Sando's 6.85 Patch

I nerfed Lesh/SF/Storm/Qop and essentially all the stack farmers in my version of the patch, but I'm still not really satisfied with it.

I think the supports themselves who are camping mid to stack should be nerfed by no longer getting any gold and XP for doing nothing and sapping assist gold and booty runes...not the cores.

Supports stacking camps for mid heroes is nothing new. However ES/Lion and similar supports doing nothing but camping mid and stacking camps and still getting 15 minute blink out of overbuffed assist gold and rune camping...that's definitely abusing the latest patch changes.

i think the XP gain is fine, the gold gain is more out of control IMO, assist gold and gold when you are behind is a bit out of control i think.

It's a good TA discussion guys, but yeah, going somewhat OT. It does hit on one of the main points of these patch notes though - farming stacks/efficiency. This is what the TI5 playstyle was all about, core heroes with strong flash farming/AOE hitting big packs of jungle creeps very efficiently, while their supports/offlane controlled the creep waves and tried an occasional pick off.

I'd like to go down the route of sorting out the individual heroes Tim, but I'm not sure it's possible. You have to systematically wreck every hero with some scaling and a spammable nuke. And even then, you're leaving it to every hero with physical spamming/AOE instead.

If you look at the core heroes who got picked/banned almost every game in the TI5:

Storm Spirit, Shadow Fiend, Leshrac, Gyrocopter, Lina, Queen of Pain...

They've all got very spammy AOE nukes that let them farm like crazy. Give em a bit of mana regen, they can be efficiently knocking over stacks left, right and center. They don't need much equipment to do it, and can farm extremely fast, very early. The only reason AM got picked up was that he farms damn fast too, and does very well against a lot of these heroes.

So, yeah, we could nerf all their AOE nukes...but I don't know how to do that without ruining these heroes. The likes of Leshrac and Lina are basically AOE nukes, they dont have much else. Shadow Fiend with Shadow Raze stomped? Even then, you just end up with the same thing but the next rung - Dragon Knight, Necrophos, Death Prophet, etc...

I think you can't put these genie back in the bottle of excessive jungle play...while I like a good stack as much as the next man...what purpose does it really serve? Why is it important that you can quad stack? Does people farming stacks really add much to the game? Is it something that should be limited for the good of the game? For me, farming neutrals is essentially the most passive kind of play possible - you're not even visible on the map like you would be if you were farming creeps in lane.

There are lots of variations of course - maybe you can stack up the ancients multiple times...but when you kill them, they don't respawn for X minutes equal to the number of stacks you killed. It's a one off piece of effiency that gives you a boost before you go fight.

all there heroes got a big buff at some point and weren't nerfed or not appropriately.
i still dont see it, nerfing stacks as a whole makes for much bigger unsolvable problems.
its not even needed to nerf the stack clearing itself, you just nerf another part of the hero because multiple strong points make the total package too strong. QOP didnt become OP because she can clear stacks better, she got OP because of blink buffs and BKB piercing ult. same with lina, BKB piercing ult. shadow fiend, minor buffs along with new invented playstyles.

if OD was too strong right now you dont nerf his laning phase because that is what he does, you nerf something else because oops, they game him massive splash damage or way lower CD or something.

also did you really find the games dull? the games were pretty great.

No. Go buy some dust and stop picking the ******** magic meta carries :P

ES sitting mid and just stacking camps isn't new, he did exactly the same thing in 6.83. Because he disuades ganks on fragile mids like Sniper and Shadow Fiend, and for SF well he gets back the time investment through the stacks being farmed, not through the aoe component. Likewise the ES passive applies mid pressure, because you have to be weary of Fissure. That almost makes it more likely to bring a support on the opposing side in to compensate.

He actually camps mid less now given that offlane ES is a thing.

And the other reason you see supports sitting mid a lot now is because of the rise of BH - He stalks around mid, so it's natural to have a more defensive support there to even things out.

Tbh, I think the thing you need to do to change how mid functions right now, is make Ganks more efficient uses of time. Not sure how to do it, but it's the sort of change I'd make. Make ganks more efficient, and make stacks a little harder to farm for these sorts of heroes.

No, see, that's exactly why glimmer is absurdly OP.

Of course you buy dust against imba cape. But it's not enough.

What's the cooldown of imba cape? 16 seconds. What's the cooldown of dust? 1 whole minute.

See, if a scrub Sniper buys a Shadow Blade, you buy dust on your carry, jump him and kill him. Ez. And once he's dead you simply don't have any kind of invis to worry about so you're fine.

Now with imba cape, you jump the sniper, dust him and kill him (already I have to mention that the Sniper didn't have to pay a single coin or item slot for the ability to turn invis and force you to pay money and a slot for dust, which is already incredibly broken). But once you killed him, 16 seconds later, the enemy supports casts glimmer on *another* hero, and your dust is now on cooldown so you can do literally nothing about it.

Essentially glimmer overloads your dust cooldowns. This item means that you're facing mass invis every game, and that you have to buy a gem otherwise your carry gets endlessly kited.

And don't even get me started on single target magic burst and the irreparable damage it did to Necrophos or shotgun Morphling. That's 2 heroes in the dustbin unplayable tier, nice item volvo.

And did I mention that the item costs literally nothing, has the best buildup ever, and gives natively 20% magic resistance to supports which stacks with the active making them almost immune to magic damage?

See, Shadow Blade can't be cast on other heroes and has a 28 second cooldown. Imba cape can be cast on any teammate with the most broken cast range ever and has a 16 second cooldown.

Something has to be done.

EDIT
@ caine : First off, can you learn to quote properly? These badly closed quotes kind of make your posts unreadable. Second, if you want to talk about ancient stacking TA, as I said previously please make a separate thread instead of hijacking Sando's. So I'll only continue this discussion if someone makes anouther thread about it.

Refraction level 4
Meld level 4
Psi Blades level 1
Psionic Trap level 1
Total : level 10.
Blink Dagger + bottle/wand + treads or phase

TA doesn't get any stronger than that. Her skills don't scale beyond this. And the way refraction and meld work means that she doesn't need items to deal heavy physical damage. She has non-scaling bursty skills, her skills deal the damage not her items. That's why you rush blink because that's the only item she needs.

By the way you just said Dendi is not a decent TA player, because he rushes phase blink and wrecks the game. Sure...
[/quote]

I'm not saying you shouldn't gank once you get blink. She is strong then, but also easily killed.
Also, I'm pretty sure waga is better on TA than dendi.
Furthermore, you won't always be able to pull off the 4-4-1 build. What if you are laning vs huskar or something? You need more lvls in psi blades.
Doing the ancients takes maybe 90 secs in total. Push out the lane at xx:4x when you go for rune and stack the ancients because they are in your way. By stacking at mins 2,4,6,8 you are going to have a 5 stack (probably a 4 stack because you might screw up). That's about 1000-1200 gold. If you don't want that gold I don't know what to say.

If you go bottle, phase, aquila, blink you are going to get that blink at around 12-15 mins. So doing the ancients should happen before you have blink and it will help you massively. Not to mention ancients are a good way of coming back from a bad lane.

I'm not going to post anymore on this topic, because if you don't understand why doing ancients is good now, you will never understand.

Has anyone thought that the cooldown on Shallow Grave is OP? I mean, being able to use it twice in fights seems pretty OP. Maybe a cooldown nerf would do fine?

Black King Bar+ Satanic+ Shallow Grave= Two lives +5 seconds.

If the arguement keeps going, I'll close the thread.