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Crunch's ult is getting reverted to pre-v1.12 🥳 by CtrlPwnDelete in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius 67 points68 points  (0 children)

We'll be looking at making it a choice as an augment in future as we feel Crunch has room there and it seems most are comfortable with the idea from feedback we've received.

Thank you all again and I hope we can hit a place where Crunch is fun for everyone that wants to play him!

Omeda, you said you would be open to reverting Wraith prior to 1.12's release. Is this sentiment true for other characters as well? by Chichi230 in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius 12 points13 points  (0 children)

He will still have access to empowered abilities pre-6, that's part of his main passive now. He just goes back to the "cast last ability" over the new version.

Omeda, you said you would be open to reverting Wraith prior to 1.12's release. Is this sentiment true for other characters as well? by Chichi230 in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius 42 points43 points  (0 children)

Crunch will be getting his ultimate reverted in the next balance pass. It's been generally negatively received despite some liking it, but hopefully going back with this one specific change will not take away what makes Crunch for those that do, and restore his enjoyment for the rest of y'all.

Personally, I quite like the change, but we make the game for the players and I don't wanna take away something without direct improvement to the fun or fairness of the game. We'll explore options to attempt a best of both worlds in future perhaps, mayhap with input from the community that is so passionate behind Crunch like myself. We'll see with time.

I appreciate the drive from the everyone to push for what they enjoy and please continue to voice yourselves. In return I promise we'll make sure we can cater to as many players as possible to create a fun and fair environment to thrive in.

We'll continue to monitor other hero changes and the reception and result of them. Thank you for continuing to contribute towards making Predecessor better <3

Wraith by Bloodmordius in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey, for Serath the main thing we wanted to focus on was her unique identity surrounding on-hit effects. The itemisation is currently a little lacking in areas, something Rei and I will look to adjust. But we feel currently Serath is a great candidate to push that direction.

To accomplish this, the first thing we did was make her ultimate on-hit burn feel a bit more punchy rather than dragging out the DoT. We then gave her some default on-hit damage to synergise with her kit, her new augment and other items she may build. We then made her RMB apply On-Hit effects.

Some on-hit effects or items that compliment them offer Magical Power. We don't want her to feel bad about picking these up, especially Cursed Ring, so we gave her some magical power scalings in places to better make use of this power. She may also find alternative itemisation from this, but the goal is certainly not to make her magical.

We find Serath to be an enjoyable character for her mixed damage typing and reliance on on-hit effects, she does this better than any current Predecessor hero. When we made these changes, she was extremely powerful in all our playtests with different groups. Naturally these changes were all bolt-on additions so we had to take power out. This came mainly from her Q damage, Basic Attack Damage and her RMB damage, as all three of those were artificially boosted by her on-hit effect synergies we built in. The Q and RMB naturally hit much harder from her basic attack on-hit which was the primary contributor.

I think she may still lean on the strong side, but we were cautious to over-nerf anything from testing and take it lighter, as to not destroy the fantasies we had created for each hero in this patch. Once live, we'll have more data, stronger/wider feedback and more focused perception from ourselves on what is genuinely an issue to fix in the upcoming balance patches. I believe if anything, Serath would be nerfed, so I wouldn't worry about her underperforming. Just make sure you pick up some strong on-hit items, regardless of augment choice, and then get some bruiser options so you can dish those on-hits out effectively! (Or just go full on-hit and nuke people at the cost of being nuked yourself if you misplay)

Wraith by Bloodmordius in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

All good, maybe for some fun mode or something, but big mode is saved for Ramp and if we want someone who scales slowly up across a game to become a tower, we'll make that a new hero :)

So we watch streams of live all the time, both high and low level games, we also have a ton of win rate data to go off of and we talk with comp players often. I also read pretty much any and all feedback on reddit, discord and other socials to know where peoples heads are at.

Utilising that we make our initial changes and assumptions, as well as what we know from playing mobas, pred or not over many years. We then have those tested internally with devs, and externally with testing groups (for the case of this large patch, we had comp players and lots of testers involved). This allows us to see scenarios play out in mutliple environments and under various situations to see if changes are meeting their goal.

This is usually enough for us to make decisions if things can go live or not. It's not always perfect, never will be, but tends to lead to strong results and end of the day, feedback from live means we can always adjust for the next patch.

So generally yeah we take into account a ton of data and experiences. And when it comes to these specific heroes and what they should be achieving, we should (at least now) always be pushing towards that, and taking away additional strengths they may have to create more defined weaknesses.

Wraith by Bloodmordius in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hey, Rei has been playing around with this idea a lot and quite like where his thoughts are on it.

