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i was thinking about zagara's E or azmo's minions draining tower ammo the other day and also locked talents the other day too, some pretty major changes over the years to it
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Feb 11, 2024 21:46
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Sometimes, you have one of those amazing, back & forth, swing battle games where you think 'gently caress man, I wish HOTS didn't go out like that' Then you get stuck in 20 minutes of Towers of Terror with a Nova who left at 1 minute (after dying predictably in the first 45s) and the designers of this game thought to make it so not only is there no way to accelerate the game being over for the other team, who also aren't doing objectives because they're farming people, and you also can't leave without being put in leaver queue, and you think 'No, wait, now I remember'.
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Feb 14, 2024 07:55
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I heard we getting updates again???
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Feb 20, 2024 16:13
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For some reason, yes! Including a massive buff to Li Li that was completely unnecessary.
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Feb 20, 2024 16:21
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aba mines not getting cleared out by a bubbled murky is kinda nice. doesn't exactly come up often, and now that monstrosity gets dings i may even use it occasionally
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Feb 20, 2024 21:31
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Give me drafting (no bans if you like, speed it up) at the start of QM, you cowards.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:04
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just play unranked if that's what you want (:
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Feb 20, 2024 22:05
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Kith posted:just play unranked if that's what you want (: I'm getting old, I don't have an hour to waste waiting for the queue to pop.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:05
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Since it's tangential and one of the other MOBAs that I've played that isn't Dota2, Gigantic is being re-released on April 9th ($19.99) For those not familiar with it, it's similar to Smite (third person perspective) with jungle camps, lanes, creeps, etc, it was a decent if short lived entry into the genre, you can signup for the closed beta on their Steam page https://store.steampowered.com/app/1924490/Gigantic_Rampage_Edition/
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Feb 21, 2024 00:22
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ninjewtsu posted:aba mines not getting cleared out by a bubbled murky is kinda nice. No it's not 
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Feb 21, 2024 07:34
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Jesus gently caress. Played a match against a guy with level 999 TLV, 6000+ games played on them alone. My team won, but even fighting his TLV was kind of a special hell.
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Mar 8, 2024 13:27
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you encountered a cryptid
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Mar 9, 2024 19:44
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I feel I've made this same post in the past, but I'm constantly bewildered that people play quick match and even storm league without a 5 man, and without somebody calling out moves. When timing, composition, and teamwork are so critical, going into qm or SL all half cocked just feels a frustrating waste of time. Even if you win! I consider myself casual, and not a great player (and rarely a sober one). So I hope this doesn't sound judgemental, but I wonder if people do it simply because they just want to be a specific hero, or aren't knowledgeable about enough heroes to play ARAM. I remember before ARAM existed carefully picking (or drafting) synergistic heroes, and having a knowledgeable teamate call out moves in comms. Anything less seems like playing chess blindfolded. Just feeling like a weirdo for nope-ing out from groups that wanna QM. I swear I'm not a tryhard!
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Mar 9, 2024 20:46
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we just go your test results in. i'm afraid it's bad news: yore a tryhard. i'm prescribing you a course of electrolytes
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Mar 9, 2024 21:03
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Kevin Bacon posted:we just go your test results in. i'm afraid it's bad news: yore a tryhard. i'm prescribing you a course of electrolytes No tryhard, no tryhard! You're the tryhard! I don't know, i only play ARAM because it seems like the casual mode...(typically) shorter matches, constant action, no map awareness or larger strategy necessary. What's the point in playing full map moba with objectives and poo poo if you're just gonna gently caress around and pew pew? I guess I can understand if you're a specialist (xul or aba or naz) and just push lanes while your team does whatever. Still, communication and teamwork are basically the point of a game like this. It's just so strange to me that people queue up to just gently caress around I guess. ARAM is the ideal place to just gently caress around and blast fools.
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Mar 9, 2024 21:51
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I played a few games of qm yesterday. First time playing a HotS in maybe two years. It was fun even though we lost most games 
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Mar 9, 2024 21:58
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BRJurgis posted:No tryhard, no tryhard! Not every hero is playable, much less effective, in ARAM. ARAM also tosses out some of the more mapwide strategy that comes out in the more standard maps. By no means do I think that everyone who solo-queues quickplay is thinking along these lines, but the point is that there are absolutely reasons for someone to want to jump into QP for a solo/duo game instead of hunting for a large group. Doing it in competitive is more for those people that want the extra incentive for others not to be in fuckaround mode.
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Mar 9, 2024 22:01
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Queuing solo/duo into QM is reasonable, no way in hell I'd do it in storm league.
