BALANCE SUGGESTIONS FOR 1.05
10:57 PM by IN.TillerMaN
Well since there has not been a patch for quite some time and the fact that Blizzard are probably working on one as we speak, I thought it was about time for another of my Balance Suggestion posts. I am not going to cover old ground, lots of ideas were suggested in the past which I still agree with but which Blizzard did not or could not implement in subsequent patches. The following is probably not a complete list as I have surely missed some stuff, however, I think I cover a lot of important points.
Balance
I know I have talked about Spellcasters nearly every single patch but I truly beleive I have always been right about this major problem as well as having the correct solution! I believe that an army of Spellcasters without regular troops should be seen as a weak army and certainly not as an invulnerable one as is the case all too often in 1.04. Some examples from high level play:-
Human v Anything, armies consisting only of Heroes, Sorcerresses and Priests with only some initial footmen for creeping(although even these are being skipped entirely sometimes).
Orc v Anything(possibly with the exception of Night Elf), mass Witchdoctors and/or Shamans with 2 or 3 Heroes, if it vs Undead, practically unbeatable at high level.
Night Elf v Anything(apart from Night elf), 2 Heroes and massed Dryads followed up "sometimes" with Druid of the Claws.
Undead v anything, spellcasters used exactly as they should be, as support units only(mass Ghouls instead! >_<).
So, there we have it, nearly every single game of War3 at high level is all about massing Spellcasters, sad but true. Another offshoot of the Spellcasters basic Piercing Attack being so good is that Tier 3 Melee Troops get decimated by the massed focus attack alone! You don't even need to Polymorph or Purge them because they will die regardless and quickly.
The not so radical solution is too "dramatically" reduce the damage of Spellcasters, simple, but will be truly effective. Spellcasters will then be trained only for their Spells rather than for their Spells and strong Basic Attack. A suggestion I also made in the past which was not implement was combining basic training and master training for 2 spellcasters into 1 single upgrade. This will make it easier to get a nice combination of support Spellcasters and will counter effect the dramatic reduction in basic damage I hope you are going to introduce in the next patch >_<.
Ancients have become very problematic since 1.04 and are being "abused" in an increasing number of high level games. The main problems were brought in with the new Armor upgrade, new health regeneration when eating trees and the fact that Ancients have always required no food supply. It has taken players some time to take advantage of these changes but now they are, games are getting quite ridiculous in an increasing fashion. Common usage is for a Night Elf to build Ancients of War solely as defence for his expansion and main, it becomes incredibly difficult and sometimes impossible to attack a Night Elf who is defended in this way without suffering heavy casuilties. Obviously it is not economical to build Seige as a counter because they generally take 4 food and of course are easily dispatched with focus fire attacks. I'm not sure of an obvious solution but at the very least, their attack damage should be reduced.
Items are still very broken. I will focus on the most broken ones but there is possible improvement across the board and I'm sure I could fix items entirely from a "balance" point of view. However, here are the most important ones.
Level 6 Items :-
Awesome items in order of awesomeness.
1. Potion of Restoration(Improves as your heroes gain levels)
2. Ankh(Ditto)
3. Healing Wards
Good items in order of goodness.
1. Stone Golem
2. Mana Dog(>_<), Drake, Book of the Dead
3. Wand of the Wind(this item got broken because you reduced Cyclone to 10 seconds from 30 seconds, it should be at least 15 seconds, if not 20), the only time it moves up the ranking is when you use it skillfully on say a Demon Hunter in Metamorphosis form but this is all too rare.
There is a HUGE gulf between the good items and the awesome items but they are all treated as Level 6 Items. This will hopefully be addressed in 1.05. The Potion of Restoration and the Ankh are both better than any Level 10/ Level 9/ Level 8 or Level 7 item with the exception of "Scroll of Restoration" and possibly Scroll of Ressurrection in some circumstances but definitely better than all those shit Armor Rings, Medallions of Courage, Hoods of Cunning etc etc.
