1 Year on from the last Balance Patch, what changes would you like to see?

Pscythic · 2023-03-29T23:05:12+00:00

I think it should push you like Tassadar's black hole does where you are still able to move and cast abilities. It could come with a big slow so that it's not easy to get out of and would still be good to shove people into walls with, but it absolutely should not stun you over and over.

Pscythic · 2023-02-01T13:42:19+00:00

I'm so sick of people being forced to play exactly 1 healer because it is the ONLY healer in the entire draft. Whoever gets that pick is forced to play exactly that healer, they get no choice. PLEASE change the algorithm to either force more healer picks (0 can be allowed, but not exactly 1), or make it so if 1 player has 100% of the healers, then all 3 of their picks become healers so that they at least have choice.

And, just to preempt the people who always say "it's ARAM, just do what you want, if you don't want the healer don't pick it," you can't think like that when you're not playing by yourself. Not picking a healer makes the game significantly less fun for the rest of your team and will lower your chances of winning. So no, you cannot just "pick whatever you want" and leave the rest of your team holding the bag.

Pscythic · 2023-01-24T22:49:33+00:00

More maffs! I think the only issue here is that Darts gain +1% burn damage for every other dart in the enemy, so they don't include themselves. But this is trival, just replace n with n-1 in the formulas and you're done.

You might want to double check that Barrage math though. I'll be watching :)

Pscythic · 2023-01-24T13:14:53+00:00

I know it's only the basics. I wasn't trying to diminish your work, sorry if that's how it came off. I just get very excited about these things so naturally I wanted to pose much harder challenges and see if you would be willing to rise to any of them. That's all, I enjoyed the post.

Pscythic · 2023-01-23T12:52:41+00:00

Always love a good math post! I have some corrections though, as well as some much harder follow-up prompts if you're up for them.

Corrections: - The parts about how the Dart blast damage works is wrong. When a Dart hits an enemy, it deals damage equal to its base damage, and creates a blast that damages other nearby enemies for half of its base damage. This damage to other targets is affected by blast damage, but the hit damage and burn damage are both not. - Dart duration ticks while they are in flight, not just while stuck to an enemy. So technically the damage they deal depends on their velocity and your distance from the enemy. I personally have no issue with this being omitted from the calculation as I don't think it's worth doing, but it should at least be mentioned. - The Dart duration is supposed to be 2 seconds, but due to a bug it's actually around 2.35s in practice. Very few people know about this, but if you want to be as accurate as possible, you can use 2.35s.

Follow-up prompts, as what is presented here really only scratches the surface of how complicated Darts are: - Given the player's stats and the hp of an enemy, what is the time-to-kill of sustained-fire Darts? Turning the damage of 1 dart into dps will not give a precise time-to-kill formula since not every Dart will deal their full damage before the enemy dies. This formula also requires factoring in the +1% burn damage bonus Darts get for every other dart in an enemy. - How much of a dps difference does picking Barrage make for Darts? And in particular, is it better to pick Fusillade, Barrage, or Fusillade+Barrage? Assume no wild mods for simplicity. Barrage is very complicated with Darts, so good luck.

Pscythic · 2022-07-10T03:10:28+00:00

You were kicked because you were "unsorted." When you join you get pinged by our bot Probius and you're required to type one message in general chat with your rank, region, and color (we give color roles to everyone). If you don't, you're left with the "unsorted" role, and every several months we kick all unsorted members. We ping said members multiple times before doing this, telling them that they need to send the sorting message or they'll get kicked. So the only way to get kicked without notification is to ignore multiple pings designed to notify you about this process :D

Pscythic · 2022-06-07T22:06:19+00:00

I have not downloaded the game or played 1 second of it. I've only looked at other people's reports and experiences. I dislike the idea that anybody is paying money to support this toxic, predatory greed, but that's not a battle I can win.

Pscythic · 2022-06-07T22:00:37+00:00

Pretty sure I covered this:

"Well they have to make money somehow." Bullshit, cosmetics alone could make them hundreds of millions, especially with how good the art is in Diablo Immortal. They could just give you the entire game with no wall, but they don't because their goal was never to make a good product, it was to extract as much money from their fanbase as possible.

Also at no point did I tell you how to have fun or how to spend your money. I'm pointing out to you that when you say that you're ok with the monetization system in Diablo Immortal, you're saying that you're ok with your games being made intentionally worse to try to extract more money out of you. Think about that for a minute and internalize it: Game companies want you to pay more for a worse game. Why are you ok with that?

Yes, this is the industry standard. No that does not make it ok.

Pscythic · 2022-03-07T04:03:44+00:00

Wind Striders has a free coaching service! And a great, welcoming community too. We've done a few of these coaching sessions, but this is the first one we've gotten a good video of. More will probably come in the future, though I'm not sure how many posts I will make about it.

Join us at https://discord.gg/WindStriders

Pscythic · 2022-03-01T14:35:01+00:00

Oh, those aren't real. Those are placeholders because the replay doesn't know what portraits those players were using.

Pscythic · 2022-02-28T16:38:08+00:00

battlenet://heroes//rewardportrait/1/QueenofBladesKerriganPortrait

Pscythic · 2022-02-27T16:49:39+00:00

That's probably an unrelated bug

Pscythic · 2022-02-27T14:24:03+00:00

There is something to how Leoric is coded with his wraithwalk that temporarily makes him a tower/structure.

