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RazzleDazzleHour
Mar 31, 2016

mikeraskol posted:

Newer is also a relative term. Monkey King is 5 years old at this point.

5 years old but he's also the 8th newest hero

I think honestly the biggest contributor, while partially it is that every new hero has some sort of mobility spell, is that every single new hero has four (or gently caress it sometimes five, let's just give Willow a fifth spell) abilities that are relevant to the way the game is currently played. Compare that to some heroes like Treant, who have waved through various phases of usefulness as their abilities have changed multiple times over the years. Not having to stick to the Warcraft archetype of "well this is what that hero sort of did back then" makes the newer heroes way stronger because all their abilities are made to be relevant in the current state of the game.

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Sab669
Sep 24, 2009

I feel like Willow's toolkit is just so diverse.

Here's a giant AoE denial spell that lasts for ever and also does decent damage.

And she can go untargetable for a duration that would make Puck jealous while also building a large nuke.

Another large AoE stun that can optionally spawn more brambles.

And another large AoE control spell for her Ult.


Why does one support provide so much control??

ZenMasterBullshit
Nov 2, 2011

Restaurant de Nouvelles "À Table" Proudly Presents:
A Climactic Encounter Ending on 1 Negate and a Dream
Because the hero is already barely picked.

IcePhoenix
Sep 18, 2005

Take me to your Shida

The MidOne/Mushi stack bombed out of quals lol

The REAL Goobusters
Apr 25, 2008

IcePhoenix posted:

The MidOne/Mushi stack bombed out of quals lol

Taken out by ninja boogie and Deth

Super-NintendoUser
Jan 16, 2004

COWABUNGERDER COMPADRES
Soiled Meat

IcePhoenix posted:

The MidOne/Mushi stack bombed out of quals lol

how many times did midone die by diving t2 alone

shades of blue
Sep 27, 2012
To be fair, the SEA opens were by far the most stacked open qualifier. The Deth/Poloson team is super good and the Motivate Trust Gaming squad is probably the fourth best team in SEA. Also Mushi is probably the worst captain in SEA at this point I have literally no idea what happened to him lmao.

Incoherence
May 22, 2004

POYO AND TEAR

Sab669 posted:

I feel like Willow's toolkit is just so diverse.

Here's a giant AoE denial spell that lasts for ever and also does decent damage.

And she can go untargetable for a duration that would make Puck jealous while also building a large nuke.

Another large AoE stun that can optionally spawn more brambles.

And another large AoE control spell for her Ult.


Why does one support provide so much control??
She also has very little laning presence because all of those things have long cooldowns at early levels and aren't particularly effective except in combination, which is a very bad trait for a support pick. You could do the comedy mid Willow, but plenty of mids do the control/pickoff thing better, and her attack speed talent at 25 has been nerfed repeatedly.

IcePhoenix
Sep 18, 2005

Take me to your Shida

The Aghs meme dream is great but Willow's ult is what you actually destroy people with while you build up some attack speed

Sab669
Sep 24, 2009

I guess I just don't know how to abuse her but we got shitcanned in a 5 stack last night and I got very triggered by their Willow tbh lmao.

And every time I lane against one I'm always like why does she do so much damage???? But I generally play squishy supports

IcePhoenix
Sep 18, 2005

Take me to your Shida

Sab669 posted:

I guess I just don't know how to abuse her but we got shitcanned in a 5 stack last night and I got very triggered by their Willow tbh lmao.

And every time I lane against one I'm always like why does she do so much damage???? But I generally play squishy supports

her W makes her untargetable for up to 5 seconds and charges up her next attack while under the effect with up to 90/180/270/360 bonus magic damage (depending on how long she charges it) on a 32/26/20/14 second cooldown. Attacking ends the effect, unless you have aghs which keeps you under the effect (and charges all your attacks) for the full duration.

the damage ability of her ult (not the AoE fear) has her fairy orbit around her for 5 seconds and attack random targets in range for 75/125/175 per attack at a rate of 4 attacks per second. If you get caught solo btw that's 1500/2500/3500 magic damage over 5 seconds.