I won't bother going into too much detail about the higher items but there are some big problems but because you can only get them on a couple of maps and because they are hard to get, they are not quite as important to fix but for instance - +4 Armor Ring or Scroll of Restoration? Come on, it's not hard to spot the totally broken ones
Level 1 Items :-
Tome of Experience should just not be in this group, it is too good and if you get a lucky run of them, you can win games when you shouldn't. Please either remove it, or make it give a lot less experience
I could go into tiny details on some of the other balance issues with the low level items however I don't want you to think they are anywhere near as close to important as the ones I just talked about.
The Black Citadel is far too good, easily the best static defence in the game and it is free!
You have probably forgotten these but Human cannon Towers seem underused, the underused was an attempt at sarcasm because they are not just underused, they are NEVER used! This is obviously because of the tech tree the Humans have where that required workshop makes stuff more useless than it should be. An easy fix and one I would like to see would be for Cannon towers to require a blacksmith only and possibly Keep too. They will of course be totally imbalanced I'm sure as they have never been tested because no one ever builds them. We can balance them for 1.06 >_<
I would like to see all Seige Units that currently use 4 Food, only to use 3 Food and possibly be made slightly cheaper. This will make them a much more viable option throughout the game rather than only building them when you are already winning and want to break into a base.
If Abolish Magic is going to be an Autocast spell at least make it work properly vs summoned units. You nearly always have to manually Abolish Magic vs Water Elementals, Skeletons, Spirit Wolves etc. I'm not saying, it is a bad thing, but either make it totally manual or totally autocast, not sometimes >_<
Wind Walk still truly sucks, the idea that someone suggested before, that whilst invisible, you regenerate quicker or something like a free Critical Strike when you come out of it manually would improve it. Just think, a single Gem of true seeing totally counters it, why would you ever want it?
You should add Anti Magic Potion back to the shop. Don't know why it was removed to begin with.
The Deathknights Ultimate truly sucks. It is so bad an ultimate that I rarely even bother getting it, instead getting Level 3 Aura. It truly is bad, you probably thought it made the DK and Paladin balanced because the Paladin cannot attack other races with Holy Light. But remember, the Paladin has been radically improved since then. So there is no reason whatsoever not to improve this ultimate
Dryads should NOT be immune to ANY ultimate. That is ridiculous, I'm talking here mostly about Bladestorm, but if Tranquility heals them then Bladestorm should hurt them. It is not even a good ultimate anyway in most cases. It used to be good when the Blademaster could not be targetted when it was being used. I think you should change it back to this, dying whilst Bladestorming from focus fire is truly the sucks
A Necropolis should be less expensive to construct.
The Rifleman Range upgrade should not require a workshop.
Improve the Gargoyle upgrade, so that when a Gargoyle is being regenerated there is no timer on when you can bring him out of Stone form. It is never used anyway and this is a much needed change.
Some building costs probably need tweaked that you think are being underused, for instance I don't see much of a problem with reducing the cost of Spellcaster buildings across the board, expensive buildings put people off having mixed armies and actually makes it inefficient to do so, much better to just Mass more Ghouls than try and and get a Slaughterhouse for a couple of Abominations or get a Boneyard for a single Frostwyrm. There is just no way you can practically go for a mixed armies because of building costs.
Give Mortar Teams Flares for free. Ridiculous upgrade for a unit that is so hard to get into your army anyway.
Suggestions
Opponents Inventory being viewable when you click on their Hero. You can make this a more skillful thing by requiring you to have a Shade, Gem of True Seeing or even a Crystal Ball in your possession. I think this would make the game even less luck based than it already is which can only be a good thing in my opinion. You will also see some subtle skills being utilized for instance, swopping important items in battle "secretly" or after you know your inventory has been viewed. You may even see important items being hidden somewhere for later surprise use >_<
The system for purchasing items from shops could be improved quite a bit so that when you want a new hero to be able to access the shops, you don't have to retreat the Hero away, move the new Hero in and then wait etc.
Demon Hunter when coming out of Metamorphosis or Mountain King when coming out of Avatar to not stop moving totally when changing forms.