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Mar 9, 2024 23:19
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I used to do a ton of aba solo quickplay because it was fun figuring out how I was going to best push an uncoordinated team towards victory. Less playing to win and more playing to gamble on what the thing most likely to result in winning was. Definitely got me looking at and thinking about the character and his talents and what they're good for way beyond what I was otherwise (I'm the only person in the world who really, really misses assault strain)
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Mar 9, 2024 23:27
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I'm queueing solo in QM because I live in fuckin' Australia, and don't have anyone on in my primetime any more. 
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Mar 9, 2024 23:27
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ninjewtsu posted:I used to do a ton of aba solo quickplay because it was fun figuring out how I was going to best push an uncoordinated team towards victory. Less playing to win and more playing to gamble on what the thing most likely to result in winning was. Definitely got me looking at and thinking about the character and his talents and what they're good for way beyond what I was otherwise (I'm the only person in the world who really, really misses assault strain) i miss it too and also just in general the specialist laning mold of yore, theres a few other older kits i liked a lot and mostly never got the hand of newer ones; chen and gazlowe come to mind, and rexxar also comes to mind for "lots of changes" but esp around misha control i think? who ended up getting the most reworks anyways? thinking about gaz and rexxar my initial guess is each had at least 3rd major change ups? there's been a lot of mechanics changes and without delving into some wiki and/or changelogs (i refuse) i have a harder time remembering if things came in a full rework or just adapting to changed mechanics or adding in baseline quests to older kits etc.
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Mar 10, 2024 04:38
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I only play solo SL and it’s honestly not that bad. Of course you can’t expect the same coordination as in a premade but it’s still quite fun when it works and people do the correct thing.
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Mar 10, 2024 08:42
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After playing this, Dota2, and SF6 quite a bit recently, i'm honestly stunned how bad the ranked online experience in HOTS is. I love HOTS, it can be so much fun, but man with some perspective I can finally see how shockingly bad the online experience is. It's grueling, slow, frustrating, forces you to play unwinnable matches, and feels way too obsessed with assigning people a correct rank than with having fun. SF6 is an example of fantastic near-perfect online play. Ignoring if lag is good or not, the flow is incredible: You start any single player mode, training arcade storymode whatever you want to do, and turn on matchmaking. Then you just play or practice while the game matchmakes in the background. After around 30 seconds, you'll have a match. A match is 2-3 minutes, and you can rematch until someone has won a best of three matches. And done, and you're right back where you're left off. On top of that, the rank system is A M A Z I N G. There is an MMR based system - but only once you've reached Master rank. Before that, there is a much simple easy-to-understand ranking system. You gain rank every around 1000 points, you gain 50 points per win, and lose 40 points per loss. Also winstreaks grant bonuses. This means people on average are climbing until they lose 60% of matches, climbing goes really really fast if you win, etc. The only improvements I can point out are the menus can be a bit more fiddly than i'd like and the custom room UI is overcomplex, but they still only take 30-60secs of your time. So I am always having fun, always doing something, and always feel like me climbing is due to me training harder and winning more matches, and bad laggy trolly etc matches are rare and just 2mins long and then I can quit. My fate is always 100% in my hands, it feels like. But sure, it's not a team game. Right? Aaaaand now let's get back into HOTS. I lost my three ranking matches this season due to trolls and leavers and the game catapulted me from Silver 5 to Bronze 4. Due to some hidden MMR value being low, I am currently gaining 25 points per win, and losing 250 points per loss. This means i'm stuck in Bronze 5 trying to boost some hidden loving value until the game is allowing me to climb ranks again. Do I need to win 1 match? 10? 100? 1000? I have no loving clue! Once I get a match after 3-5 mins of waiting staring at menus and the shop because thats all I am allowed to do while queueing, we get into draft which takes forever. In DOTA2, everyone bans at the same time and it takes 10 secs. In HOTS there are 6 ban rounds in total where each can take up to 30s, meaning 3mins sitting around waiting for people to pick a ban. Each hero pick is also alternating turns, which also takes forever, while in Dota2 hero picks are simultaneous and you just get to redo it if two teams pick the same char. Ok so now we in match and someone is raging and decides to rage quit and troll. Because the game hard punishes leaving, many people stay in match and just gently caress around instead, wasting everyones time. But if they decide to leave, well, my next 30 mins of my lives are in the trash bin! Because there is no system that allows anyone to leave the match! What?? In DOTA2 5mins of a player disconnect makes the match safe to leave. While here, i'm just stuck! If I don't stay around clicking around to move my character, I get disconnected and punished! This means 30% of matches are a complete loving waste of my time! Which brings me to the XP system and gameplay in general. In Dota 2, the above match would actually be at least winnable! Because one lane would allow one hero to get twice the XP with your ally gone, you could at least hope for that hero to get fed and start ganking and winning the game. It's happened a few times! So there is no reason for me to give up. Also, Dota2 premieres individual player decisions and skill much more than 5v5 team glomps, meaning even as a bad player I can win a game with a few good decisions and not loving up. In HOTS though, XP is shared, so