Season 2 Balance Feedback - Week One

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GrindcoreTHRALL wrote:

Also the 30 all res flask roll is very very good at countering EE. I dont see enough people talking about this. Stack some resistances and a variety of warding flasks in conjunction and in 1v1 environments against EE, EE will seem very week and only team oriented.

ee is defintely not team oriented only currently.
Some really good casters ee oriented shows up in torment.

I'm currently playing Puncture (non nado) + puncture trap.
I can say a few things about the matters that were addressed.

I'm not able to 1 shot by any means, in fact most of the matches almost always end in flask attrition wins. In the current state of the game, you don't even need to bleed remove all you you need is a healing flask and to put yourself LoS from the Archer to heal up or just wait for the bleed to expire.

Its bad enough already that most enemies use block or dodge and even ondars that I find these matchups to only let roughly 1/3 of my arrows to even hit.

I can drop 2.5 sets of traps, and then i'm on some serious cooldown.



In the matter of balancing the mid tier, I think it just needs to be emphasized that when you get punctured your either dispell it or don't run!

I'm barely able to get by in high competitive play because most players can just deal way more burst damage than I can inflict, on top of that I don't have time to burn people's flasks in a blitz setting 90% of the time.


The matchups I usually win:
Cycloners that don't care to do anything but cyclone. (so yeah i can see why they're frustrated when their attack is a movement skill, but they do nothing to try to avoid or disarm traps.)


The matchups I usually lose to:
Heavystrike Melee, Firestorm, Dual Strikes

Everybody else: Pretty balanced in the matchup overall when calculating flask attrition kills.


Typical setup at the higher end of the ladder spectrum, first 2 rounds draw or with 2 losses, then I usually make a comeback when flasks are thin and we trade off the last rounds.

Feel free to check out my stream, I stream every event!


Archers in general, were never broken even in season with puncture trap, Moreso with tornado, but that got nerfed.
With the flask changes, that is a 2ndary effect that extremely counters that a puncture trapper has to offer, and its made it much more of an attrition meta with good play and mechanics.

Its really a bit premature to be making adjustments to a skill like puncture trap. I honestly barely making it as it is and I'm one of the top ladder archer players. If it were nerfed anymore, I'm 100% convinced I would just ditch it because it would become uncompetitive.

Game is starting will post more feedback when I have time!

I think its a really poor idea to balance pvp matches based off of blitz.

Blitz is is more like a playground of aggressive play on each character.

Because you're able to use particular flasks for quick bursts, its so quick to judge "imbalanced!" when in reality it just takes a little maneuvering in a swiss match until his burst or special flasks are over.

Let blitz be, take a look at closer matchups that aren't ladder related. A lot of great players, climb the ladder just to get experience or test, then delete their character to avoid being examined under the radar. I know this for a fact. If the top season point holders and blitz players aren't on the ladder, its either

a. they haven't played because they dont want to.
b. want to remain under the radar for as long as possible.
c. Deleted their character after sufficient testing of their build and dominance.

by the way. CC at 2.5 is really rough even in the HLD setting. Traps become your worst enemy. Herald of ash is so easily manipulated when you can't control the safety of your own traps. 3 seconds because of the way the current meta has its trap cooldowns would be put trappers in a better position to not get cheesed so hard from 100% to dead in a herald of ash. Go about giving traps 75% all resist would help rectify the overkill damage to such insane amounts!

Trapper in general is supposed to be methodical and evasive. You have very few things to throw and after that you're on a cooldown. So its playing defense and swift getaways. That is how they currently play, only the factor that they get wrecked by their own traps via herald of ash.

The counter we've been seeing in a lot of CC matchups, is people have been generating power charges off the cc traps or proccing their herald of thunder. That is a good balance to the CC answer. not full kills from prolif HoA

Thanks for the very constructive feedback!

I'll add some more notes after we see some Swiss results.

I would say something about mirror and blink arrow with minion instability and how OP it is 1 shots everyone with no saves. But i'd rather not get yelled at again. Ofc it would be in my best interested if it was nerfed. ZZZzzz...

