The weekly threads were usually regarding Tracer and Genji; not Nova and Valeera. It is true though that esp. Nova had a quite a impact in QM. Not for her stealth though (unless you account for the short period where she actually was op), but for the lack of supports (to heal up her “safe” dmg) and tanks (missing engage, CC to punish bad novas). Smurfs have and had quite an impact as well, when looking at new players.
Everybody else laughed when Nova showed up in a regular draft in unranked or ranked play.
This goes before the Tracer/Genji mobility QQ threads timeline-wise. Further back, even before their releases.
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That’s the point. Their impact was mostly safe (outside of ranked, where people who typically had an eye for stealth-blur hung out and laughed at Nova’s and Zeratul’s), as opposed to Genji/Tracer who simply have a place as mobile skill-shot punishers, yet they too can get lolstomped in Ranked depending on drafts, just like old stealther’s.
Not only did the stealth change appeal to the less experienced (or eye issued) players who weren’t adept at map awareness and/or stealth-blur, but it also upped said stealther’s so they could actually be considered for ranked. Sure, still not even remotely as popular as they were, yet you will see Nova’s, Val’s, Zera’s get picked from time to time and NOT get flamed for doing so, unlike in the past where locking in a stealther would result in “GG it’s lost” comments immediately due to how easy their cheese could be handled by any team with half a braincell.
Trying to blame ‘corporate greed’ is pretty hilarious. Next thing you know people will advocate for everything to be 100% free, like there aren’t servers to pay for or costs and quotas to fill in order to keep the game moving forward - and this is a game where you can grab 80% of the things you want for in-game currency anyway.
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As the developers themselves and SoulScar has already pointed out, it was due to gameplay being down to a eye test, rather than fun.
This is a major accessibility problem for many gamers that do not have perfect vision, or disabled gamers in general, so the changes are more inclusive to a wider audience.
It doesn’t really make a difference either, good/pro players didn’t have trouble seeing them, so all it’s done is affect the players that had problems.
It also discourages graphical settings abuse, where people might have deliberately lowered/changed specific settings to make the previous stealth more noticeable.
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And we trust those who offer us products without question. Brilliant logic.
SJW spewage.
Agree with you on that. Players who had problems, were mainly shitty players with low MMR playing QM predominately. New players as well.
After microtransaction update 2.0. It seems we are talking about 2 completely different timelines in HotS’ history.
I didn’t say that; try not to strawman discussions.
Are you serious? What an uneducated response. Accessibility is a fundamental element in design in so many fields; you want everything to be as intuitive and open as you can, and obviously businesses want this. This has nothing to do with SJWs, and a extremely high number of games try to be as accessible as possible, not because they’re trying to push an agenda.
Here are some videos to educate yourself with, but you could also just look up basic design or accessibility. You’ll find that Blizzard games are filled with accessibility features/design principles already, including HoTS.
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It is cute, you’re trying to advocate for a 0,1% group, portraying them as a big part of the community by saying “many gamers”. Perspective.
Stealth is a useless trait right now. It even makes Tassadar’s trait worse.
I haven’t seen an enemy Tassadar in a while, but doesn’t he vanish completely (it says "becomes unrevealable) ?
That’s Dimensional Shift (his E ability), his Trait is Oracle (AoE Vision + Reveal).
And the Trait is not completely useless as it does ignore terrain/bushes for the purposes of Vision. It will still allow you to check the entire area without doing a (potentially lethal) face check of every bush.
My guess as to why he’s so rare has less to do with his Trait, and more to do with the amount of green numbers he makes appear above his team’s heads. People have difficulty understanding support that isn’t healing.
Yes, a lot of misconception based off the role-categorization we currently use in HotS. Warrior =/= tank, Support =/= healer. Really good Tassadars are a pain to play against, Psionic Storms on your butt, slow-BA beam, FW in your face when you try to get away, all the meanwhile his team picking you apart. Vision-granting, good escape, and targeted Plasma Shields on people who really need it.
Everything I said still stands - the “corporate greed” comment was aimed at the guy who seems to believe the stealth-rework was a cash-grab (which is funny at best).
They were reworked due to the huge mismatch between QM noob-stomp against casuals vs being a laughing stock in ranked. They’re still solid QM stompers and are now actually playable in ranked without being laughed out of the draft. I remember the countless times where people would hover over old-Nova/Zera in ranked and the groaning would instantly become palpable from anyone who could actually draft/play the game at a semi-decent level.
As such, I still believe the majority of people complaining about the stealth-rework after all this time either haven’t adapted or were one of the above-mentioned QM-stompers who have to realize that effort is now required.
