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Karma Guard
Jun 21, 2006
Just one spray keeps bad karma away!

Kith posted:

More skins.

Seriously, just more skins.

Minor texture edits to existing content prints money with almost no effort: play with the Hue and Saturation of a diffuse texture until you get something that looks vaguely different enough from an existing item and ship it. Maybe gently caress with the emissives too to add some fancy lights, or throw in a premium user-recolorable variant that can only be obtained with :10bux:. Suddenly, Casuals have reason to chip away at their Gold/Shard/Gem hoards to pick up the perfect combinations for their heroes and Whales have reason to spend twice or thrice or howevermuch as much on the game as they used to. Do the same thing with Mounts and you've jump-started your economy.

Ultimately, every online game with people in it boils down to pretty-pretty dressup. Straight-up. The better the dressup endgame, the better.

We also know how good they are at these minor edits; the Ghostly editions of skins are all slam-dunk cool as hell. The Epic-tier skins (color change, minor model or texture change) in HotS is loving amazing compared to Overwatch imo. The recolors are also really cool- I got one of the recolor skins of Fenix's golem skin because they changed the speculars. It's super-dope.

I also just want more banners :negative:

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Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


My understanding of Blizzard, which is mostly like stuff I've overheard from ex employees from a labor perspective rather than from a more specifically gaming perspective, is that Blizzard as a company likes to have a very narrow product line and to only focus energy on the absolute highest growth products. Like just being reliably profitable is not good enough, you need to be more profitable than other divisions. For the kind of money they're walking around with it's a very tiny set of products.

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.


If they wanted to go a step further and ape DotA 2's system where you can mix and match stuff like hats and weapons and effects, they'd be rolling in money. Just absolutely buried in it.

It just frustrates the hell out of me because HotS could be incredibly profitable if they would just put forth the tiniest amount of effort in the right places and they just... won't. Even though there's a ton of examples on why and how, up to and including actual and literal scientific/psychological studies.

NoEyedSquareGuy
Mar 16, 2009

Just because Liquor's dead, doesn't mean you can just roll this bitch all over town with "The Freedoms."
HotS could be profitable if they added a skin where Ragnaros is on a surfboard riding a wave.

Karma Guard
Jun 21, 2006
Just one spray keeps bad karma away!

NoEyedSquareGuy posted:

HotS could be profitable if they added a skin where Ragnaros is on a surfboard riding a wave.

I would also accept a candy monster skin to mirror Muradin.

Fried Watermelon
Dec 29, 2008


NoEyedSquareGuy posted:

HotS could be profitable if they added a skin where Ragnaros is on a surfboard riding a wave.

People would obviously get him confused with Neptulon

WITCHCRAFT
Aug 28, 2007

Berries That Burn

Shockeh posted:

Alt casting is necessary for Medivh too, so you can self cast Shield and also enjoy the monumental gently caress up that is discovering self casting Portal puts it the minimum distance away, rather than the maximum you’d logically want in any panic speed situation.

(There’s no reason for a min distance Portal, ever.)

what if you just want to get your team to trigger the Raven Familiar talent, so each one that goes through the portal has their next autoattack apply 114 (+4% per level) damage and a 30% 2.5 second slow on enemy heroes they hit? And they can keep hopping between portals to get the buff again for their next autoattack???

When I tell my team that talent exists and I took it, portal use skyrockets for the rest of the match. Usually your portals will go unused for the entire match by anyone that isn't you. Unless you queued together and planned to do portal hijinks in the first place.

Pedestrian Xing
Jul 19, 2007

NoEyedSquareGuy posted:

HotS could be profitable if they added a skin where Ragnaros is on a surfboard riding a wave.

I believe you mean Italian Chef Ragnaros, with the fancy hat, meatball meteor, and marinara wave ult.

Natural 20
Sep 17, 2007

Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.
As someone who plays Gacha games.

I don't know how you could make a Bikini Nova spray and not realise you would probably make illegal amounts of money with a skin that was exactly the same.

W.T. Fits
Apr 21, 2010

Ready to Poyozo Dance all over your face.

