6.86 Wishlist

It's like 2 weeks before a "major"(according to Valve) patch comes out and still no OSFrog simulator threads which I like so much? That's a shame. What do you wanna see(aside from obvious Pit Lord) in a new patch?

Arc warden.

Will probably be nerfed to an unplayable condition anyway, It's kinda hard to balance this hero, especially if you are Iceforg.

Doesn't matter. Doesn't change the fact that you can stack rapiers and just push with your ultimate.

2 weeks? Really? On top of my head :

- Nerf offlanes. e.g make the safe lane tower less diveable, make the T2 tower closer to the T1, remove XP from bounty runes, make safe lane creeps easier to creep block, buff stacking and pulling in the safe lane...

- Nerf stacking for mid heroes. Put radiant camps farther away from mid lane to balance out with Dire, and screw up with their stackability. Nerf assist XP. Again, remove XP from bounty runes. Supports who do nothing but sit mid all early game and stack should get zero XP.

- Give us another item to deal with evasion that isn't MKB, now that sheep no longer disables evasion. Especially one that is viable on INT carries. Example : octarine.
Alternatively, make a ~2500 gold item for supports that does that.

- Nerf Wyvern, Shaker and Dazzle. Only 3 supports are playable these days because they're just good against everything. Cold embrace, fissure and grave all need major nerfs. You want a fighting meta? Nerf defensive supports, especially those that are already way too strong.

- Remove that ridiculous nerf on solo kill gold. Why would you make solo kills give 100 less gold than team kills? Do you want to see mid heroes AFK stacking or do you want to see them look for kills?

- Nerf glyph. Remove the ability to deny towers just after glyph : it's cheap, skill-less, and boring.

- Nerf sentries. Now that they stack with observers, supports can literally spam them all over the map with no cost. Less duration pls.

- Make Morphling, OD, ET and Naix finally playable.

- Arc Warden pls. Pit Lord will only be fun once he gets in CM, so if he's released in AP it won't change much to pubs anyways. If you fix midas, rapier and stuff on AW he can be balanced I think. After all he's not more OP than Tinker is.

- Make more aghs. Make an upgrade path to aghs to make it finally viable on carries

- Nerf Tiny's push. No seriously, 75% damage to buildings = OSFrog pls. All the hero ever does is rat : his manfight is weak and his teamfight presence is meh because he gets kited harder than naix. Make him a better fighter and a weaker pusher.

- Fix killstealing in Overthrow. Make the kill go to the highest damage source and not to the guy who got the last hit. Last hitting is only a decent mechanic when there are only 2 teams, when there are more, it just encourages waiting outside of danger and stepping in for the KS all game long. Right now it's essentially the only way to win and it's stupid as hell.

- Buff items (atos, orchid, diffusal), as well as skills (open wounds, astral imprisonment...) to disable dagger.

- Buff drum. Not especially cost-efficient, weak active with a low charge limit, and dead-end item...outclassed by other items on most heroes these days, kind of a weaker point booster on any hero that goes aghs or skadi.

- Rebalance Void's chronosphere. Reduce the cooldown back to 115/100/90, but make damage from any source not controlled by Void deal 60% less damage in chrono. Aghs removes the damage reduction completely (on top of the other effects).

Few key points for me (a lot of the rest I agree with):

Small nerfs or changes to these heroes would be good, as you say, they're fitting the current meta extremely well due to their adaptability, but I'd keep them reasonably small. Maybe shorter duration on Fissure and Shallow Grave at lower levels, shorter range on Cold Embrace at lower levels, something like that.

Nerf Sentries - no way!! They're already a huge overhead for supports - seriously delayed or denied items like Glimmer, Crest etc. I'd trade you a cheaper cost for a shorter duration and/or a short cooldown before they can be used multiple times.

Totally agree on some buff items/skills to screw with daggers more, kinda ridiculous how out of position people can get with being unless you have serious lockdown to counter them. It doesn't need to be horrible, but should encourage more careful/skillful dagger usage - not just, you can basically dodge everything that isn't an instant stun.

Other changes for me:

- Increase SF's Shadowraze mana cost and his int. Basically, keep the cost scaling, but make regen items less effective for him.

- Further Undying tweaks required.

- Gotta go - various other stuff!

Oh boy. This'll be fun.

At least 2 of these:
Pit Lord
Arc Warden (needs one more nerf, but the spark wraith nerf was a pretty good place to start, no more autowinning lanes for you Warden!)
Axe Immortal + Comic
Zeus Remodel/Arcana
New Voice lines for heroes for when they buy the new items (Leshrac: "Octarine Core!")

Heroes Buffs:

Techies: Mine Bounty reduced from 10 to 5. Remote Mines damage increased from 300/450/600 to 400/525/650 (Aghs to 400/600/800)

Axe: Battle Hunger cooldown reduced from 20/15/10/5 to 5. Culling Blade cast range increased from 150 to 260.

Outworld Devourer: Arcane Orb now deals 100/200/300/400 bonus damage to all non-hero targets. INT gained from Astral Imprisonment is granted to illusions. Essence Aura now uses Pseudo random distribution

Faceless Void: AGI gain increased from 2.65 to 3.

