FOC Finals - Harefoot, the Scoundrel

Harefoot, the Scoundrel

Jacob Fyre - Assassin's Creed

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Stats

Melee agility hero:

Strength: 16 + 1.8
Agility: 18 + 2.3
Intelligence: 17 + 2.0

Base Armour: 2
Base Damage: 46
Movement: 300

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Rogue

What's good for the goose is good for the gander...

Passive: Denies give him 20/30/40/50% of the gold value of the allied creep.

Active: Invisibility
Duration: 20/30/40/50 seconds.
Cooldown: 30
Mana Cost: 50

Using Sabotage or Embezzle doesn't remove invisibility - attacking, using item actives or throwing an Arcane Bomb will decloak you as normal.

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Arcane Bomb

The finest weapons money can buy...

Range: 400/450/500/550
AOE: 150/200/250/300
Movement Slow: 20/25/30/35%
Stun Time: 0.1/0.5/1/1.5
Duration: 3
Mana: 90/100/110/120
Impact Damage: 50/100/150/200
DoT: 25/30/35/40
Cooldown: 20/18/16/14

Must be manually targeted at the ground.

When landed, every enemy in the AOE is stunned and takes the impact damage. They are then afflicted with the slow and DoT for the duration of the ability.

For example: level 3 - the target is stunned for 1 second and takes 150 damage immediately. They take 35 damage per second for 3 seconds, for a total of 255 damage. Once they recover from the stun, they are slowed by 30% for 2 further seconds.

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Sabotage

All disaster requires is a single loose screw...

Range: Melee
Mana: 80/90/100/110
Cooldown: 60/55/50/45
Duration: 45/90/150/240

Sabotage a chosen enemy item with an active component, the item will malfunction the first time it's used, if sabotage is still active.

Consumables will have their usefulness approximately halved. E.g. Healing Salve will only heal 200hp on use. Town Portal Scrolls will take twice as long to work, Observer Wards have half duration etc.

The general rule for item actives is that will fail to work and go onto cooldown when used - e.g. Mekansm.

However, there are a few exceptions which get their own rules:

Dagon - will hit the user for half damage.
Abyssal Blade - will stun the user for half normal duration
Ethereal Blade - will hit the user for half damage, not the target.
Bottle - will completely drain the bottle the next time a charge is used, half usual regen

Enemy heroes do not receive any notification or tooltips indicating they have been sabotaged. Allied heroes will see a symbol on the sabotaged item. Only 1 item can be sabotaged on a hero at a time, and only the first item if they have a stack.

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Embezzle

Fools and their money are easily parted...

Range: Melee
Mana: 200/250/300
Cooldown: 80
Duration: 75/100/125
% Steal: 25/30/35

Must channel for 2 seconds to place on an enemy hero. (you have to start within melee range, they don't have to remain there). Enemy heroes receive a tooltip notification that the ability is active 30 seconds after it is placed.

Once placed, you automatically steal a % of their creep kill bounties while it is active. The ability isn't removed if you die - but you don't steal anything while you're dead. You don't receive any of their kill, assist, tower, roshan, trickle or any other gold income. You would receive gold from creeps killed by Hand of Midas or Devour.

This ability cannot be stacked on the same hero, but can be active on more than one hero at once.

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Idea:

He's a very indirect hero, and very specifically targets 'greed' on the opposition team. Fast farming heroes can have their speed slowed and their gains partially stolen. Important items can let them down at key moments. Even denied creeps have an economic value to him.

He has pretty poor fighting prowess, but can become dangerous if he can steal enough farm. His powers are high risk-high reward. He has to get into melee range in order to use his abilities, so a wary enemy team may be able to take full advantage of this.

The design was challenging in that you're treading a fine line between making something clever and useful, and something that's OP and annoying. Still, that Alchemist is looking an ideal investment opportunity. Anti-Mage? Life in the jungle ain't what it used to be. Nature's Prophet - nature is indeed profitable.

Possible Roles:

- Trilane support. Adds some kill potential with Arcane Bomb, but most usefully can earn some money from creep denies.

- Roaming scout. Perhaps doesn't have enough kill potential to be a true roamer, but could be very irritating - especially to mid.

- Offlaner. This is pretty dodgy as his escape is quite weak and he's squishy. Theoretically could steal deny money.

- Played well, he could become reasonably rich for a support, making it easy for him to provide consumables and utility items for his team. Alternatively, you may even want to try and transisition into a semi-carry, given enough opportunity.

Obviously there would have to be some careful balancing, but I think he'd be a lot of fun to play and fill a new and developing role in the game...

I really like the hero idea, the idea of a thief hero is really nice.
I'm not really good at critizing hero ideas but I think it would be better to make sabotage "sabotage" a random item in a heroes item stack instead of the first item, otherwise you will just place a ****py item like a teleport scroll at the first slot and the rest at other slots.

But in general I really like the idea of this hero. Maybe he also lacks damage, he does have a strong nuke but I don't know it's cooldown, if it is spammable it will probably be to overpowered because of it's stun and slow but if it has a long cooldown the hero will probably lack damage and be kind of useless if he doesn't get a good item stolen.

Thanks for the feedback Frosto :)

Sabotage is a "chosen" item (i'm not quite sure how the UI element would work for targeting), so you get to pick what you want to hit. Bear in mind that canny opponents might intentionally use their actives during downtime to avoid problems, but it might also mean long CDs.

Thanks for the reminder with Arcane Bomb - have added a cooldown now. It's fairly usable, but not repeatedly spammable as it would be too strong.