Sab669
Sep 24, 2009

I mean, I know what she does, I've looked over the wikia plenty of times. I just don't know how to best play against her in the sense of like, "Oh you're laning against a Bristleback? Better buy a Wand you dummy"

That was more of like a, "Why did IceFrog choose to make her do so much damage" question, not a literal "how much damage do her spells deal :downs:" post

IcePhoenix
Sep 18, 2005

Take me to your Shida

Oh, she's fragile so just get on top of her and kill her while her spells are on cooldown. Her stun takes four seconds to go off and the root can be dodged so she doesn't have a reliable escape, really.

sugar free jazz
Mar 5, 2008

She’s also slow, has no reliable save, bad catch, low range on her auto attack, and just ok stat gain. Bad wave clear too, so farming as DW support is risky and slow, her tower defense is bad, and she doesn’t push or hit towers. Strong at some stuff, bad at other stuff vOv

Zurreco
Dec 27, 2004

Cutty approves.
Bad catch? Once she gets Eul's she can lock one hero down and solokill most of them in the midgame.

shades of blue
Sep 27, 2012

Zurreco posted:

Bad catch? Once she gets Eul's she can lock one hero down and solokill most of them in the midgame.

So this doesn't actually work very effectively anymore and you have no way to farm it. The hero is honestly pretty medium right now.

TOOT BOOT
May 25, 2010

How buggy are replays? Because I got an overwatch case of a supposed Skywrath scripter. The replay was 99% a normal Skywrath game except one single instance near the very end where it looked like he autohexed someone that blinked on him from the fog.

IcePhoenix
Sep 18, 2005

Take me to your Shida

TOOT BOOT posted:

How buggy are replays? Because I got an overwatch case of a supposed Skywrath scripter. The replay was 99% a normal Skywrath game except one single instance near the very end where it looked like he autohexed someone that blinked on him from the fog.

Just watch his player perspective in slow motion and you can probably tell if it was a script.

I don't think replays are too buggy though as long as it's not from a different patch

sugar free jazz
Mar 5, 2008

Zurreco posted:

Bad catch? Once she gets Eul's she can lock one hero down and solokill most of them in the midgame.

Yes once she gets items she can use the items to shore up her weaknesses that is true

ZenMasterBullshit
Nov 2, 2011

Restaurant de Nouvelles "À Table" Proudly Presents:
A Climactic Encounter Ending on 1 Negate and a Dream

Zurreco posted:

Bad catch? Once she gets Eul's she can lock one hero down and solokill most of them in the midgame.

I mean so can literally any hero with a stun or CC once they buy that item. Some of them can do that and also not die if the enemy manages to hit you once.

Zurreco
Dec 27, 2004

Cutty approves.
By that logic, almost all heroes are bad because they need levels and items. That leaves Techies and Axe as the gold standard.

Checks out.

ZenMasterBullshit
Nov 2, 2011

Restaurant de Nouvelles "À Table" Proudly Presents:
A Climactic Encounter Ending on 1 Negate and a Dream

Zurreco posted:

By that logic, almost all heroes are bad because they need levels and items. That leaves Techies and Axe as the gold standard.

Checks out.

It's more other characters do what she does better and while being able to actually farm so going "Well when she eevntually gets two items 30 mins in the game she can pick off a PoS 4 solo easily!" is just not a good indicator of a hero being not poo poo.

DNK
Sep 18, 2004

Just wanna say that Hoodwink is an insanely good pub 5pos. Her base stats are extremely good: 4 armor, 50 damage, 675 range, and 320(!!) movespeed. You can trade clicks with anyone.

Her ult being 600 damage on a 45s CD (besides applying a 5s break/slow) is very, very good.

Her downsides: no instant disable, abysmal hp/str growth, and very mana hungry. But she has CRAZY damage output at extreme range with almost no item dependencies and is very difficult to catch (because of the range + movespeed advantage).

I’m like 10-3 with her from 5pos. I would be surprised if she doesn’t get some captains mode play. And I have no idea what her aghs effects might be but whenever they’re introduced she’s going to pop off with ‘em — she’ll LOVE the stats and her abilities are already so freakin good any little push is gonna make her overpowered as heck. Can’t wait.