Natural 20 posted:

As someone who plays Gacha games.

I don't know how you could make a Bikini Nova spray and not realise you would probably make illegal amounts of money with a skin that was exactly the same.

I remember Bikini Nova actually being a highly requested skin for awhile.

The HotS team's response was Bikini Stitches.

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.


haha yeah like blizzard would make a skin that highly sexualizes their characters like that

*releases valeera*

Fried Watermelon
Dec 29, 2008


Kith posted:

haha yeah like blizzard would make a skin that highly sexualizes their characters like that

*releases valeera*

*releases Overwatch*

She's 18 we promise!

WITCHCRAFT
Aug 28, 2007

Berries That Burn

Fried Watermelon posted:

*releases Overwatch*

She's 18 we promise!

I was gonna say tha D.Va is 16 but the Overwatch wiki says 19?

Further reading says that she became an EVA MEKA pilot at 16 but is 19 by the time Overwatch takes place???

Now what am I going to do about the random people on my team that tell me they want to sniff D.Va's butt crack

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.


I was legitimately fooled by these fake leaks for a bit because they seem like the kind of vaguely useful but ultimately underwhelming changes that we've been getting for some time.

Nybble
Jun 28, 2008

praise chuck, raise heck

quote:

tfw notbelial put together more hots content for blizzcon than blizzard did

NameHurtBrain
Jan 17, 2015

WITCHCRAFT posted:

I was gonna say tha D.Va is 16 but the Overwatch wiki says 19?

Further reading says that she became an EVA MEKA pilot at 16 but is 19 by the time Overwatch takes place???

Now what am I going to do about the random people on my team that tell me they want to sniff D.Va's butt crack

I believe the story is:

Blizzard intended D.Va to be 17. Then, they wisely realized their players are horny monsters and decided to age her up slightly so the inevitable porn that would happen would at least not be child porn.

Nerds are the worst, and sometimes designers have to design around that, is what I'm saying.

Dodgeball
Sep 24, 2003

Oh no! Dodgeball is really scary!

NameHurtBrain posted:

I believe the story is:

Blizzard intended D.Va to be 17. Then, they wisely realized their players are horny monsters and decided to age her up slightly so the inevitable porn that would happen would at least not be child porn.

Nerds are the worst, and sometimes designers have to design around that, is what I'm saying.

Also, more than enough 17 year olds get shot each year in the states, so they probably don't want to add child-killing to their hero shooting game.

No Wave
Sep 18, 2005

HA! HA! NICE! WHAT A TOOL!
Blizzard just wanted to put the 17 year old in the skin tight asscrack suit, they didn't have any bad intentions.

ninjewtsu
Oct 9, 2012

as a guy who has always played a lot of abathur and ultimately ended up playing abathur close to exclusively, i like 80% really really liked his rework (was it much of a rework? some talents got messed with but the more i think about it the more it feels kind of minimal compared to what happened to msot other heroes). i can't really remember the old abathur too too well anymore, but i definitely thought and still think that moving the heal talent to baseline was an incredibly smart move. the monstrosity getting the tunnel at baseline makes it feel a bit less awful too, though i still kinda hate it (i know it's not awful but it really feels awful, and it's a huge bummer to take abathur's constant mapjugglign gameplay and essentially turn him into just another body given the amount of babysitting you end up having to do for the mosntrosity)

but i'm also still super duper salty about losing the old locust explode talent. i think current abathur has a large number of good builds and which one you should go with is highly determined by both map and the team comps, which is pretty cool, but there's basically no flexibility in his builds now it feels like. used to be you could start a shield build and then later in the game shift into locusts depending on how the game was playing out, since assault locusts were still really strong to spawn 3 of in an empty lane so not taking the level 1 locust talent wasn't a big deal, and if you wanted to take double hat at 20 it was fine to miss out on locust nests, you could really play either way and it felt neat to be basically making a second evaluation of your build halfway through.

