Drunken Rage – Who Thought These Were Good Ideas?

Last Drunken Thoughts was my nicer, more constructive criticism post about Heroes of the Storm. This is the one where I punch it in the throat and question what it’s doing.

Someone reminded me of these after I made my last post, and I remembered these are the things that have been pissing me off but may not be something that will be fixed at all, nevermind before the June release date. So here goes.

Permastealth Characters

Who the fuck thought this was a good idea? Let’s make two characters permanently stealth and give them a shitload of burst damage. Nova I can mostly deal with, she’s annoying and powerful, but nowhere near as bad as Zeratul. I get it, Zeratul is a dark templar, and dark templars are permanently stealthed in Starcraft. The difference is there’s a shitload of detection options in Starcraft, and last time I checked this is fucking Heroes of the Storm.

Technically you can see the stealthed character, it’s the same concept as Starcraft where you see an area distorting as the character moves about while invisible. The problem here is if you don’t have a skillshot or only targeted abilities, well you’re shit out of luck, you’re their bitch now. Zeratul is free to walk over and jab his energy blade through your jugular then kick you off it. THEN FUCKING TELEPORT AWAY BECAUSE THAT’S COOL MAN.

Riot figured out this was a bad idea with Evelyn so while she’s permanently stealthed she becomes revealed when she gets closer to an enemy. Zeratul and Nova can wander around all day invisible until they goddamn well please.

The worst part? They can still capture objectives or gather tokens toward objectives WITHOUT HAVING TO UNSTEALTH. That’s right, on Pirate’s Booty there they can run around and grab coins without appearing, or hell just wait until someone kills the enemies for them then casually walk by and take the coins. At the very least make them unstealth the second they do anything objective-related, come on man.

What Just Killed Me?

Many games give you a post-death recap of what happened to you, in terms of who did how much damage to knock you into next month. It’s usually useful to figure out what the enemy is doing or at least identify who the biggest threat in a teamfight was. This isn’t in the game at all, but it’s on the list of things that could be added.

Right now you just have an explosion animation saying “Ha ha FUCK YOU GIT GUD”.

I Can’t Report This Asshole

Along with the no post-death coverage is the lack of post-game information immediately following a match. There are match statistics, but they’re in a separate menu entirely. Granted not having a post-game lobby is good to cut out the opportunity for morons to continue to ruin your day with harrassment, but at the very least let me report the jerks, AFKers, and trolls.

Point -> Click -> Full Health

Going back to Riot and League of Legends, since I’ve been to many of their design talks, one thing they talked about was support characters and healing. It was around the time they were working on re-working one of their original characters, Soraka, at the time a simple to play character whose function was essentially to cast two abilities on their allies to keep them topped off with health and mana. Morello at Riot specifically said something to the effect of “Essentially raid healing someone in a MOBA and just keeping them at 100% health is boring for everyone and not really fair to teams without healer supports.”

Blizzard said fuck that shit, we like our World of Warcraft style heals and we’re going to put people like that in Heroes. Lili? Hey why have to even target people, just heal the shit out of them. Here’s my ultimate that AOE HEALS EVERYONE THROUGH 3 LIVES WORTH OF DAMAGE GET CRUNK. Malfurion takes the spot for mana battery in addition to strong burst heals with a heal over time component. Good luck bursting through any of that, guess I found my “fuck Zeratul” strategy, if only matchmaking wasn’t a pile of shit.

Tone the heals down, someone shouldn’t be able to just negate that much damage and laugh as they casually wander away from the fight. The same goes for shields, they’re all sorts of fuck you.

Serious Bugs

Each patch, once it finally shows up 2 months after the last one, usually introduces some sort of bug that either makes someone insanely overpowered (see Abathur’s ability to move around the map unhindered with no cooldown) or unplayable due to crippling issues (You picked Anub’arak? Your team is now 4v5).

Those should have had hotfixes that same week at least. But nah, we’ll get to it eventually I guess…

Sick of these lists yet? Studies show 9/10 doctors prefer lists to non-list formats. Or I just made that up.

I’m not even drinking today and this is what I wrote. Nice, huh?

– Jimizzle

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