RazzleDazzleHour
Mar 31, 2016

Willow has only just recently been nerfed to a point where she is no longer literally the best support in the game who removes any reason to pick someone like Lion so I don't know if this is exactly fair. The only reason she's weak now is because her numbers are too low, not because the actual function of the abilities herself are not useful, which they just plainly are. Compare that to like, Antimage back when people would level stats over his spell shield skill

if Antimage never existed and was released tomorrow, instead of spell shield he would have some insane skill like an AoE silence

RazzleDazzleHour fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Apr 9, 2021

shades of blue
Sep 27, 2012

RazzleDazzleHour posted:

Willow has only just recently been nerfed to a point where she is no longer literally the best support in the game who removes any reason to pick someone like Lion so I don't know if this is exactly fair. The only reason she's weak now is because her numbers are too low, not because the actual function of the abilities herself are not useful, which they just plainly are. Compare that to like, Antimage back when people would level stats over his spell shield skill

if Antimage never existed and was released tomorrow, instead of spell shield he would have some insane skill like an AoE silence

dark willow hasnt been nerfed since july 2019

RazzleDazzleHour
Mar 31, 2016

Sampatrick posted:

dark willow hasnt been nerfed since july 2019

Yeah and during that time TI8 happened when Dark Willow was the 5th most picked hero of the tournament with the highest individual hero winrate of the tournament

DNK
Sep 18, 2004

I actually think AM might be pickable if he could take stats over ability points. All he needs is 1/1/1 and then mass stats until he has manta finished (at which point he'll be like level 17 and able to skill poo poo).

shades of blue
Sep 27, 2012

RazzleDazzleHour posted:

Yeah and during that time TI8 happened when Dark Willow was the 5th most picked hero of the tournament with the highest individual hero winrate of the tournament

that was almost three years ago

EorayMel
May 30, 2015

WE GET IT. YOU LOVE GUN JESUS. Toujours des fusils Bullpup Français.
I wish Necrophos was meta (again) IMO

RazzleDazzleHour
Mar 31, 2016

Sampatrick posted:

that was almost three years ago

Yeah, and?

shades of blue
Sep 27, 2012

RazzleDazzleHour posted:

Willow has only just recently been nerfed to a point where she is no longer literally the best support in the game who removes any reason to pick someone like Lion so I don't know if this is exactly fair. The only reason she's weak now is because her numbers are too low, not because the actual function of the abilities herself are not useful, which they just plainly are. Compare that to like, Antimage back when people would level stats over his spell shield skill

if Antimage never existed and was released tomorrow, instead of spell shield he would have some insane skill like an AoE silence

3 years ago is not recent.

RazzleDazzleHour
Mar 31, 2016

Sampatrick posted:

3 years ago is not recent.

That's still two years after her release during which time she was an absolute scourge upon the game. The idea that she was nerfed three years ago does not at all diminish my original point that Willow's kit, as a whole, is completely insane and incredibly useful and combines basically the best parts of five individual heroes and rolls them all into one. This is an incredibly pedantic part of the discussion to focus on when looking at what is actually being discussed, which is the different design philosophies among heroes that were developed explicitly for Dota 2 as opposed to heroes based upon Warcraft 3 units that are repurposed and slightly remixed, but sure, yes, three years is a while ago.

ILL Machina
Mar 25, 2004

:italy: Glory to Italia! :italy:

Ayy!! This text is-a the color of marinara! Ohhhh!! Dat's amore!!
That's a lot of words to call someone pedantic.

ZenMasterBullshit
Nov 2, 2011

Restaurant de Nouvelles "À Table" Proudly Presents:
A Climactic Encounter Ending on 1 Negate and a Dream

Your point was that the hero was only recently made bad as a counter to talking about how the hero is lackluster and no actually the hero has not been nerfed within the last 2 years which means your point was completely and utterly pointless and basically had nothing to do with anything anyone was talking about since they were talking about how she's been less than good for awhile now.

Terminal autist
May 17, 2018

by vyelkin
So are we getting a patch and hero tomorrow?

ZenMasterBullshit
Nov 2, 2011

Restaurant de Nouvelles "À Table" Proudly Presents:
A Climactic Encounter Ending on 1 Negate and a Dream

Terminal autist posted:

So are we getting a patch and hero tomorrow?


They have to leak the patch to Purge to give him 24 hours to make his 48 hour patch analysis video so Saturday probably

shades of blue
Sep 27, 2012

RazzleDazzleHour posted:

That's still two years after her release during which time she was an absolute scourge upon the game. The idea that she was nerfed three years ago does not at all diminish my original point that Willow's kit, as a whole, is completely insane and incredibly useful and combines basically the best parts of five individual heroes and rolls them all into one. This is an incredibly pedantic part of the discussion to focus on when looking at what is actually being discussed, which is the different design philosophies among heroes that were developed explicitly for Dota 2 as opposed to heroes based upon Warcraft 3 units that are repurposed and slightly remixed, but sure, yes, three years is a while ago.