i will say that most of my enjoyment of abathur comes from having buds to play the game with though, i used to solo QM abathur a lot but idk if i'd really enjoy that very much now. every random player always has their own dumbass opinion about your abathur play, at what i'd estimate is double or triple the rate of getting complaints about your build 1/4th of the way through a game as any other character. to a certain extent i get that the character is unintuitive even to play alongside so everyone always has in their mind the one time an abathur played well in a way they could easily understand (mostly attack speed abathurs enabling illidan to pull some stupid poo poo against a comp that probably wasn't going to be able to deal with an illidan well anyways), and don't ever notice the actually good abathur play of double soaking empty lanes while larger brawls are going on. but also it's really annoying. anyways, the character also gets a lot of advantages out of having buddies in voice chat who can shout "hat please" at you a couple seconds before they jump into a 1v1 against someone taking a merc camp, or when they're getting jumped and need a quick shield to barely squeak by to safety. also because i'm bad it's also helpful when they shout at me that i need to move and i glance at the minimap and realize that the towers i'm hiding behind are about to get killed by an enemy hero with a bruiser camp backup (or, more embarrassingly, something that should be big and obvious like ragnaros' lava wave)

i do think it's really interesting that abathur is a "pushing hero" that doesn't actually push very well unless you go for a specific build for it, and even then not until level 16 or whatever. he can't really do very much against a single enemy hero in a lane, but if there's a lane with no heroes in it an attentive abathur turns that into a constant xp stream with little impact on his other activities (or, ideally, if there's 2 empty lanes he's a 24/7 xp gremlin). i saw him described before as "a series of constant small advantages that, over the course of a game, eventually accumulate into an overwhelmingly massive advantage" and that's constantly in my mind as i play because it's very true and also a really neat design. and i really wish there was more heroes like him that just play completely differently from how every other hero plays at a basic level. i'm really bummed that they moved away from poo poo like chogall

ninjewtsu
Oct 9, 2012

also as long as i'm posting about abathur i'll give out my controversial opinion that i really don't like the attack speed talent in like 80% of situations. even if you have an illidan on your team going for a stab based build will be more value for most of the game unless you just park your rear end on illidan constantly, at which point your team is actually just down a hero (and much worse off if illidan or varian or whoever dies or is otherwise not where your hat needs to be). your illidan will still get rocked by blinds and stuns and roots and if he isn't getting rocked by those things, he's probably already doing super well, so the situations where it isn't either winmore or a throw talent are kinda narrow. i only like it if there's multiple heroes on my team who benefit from it substantially, since then you don't spend the whole game hoping That One Guy is always going to be in the right spot at the right time.

the honorable stab build i rarely see other abathurs use but honestly it's probably the most consistent/"you aren't gonna go wrong with this" build abathur has. take the shield talent at 1 so you can quickly save someone's bacon in a pinch and just generally add a surprising amount of survivability to squishier heroes. stab talent at 4 for the flexibility of both more range and more damage (even when you're hopping on characters without AA damage! you know, most of the characters that people play!) and faster clearing (getting to spend less time cleaning out waves means you get to spend more time hopping around the map healing people between waves). shield talent at 7 for aoe healing and more conveneint clearing (and much stronger pushing a bit later in the game). clone ult because being able to turn a 1v1 into a 2v1 or get your team to win teamfights by doubling up on whatever hero is contributing what your team is missing out on most (usually damage, but never discount the value of cloning a tank or bruiser so your already extent damage dealers have the space they need to properly do their jobs). stab talent at 13 because honestly it's just a really nice dps increase that will frequently edge out a kill (in addition to making clearing minion waves much, much faster). speed shield at 16 for both helping teammates catch fleeing heroes before they get to safety and helping them flee to safety when they're getting caught. double hat at 20 because obviously. you end up making a pretty good contribution to every situation no matter who your hat target is or what position they're in (it's also really, really good on tanky mobile heroes like dva. picking someone is really easy when those heroes also have actual damage). and the whole point of the hero is constantly finding situations where instantly throwing your weight behind your teammate will edge out into a big result like a pick. so it's jsut really good to be more "generalist" so no matter what's going on you're always useful, rather than be someone who's pretty useful only some of the time (but probably still not as useful as a 5th body would have been)

ninjewtsu fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Feb 19, 2021

Shockeh
Feb 24, 2009

Now be a dear and
fuck the fuck off.
It’s not Illidan that Talent is absurd with, it’s people like loving Lunara. The ranged AA heroes, who can maximise the IAS can be fully stupid.

