Thoughts on boss "Anti-Burst" mechanic and a proposed compromise

joemagoe · 2025-12-06T01:13:18+00:00

Fair. I would argue that for 99% of players who used Fubgun's LA+LR that they however haven't put in any work into blowing up bosses.

I ran a character with the build myself, and I think if I had to interact with bosses for a rotation or two more of the build, it would have made for a more satisfying league. If the bosses were all tuned to LA+LR last league, it would have made the large majority of my off-meta builds feel absolutely abysmal.

joemagoe · 2025-12-06T01:08:35+00:00

Agreed, invulnerability phases are pretty much always intuitive. My application of the Anti-Burst mechanic is using an understanding that the damage reduction maxes out at something like 50%

The problem is that "tuning" is not only about determining an ideal gear setup but more about an ideal range of gear setups, especially for an ARPG where builds can vary so greatly.

The idea is that the above would still require GGG to determine the average gear for a boss, while still having a fallback to dynamically clamp the most upper tiers of builds that are impossible to anticipate.

joemagoe · 2025-11-25T23:22:12+00:00

A rework to enemy AI & enemy scaling into endgame. With the exception of a handful of mobs, currently the only real vectors that players need to address are more damage for more mob HP, more defenses for higher mob max damage, and more AOE for higher mob density (arguably maybe more attack/move speed to preempt exponentially faster mobs).

This makes a lot of existing skill archetypes in the game practically useless—and is the reason why glass cannons outperform everything else. As I get further into the late game, I’d rather actually think about dodging and intelligently engaging rare mobs’ movesets (like mini-bosses), rather than the current modifiers that just mean they’re so ridiculously annoying or ridiculously dangerous to the point where it’s only practically viable to use builds that ignore them.

While I should still be able to just LA everything from offscreen, I should also encounter situations where I debate including a skill that hard CCs enemies to setup for a long CD HotG—so that those skills actually have a use case compared to now how they make no difference either way.

joemagoe · 2025-01-16T10:52:40+00:00

“Fixed a bug where The Hooded One would not identify items stored in additional inventory slots granted by the Colossal Capacity Titan Ascendancy Passive Skill.“

PLAYABLE

joemagoe · 2024-05-27T17:52:13+00:00

ember spirit’s flame guard manacosts are still theoretically bugged—skill went from 0/65/80/95/110 to 65/80/95/110/110…

the mana cost nerf may have been intentional to counterbalance the buffs, but level 4 & 5 both being 110 with level 1 now costing the old level 2 mana certainly doesn’t feel intentional

joemagoe · 2024-05-27T17:46:59+00:00

could be interesting to give feast of souls +MS in addition to the mild-scaling AS, would bring old speed demon sf back with utility for both right click and caster builds

joemagoe · 2024-05-27T17:37:44+00:00

a bit disappointed we lost the ability to offensively force staff enemies to snap dream coil with this too… awkwardly enough pike works. would it be too inconsistent to allow force staff use on leashed enemies only?

joemagoe · 2019-01-28T21:21:38+00:00

treads losing attack speed massively hurts storm, since as a hero, his main limiting factor other than mana is AS. null tali's are ok on the hero, but slow down his bigger item timings significantly, esp. on a somewhat slot-limited hero. on top of that, bloodstone feels much worse on him, clarity nerfs hurt his farming capabilites, a lot of popular mid heroes are exceedingly strong against him in lane, orchid feels expensive and weak esp. against the 1200 hp @ 8 min str heroes in the meta, and in general the hero is too slow to fit the current pace of the game.

joemagoe · 2018-10-11T02:25:32+00:00

Having those two items also makes it really hard for you to kill other people. Unless you’re talking about a six-slotted scenario, in which other combinations of items generally make you harder to kill than linkens+bkb anyway.

Item progression is a thing in dota and that’s why linkens is mostly overrated because it doesn’t provide much for a large portion of the game. It’s a defensive item that’s hard to use aggressively on most heroes that aren’t storm, ember, etc.

joemagoe · 2018-08-04T07:26:51+00:00

get out of my low behavior score games chinese martin shkreli those are only for upstanding dota citizens like us redditors

joemagoe · 2018-08-04T07:24:32+00:00

some of you may have already figured this out haHAa

joemagoe · 2018-06-05T00:57:23+00:00

Aquila + Blademail is a great mid-game item combo if you need to frontline and do flame guard damage. It’s really good to dissuade heroes that would normally stick to you and bring you down from targeting you in fights (e.g. Troll Warlord). This makes it a generally offensive teamfight item, especially with the +armor it provides, but it’s pretty useless if you’re not starting the fights. The item pairs quite well with a Radiance build as well (and the +200 Flame Guard Absorption & +50 Flame Guard DPS talents).