a member leaving means we're just hosed. We're getting a harder time picking XP balls, they contribute to team XP so we are not gaining a level advantage anywhere. Also, the game is designed to force team fights early and often, and solo ganking is a lot harder for a multitude of reasons including the lower damage and abundance of heals all throughout the game including a full heal every 90s that is just a 8 seconds walk away. This means my individual decisions matter a lot less, and my ability to turn around a losing game boils down to almost nothing other than landing a perfectly executed big ult combo or hoping the opposing team has dumb players that expose themselves one at a time. While a skilled player can easier turn around a losing game, your ability to do so is an order of magnitude smaller than DOTA2. All this means, in Dota2 I feel like I am always having fun and fighting for a win, and even in 4v5 near unwinnable matches than can stretch to 45+ mins I can still always identify "man if I had just did that or that instead I could have actually won" while in HOTS I feel like I repeatedly get stuck in games I can't win or games I literally can't lose, leaving about 1/3rd of games boiling down to games where my skill matters and the rest to just letting the numbers machine torment the 10 (or 9) of us until it decides we can move on with our lives. It suddenly feels a lot easier to understand why this game died and I am a lot more content with it. Bisse fucked around with this message at 10:15 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 10:06
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It died because when it had half of dota2's playerbase they cut the esports organization abruptly and badly burned everyone involved with it, and then stuck the game on life support It's impressive and somewhat astounding that it has the playerbase it has frankly. When it really does kick the bucket I will most certainly not be moving over to dota or lol
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Mar 10, 2024 10:11
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I mean TF2/Diablo/WoW has little ESports to speak of and still have like a neverending fanbase of a bazillion players, and there are more MOBAs out there other than just DOTA2 enjoying decent lives without insane ESPORTZ funding, so I feel like if the game was genuinely good it would not have suffered that massive drop after the artificial billionaire injections ended. EDIT: Or to put it like this, if the entire Dota2 pro scene died today, Dota2 would still have a significant playerbase for years to come just due to it being a Fun Game in its own right. Bisse fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 10:14
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Bisse posted:I lost my three ranking matches this season due to trolls and leavers and the game catapulted me from Silver 5 to Bronze 4. I have no issues with the rest of the points you bring up (although I don’t agree with all of them), but this sounds a bit strange. Placement matches almost never make any real difference to your rank. You might go up or down one rank (e.g. 4 to 3 or 5) but moving from S5 to B4 shouldn’t happen, even with three losses. Was the S5 rank from way back? I was around plat 1/diamond 5 back in late 2019 and when I jumped into SL again this spring I got placed around S5.
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Mar 10, 2024 10:36
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Bisse posted:I mean TF2/Diablo/WoW has little ESports to speak of and still have like a neverending fanbase of a bazillion players, and there are more MOBAs out there other than just DOTA2 enjoying decent lives without insane ESPORTZ funding, so I feel like if the game was genuinely good it would not have suffered that massive drop after the artificial billionaire injections ended. yes but burning the esports teams publicly and then cutting down support for the game massively put a very sour taste in the mouth of everyone playing the game, it's not that it doesn't have esports now it's the specific events that happened which were really lovely (and made the game going forward appear to not be long for this world or worth investing in) if dota2 abruptly killed all of its esports, leaving the hundreds of people involved in the esports (players, team managers, organizers, etc) without jobs after previously telling them that esports would be sticking around for at least another year, and then also had its support and development quartered simultaneously, that amount of bad press from people the playerbase was already specifically paying attention to (and encouraged to do so) might have an effect on the size of the game's playerbase! and like, it did lol hots became much less popular very shortly following that. the surprising part was that the playercount dropping off a cliff was something that stopped before the playerbase was too small to sustain itself, pretty much entirely off the unique strengths of the game's design. cause i mean, why else would they have stuck around lol the matchmaking is a kind of terrible experience and there's no esports to get invested in ninjewtsu fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 11:06
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BRJurgis posted:I feel I've made this same post in the past, but I'm constantly bewildered that people play quick match and even storm league without a 5 man, and without somebody calling out moves. When timing, composition, and teamwork are so critical, going into qm or SL all half cocked just feels a frustrating waste of time. Even if you win! I find no fun in ARAM. It takes all the strategy and interesting things out of the game, it's smash against the other team until one breaks most of the time and that's boring as hell to me. I'd much rather lose in QM than lose in ARAM. Is solo QM miserable sometimes? Sure, but sometimes you win or at least have fun and that's more than I ever get in ARAM. I also have no friends who play, so solo it is. I have zero interest in teaming up with randos from general chat. At least if I'm solo I can mute the racists and homophobes and not be expected to listen to them for the remainder of the match. I try my best, I don't throw games or give up early. But I have no patience for that poo poo in my life. Also yeah, when HotS finally dies the rest of the way I'm just done with MOBAs. Not going to DOTA or LOL or any other misery fest, they don't interest me in the slightest.