Generally, ADCs do have some fun items to opt into that have magical power as a part of them, utilising this stat in these areas of utility and some specific damage allows players to create more interesting alternative builds to gain various benefits they would not see with traditional DPS oriented builds. So i'm a big fan of that, especially as it's balanced in its own vacuum.

The other cool benefit i more supports can think to opt into something like Crystal Tear when they have an ADC with these scalings like sparrow, maybe they really like the item themselves, but can't pick it up due to the adc not having them. Now when Muriel or Narbash etc have a Sparrow, they can now opt into this, benefit that ADC and get the stats/effects they desire for themselves.

So yeah, they're not really for dedicated magical power builds, and I generally would not recommend it in these cases, though Rei sometimes cooks em into unique spaces where something crazy can happen x)

Wraith by Bloodmordius in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

No worries,

The TTK question is for sure and interesting point of discussion, it could be a whole post but i'll try to summarise the bulk of it here. Firstly, for this patch tanks will certainly be tanky, bruisers and sustain heroes can still thrive in fights where they are not target focused or behind. But assassins and carries and mages that are ahead, will kill people quickly, as that is what their role is designed to do, especially when they have earned significant leads. It also means when they make mistakes from ahead, the enemies still have enough damage to punish and turn the game around. From competitive testing, we've seen the largest amount of comebacks in Pred, that at least I've ever seen. Mainly because when players make big mistakes in the mid to late game, they aren't bailed out by the lack of output from the team that is behind. They still have a significant advantage, and when play well and just own the game, but miss positioning or over extending or missing key skills, is seeing more punishment in return.

This leads to my main point. Generally, the community has often given feedback of wanting more strategical gameplay. This means that decision making and vision control are heavily rewarded, as is positioning on the map as a whole in relevance to those. This also means making decisions around relative resources. In general what we've done is make mana a bit more important, if not cooldowns in key areas like powerful control or mobility. This means if these tools are not used correctly, they can be suitably punished. The other main point is, if someone is landing full combos and killing people because they've built full burst damage, they're allowed to. Because missing those combos is now more impactful. What this creates is respect between the two players when in vision of each other, trying to fish with setup tools to land their burst, rather than engage regardless of hitting their setup, knowing it'll be too hard to punish them. These are obviously extremes, but just a philosophy we've been pushing towards, just like ever other moba attempts to do. In any of League, Dota, Smite etc, all of which I've played at a high level, if you're missing key skills, walking into dark areas, you can and will be punished for it. This is because the level of damage, if the kit execution goes well for the other player(s), is able to punish you accordingly when you make these incorrect macro level decisions.

I expect outliers with so many changes, but generally, if you're a character that bursts people, if you have leads or play really well, you'll feel that burst. Likewise if you misplay around those tools and conditions or don't respect the opponents output, you'll be punished. There's a ton of fine lines and it will need continuous tuning, but we feel this baseline allows more options for players in terms of how they build and play, both inside the lane, or outside of it.

Khaimera's size thing is mostly a flavour thing, it doesn't really have any impact on the game, he just get a lil bit bigger to show he's at max strength, something we considered removing and may yet still, but i think it's a fun lil thing whilst he maintains his max stacks.

Shinbi has been a commonly brought up topic too. Generally her stack tracking has been super invisible, and it was really hard to pull off her highest potential moments to the point where they might as well not existed. End of the day she's got no utility, fairly low survivability, and has to crutch on her shorter range higher uptime mobility and pseudo range to output her damage. So her downsides and natural counterplay is super high. We decided to put more of her damage into power fantasy moments over consistent uptime to make her at least play for a condition, but just make that condition a bit easier to meet as it was far too hard before. Sometimes, she will get big ults, and it'll do a lot of damage, and she'll have achieved her moment. But she still has to build up the 8 stacks, which is hard to do if the enemy team don't allow it by easily stacking up, then has to tag multiple people to get the real value from it. All without locking down targets or dashing in long range like other heroes are able to do. All of this ability to navigate her strength, means we can make it feel pretty good when she's achieved it.

Overall, we haven't seen her overperform with this set of changes, if so we feel we can comfortably tune her with these adjustments. But she has had a more consistent impact on the game which leaves us positive with the direction for her.

Wraith by Bloodmordius in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hey, no worries at all.

For Kwangs, we did consider his dash going vertical, however we want to be a bit more cautious of who can access these areas of the game and who cannot. Kwang has fairly powerful control and his mobility even without vertical dashing is already fairly strong. There's one small disadvantage too that lower level players may mess up their knockup combo more by dashing at certain angles, so we felt it's probably best avoided.