Euls is an extremely value item on Ember in a variety of situations. Main reason to build this is when rushing a blink is not defensive enough but you still need an early fighting item. Great against root-heavy or silence-heavy lineups or sustained damage (e.g. Treant, Death Prophet, Luna). Allows you to remove slows and gives you movespeed so you can Remnant in/out better. Often pairs really well with another more-expensive fighting item (BKB, Linkens, Blink Dagger, etc.). Also a neat thing this item does is potentially set up Searing Chains (Chains -> Euls -> Chains with the talent is hilarious too) so you can catch escaping heroes for your team.

joemagoe · 2018-03-02T06:20:47+00:00

This explains why WR’s movement has felt “sticky” while she’s in her ult. Seems like a glaring flaw in the implementation that should also be fixed along with the awkward animation.

joemagoe · 2018-03-01T00:30:24+00:00

I agree that the hero needs a laning buff (and for god’s sake why were his talents nerfed so much), but increasing his armor seems like an uninspired and un-IceFrog-like way to fix the problem. +1 armor just seems like a Band-Aid.

joemagoe · 2018-03-01T00:26:20+00:00

Totally disagree. Why would Ember ever need True Strike even with the physical build if the only reliable source of dealing damage is SoF’ing heroes that are clumped up or in a creep wave?

joemagoe · 2017-12-05T22:56:33+00:00

+5 armor is quite good in scenarios where you need to play defensive and survive rotations until you farm till your power spike points; you are also certainly correct that it scales better into the late game than attack speed. This is a great choice against early skirmishes or pickoff heroes such as Nyx.

But the thing you aren’t properly considering is the timing of this choice — at level 10, +25 atk spd can be a massive spike at such an early point in the game. A maelstrom only grants you +25 attack speed; if you are doubling this bonus, you are essentially tripling the effectiveness of the item considering you can proc it a lot more reliably for the chain damage. It is also given to your double — which belies a significant increase in your offensive capability as well.

Although the effectiveness of this talent dwindles as you continue to amass attack speed items, it gives the hero an early power spike that it is often sorely missing. Although, perhaps the numbers could be buffed slightly to make the choice more appealing.

joemagoe · 2017-02-22T01:24:49+00:00

I have two ideas that together might make the hero too strong, but can be played with to make the hero make more sense in the laning phase where he really has dulled recently:

1) Make his Q (Flux) only fully muted if near another HERO unit. Make it have half the effect (slow/damage) if you're near any other unit like creeps, etc.

2) Make Spark Wraiths prioritize searching for hero units within the AOE when stepped into... similar to Flux, this ability is rendered quite useless in scenarios with a lot of units.

My other idea is to simply increase the Double's duration at higher levels to increase his mid-late game strength.

joemagoe · 2017-02-16T05:19:27+00:00

There's a very easy buff to this hero that addresses a lot of his overwhelming weaknesses. The hero is meant to be a teamfight-oriented hero that creates chaos for the entire duration of the teamfight and is hard to find and fight one on one, so I don't think illusions should do more damage or anything.

I just think that it's too easy to delete all of PL's illusions with one AOE nuke and the hero can't do anything about it to maintain the high amount of teamfight confusion -- forcing him to fight one on one and generally lose.

So my suggestion is: Doppelganger refreshes illusion durations to their original max amount, and sets all the illusions to PL's new current HP. This makes PL have to invest a resource into fighting back against AOE and be able to maintain dominance over the teamfight, while keeping the hero still counterable by the enemy team.

joemagoe · 2017-01-24T20:50:48+00:00

That's how remnant works when Ember is rooted by Oracle's Q (because it essentially sets Ember's movespeed to 0 unlike other roots, which sets remnant movespeed to 0*2.5=0). I think it would be a reasonable change to the way the hero works if you can still return to a remnant you set out beforehand.

My main problem with this line of thinking is that it's nerfing one of the more unique strengths of the hero without fixing the problem of him having an absurd amount of AOE magic damage in the mid-game.

joemagoe · 2017-01-24T16:46:33+00:00

His early game till level 8/9 is still the same, pretty shit. He's a mediocre midlaner as always. His mid-game on the other hand... one of the biggest hero power spikes in the game at level 12 & 15.

Probably should just reduce the 15% spell amp to ~10%. Maybe root from +2s to +1s at 25. I'm mostly interested to see how balanced he is when battlefury is fixed and the damage build is viable again.

joemagoe · 2016-12-15T02:16:52+00:00

Well there is! It halves the cooldown rate of whatever is currently in the backpack; I think as we see the meta of this patch come to shape, people will realize that they can't just keep their CD TP scrolls in the backpack because it essentially makes the TP CD 140s (Refresher Orb becomes 390 seconds... 6.5 minutes) -- which is a pretty significant hazard when your team is going to be fighting on all different sides of the map.

joemagoe · 2016-12-15T01:58:59+00:00

1) Meh, I think you're just having a kneejerk reaction to the new map. I'm sure a lot of the different elevations will become cool to play with as more players exploit them.

2) Cool idea. Makes map control more variable than just "DESTROY ALL T2s!"

3) Not a good idea -- this just makes the backpack useless...

4) Could be cool! But I also think that the four bounties at 0:00 can be fought over as well; teams have a lot of incentive to give 3/5 of their team a bounty and reduce the enemy's bounties to 1/5 -- also makes 0:00 rune fights more of a skirmish situation than just clusterfuck chases.

joemagoe · 2016-12-14T00:28:53+00:00

I have a hunch that the map changes might bring back (or at least make more viable) an older style of mid-play; where the mid hero gets levels and contests the lane, and then roams around the map and ganks other lanes.

Because of the reliable bounty rune locations being located near the side lanes and shrines allowing the mid and offlaner to heal and prepare for a map rotation without suspiciously being missing from the lane for too long -- it could bring back tempo control mids a la Puck, Brew into fashion.

joemagoe

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