The counter is that you can see invisible people even when they’re stealthed, just like sc2, so just keep your eyes open and hit them out of it. Only lili has no way to hit people out of stealth
I’ve been looking, I can see her going into stealth, but I can’t see shit when she’s running around fully stealthed. I can see now a lot of champs have ways around this, Valla just seems like a bad matchup. Only W to reveal stealth, Strafe doesn’t even seem to target her in it, and she has all the burst in the world compared to steady DPS from me that can’t hit stealthed champs.
Maybe if I could see her I could W on reaction but despite everyone telling me she’s visible slightly during it, I REALLY cannot see this bitch at all. Guess I’m just getting old.
Just got around to playing HOTS. Is there an equivalent to LoL’s Garen? An unkillable character that can just fuck around and annoy people?
Sonya has Garen’s spin, and it heals her.
Murradin has Garen’s ‘heal when not in combat’ mechanic.
…for Stealth, have you tried setting your graphics to lowest. Makes it much easier to see.
Not gonna lower the game when I already max it easily, I’m playing this for shits and giggles and to relax from taking LoL more seriously. If I lose to Nova, I lose to Nova oh well. I’ve just stopped trying to fight her straight up, I realized she’s not an ADC at all, she’s a burst mage and I should treat her as such.
You dont need to lower it, you just need to learn to recognize it. It may be easier on lower settings, but its easy to see period once you get used to it. Really anybody used to playing SC2 will have an advantage, since at high level you look for cloaked dts coming and forcefield them out without detection. the more you play the less of an issue it becomes. They can be lost in the chaos of a battle, but thats why they’re cloaked. Nova has like no escape tools, and if you pop her out of cloak she loses a ton of her damage (big boosts out of cloaked). Its far from overpowered. She really is the closest thing to a burst mage that exists (maybe jaina? I havent played in a few months) and she was also nerfed quite a bit recently, so shes far from op. You woulda loved her when she had rewind and could double snipe from cloak
Beta tomorrow!
Lots of cool stuff coming
I’m in there for Ranked play.
abathur change is welcome. li li change was also well needed, real tired of ETC/lili free weeks
they really should’ve clarified that stimpacks don’t boost in-game exp lol.
also sucks that there’s no mention of changes to the reconnect system, as the current system is pretty abysmal if you aren’t playing on a $2000 computer.
i have nine heroes lol. guess i’ll have to buy arthas for #10, though maybe i should wait and see how abathur and lili changes pan out.
Q can hit Nova, R can as well if you take RoV instead of Strafe.
But yeah you typically want to let your warriors handle Nova as Valla. Valla is more about objective control, she’ll lose a duel to most assassins but she’ll melt grave golems/garden terrors and structures with her ramping attack speed/attack damage.
As other heroes you’ll often make trait choices specifically to counter Nova/Zeratul. Valla just doesn’t have any choices that help (giant killer/tempered are too good to pass up for spell shield @13, blood for blood is also too good to pass up for stoneskin @16).
Murky is extremely annoying and very difficult to kill (he places an egg that acts as his spawn point and reduces his respawn time to 5 seconds as long as it stays alive), even in long games it’s rare for him to have more than 3 actual deaths unless the other team has both Tassadar and Illidan. His hero damage isn’t too great but his sieging and area control is pretty serious.
Diablo spends more time bodyblocking and shoving people around than he does actually doing damage to them. His hero damage is awful pre-13 (at which point it becomes amazing, though he still lacks single target damage) and he’s incapable of soloing camps quickly, but he has the highest HP and regen. He also has a faster respawn mechanic, though it’s far less useful if his team isn’t winning.
Zeratul’s a stealth character who is pretty annoying and close to uncatchable if played well and not counterpicked against.
Falstad would be the most difficult to kill of all the autoattackers imo. Sgt. Hammer is also really hard to catch when played well (most people are incapable of this) and at 20 she can attack from incredibly obnoxious distances. That covers all the roles.
This means you didn’t hit her for 2 whole seconds.
Did anyone get a Beta invite today? I mean people who were not in the Alpha.
(Just check the client to see if the button is active.)
Cloak was also changed to 3 seconds instead of 2 not being attacked with this patch
As for the reconnect system, given that its based on SC2 engine, its going to be really hard to do that. The engine handles reconnects by using a replay system and having your computer run through the entire game up until that point. In SC2 theres only 2 players, and the game would be launched from the replay in the lobby; here you’re trying to catch up with a game with 9 other people, so unless the game paused completely its going to be a bitch to catch up.
I have no doubt that they will overhaul this, but its definitely not trivial. They need the server to send the exact game state, and have you load in based on that state and probably do some sort of local load (load things closer to your hero first, the important stuff like enemies and ais, then fill in the map details and objectives and such). In SC2 the engine makes sure all players are always synced up, and any one player lagging slows the game down for everyone. Not Ideal for a MOBA, so they patched that part of the engine. The next step will definitely be patching that part of the reconnect system. Its probably a full time job for an engineer who has been working on it for awhile.