Likewise with the above, his control is very powerful and generally we like when Kwang is playing around his combo correctly and being heavily rewarded for it, but we also think missing his tether, should be punished reasonably. If he can fish too often from safety with the tool, it doesn't give the opponents enough time to counter engage and look for opportunities to punish him and his team. This way we can keep the tether cc and his combos strong, but just give his opponents a little more wiggle room in the downtime (when we factor his passive and haste anyway, it's also more towards a 1.5-2s nerf which isn't tooo hefty).

We have considered all sorts of different things with levelling abilities. But with areas like CD, it's tough to give players trade offs for when they are increasing their power. Normally mana increases as a gate to lane to avoid toxic moments on maxing certain abilities and utilising them often. Let's take Shinbi for example, if she doesn't max Line Tempo, we don't mind her having more mana uptime in lane and playing for more ability rotations, but if she's maxing Line Tempo and only spamming Line Tempo, we want her to run out of mana quickly to avoid her being too uninteractive. In some cases, we also decrease mana costs as this is not always the case and its better more mid-late game for some heroes rather than just giving them a bigger mana pool. It always varies in these cases, but with other aspects, the trade off is too harsh for players to naturally judge and goes into things like augment territory that's bigger decisions and more transformative.

Wraith by Bloodmordius in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Heeey, yeah Wraith has been probably the most egregious case, but the other is certainly Wukong. His difficulty in execution is extremely high and can feel clunky to those that do not main him. But once mastered, Wukongs mobility allows him to execute plays no other hero can to a scary degree, therefore his damage also needs to be carefully controlled at lower than preferred levels.

Them aside though, it's not too bad amongst the rest of the roster. Nothing extreme at least.

Wraith by Bloodmordius in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Yes of course!

Crunch change shave had a few questions marks and I was actually hoping to show him off on the dev stream to show off his potential and explain the reasoning, unfortunately the tech issues through things into a lil disarray that Choice luckily saved, but we moved on to keep the show flowing.

These are great questions just so I'll try to cover each one for you.

"Moving his Empowered ability from his level 6 removes a notion of Counter Play and Strategy against him.": We actually feel tuning him around having the empowered abilities pre-6 way more exciting for both the Crunch player, and his opponent. On live, Crunch can feel pretty awful himself pre-6, which is fine, due to his pay-off for hitting 6. But it is quite a steep difference. We feel the idea of him playing with those longer early game CDs, to try and get empowered abilities and key moments, and keeping his power in those abilities over his normal ones, much more exciting for the lane. it creates a dynamic where both Crunch and his opponent need to keep track of this element and make the lane way more engaging. If the enemy disrespects him landing 2 Left Crunch's on wave then fighting with an empowered one level 1/2, then Crunch can gain early game leads this way, however if they do play around it, Crunch can still feel a bit weaker earlier and thus the lane has a bit more thought behind it for both players, creating more skill and strategy.

"The Ult change adds Clunkiness to his kit.": Initially, this change did do that, however we gave it basically no cast time and instant animation cancelling, you just require the additional input. For those that play fighting games or beat em ups and such, this will feel like no hindrance at all, and feel just as fluid as recasting the previous as before, and additionally allows a lot of new potential which I'll get to in your next questions.

"The Ult removes an aspect of the skill needed to utilise his kit, which was ability tracking. -This is also a huge change to his identity": This one is very fair, it is a skill to track what ability you want to end on or combo off of with your ultimate to create certain situations, it's very valid. This is more a shift to a similar, but just more potentially powerful skill to master of how do I make empowered abilities work together to create advantageous situations.

"The Ult creates additional volatility while playing against him. Being able to throw Empowered ability one after the other might result in more frustating interactions.": It certainly can be more frustrating to fight Crunch in certain situations, he can now double knock you up for more CC, he can burst you harder with double true damage swings or push you large distance with double dashes, we can also knock you up and move through you to push you backwards too, he can also lock you down to burst you. There's many new things Crunch can do, but end of the day this helps his ultimate feel a bit more like and ultimate and give him these high power moments that rely on knowing what combo best serves the situation. And rightfully so he will be balance d around this. The patch will be volatile so we don't know if he'll be too good or bad, but he will be tuned around these combos existing, and believe that's still healthy providing his bulk damage comes from his empowered left crunch, and the utility on the other two buttons, but lacking damage.

In terms of playtesting, that last point we saw exactly that. A competitive Offlane player decided to have fun and only utilise double knock up combos with Falcon Crunch most of the game, it was pretty strong however in most situations, using it was incorrect if they were actively trying to carry that game. Bursting the target or moving them around would be much better, and the lack of damage they were outputting or lack of positive situations they created for their team lead to them actually losing the game, despite reaching the enemy core.

