impale is 1.02 sec stun, 12 sec CD, 100 mana at lvl 1. Starting mana pool, 286.
So Anub has a more impactful stun on the same CD for less mana and almost double the starting mana pool. That means you can start being more impactful earlier in the game, and use Impale to either walk up and hit them a few times uncontested for chip damage, or Burrow in, hit them, then Impale to cover your retreat.
Lion level 1-3 can use Impale effectively 3 times (technically twice if you spam it on CD) before being completely OOM and forced to blow some sort of item or go back to base. The only reason why it isn't just flat worse is that heroes have much lower starting HP in DotA so ability chains at the beginning of the game are more potent.
That's not even counting the fact that Anub can use all 3 skills at level 1 and combo it with burrow charge. IMO, there's a window, approximately level 6-14 where Lion is really fun to play and really impactful. After that, he doesn't do enough damage to one shot a carry and gets fucked because of BKBs, and before that he doesn't have enough mana or damage to do much of anything apart from being a followup stun once in a blue moon. Anub is fun and useful at every single part of the game, and you can start comboing and outplaying people at level 1. I find that more fun personally.
On November 05 2014 13:04 ETisME wrote: I agree that there lacks the cool pvp factor in heroes I was watching the showoff videos from league of legend and you just cannot have it in heroes
Its those engagements that really makes the crowd go wild.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Dota2 is graphically a lot more sophisticated but generally flashy than League and the crowd goes wild for their teamfights as well.
(Some of these you can hear crowd reaction some you can't. I really posted it more to show what their fights look like and you can take my word that crowds get excited.)
Anub is fun and useful at every single part of the game, and you can start comboing and outplaying people at level 1. I find that more fun personally.
You can do that with a Lion or Venge or a number of other heroes as well (literally any hero really just some are a lot better at it than others). Going from usually playing lane support to roaming support was a revelation in just how boxed-in my thinking had become regarding what you can do with one spell. But I don't want to risk this devolving into a back-and-forth about what is and isn't possible in comparitive mobas; I think it's well established that there is a lot more dynamism in Dota2 laning setups compared to League but the flipside is that there tends to be less use of skills and they are important.
Comparing Dota2 to HotS, however, the other factor is how impactful and meaningful kills/deaths are. The latest patch made early deaths more possible to recover from but they still matter a lot, so those things like map awareness (knowing when rotations might be happening), the importance of small positioning adjustments, the numerous ways you manage creep equilibrium, denies, pulls, etc, are all the things you get instead of more actives.
Now, arguably, you could have both of these but I don't know if any game has tried that route yet. Dota's basic lane dynamics are the most complex I'm aware of before spells are added and then at level one the spells add very little in most matchups (usually just enough to force individuals to position themselves in more nuanced ways). You could certainly do both at once I just haven't seen it yet.
Of course I think decisions are the number one thing that makes mobas interesting and this comes down again to what decisions you are allowing or disallowing your players through your design decisions. You can't both give people all their low level spells at level one and give them a decision point as important as "which of these spells do I have." They are mutually exclusive. A lot of things like that exist. HotS has more dynamic map objectives (read: things that are not directly farm or destroy the enemy base) but takes away itemization decision points.
I am sure crowds go wild at the team fight but I think I didn't explain my point clearly.
The difference is that dota and lol allow more cool moments of 1vX turn around such as juking or killing the gankers.
There is a much higher degree of what you can achieve with the hero/champion. Puck for example. No heroes in hots is remotely close to that level of openess.
There are still cool team fight combo in heroes but lacking in this area in particular.
I know the selling point is different, it is more of an objective based game but is it as exciting to watch a Lee sin doing some crazy good combo off against a ganker?
So far my experience is that their team is better / worse but in none of the game I felt Whoa that player on their team is really good