Phantom Assassin: Crit amount from 2.3/3.4/4.5x to 2.7/3.6/4.5x

Sniper: Shrapnels slows and damage now stack fully and recharge time from 55 seconds to 45.

Oracle: False Promise cooldown from 80/60/40 to 50/40/30. (no captain's mode yet)

Storm Spirit: Static Remnant activation delay from 1 second to 0.6 seconds. Overload slow duration from 0.6 to 0.9

Lifestealer: Rage can now be cast while stunned.

Batrider: Sticky Napalm mana cost reduced from 20 to 15.

Bloodseeker: Thirst scaling from (75>25) to (85>30)

Sand King: Armor increased by 1. Caustic Finale is no longer a UAM.

Dragon Knight: BAT from 1.7 to 1.6 in both forms. Dragon Tail Dragon form range from 400 to 500 to match attack range. Frost Breath radius from 250 to 300, to match the radius of the damage splash.

Hero Nerfs:

Tiny: Craggy Exterior no longer deals damage, and the stun is now 1 second each level.

Doom: Doom cast range from 550 to 400, cooldown from 100 to 120/110/100.

Alchemist: Greevil's Greed no longer is carried by illusions.

Tusk: Ice Shards reduced from 7 to 5. Snowball launch time reduced from 3 to 2.

Windranger: Shackleshot mana cost from 90/100/110/120 to 120/130/140/150. Powershot mana cost from 90/100/110/120 to 120.

Shadow Fiend: Requiem of Souls mana cost increased from 150/175/200 to 150/200/250.

Lich: Frost Blast slow duration from 4 to 3. Ice Armor] movement slow now scales from 15/20/25/30% instead of flat 30%.

Winter Wyvern: Cold Embrace can now be ended by purging it.

Earth Spirit: Rolling Boulder speed with remnant reduced from 1600 to 1400. Geomagnetic Grip Cooldown from 13 to 15. Added to Captain's Mode.

Hero Tweaks:

Leshrac: Aghs Scepter no longer increases damage, now it gives a second pulse nova, much like timbersaw's aghs.

Chaos Knight: Chaos Strike Armor reduction rescaled from 5 to 3/4/5/6.

Item Buffs:

Boots of Travel 2: Increases the movespeed granted from 100 to 120. Teleport Cooldown from 45 to 36.

Bloodstone: Recipe cost from 900 to 500.

Pipe of Insight: Now adds 4 to all stats.

Crimson Guard: Guard Cooldown from 70 to 60.

Rod of Atos now deals 20 damage to it's target.

Orchid Malevolence now deals 20 damage to it's target.

Aegis of the Immortal: Now warns you when you have 2 or 1 minute left on your aegis.

Item Nerfs:

Blink Dagger cooldown from 12 to 14.

Radiance: Recipe cost from 1350 to 1700.

Amusingly enough we do have a fighting meta despite having a tonne of defensive supports, it's probably a result of that that we see defensive supports. Like an incredibly fight orientated meta. We have done for months (6.85 was like bursts of hyper aggresion with a lot of stack farming and map efficiency in between)

But I agree; Dazzle, Winter Wyvern and Tusk need to be nerfed. Badly Not Earthshaker, that hero has become waaay less popular/successful since 6.85 and the era of aggresive dual offlanes hit. Maybe like a minor fissure nerf.

Tiny needs a nerf since he has waaaay too high a winrate right now.

Dual offlanes need to be nerfed, and arguably some safe-lane carries need buffing/rebalancing relative power levels. Since the carry pool right now is just eurgh in comparason to everything else.

Balance out mid-laners as well for similar reasons, minor number nerfs to the popular ones, minor buffs to some of the forgotten ones, except OD who needs bigish number buffs.

Oracle and Earth Spirit into captains Mode.

Lots of new items.

Again some minor nerf to stacking/jungle camps that doesn't kill the mechanic. Even if it's just raising kill gold/creep gold and lower jungle gold I'm happy with that.

EDIT; But no seriously, Earthshaker has gone from like 2nd most popular pick in 6.84 to like 12th this patch. That's pretty significant. And he's doing trash in the major.

Well he's doing trash as an offlaner, that's what I've seen a lot in the major. But like, who knew that ES was a trash offlaner? Everybody. Kappa.
I'm really talking about ES AFK sitting mid and babysitting their mid hero, roaming and stacking, and still coming out with a 15 minute blink with that absurd assist gold and XP. That's still just as strong from what I've seen. True his winrate is pretty low these days but for me the numbers are skewed by the fiasco of offlane ES.

Oracle in CM though, definitely. At least let the pros show us that he's good...because he is :)

You don't see the babysitting ES much anymore tho, and you haven't since like mid 6.84. In part it's probably got to do with mid match-ups being less volatile than before, and in part probably due to against these aggro duals that force tonnes of attention away from other lanes.

Even then, you can change that by just changing stacking, or assist gold not directly nerfing the hero himself.