They added a beta key to the worst bundle. I decided to bite the bullet since I got tired of earning daily quest gold for my friend’s account instead of my own. Too bad that it has Raynor in it rather than another character, as starter bundle and nexus bundle are the only bundles relatively worth buying.
Wow they added the founders pack?
how is this game…im on the fence on getting the founders pack
Depends on what do you like or dislike about other MOBAs.
Business model-wise DOTA2 is the fair one but I like all the changes in HOTS compared to the genre.
-No last hitting and denying
-More team/cooperation oriented with shared xp and stage goals (The raven stage is boring but the rest have cool dynamics)
-20 minute games instead of 40
-No convoluted shop with a million items
-Smaller maps + horses means less time spend going from place to place
-Quick turning and smartcast like in LoL, which I really liked personally
One interesting comparison to LoL is that LoL rewards you for going NEET and playing as much as possible, while HOTS works better if you play it less, because once you do your daily quest (can stock up to 3) it’s not worth grinding for the gold gain per game. A daily brings on average 350 and each normal game brings 25 on average.
If you know of a character you want to “main” for sure 100% you buy it, get it to level 4 in roughly 4 games and that’s it. In LoL there are also runes and other bullshit to grind to play the “real” version of your character.
See the lack of a reward for CS takes some of the player vs player element out of the lane, and just makes everything a series of teamfights or split pushes. That wouldn’t be SUCH a big deal if the XP wasn’t shared across the board, which honestly is the worst thing about this game currently. If a team gets two levels or more down, it’s incredibly difficult to mount a comeback, since sending a teammate to split push can’t get them xp/gold gains in order to make a comeback.
This also means that if a team hits up some objectives and gets their ults quickly enough before the opponents, they can push that advantage to a ridiculous degree, since so many of the ults are so game changing, and an entire team gets them all at once before the opponents. When a game starts to go one sided in LoL, teams can bunker down and catch up in XP, or one person can outperform his competition and carry the team in the interim while the rest catch up. This is something that isn’t a real factor so far in HotS, that I’ve seen.
It does have a lot of things that I like, but the shared XP is doing more to make games snowball in the end. Their attempts at taking away individual responsibility just means that the entire team can get rolled more easily.
Thats just wrong, having shared XP is easily the best thing about this game in my experience. If you allow your team to get 2 levels down, then yes you’re in trouble, and a good team can press that advantage. They used to have the trickle xp bonus, so teams behind just automatically caught up, but I like it better now where you get bonus XP for hero kills at a lower level. If you can get a gank, you’re back in it. If the enemy team groups as 5, then you can split and soak xp and catch up. Theres options. But the only time being 2 levels down really makes a difference is before level 10, you really need to be the first team to hit level 10.
I agree that 1 person can’t just go farm up and decimate an entire team anymore, and thats good IMO. Theres no such thing as a hard carry in this game. Shared XP does way more good for the game than bad, since the entire game is based around working as a team and not being a 1 person superman. You win or lose as a team, not as an individual.
If you get behind in 2 levels it means you fucked up the team battles. If you start winning the next team battles you even up. The 2 levels difference doesn’t matter that much compared to who makes mistakes. I’ve had games where we were 3 levels behind because we made ~6 mistakes, and then the opponent’s team made ~6 mistakes themselves which we capitalized on and we got even. There’s literally no snowballing in this game. The only “snowballing” is one team keeps fucking up while the other team doesn’t.
That’s because the stat growth between each level is not that big overall. The only critical spot is lvl 10 team vs lvl 9 team.
If you want to feel like you make a big difference in critical times, play Stitches/Diablo and pull someone into your team for a quick player advantage, or play a teleporting character and turn a 2v2 on the map into a 3v2 win.
If YOU allow your team to fuck up in teamfights, if YOU allow your team to get two levels down, explain that to me. How am I supposed to make 4 other players not suicide at these objectives? In a traditional MOBA if I’m playing that much better than the other team, I can make up the difference from a shitty teammate or two. In HotS, they’re not just getting the enemy team ahead, they’re setting your own levels behind.
It’s a cute game and all, I’m just not seeing any possible way to take it seriously.
I’ve played DOTA2 games where one lane fucked up and fed a hard carry which could then butcher the whole team. The same scenario in HOTS will still put you in a worse position but never AS bad.
I’ve forgotten another thing which like- There’s no “get the last hit for a hero kill” mechanic. This means that what matters is that the opponent died, not who did the last hit. It removes all the “kill stealing” infighting and having to force yourself to not kill a running opponent just so that the carry can get the last hit is unintuitive and bad design IMO.