okay but have you considered that dark willow's kit, as a whole, is not actually completely insane? the hero does not actually have any reliable disable. you have area control spells and terrorize is an excellent ability for comboing with other heroes but the hero is actually very reliant on the other heroes in the game. like, cursed crown is a horrible ability. bedlam is honestly pretty awful most of the time. the issue with willow right now is that the hero is piss poor in lane and you also just don't offer much against high mobility mids that are building euls every game. willow at this point is relegated to the hero that combos really well with a few heroes (mars, puck, elder titan, etc) but is otherwise pretty mediocre. this seems like a pretty good spot for a hero to be in, tbh.

also, i think icefrog has done a really good job of balancing all the new heroes after a year or so passes. the least balanced hero is probably monkey king and thats mostly because of his insane starting armor and stats. the offlane hero pool is actually super hosed up because of monkey king (and ursa to a slightly lesser extent).

RazzleDazzleHour
Mar 31, 2016

Sampatrick posted:

also, i think icefrog has done a really good job of balancing all the new heroes after a year or so passes. the least balanced hero is probably monkey king and thats mostly because of his insane starting armor and stats. the offlane hero pool is actually super hosed up because of monkey king (and ursa to a slightly lesser extent).

In a game of 120 heroes, four of the top ten most-picked heroes at the Major are the new heroes that weren't in Dota 1. Eight of the top fifteen have been added since leaving beta. There's definitely a correlation there.

Also, none of the things you listed there are downsides to the hero that were added after her absolute reign in TI8. Every single change that was made to Willow to transform her from one of the best heroes in the game to her current state was demolishing the actual damage and cooldowns of her spells. If you put those spells right back to where they were during TI8, all of those weaknesses would once again vanish. Because again, to get to the actual point of mentioning the design of her kit, all of her abilities make sense when used together. There's obvious synergy between everything she does, and she does way more than other comparable heroes that is emblematic of a totally different design philosophy.

Like, look at the kit of Monkey King and how much every single one of his abilities does. Then, look at Chaos Knight, who has basically a significantly worse version of every one of Monkey King's spells to the point where MK looks like a custom game mode hero. Void Spirit is like what if every one of Zeus's abilities also had some kind insane side effect, like damage to an AoE but ALSO gives him armor, or ALSO makes him invincible, or ALSO teleports him and ALSO you can cast it multiple times. Willow is just like this, but instead of a stunner, she's way more like a Lich or a Veno (who also do not have any hard lockdown skills), except again, all her abilities also do some other nutso poo poo, like oh my slowing skill also hits multiple times and forces you to run through a maze, or my damage skill also makes me invincible, and I also have a fifth skill that deals tons of damage if I get close to you which is easy to do because again I can slow you and become invincible.

TheFlyingLlama
Jan 2, 2013

You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and be a llama?



RazzleDazzleHour posted:

Yeah and during that time TI8 happened when Dark Willow was the 5th most picked hero of the tournament with the highest individual hero winrate of the tournament

this is one of those things that's true but also kinda missing the point; Dark willow was 5th most picked...because teams were way more afraid of Enchantress and Io who got picked or banned in 90% of games played each. poo poo, Weaver had a 58% winrate in 62 games to Willow's 56% in 66.



On the "newer heroes are stronger thing" I mean, there is definitely a "skill creep" in the sense of heroes having mechanically more dense skills than they used to; I don't know if a new hero is ever going to get a DP style Crypt Swarm or Lina Dragon Slave type spell that's just "click button do damage". I'm less sure that makes them better though, Death prophet is mechanically pretty simple atm but she's still really strong.

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Blaise330
Aug 13, 2007

GOD'S FAVORITE CHAMPION

TheFlyingLlama posted:

On the "newer heroes are stronger thing" I mean, there is definitely a "skill creep" in the sense of heroes having mechanically more dense skills than they used to

It's kind of a thing in fighting games too where people cry that developers make dlc chars broken on purpose to sell more dlc (but ofc they conveniently dont bring up all the times the new chars WERENT broken). It's not that the devs were trying to make someone busted, the game is just more solved after a few years so the dlc char comes in with a bunch of tools to fit the meta. It's like on day 1 you got Ryu's dry rear end, then by the 4th round of dlc you got chars with all kinds of exclusive mechanics and any hole in their gameplan is 100% intentional. It would be funny to see people's reactions if like Sven never existed but he got released today. "WTF HE JUST HITS STUFF"

Blaise330 fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Apr 9, 2021

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