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Mar 10, 2024 11:26
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Way back I enjoyed super monday night combat a lot, and awesomenauts was pretty fun for a bit. Perhaps another moba in the future will be creative and off the wall enough to capture my interest, but I've given dota enough of a try to know that my sensibilities are not what they are really going for. At the very least shared xp, frequent impactful map objectives, and something like the talent system would be nice to see elsewhere.
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Mar 10, 2024 11:53
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ninjewtsu posted:At the very least shared xp, frequent impactful map objectives, and something like the talent system would be nice to see elsewhere. The funny thing is that Dota2 has been adding some of that stuff & moving (vaguely) towards a closer experience. There’s a system that gives you bonuses to choose from as you level, sometimes it’s stat increases but other times it changes an aspect of a talent. They’ve added runes that give gold and XP & an item that gives XP to the user (and the team member with the lowest XP?) and there’s a couple objectives that move/give non-xp rewards, incentivizing people to leave lane and do big team fights. They’re not the same game or anything, but as the genre has matured lessons from HOTS are being re-learned.
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Mar 10, 2024 12:51
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Star posted:I have no issues with the rest of the points you bring up (although I don’t agree with all of them), but this sounds a bit strange. Placement matches almost never make any real difference to your rank. You might go up or down one rank (e.g. 4 to 3 or 5) but moving from S5 to B4 shouldn’t happen, even with three losses. Was the S5 rank from way back? I was around plat 1/diamond 5 back in late 2019 and when I jumped into SL again this spring I got placed around S5. I had spent most of last season hovering around B1 and finally ended on S5. Had about a 2 week gap in between.
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Mar 10, 2024 12:52
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Chakan posted:The funny thing is that Dota2 has been adding some of that stuff & moving (vaguely) towards a closer experience. There’s a system that gives you bonuses to choose from as you level, sometimes it’s stat increases but other times it changes an aspect of a talent. They’ve added runes that give gold and XP & an item that gives XP to the user (and the team member with the lowest XP?) and there’s a couple objectives that move/give non-xp rewards, incentivizing people to leave lane and do big team fights. This is true but they have also made the map bigger. So there are more things to do that are clearly good but also you need to decide which is worth it when and who does it. And one player making good calls help turn a game. Conversely being caught out of position is even more bad than before because of the increased distance to safety. You rarely see 5v5s until the late game. However in HOTS, the map routinely asks the entire team to 5v5 over an objective. Sometimes it makes sense to ignore objective and go back to lane, but the game is often about whole teams moving to one or more pings on the map. Things like small map sizes, mounts, nearby forts, and support that poo poo heals out like diarrhea help discourage other styles of play. There are macro decisions like what is more important early game, a fort a camp or a kill etc, but the game just really wants you to 5v5 basically all the time. In Dota there are often multiple possible decisions with clear pros n cons and either is fine, but in TotSQ when spiders drop you are either there defending against the spiders or you are losing your team the game. Bisse fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 13:24
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Bisse posted:After playing this, Dota2, and SF6 quite a bit recently, i'm honestly stunned how bad the ranked online experience in HOTS is. I love HOTS, it can be so much fun, but man with some perspective I can finally see how shockingly bad the online experience is. It's grueling, slow, frustrating, forces you to play unwinnable matches, and feels way too obsessed with assigning people a correct rank than with having fun. Thanks for reminding me why I only watch mobas thesedays
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Mar 10, 2024 15:20
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One real suggestion I have is to be willing to put out friend requests to relative strangers. I know it feels weird, but if there’s a player on your team that comes across as competent and level-headed then send them a friend request. Play a game or two with them, and see if you get along. After a little bit of doing this, you’ll develop a small community of players who play at the same time you do. Often they’ll have friends of their own, who you can network with too. Queuing with a couple of relatively-sane people, even if you don’t chat much with them, really improves the matchmaking experience.
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Mar 10, 2024 15:35
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I play ARAM because I wish battlerite had 20-second matchmaking.
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Mar 11, 2024 03:47
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Just played an ARAM with Rehgar/Brightwing/Andy/Alex & Illidan versus a regular comp. The Illidan was actually good and the other team didn't take any blinds. Constant healing, constant dragonqueen, 34-14 in kills. God this game can rule when everyone is on the same page.
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Mar 19, 2024 04:37
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Etc might not be meta atm but few things are as satisfying as nailing a big mosh pit to win the game.
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Apr 14, 2024 13:14
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ARAM is fun
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Apr 14, 2024 13:44
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Janitor put out a balance patch https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/heroes-of-the-storm/24077220/heroes-of-the-storm-ptr-patch-notes-april-16-2024
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Apr 16, 2024 19:49
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All Leoric All Mid game please god let me play this
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Apr 16, 2024 19:52
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