Nybble
Jun 28, 2008

praise chuck, raise heck
FYI: All heroes are Free To Play today (this weekend?) because of BlizzCon

time to finally try out Cho'Gall

ninjewtsu
Oct 9, 2012

Shockeh posted:

It’s not Illidan that Talent is absurd with, it’s people like loving Lunara. The ranged AA heroes, who can maximise the IAS can be fully stupid.

You're still giving up one of your 5 players to make 20% of your team 25% better. You can't really contribute much with stab or spike burst while on a ranged hero either. If the lunara is killing the entire enemy team with 25% more attacks that means they have no means of shutting her down and she was probably going to do that without the hat too

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.


No, throwing enough force multipliers on someone that they can overwhelm the enemy is an extremely powerful tactic called Hyper Carrying and it's been around for a while. That Attack Speed bonus is not just a DPS booster - it magnifies On-Hit effects and can easily make a lot of characters totally unstoppable because of them.

ninjewtsu
Oct 9, 2012

sure, that's basically the whole idea behind morales, but there's a bit more to it than "we have a lunara, run attack speed and stay on her the whole game" and if the enemy team has blinds or stuns she's still going to get countered extra attack speed or no. in most situations 25% more attack speed on its own isn't quite going to be enough to push a hero over into "worth 2+ heroes" and on ranged AA like lunara especially you're not providing a whole lot besides that 25% attack speed. it's still a powerful talent that you should be keeping in mind but i think it's frequently well oversold

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.


I think you're over-focusing on the Attack Speed. It's not just the Attack Speed, it's the Attack Speed plus the hat skills - which are basically an entirely additional skillset and either smoothly cover the weaknesses of the carry (shield giving extra durability and sustain) or magnify their strengths (Lunara and Illidan are very easy to get into position for good Stab casts). The Attack Speed bonus just happens to do both for a lot of characters, especially ones with sustain abilities or Talents that interact with their Basic Attacks.

ninjewtsu
Oct 9, 2012

yeah i know, my point is that if you're just sitting on illidan all day that's usually not as good as being able to hop around between different heroes as the situation requires, and just because you have an illidan or a lunara on your team the attack speed isn't an immediately slam pick - and i'd posit is frequently not as much value overall as the extra stab damage and range

Shockeh
Feb 24, 2009

Now be a dear and
fuck the fuck off.

ninjewtsu posted:

yeah i know, my point is that if you're just sitting on illidan all day that's usually not as good as being able to hop around between different heroes as the situation requires, and just because you have an illidan or a lunara on your team the attack speed isn't an immediately slam pick - and i'd posit is frequently not as much value overall as the extra stab damage and range

That's rather the point, because it's a multiplying effect, yes it is worth it, the IAS is a slam pick, the value isn't as good. The IAS is going to scale across the whole game, because it's going to scale with our hypothetical Lunara, whose entire skillset revolves around either doing auto attacks, or enabling them.
(A ranged nuke whose purpose is to facilitate a slow, a vision option to ensure she either picks or is not picked, a pair of nuke ultimates that, you guessed it, enable slow, and native +MS.)

This isn't a hill worth dying on, nobody is saying it's madly OP and Abathur/Lunara is ruining the game, (ActiBlizz are managing that all on their own) but to say it's not an extremely powerful pick is disingenuous.

Shockeh fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Feb 19, 2021

Karma Guard
Jun 21, 2006
Just one spray keeps bad karma away!
https://twitter.com/NexusCompendium/status/1362914210334846976?s=20

:toot:

Jimmy is 76.

e: It's definitely not the attack speed itself, it's the accelerated healing or %damage stacking that makes the hat works.

e2: If they have a voicepack for Hog I will legitimately have to try to be good at Stitches. I know he's not a good Tank-tank, but what CAN I do besides sick 360 noscope hooks?