More control over what side of your Town Hall you appear when using a Town Portal.
Because of the stringent use of Upkeep at high levels of play and the importance of not wasting food on non combat units I would like to see a more versatile system for food, for example, your first shade as Undead costs no food for upkeep, each subsequent one could cost food. Same for a Gyrocopter, your first Gyro can cost no food or 1 food and each subsequent Gyro can cost 2 food. I'm sure it can't be too hard to implement but it will definitely make Warcraft III much more diverse with little effort.
Possibly more for an expansion pack but I would like to see an overview of the entire game structure, so that we can try and get more creativity in Warcraft 3. The over reliance on Creeping in this game, makes a lot of games tiringly repetitive. The stringent use of Upkeep at high levels of play as well as the forced and false economy(5 Peons only) encourages optimal and set build orders with little variation or creativity. There is no way you will see games in Warcraft 3 at the moment reach quite the same standard of innovation and creativity that was witnessed in Broodwar which will be understood by those who know and understand both games to a high standard
Somehow stop Map Hacking once and for all! I find it strange that this is nearly the only hack that ever existed for War3/Broodwar/Starcraft and War2 which truly hurt all 4 games in a big big way. It is so sad to see it exist continually game after game release and nothing can be done about it. I would not mind downloading a tiny daily patch which automatically swops memory addresses breaking all map hacks automatically every 24 hours. This would totally stop map hacking on Battle.net and I'm sure everyone would welcome this.
I would like to see a small increase in the Speed Setting for Warcraft 3. Standardized of course but slightly faster than it is now.
An Auto Reply function from within the game similar to ALT+R in normal battle.net chat.
Observers on by default when creating a custom game.
I'm getting picky now but while we are at it how about making the Menu's appear quicker within Battle.net, the first time you see the chains move up and down is cool, but by the one millionth time, it starts getting slightly old and very slow >_<
Bugs
Unit pathing, Targit Acquisition problems have been there since release, maybe it is time they were tweaked a little to see if it is possible to get some improvement. Common problems seen :-
1. Forcing units/heroes to stop moving entirely by running a unit in front of them, you would never see this happen in Broodwar for instance because pathing seemed much smoother.
2. Moving camera focus back to your base and seeing all your Peons/Peasants actually not moving, and no, you are not imagining it, you are losing GOLD and WOOD income as this takes place. Eventually they start moving again, but you definitely lose out when this occurs. This is a problem with the engine or pathing and definitely has nothing to do with Lag.
3. Sometimes a problem occurs when moving your entire army, suddenly they will all just stop and you repeat the command because it seems like they have stopped, and you repeat again and eventually you realize that if you don't do anything they will after a delay of 1-2 seconds start moving again. Hard to explain this one, but if you have experienced it I'm sure it will be familiar to you.
4. Problems when focus firing with ranged units, sometimes for instance when targetting and actually right clicking a unit, they will actually just run up to that unit instead of fighting from a distance. And NO, I am not accidentally clicking the ground >_<.
5. Similar to the above, and this is easily reproduced because it happens all the time, when using Dryads for instance and you want to fight Creeps, sometimes, you will command them to attack via attack/move and they will not fight from range and will actually run close up to the Creeps within Melee range before attacking. This happens a lot! I mean, this would never occur in Broodwar with a Dragoon or a Marine, in fact come to think of it, that game rocked as far as unit acquisition/targetting goes. War3 is nowhere close to this standard for whatever reasons. I'm sure it has something to do with the change to 3D though
The Dragon Abuse Bug where you can force the Dragons to attack your enemies base on Plunder Isle which I know you are aware of.
Entangling a Gold mine from below a ledge which I know you are aware of.
Now, a lot of people say when I post about balance that I am whining about some loss or other but I truly do not do that. I just want this game as balanced as it is possible to get, somewhere close to Broodwar would be great! I am also a Random player, so I am way less bias than most >_<
Keep up the good work and I hope we see 1.05 sometime soon as well as an announcement about a War3 Expansion >_<