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Stealth is in great spot right now. Heroes using stealth still has massive advantage as they are untargetable, not visible on minimap and hard to see on map sometimes plus it completly counters best hero in the game - Li Li. Old stealth was just unbalanced and toxic to the game. Zeratul is one of the best heroes in the game, imagine if he kept old stealth…
And yes warriors = tanks, supports = healers. Tassadar is shielding/healing with his Q. If Tassadar is not a healer stop calling discipline priest healer.
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I don’t like it as well but what can you do ?
I never had problems spotting stealth heroes but some people complained so much that blizz decided they had enough of complaints, now there are only complaints that they are too easy to spot.
Personally I proposed a fix so that if enemy stealth hero got in range close enough they would be detectable, but that was met with complete ignore.
You know, like rogues in WoW, you get too close and people spot you and can react. It was a good solution met with community approval as well.
Getting in combat range you get spotted by the nearby enemy heroes allowing them a way to react, run/fight.
Currently the only hero that benefits from stealth most is Samuro as he has the longer unrevealable status when using windwalk or what it’s name is.
Could you imagine if the majority of people shared that mentality? Forget wheelchairs, not enough people use them.
Anyway it’s far greater than 0.1% (since around 15% of the world is classed as disabled…), and this fix isn’t exclusive to disabled users; I just provided an example of how design can be catered to reach everyone. You’ll find that the percentage of people that don’t have perfect vision is not 0.1% (more than 60% of people in the US/UK wear glasses), and you’d also find that in business you don’t surrender even 1% of the market if you can help it.
Much like web design, the majority of users use Chrome, but if you didn’t make your website compatible and accessible to other browsers that are even at 1% usage it would be poorly designed (and no business would want your website). Additionally if you’re interested, websites hosted by businesses are required to be accessible by law to disabled users in many countries.
0.1% could be a stretch to justify from a designers perspective, but you’d have to be blind to not see (ha ha) that blizzard didn’t make this change to satisfy 0.1% of their playerbase.
I’d also like to remind you that most modern games do have accessibility features, including HoTS. What is cute about what I’m saying? It’s already exists; I’m not promoting a new idea here. HoTS has Color Blind Mode, disabling screen shake, enlargement of cursor size, remapping of any controls and smart controls; you may think these are basic features that benefit everyone, but they all fall under the roof of accessibility.
If you’d had even watched one of the videos I’d linked, you’d realise how modern it is. Actually if you’d had done any research or knowledge on the matter you’d have realised, because you thought accessibility design was for 0.1% of people.
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If you find the stealth heroes useless now, then you are the one that can’t play the game. I have seen Valeera just destroy low hp heroes, and get away, due to the distance so can teleport/jump, and the burst damage combined with her cc. So learn to play
That’s because that’s her role, she’s a finisher and one that this game can be proud of, I mean, none of the other heroes fulfill their design roles properly. Especially since someone was smart enough to adjust Valeera’s skillset to adapt to the new stealth system. She’s much more fun because she can use her abilities better than Zera, Nova or Samuro.
Her ambushes are great openers and finishers, I often start fights as Valeera, then strut away leaving my team to pick off hp on enemies and I go back into the shadows, then I just move around to place myself wherefrom I will pick off enemies when they flee.
Zera is much more offensive in this regard, he’s a constant damage dealer, he was a finisher before the changes but now he was changed to be a chaser/dps.
Samuro is picker, he can really deal a lot of damage but he can only go after one target if he wants to finish them off, but often enough he lures enemies to him and gets to pick off 2-3 enemies at once, completely outside his design role.
Nova’s stealth is actually more of :Annoy them all!
They increased the decoy damage and duration and you basically are left with an annoyance assassin instead of a finisher like she used to be her ability kit was pretty much left without adapting it, which is sad because all it takes is adding 1.5 range to snipe and pinning shot and giving her back the auto-attack range +1 which was taken away from her at the same time it was taken from Raynor, although they gave it back to Raynor for no reason and made HIM the biggest bully in the game.
Most of the Stealth heroes work more or less properly, whiners don’t have an excuse now when they suck, so I guess it’s fine ?
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Just one point to this - she wasn’t finisher for quite a year or two before the stealth rework occurred. They just buffed the role she already had and was bad in due to ban hammers which hit her back in early stages of the game.
That I am well aware of, you have probably no idea what she was like in Alpha and Beta stages of the game.
I was particularly fond of her decoy exploding on death/expiration, or snipe piercing all targets in line which was pretty fun when you combined it with exploding rounds XD that was really hilarious, I mean, her original decoy didn’t even deal damage until lvl 20 but the exploding piercing snipe was really fun to use as each pierce lowered the damage overall but seriously you could deal massive damage in a single fight XD
Zera wasn’t much worse too he used to cause bleeding effect initially on ALL hit targets when used cleave and it’s radius was massive, so op his current and earlier iterations are childs play.
I have posted a long time ago (about year and half ago) about this topic
my suggestion was to make it completely invisible but nothing happened
and in return make watch points be able to see stealth
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