Karma Guard fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Feb 20, 2021

W.T. Fits
Apr 21, 2010

Ready to Poyozo Dance all over your face.

Looks like Stitches is Roadhog, Valla is Reaper, and Johanna is Reinhardt.

Shockeh
Feb 24, 2009

Now be a dear and
fuck the fuck off.
Doesn't seem positive news though; If the rest of the Overwatch cast is only going to be a skin option, that sounds a death knell for any of them being released as actual Heroes, and if they're not turning more of the Overwatch IP into HOTS IP, that doesn't bode well for HOTS at large.

Shadowlyger
Nov 5, 2009

ElvUI super fan at your service!

Ask me any and all questions about UI customization via PM
I think it's more that those characters' gimmicks were already pretty well covered by existing characters and they couldn't figure out a way to meaningfully differentiate them.

Karma Guard
Jun 21, 2006
Just one spray keeps bad karma away!

Shockeh posted:

Doesn't seem positive news though; If the rest of the Overwatch cast is only going to be a skin option, that sounds a death knell for any of them being released as actual Heroes, and if they're not turning more of the Overwatch IP into HOTS IP, that doesn't bode well for HOTS at large.

They've also said in the past that skins won't prevent a hero from happening; Novazon exists. The devs recolored her hair in the tints that look closest to Cassia to be less-similar.

Shaman Tank Spec
Dec 26, 2003

*blep*



I got a press release from Blizzard on all the hot BlizzCon news, and Heroes of the Storm is not mentioned once. So probably not wise to hold your breath for any announcements :smith:

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.


Oh yeah, we've known that. They revealed the schedule a while ago.

Shaman Tank Spec
Dec 26, 2003

*blep*



Kith posted:

Oh yeah, we've known that. They revealed the schedule a while ago.

Yeah but I was still hoping for ... something.

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.


Haha, nope. HOTS requires too much effort, apparently.

WITCHCRAFT
Aug 28, 2007

Berries That Burn

Agree with a lot of this, Abathur is my favorite hero for the same reasons you stated. His talent picks are versatile, and it feels great to hop between points of action giving your ally that little edge to land a kill. It also sucks that some of his versatility has been scaled back in the rework. I would think twice about taking the autoattack talent if the enemy has blinds, but even then it's really good on the right host. It's not just a DPS upgrade, it boost all autoattack-related bonuses the host has as well. Illidan gets additional cooldown reductions. Tychus shits bullets even harder and therefore lengthens minigun duration and self healing to stupid levels. Zul'jin, Artanis, and to a lesser extent Jimmy and Thrall can get more endless stacks from autoattack hits. Even if they spend some of that time blinded, it can still be worth the pick if your host is competent. You are putting a talent point into someone else's hands, look at it that way. A good player with the right hero gets a HUGE advantage from that talent pick.

It would be completely overpowered if those heroes could skip some other talent to give themselves 25% attack speed. Tychus can even do just that, and if he takes his talent and you give him another 25% attack speed it is fuckin bonkers clown bullet world for anyone downwind of him.

You know, I've never done a gimmick Muradin (storm bolt quest + 3rd autoattack ministuns) or Uther (hammer of justice quest) with an abathur IAS hat.

The best weird ones I've done are Murky (with the autoattack stacking slow and autocast slime on autoattacks) and autoattack build Blaze.

Kith
Sep 17, 2009

You never learn anything
by doing it right.


Dumping Aspeed effects on Tracer is hilarious - her guns burp and then she's juggling reloads constantly.

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Karma Guard
Jun 21, 2006
Just one spray keeps bad karma away!

Kith posted:

Dumping Aspeed effects on Tracer is hilarious - her guns burp and then she's juggling reloads constantly.

I had to deal with this last night :argh: Aba-Tracer is worse than Aba-Illidan, every time. It was depressing. They had Abathur and we got Zarya and she was a bot half the match.

e: kith can you make an effortpost for Stitches :kiddo:

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