As an agility hero, he could potentially gain a reasonably decent right click, if he can steal enough money, but he's deliberately designed to lack damage to make up for his utility.

It is a very interesting idea, but I unfortunately see it as fairlyunviable.

Allow me to explain. His Q, whilst incredible early on in the game, would need to be maxed as soon as possible to have a good amount of impact, and falls off HARD the moment you stop going for denies. As in, it becomes a completely dead and useless ability, unless you exploit with someone like Enigma with his Eidolons or something. The invisibility, whilst useful for applying his debuffs, does not particularly benefit him otherwise except for some ganks early on, and even then he'll require probably one extra hero alongside him (not counting the lane he is helping) purely because he lacks any early game killing power.

His W's pure utility does indeed make up for a small lack of damage, and allows him some extra ability to harass, chase and interrupt channels, and is in my opinion one of his 2 decent spells.

His E, whilst a cool ability concept, simply...Doesn't DO enough. The only four items that come to mind as worth sabotaging are Blink Dagger, Scythe of Vyse, Guardian Greaves/ Mekansm and Black King Bar. Hitting any other item with this move just isn't worth the skill slot at all, really.

His ultimate is the other decent spell I mentioned earlier, but even then it has some flaws, not due to what it does do, but what it does not. Instead of merely gaining a percantage of what they earn, he actually STEALS that amount. Which is fairly impactful, I will admit...Until around the 3 slot mark, where the potential target, depending on hero, will be moving around so often to farm that you may not be able to spare the time to hunt them down SAFELY and apply the debuff. Certainly, it lasts much longer at level 16, but then it really doesn't have much impact at all. This ultimate also does not affect kills on heroes, so carries that rely a little more on kills more than farm (ala Juggernaut, PA and their like) are not that affected.

However, getting onto my problem with his ult and my problem with the overall build of the hero is that...Past like 20-25 minutes, his spells and kit in general simply leave him with two effectively dead slots in fights, being his ult and Q, and his sabotage will not provide nearly enough to make up for his lack of...Anything, really. His W is great, and I have no issue with it at all. This hero's main advantage seems to be that he can siphon gold and generally gain it much easier, giving him items quicker than the enemy team might be able to deal with. But this is a massive weakness, as two(!!!) of his skills are absolutely worthless in combat, except from the easily countered invisibility, which provides no movespeed or damage bonus. His Sabotage, as stated, does not do enough to be worth a skill slot, and the massive duration just seems arbitrary. Planning on stopping a midas? Might help against Midas rush Invokers, but other than that it has no early game use whatsoever, except maybe to gimp the odd TP.

At around the 30-40 minute mark, where both sides are mostly full on items, this hero becomes almost completely worthless, as he has to rely on sheer right clicks, with no real way of backing them up. Jugg has Blade Dance, Void has Time Lock, PA is Pa, but this guy just has...Nothing.

So yeah, a cool concept, but past mid-game he just has too many dead abilities to be worth playing in favour of any other character with moderate game presence.

Thanks for very detailed feedback - of course it would all need to be carefully balanced and adjusted, but it's difficult to do without the ability to playtest.



I think of his Q primarily as a delivery mechanism for his other skills - he needs to be invisible to get close and use either Sabotage or Embezzle. It also allows him to scout and ambush effectively. The passive is a little 'bonus' to help swing the gold graph in your favour and open up his laning options - it's not meant to be Greevil's Greed.



Had to pack quite a lot into this to give him some impact. I think it actually gives pretty good level 1 kill potential as part of a trilane or roaming attack.



Refresher Orb? It counters that so hard I almost made an exception for it. Satanic? I think you're also under-estimating the early game impact of a value point in this - a tight mid battle could be easily swung by a sabotaged Bottle. Countering me with Sentry Wards? Oops that didn't last long, did it? That saving TP that would have swung a kill the other way? Yeah, guy was late...

I did consider making it possible to sabotage multiple items, or have it break multiple times...seemed too strong. The long duration is mostly to reflect the style of lategame play - lots of detection, often long gaps between skirmishes, so wanted it to be useful. Generally you'd deploy it on top of his ult for maximum effect.

Would agree it would need active testing to be sure though, it could be underpowered.



Again...it's hard to tell. In some ways it could be OP as hell. You could be not just preventing or gaining 25% of an enemy carry's farming gold at level 6...you're actively transferring it from one team to the other. This could be majorly broken. The SAFETY bit is really important. You're taking a chance going looking in the enemy jungle...but the playstyle certaintly encourages it.

I think it would be if Harefoot offered any kind of DPS scaling skill (go safe lane carry, get bonus gold for denies, steal 25% of enemy's gold too...), so I didn't. His ability to get gold is balanced by his inability to use it really effectively.

And yes, he's much less effective against snowballing heroes - but even they do tend to farm somewhat. And he was primarily designed as a counter to AFK farmers. He'll be somewhat weak against aggressive teams that prioritise ganking and pushing.

Certainly without items he'll be weak late game, but he's intended primarily as a roaming support and scout/gank assister. Just think though - he could potentially be stealing 35% of two enemy hero's farm incomes late game, and even though people will be getting slotted, they will have be slowed down substantially, and will be struggling for things like buyback gold...while Harefoot thanks them for the items he just bought.

- Thanks again though for commenting so much, I do take your points, and agree it'll be a fine balance to get a hero like this in good shape to be relevant without being OP. As you can tell, I've been a bit conservative in the design cos that ult screams "OP!" until you see the limitations of the hero.