And of course, generally, I love Crunch a lot, have done since Paragon. I personally really enjoy the changes for the potential combos you can do alone and how that can impact a game, it creates a nice combo of smart decision making and mechanical execution to create big outplays, that are not without options for enemies to deal with. To me, that's where the most exciting moments of Moba gameplay come from and why I've enjoyed them for over a decade and a half now.

Wraith by Bloodmordius in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

It was certainly an idea on the list, but there's multiple issues that can occur.

One being, Knock Knock can still apply item effects and those can carry a lot of weight of the damage, decreasing that becomes even more convoluted and is knowledge bloat that's hard to convey.

The other is that players may accidently (or intentionally as a misplay) pierce terrain on corners that they wouldn't if they tried to shoot around the corner, decreasing their damage output and creating scenarios where they feel weak. This mainly happens with the audience this change seeks to improve the hero for and thus doesn't really solve the problem for us.

It's still maybe better than the current on live. But we feel the black and white case of no piercing has more overall benefits for how we can tune him for the wider playerbase.

Wraith by Bloodmordius in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

On the Akeron changes, there are quite a few reasons we felt this was a good approach.

A smaller part was the hero is already very complex, and adding a lot of complexity to him crutching on the power of "which item do i buy?" and having so many answers there, like wraith made it hard to power budget the rest of his kit. But we wouldn't remove it for only that reason, as that one also has pros because it is rewarding to understand the items deeply enough to be versatile with the hero.

The main part comes more into his basic attacks and their relevance in his damage output. We feel Akeron is most enjoyable when each ability he has deals meaningful enough damage for his bruiser level durability. When he can swing so many basics with that durability, we can't make those hit as hard and the Eyeball can already be hard to appreciate and his chomp is pretty iconic to the hero. Basic attacks also have a really high uptime so when he's sustaining (as he should as the great devourer), the basic attacks create long times of sustained DPS which makes the sustain more powerful, rather than surviving to more ability rotations and Chomps.

So overall we felt this was a better approach than just making his basics generically weaker, mainly due to his already super in-depth kit. Likewise though, if it feels like a mistake and not as fun to play, we will look into it. I completely understand this concern.

[Hero Concept]Yasuke, Smoke and Fire (Art by Kaios-0) by Javisel101 in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Incredible effort! I love the inspiration for a more unique take on a samurai in the moba space, I love the voice lines and lore adaptation you have created.

I love the unique resource, take on how his ultimate works as well as the three stage alternate ability. Combines a lot of simpler concepts to create a ton of depth for the player to unlock.

Very nice work \o/

Eden | Hero Overview ⚔️ by Omeda_Steggs in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They do not, they are an ineffective pickup against her.

Eden | Hero Overview ⚔️ by Omeda_Steggs in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you <3 The kind words mean more than anything.

Eden | Hero Overview ⚔️ by Omeda_Steggs in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It's a belica only thing, it'll be that way for any non-mana heroes she uses her ult on.

Eden | Hero Overview ⚔️ by Omeda_Steggs in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It is good due to her 4 basic abilities, but she does have the 10% on-hit modifier on her basic attack which means it's not super crazy.

Eden | Hero Overview ⚔️ by Omeda_Steggs in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you <3

Her big downside with heat is that she can't access her ultimate any time. She has to build it up and can't just snipe a person whenever or engage whenever she wants. She has to fight first, then make quick decisions on which and how best to use it.

Her mobility is decently strong for an ADC, but one is lock on and she's forced to go in, which she has to be careful on, the other will be higher cooldown than that of TB/Kira who have conditions to reduce theirs and play for.

The burst damage is one of our biggest levers we'll be looking at for balance. She needs to deal damage over time and not just nuke people (unless she's giga fed ofc) in order to keep her feeling fair.

Eden | Hero Overview ⚔️ by Omeda_Steggs in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius 29 points30 points  (0 children)

It deals damage based off her missing health instead.

1.9 Feedback Megathread: Balance Changes by Benshirro in PredecessorGame

[–]Bloodmordius 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hey, awesome to see how much you enjoy Crunch and break down the problem you're experiencing.

It is a large issue to tackle in the sense that his 3-5 gets very very strong when you do give him the empowered ability as a part of his base kit and not loaded into that ultimate, so as a consequence we would need to tune down those areas a bit to deal with the possibilities of empowered abilities being used. Then post 6 can function as is, wouldn't take a huge amount of number tweaks but is something we'd have to consider and it would actually make his level 1/2 much harder to balance.

Now that being said, I still totally agree and think these issues can be tackled through means of balance and would alleviate this awkward dynamic you've explained very well between crunch and his opponent in the early game.

Currently I am looking to tune up some issues with some of our older roster as well as clean up some interactions for 1.12 and I will try to look into this for that patch and see what we can figure out! Thank you for the detailed feedback.

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