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Lordsidro wrote:

I would say something about mirror and blink arrow with minion instability and how OP it is 1 shots everyone with no saves. But i'd rather not get yelled at again. Ofc it would be in my best interested if it was nerfed. ZZZzzz...

yes this is something that definitely needs to be looked at. This is the current biggest 1 shot off screen mechanic

Sword is too dominant in LLD. Crit dag vs crit sword.. sword wins. non crit sword vs everything else melee.. sword wins. I'm not sure exactly what needs to be addressed, although I'm sure the Block pen cluster and +2 range is too OP.

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HegemonyTV wrote:

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Lordsidro wrote:

I would say something about mirror and blink arrow with minion instability and how OP it is 1 shots everyone with no saves. But i'd rather not get yelled at again. Ofc it would be in my best interested if it was nerfed. ZZZzzz...

yes this is something that definitely needs to be looked at. This is the current biggest 1 shot off screen mechanic

TYVM for backing me up Hege it's nice to not have people spouting conspiracy theory about my balance suggestions for a change.

I really do appreciate it.

Fells awful to get that feedback if you're really trying to help.

I'm glad others in this thread seem to feel similarly about Firestorm and Sword dominance also. TY Greendude and Bigfoot for the post.

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mephisto_n wrote:

I'm not worried at all that melee builds might get nerfed. After the swiss event it'll be obvious which builds will be nerfed and those are not melees or puncture trappers.


Also imo, knockback on heavystrike is a drawback if you are trying to perma stun someone, unless against a wall; because by the time you walk up to the kocked back target, he's not stunned anymore and has moved away.

Personally, against trappers who tend to move all the time, I use cyclone which has less dps compared to heavystrike but since it's an AOE gem, it's more likely to hit the moving target. At the same time, I tend to beat cyclone with heavystrike and specially molten strike with life gain on hit. Therefore, I don't see the reason why cyclone should be nerfed.

very very valid points here. Cyclone melee vs melee is still good but not out of balance. Cyclone vs non melee the aoe is indispensable. Range chars atm get insane damage and kiting ability. Remove melees ability to kill kiting targets with cyclone will make teams even harder for melee builds. Melee seems to mostly dominate in 1v1 but in teams casters are the ones destroying. If we are balancing around 1v1 swiss what builds deserve to dominate? Ranged chars already have soooo many escape skills, how would u balance the dps and utility against melee?

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GrindcoreTHRALL wrote:

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mephisto_n wrote:

I'm not worried at all that melee builds might get nerfed. After the swiss event it'll be obvious which builds will be nerfed and those are not melees or puncture trappers.


Also imo, knockback on heavystrike is a drawback if you are trying to perma stun someone, unless against a wall; because by the time you walk up to the kocked back target, he's not stunned anymore and has moved away.

Personally, against trappers who tend to move all the time, I use cyclone which has less dps compared to heavystrike but since it's an AOE gem, it's more likely to hit the moving target. At the same time, I tend to beat cyclone with heavystrike and specially molten strike with life gain on hit. Therefore, I don't see the reason why cyclone should be nerfed.

very very valid points here. Cyclone melee vs melee is still good but not out of balance. Cyclone vs non melee the aoe is indispensable. Range chars atm get insane damage and kiting ability. Remove melees ability to kill kiting targets with cyclone will make teams even harder for melee builds. Melee seems to mostly dominate in 1v1 but in teams casters are the ones destroying. If we are balancing around 1v1 swiss what builds deserve to dominate? Ranged chars already have soooo many escape skills, how would u balance the dps and utility against melee?

I previously suggested blink/mirror arrow cooldown increase. It's very hard to run down a team of bowers spamming blink and mirror arrow. Pretty frustrating for melee. Cyclone is your best tool here to clear them all and keep moving IMO.

As any other build though I'ts still frustrating to die to cyclone in like .5s so IDK how you effectively fix this.