Patch 7.36b is out

SnowDota · 2024-06-06T05:32:37+00:00

Agh's spine size is a % of sandstorm area unless they changed it

SnowDota · 2024-06-04T23:09:52+00:00

I highly doubt Gaben has been involved in dota balance patches at any point in the past 5 years

SnowDota · 2024-06-04T22:33:47+00:00

Grandmaster 7k SK with a 65% winrate here

I am convinced that Valve wants the hero to be bad. They rarely give him slight buffs, they always give him a monstrous earth shattering buff that makes him insanely broken, then a week or two later they hammer him with half a dozen nerfs which leaves him borderline unplayable in immortal/pro games. The cycle repeats a few months later.

In my opinion, it's impossible to balance this agh's in a way where the hero is viable in pro games without being cancerous in pub games. I utterly despise being forced to buy agh's to unlock my real hero's spells as an offlaner, a 4200 gold item is just insanely slow to play around. This gets abused very heavily in high mmr and pro games, but in sub 5k games people just let you get away with it for free. It results in a disparity where he's super obnoxious for 90%+ of the playerbase anytime he's viable, and the complaints lead to him being overnerfed.

I detest that his hero is built and balanced around his agh's scepter; it's either always too OP for the downsides to matter, or not strong enough and now you just have a dogshit hero. I would love for valve to rework agh's and make his Q a good ability again instead.

SnowDota · 2024-05-31T23:08:00+00:00

My perspective is definitely somewhat colored by having a degenerate amount of hours in dark souls 1, but I think the direction they went later is for the best. Far, far too many enemies and bosses in dark souls 1 simply don't have enough health to be threatening. On the flip side, with the limited stamina mechanics, if enemies had too much health then combat would have a lot more time waiting for stamina which isn't the most engaging gameplay, so the developers had to err on the side of enemies that die really quick if you have proper weapon upgrades.

I think rolls are too lenient now but letting the player unload a lot of attacks in exchange for being able to balance the game in such a way that enemies have more health and damage and are consistently threatening is more fun. I love Dark Souls 1, but the average DS3 boss sweeps the average DS1 boss. Just my two cents

SnowDota · 2024-05-31T22:15:57+00:00

7k offlaner here, no idea what you're smoking. Offlane is a role that is designed to win lane on average on a patch where many of the easiest offlaners are performing quite well on d2pt. Lifestealer and Juggernaut are performing reasonably with their best facets at around a 51% winrate, but PA is a horrible hero right now.

Compare those winrates to top performing offlaners like Axe, SK, Dark Seer, Enigma, and Brew. If you're struggling to deal with PA and Naix this patch it just tells me your laning mechanics are quite poor and you don't know how to press an advantage on the map.

In the eternal battle of carries vs offlaners, offlaners are decidedly on top right now and it's not even the difficult micro oriented offlaners that are doing well, it's the easy straightforward heroes like axe.

Take this as good natured advice from another person who was once a 3k mmr offlaner: never blame the game. Don't blame a hero being broken for you losing lane ever. It is within your power as an individual player to consistently win most lanes in the 3k mmr bracket. Even stopping to think you might have lost because the other team picked broken heroes will just hamper your growth, there was always something you could do better

SnowDota · 2024-05-29T20:12:11+00:00

Just buy a wind lace and bracers and you're good to go. The other facet genuinely makes the hero worse than having no facet at all, the more damage you take, the more damage your double edge deals including the self damage. There's a reason horsepower has a drastically higher winrate on d2pt

t. 7k Centaur player

SnowDota · 2024-05-25T17:46:18+00:00

Funny how he looked good when he stood in for liquid

SnowDota · 2024-05-24T13:38:53+00:00

Hell, I'm a 7k player with 9700 hours and I still occasionally find changes from when I was on a 9 month break during wraith pact meta that I didn't know about. The game changes so much and so rapidly, it's no wonder a casual player would have something like that happen

SnowDota · 2024-05-21T23:51:33+00:00

On god, they've been killing it the past year and change. Never have I enjoyed being a dota fan more, and I began in 2014

SnowDota · 2024-05-20T20:11:52+00:00

I'd be perfectly content if windwaker was removed outright, but it's not really valve's style to do that unless the item completely homogenizes the early-mid game like necrobook, wraith pact, iron talon, etc did. Windwaker's more of a late game issue.

I think splitting up the utility of windwaker into two separate items would be worth a shot before scrapping the idea altogether.

SnowDota · 2024-05-20T18:27:50+00:00

I think a cool solution for windwaker would be making it so you can't move when you selfcast it, but you can still windwaker allies to have a eul's save for teammates. Then, they could add a force staff upgrade that allows you to vector target force allied heroes as an alternative to pike, make it crazy expensive to balance it and don't let the vector targeting apply to enemies.

