What do we do with the Bounty Hunter, what do we do with the Bounty Hunter?

Early in the mooooorning.


So yea this hero sucks, there i said it. Why does he suck now and what needs to happen.
It is a hero with very little to no teamfight contribution who isnt that good at getting much out of the offlane since he only has a plain invis. He isnt a strong laner who can beat many heroes in a 1v1 situation. He cant really fill any other roles apart from a pieliedie style support bounty. Which is highly situational too.

What is the hero supposed to do?
VERY early ganking, kind of the same timing as enchantress. If you dont make your early tining count then you will fall off and wont have enough burst to set up kills. Compared to other setup ganking heroes like nyx he will be inferior after 15 minutes.

Disrupting the enemies economy. Now this is what made him very viable around the TI3 period for example. Around that time you ONLY saw trilanes. Either offensive or greedy pulling trilanes. Early roaming supports were way less common as they are now and duallanes were pretty much only for scrub pubs.
Also heroes got less passive gold gain and the medium camp was the pull camp, so supports relied on pulling to get gold, and it also gave much more. Onr of the main reasons alliance won TI3 is because they were extremely good at getting more gold out of the jungle then their opponents.
This is where bounty stepped in. He could disrupt those pulls by stealing their creeps away, bodyblocking camps, and harassing supports.
Those games were literally an economy race untill they started fighting later into the game. (It became so ****ing boring and i praised icefrog for 6.79)

Right now supports roam a lot, and bounty isnt that strong at coming in and turning around the fight. Duallanes are also very strong, and bounty isnt strong at duallaning or fighting them.

What is there left for him to do? Harass junglers as a semi offlane support i guess...

Something needs to be changed, he offers almost no utility, and even his only utility of trying to give your team a gold advantage was nerfed with the rubberband.

He is kind of like broodmother and techies, they can give your team an advantage, but the game will kind of become a 4v5. But with bounty even that 'CAN' isnt that certain at all.

I didnt get much reaction at my funky idea in that changelog i made, but i wonder what you guys think of the hero and what needs to happen.

I know that Bounty Hunter sucks, this is even discussed on PD. The hero needs several buffs to be viable. The only thing he can do in a team fight is, track all enemy team and sit back. He's not good at close combat in team fights.

Id rather have shuriken replaced with something actually usefull then just plain buffs. The bouncing shuriken also just seemed like a desperation move to me.

change his invis to a movement speed buff (like ur change log.)

also change his passive to add a longer slow... the current one isnt long enough.

I propose a complete rework!

First Skill : stays the same

OR

First Skill : dagger Throw (NEW SKILL)

Gondar throws a dagger at the target enemy, dealing damage and slowing (slow from second skill will be removed) the enemy.
Gondar loses a % of his attack damage, but if he uses second skill on the enemy, he pulls the dagger out, dealing extra damage and regaining his lost damage and reducing cooldown by 8 seconds.

Range : 900
Attack damage lost : 80%/55%/45%/30%
Dagger damage : 100/150/200/250
Pull damage : 50/70/90/110
Slow : 30%
Duration 6 seconds (maybe 5)
Projectile speed : 1200

Cooldown : 30/25/20/15
mana cost : 100/120/140/160

Second Skill: The bane of Soruk (NEW SKILL)
Gondar leaps a short distance towards the target and deals damage and slowing for a short period.
There are two components to the damage, one is static and and another is variable.
The variable damage is Proportionate to the missing health of the target enemy.
Variable damage capped at 500 (?).

Leap range :500/600/700/800
Constant damage : 50/75/100/150
variable damage : 10/20/30/40 damage increase per 100 health missing
Slow:30%
slow duration : 4 seconds
Cooldown: 23/18/13/8 seconds
Mana cost :100/125/150/165

Third skill : stays the same, Gondar gets a movement speed buff (equal to or less than that of Clinkz )

Ultimate skill : Stays the same.

So how's it guys? you like it?

The idea is to basically change bounty hunter from a Pseudo carry (pls no battlefury/deso ********) to a true utility ganker with insane kill potential with the correct application of his skills.The kill potential is somewhat limited by the high cost of his skills.

kody my bro, me likey teh 3rd skill.

now he kill escaping heroes.

IceFrog will never do that.

I think that Bounty Hunter doesnt need a rework or huge buffs. The thing is he doesnt fit the current meta and is situational.
In the offlane at the early stage of the game he is supposed to soak exp and be unnoticed by the enemy all the time. He can gank very well junglers like Lifestealer or Axe.

Like said he is fine in the right game -> very situational
Your team should be gank oriented instead of teamfights and the enemy should have a jungler and not a safelane pusher cause he has no AOE to clear creeps/cant def towers.
His Track helps him and especially his teammembers to get a gold advantage of the supps over the enemies.
He shines at the early midgame but with the right items he can even snipe squishy supports in lategame.

One thing I have to say, is what does a Bounty Hunter bring to the field that say a Riki couldn't? Beyond Track there is almost nothing.

Riki transitions into a right-clicker better, he gives more utility with Smokescreen. Arguably more survivable due to Permanent Invisibility giving HP regen bonus. He can still gib supports really quickly in the late game with his Blink Strike charges.

Bounty Hunter just feels like his does nothing to me that somebody else doesn't do does better. Maybe if you have an uber ganking line-up, but even that gets hurt by like 5 manning.

^ Riki doesn't give tons of gold to his entire team. True, Riki has better right-click potential from his skillset alone, but you're forgetting that Bounty has twice his farm with Track, so in practice it's comparable. As the game goes late both are semi-carries anyways, really good for solo kills and team ganks but almost no teamfight presence.

Problem with Bounty Hunter is that he's really a hero for 5-man roaming. The hero needs to move with his team and look for pickoffs. It's not very good in the current meta because of all the AFK farmers. However he synergizes really well with pickoff heroes in general, especially carries like Phantom Assassin, Spectre, Chaos Knight etc who are far better at farming heroes than at farming creeps in the first place and who'll love the scouting, the MS bonus and of course the easy cash.

For me his mana issues are the biggest turn-off about the hero. Give him some INT/reduce his mana costs volvo pls.
Example : Shuriken Toss mana cost rescaled from 90/115/135/155 to 110 at all levels
Right now I want to go Soul Ring or Arcane Boots or something because of how mana starved he is. There's a reason why scrubs used to go Battle Fury, this hero has no mana! Drum or whatever just doesn't cut it, and orchid is a very niche item anyways. Or I'll just rush a skadi. Every hero is better with a skadi, especially when you're BH and you can have it at 16 minutes or something xD

Bounty doesn't suck. He's a good hero, he just doesn't fit the meta. When people will stop ricing and start making plays as a team, he'll come back.