In-Game Standard Hero Builds Project - Page 291

On March 12 2016 02:15 Buckyman wrote:


1)The skillbuilds are currently very different. Mid gets stats early and fully prioritizes Shadow Word, while support prioritizes Upheaval with Shadow Word 2. I don't think these are necessarily correct (in particular, I would put fatal bonds higher on core), but core Warlock should definitely prioritize Upheaval less than support Warlock, because having a core channel is a larger cost than having a support channel in the early game.
2) Starting items - core obviously doesn't get wards or courier, buying stats instead.
3) Boot choices - core currently gets Phase, while support skips upgraded boots. I think support might want Arcanes, but they certainly don't want Phase.
4) Build-up - core prioritizes Midas more highly.
5) Extension - I'm not happy with core Warlock's build-out beyond mek+aghs+refresher. Support warlock won't go much beyond that plus defensive items, even with Midas, but might also buy Greaves. But core Lock needs to keep scaling out in the later game, and thus should have Luxury options like Hex over cheap defense like Glimmer Cape.

Side note - Mid warlock's brown boots should have its description

roger that, I'll reconsider


I don't quite understand what you mean by 'value way'. But Vengeful Spirit occasionally shown up, legitimately, in any position from 1 to 5 across a number of patches. Over time, pieces of my position 3 build have been in and out of the support guide as situational or extension, including Mek, Vlad's, Solar Crest and Shiva's. It should be fine to modify the support build so that P3 Venge is just an accelerated version of it, adding a couple of core early game items like Aquila as situational.

Position 2+ Venge builds, on the other hand, are very different. Excluding Mek rushes, which I think aren't viable in the current meta, they generally go Aquila -> farming item early and eventually build into damage items like Desolator or Butterfly that don't have any place in a support build.

For the sake of the workload, I'm going to pass on Vengeful Spirit until I see it more regularly played

On March 13 2016 18:43 Belisarius wrote:
The most important thing to note on deleting/adding guides is that we have to take a long view. Deleting or adding a guide is not just a question of "is this relevant now", but should be "is this conceivably relevant in future".


I'm not sure about that... heroes were in the "probably" section for a reason. In particular, a lot of the new guides were essentially brainstorming. I think we should be very sparing in what we add.

in the end, it's all a brainstorm/idea. We can essentially avoid creating any new guides and just focus on transitioning to the new system with our current build and re-evaluate from there. The difference is up to us


Nobody is more likely to rail against jungle cores than me, but despite my frustration jungle LC is a pub staple now. I don't think we can ignore it. We also have a spare guide with a lot of subscribers that we would otherwise delete. Converting mid to jungle seems obvious here.

I'll reconsider only because Mid and Lane are so similar, but it saddens me to reinstate it



You have a spare guide and core nyx is distinct from support nyx. Core Nyx considers dagon, considers midas, has a reasonable chance of reaching aghs+aether+octarine.

In addition, adding a mid tab to a support guide is schizophrenic and I would strongly advise against doing this, for any guide.

This is another guide I dislike personally as well because users end up getting Dagon too late.



It's somewhat different, but not greatly. It's more likely to get midas, gets phase, and extends past aghs+rfo, but is basically going for the same items. If you didn't already have two guides I probably wouldn't add one, but we don't need to be trigger happy with deletions.

Skywrath, Rhasta, Warlock, AA, Earth Spirit and Oracle are all fairly similar cases, being support heroes with two guides and a rare core build. Support beastmaster, Alc, windrunner and gyro are the converse cases. I'm not sure I follow your reasoning for how you've chosen to keep and remove them.

Personally, in order of keeping, I would rank them something like
1. Core WL
2. Core ES; Support BM, Alc, WR
3. Core AA, Sky, Rhasta, Oracle; Support gyro.

my reasoning for deletion is that I do not want to delete any guides in the near future (2+ years hopefully). I'd rather delete everything in one swift to reduce blowback than to slowly remove more and more things to avoid redundancy

In other words, if we're deleting, let's be swift and decisive on which guides



Carry venge (that is, 1-2pos with combat items) has always been kind of a thing. This is a historical build that happens to currently also be a fotm build, with a lot of Chinese teams running it situationally this patch. Burning in particular really likes it.

I don't think we need it, but veno core, tusk core, core/offlane bounty and even core void are all far more suspect.

In terms of priority, I place Void and Tusk Core as high and Veno and VS core as low


I agree, I don't think it's needed.

ok removed


First, the existing lane spiritbreaker guide should be a support.

Core SB and non-jungle prophet usually both come out of offlane, so either name would work. My preference would be to ignore SB for now but consider prophet under either name.

I agree with ignoring SB and agree on Prophet if there's enough difference in item build at least


I don't think we need an offlane enigma.

if the item and skill build is the same, agreed. However the current title is Jungle, meaning we'd have to make a tab for it

On March 14 2016 06:36 Belisarius wrote:

You misunderstand me. I absolutely agree that workload is a key consideration.

First and quickly, the deletions that come from this put us significantly under the cap. Even deleting the bare minimum of the 9 redundant mid/core guides, we are down at 138, and everything we could add is optional. We are much less likely to break 150 guides with this system than with the old one as it stands.

The old system was a "if it is not broken, don't fix it" situation. Bluntly put, we're just perfectionists dissatisfied with a system I stubbornly didn't want to work away from (for many reasons that are clearly not good enough now).

I do think we'll break 150 by the end of the year however. With Pit Lord and potentially new heroes after, I worry. Even at 147, I do not feel comfortable at all with the quality of some builds (Sniper, Drow for example)

Second and importantly, what I meant about the conceivable future is that we should be more conservative, not less, which means being slow to delete guides but also very thoughtful when adding them. The two questions that we need to ask are: "how important is this now" and "how important is this likely to be in a year".

good process

It is only worth adding a guide if the answer is "reasonably so" to both questions (or, admittedly,"top P/B" to the first one). It is probably a waste to create a guide for a hero+role combination that is a FOTM spike that will be irrelevant next patch. I am worried about eg. offlane ench from this perspective.

I believe Offlane and Jungle Ench. are played the same, but I agree with your point

Similarly, because of the inertia of existing subscribers, it is only worth deleting a guide if the answers to the questions are "irrelevant" and "probably irrelevant". It is also a waste to delete a guide which is not FOTM but which will tick along at some low but significant level of play for the next five patches, and it is a catastrophe to delete a guide two patches before icefrog buffs it back into the meta.

For this reason I am hesitant to delete any guides at all for heroes that are simply not played, like warlock and ET, because we can expect that icefrog will buff something, but we do not know which role he will buff. This is especially true when we now have some headroom on the 150-guide cap, and so can afford to keep questionmarks around.

All these considerations are why I split the heroes by "probably/possibly" in the original post. We can do that more explicitly:

Imo the cutoffs are around 1-3 in both cases. 1ish to be conservative, 3ish to be aggressive.

we can start converting old guides into the new system before adding new guides. I dread the workload nevertheless

On March 15 2016 03:07 TheYango wrote:

This is already true of a ton of other heroes though. Your QoP guide has Agha first item and that suffers from the same "item is significantly worse if the player falls behind and misses the timing" problem. That doesn't make the build "wrong".

If a build not being robust to being behind and getting an item late was a reason to dislike a build then half your guides have this problem.