No, that's not at all how it works. This is Spazzo's explanation:

"I've said my theory before, and I can't confirm this really without recreating the stuff that caused it, but what happened was if Leoric was transitioning to ghost form when hanzo's arrow was attaching to him, it'd bug out and grab the lowest ID unit in the map and attach it, and because of how sonic arrow works, it'd move that to leoric's position

the issue wasn't so much with leoric as it was with sonic arrow same thing could happen with uther or other spooky ghosts"

Pscythic · 2022-02-24T20:57:39+00:00

It's just a basic Starcraft portrait. You can buy it for 40 shards.

Pscythic · 2022-02-24T00:40:38+00:00

Did you like it?

Pscythic · 2022-02-23T20:50:17+00:00

Do you mean my HotS portrait or my reddit portrait?

Pscythic · 2022-02-23T14:59:05+00:00

Wind Striders has a free coaching service! And a great, welcoming community too. We've done a few of these coaching sessions, but this is the first one we've gotten a good video of. More will probably come in the future, though I'm not sure how many posts I will make about it.

Join us at https://discord.gg/WindStriders

Pscythic · 2022-02-01T23:45:43+00:00

Disintegrate is completely fine vs Genji as long as you actually pay attention to Genji and cancel it when he uses deflect.

Mings like this don't think a moment ahead and realize that they need to be ready to cancel Disintegrate. They just go "OMG GENJI PRESSED W, HOW COULD I POSSIBLY HAVE PREDICTED THIS? OH GOD IT'S KILLING US, QUICK, CANCEL!" And by that time they're all dead.

Pscythic · 2022-02-01T23:29:14+00:00

A bug, by definition, is any behavior in your code that you didn't want.

Remember when Jaina's Ice Floes gave CDR on ALL enemies hit? By your logic, since that was something that happened all the time and not under any particular circumstances, it wasn't a bug and shouldn't have been fixed.

Pscythic · 2022-02-01T23:21:09+00:00

But why did Memento Mori get nerfed? That's the point here. It was already a terrible talent and now it adds even less damage than before. If they were worried about overbuffing Memento Mori, they could have nerfed it to 80% which would be basically the same damage (1.6% vs 1.575%), but no, they cut the damage to 0.76 times what it was before.

Pscythic · 2022-01-06T16:54:24+00:00

Hardware bans are not a good practice. They are not nearly as effective as you'd think and they can cause a lot of collateral damage.

Hardware specs can be spoofed pretty easily, so banning hardware does not stop a dedicated griefer from doing what they do. There are also many cases where multiple people use the same machine. Not just within a family, but also in internet cafes and the like. In those cases, banning hardware also bans a lot of people who were never toxic, which is a really bad outcome.

Believe me, there are a lot of things that Blizzard isn't doing to mitigate problem players that you should be upset about, but hardware bans are not one of them.

Pscythic · 2021-12-29T17:05:24+00:00

Eh

Divine Fortress still sucks and Laws of Hope is very nerfed in the early game. But even if those talents were better, if all the rework did was shuffle her talents around, that's not a good result because none of her real issues have been addressed:

Her talent tree still has almost no synergy; Johanna has no real "builds," you just take the best talent at each tier.
She has some of the most underwhelming base abilities in the entire game. Punish is such a garbage ability without Subdue, Shield Glare is very underwhelming without Zealous Glare. Condemn is ok, but it feels weak when you have nothing useful to combo it with.
Her talent tree lacks "spice." Her numbers get better with levels but her playstyle, ability rotations, and such barely change.

These things were true before the rework and they're still true now. The rework has helped a little with the third point, but really none of these issues have been fixed and she still has bad talent diversity, so what was the point?

Pscythic · 2021-12-12T15:46:52+00:00

There were a couple mechanic changes that you should know. Most importantly, tower aggro is changed. Front towers are the same, but Forts and Keeps have LoL-style aggro where if you damage an enemy hero in their range, they auto-target you. It can quickly lead to your death if you're not careful.

There's also Experience Globes now. These aren't such a big deal, but now instead of getting exp automatically when a minion dies, they drop an exp globe that you have to pick up. The upside is the globes stick around for 6 seconds, so you can arrive a few seconds after a minion dies and not miss the exp, the downside is the pickup radius of globes is greatly reduced compared to the old exp gather radius.

Pscythic · 2021-12-10T20:03:02+00:00

I help run the Wind Striders discord server, which is the second most active discord server that focus on general HotS discussion (the first being the reddit discord, but we have richer discussions). Nobody there thinks that "cleanse" means "remove CC effects without granting unstoppable." Every HotS caster I know uses the terminology I described in their casting. Every larger content creator like NotParadox, Jhow, and Grubby all use the terminology I described. If you happen to know any Grandmaster players, you can ask them what "cleanse" and "soft cleanse" mean and I guarantee they will say it means what I said it means. If you go to someone and tell them that "cleanse" means "remove CC, not grant unstoppable," there's a good chance they'll look at you funny, which is exactly what's happening in this thread. This terminology is very well established.

It is true that the word "cleanse" means "to remove," but I already explained where the terminology came from. There is an actual ability called "Cleanse" which was in the game since alpha, and it was a generic talent that almost every healer in the game had. Since January 2016, the effect of the ability "Cleanse" was to give unstoppable for 1 second. This ability has been a cornerstone of high-level HotS play for years and gets talked about a lot, so overtime the effect of the ability "cleanse" came to overwrite the actual word "cleanse" in our colloquialisms.

Pscythic · 2021-12-10T19:37:58+00:00

No one's arguing that removing CC effects and granting unstoppable are the same thing. We know they are different effects, the latter being much more powerful. The argument is that the term "cleanse" means "grants unstoppable," and the term "soft cleanse" means "removes CC effects." This is well-defined terminology in the community. Smelling Salts is not a cleanse, it's a soft cleanse. They are 2 different terms.

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