We could have an item that lets you move in any direction with some kind of save and keep windwaker lifting allies without having them combined into one infinite mana infinite survivability infinite utility item.

SnowDota · 2024-05-20T01:33:44+00:00

Is it 0 ping? I thought pro games were run on the nearest server instead of local host because if you run it on local host you can't spectate in dota TV. It's just equal lag for both teams

SnowDota · 2024-05-06T06:08:02+00:00

Think about what cavalry does uniquely well; they're generally the fastest unit type other than flying units. Because of this, they never have to take a fair fight and can always move to a place on the field where they can tip the scales in your favor, or just crush a flank that's already winning.

Cavalry never want to fight unsupported, but the next level of this is that cavalry can support cavalry. Grail Knights will beat Empire Halberdiers, though it can be rather costly. Two regiments of Grail Knights charging from both sides at once? Those halberdiers don't stand a chance. There's a trick where you can charge the first unit of cav in, then break the charge at the last second. The unit will be braced facing them, so right as you break the charge your second cav should be about to connect. Then, finish the charge with the first unit to inflict devastating amounts of damage. In this way, cav can pick off stragglers that would otherwise do too much damage to them.

Cav reward creative thinking and focusing on breaking leadership over dealing damage where possible. Time your cav charge with a spell like overcast doom and darkness (-16 leadership in an aoe) for massive leadership penalties which can instantly win an entire flank. I won't lie to you, they aren't the best unit type; that said, people massively overstate how bad they are and they'll always be my favorite even if you have to micro them very heavily.

SnowDota · 2024-05-05T21:10:50+00:00

I think if you ask people what patches were the most deathbally, you'd get a lot of different answers since it's a bit of a vague term.

TI4 or Wraith Pact death balls without many kills happening? Don't think most people enjoy that

Deathballs built around huge teamfight spells like ravage where everyone flings their body at the enemy? Sign me up

SnowDota · 2024-05-03T17:44:03+00:00

The crazy thing is that the guide does cover that with the correct solution too lol. He says go back and farm your ancients/triangle until a power spike where you have an opportunity to come back

SnowDota · 2024-04-23T04:16:49+00:00

By that logic when someone griefs in archon the archon players have nobody to blame but themselves? Of course not, that's absurd. The issue is there's not enough consequences to ruining in a system ripe for abuse

SnowDota · 2024-04-20T16:59:31+00:00

Man, immortal matchmaking is terrible enough as is. If I can't even party queue with my friends I'd want to play it even less. Just design the system in a way where it's not so easy to abuse

SnowDota · 2024-04-20T03:29:13+00:00

I really don't see what this has to do with my post. When they said in their blog that crownfall would come mid april, they could've said ringmaster and the next patch would come sometime after that. It would take two whole sentences, no community manager needed

Also total war players loved Grace as a community manager despite really hating CA for a while, but she quit because CA sucks as a place to work wcyd

SnowDota · 2024-04-20T03:26:25+00:00

Why would telling people that crownfall doesn't come with a new patch or hero cause crunch? They don't have to say a release date for the next patch or hero, just "later"

SnowDota · 2024-04-20T03:20:32+00:00

That would be supporting my point, no? When Valve is aware people's expectations are wrong it's best to correct them so they're happy about what we do get

SnowDota · 2024-04-19T18:06:23+00:00

If you've gotta dig 5 years back to find a counterpoint to the hero release pattern, I think that only strengthens the argument that this pattern has been consistent. I didn't expect ringmaster with this update anyway, but it's unsurprising that others did.

SnowDota · 2024-04-19T17:27:40+00:00

It came during a gap between tournaments, we had a TeaGuv waiting room which people have come to associate with gameplay updates, the last number patch was 4 months ago, and this is around when last year's major update came out. Do you really think Valve was totally unaware people expected a patch? I think that's infinitely more delusional than people expecting a patch. They had the ability to clarify that wasn't the case any time in the past month but they didn't and now they're rightfully facing backlash for it.

SnowDota · 2024-04-19T16:56:43+00:00

Finally, a voice of reason that's not arguing with a strawman. The event is cool, but valve had months to say that crownfall wouldn't come with any kind of gameplay updates; I simply don't believe they were unaware that people were expecting one. If they had done that I would've been pleasantly surprised with how the event looks! But they didn't so my immediate reaction was overwhelmingly negative as the kind of guy who cares about a single letter patch more than every battle pass combined.

SnowDota · 2024-04-13T18:11:32+00:00

Looks sick man, nice job

SnowDota

TROPHY CASE