[WC3 - Dots] General discussion thread II

[trancehime]

Hakkero's major problem is farming up the ingredients for it. 2x Stolen Grimoires (4200) is really something that is not easy to get, especially if you want it to count most (Mid->Late). For this purpose, I hear Sakuya really benefits from Hakkero; the main problem is Sakuya starts of insanely slow early game, and requires a constant stream of points in order to even farm up the components for it because really Hakkero's build-up is a piece of shit. I think anyone who's played with me in a game where I manage to farm Hakkero on Sakuya will know what I'm talking about.

Re: Lunar Bow
Lunar Bow is a really silly item, but I think what most people fail to realize is that the damage is physical, which means you CAN at least mitigate the shittons of damage dealt from Bow by stacking armor (or Agility if you're an Agility girl). The major complaint I think that's worth noting is that it's basically a super-powered Dagon, in which if it gets rushed by somebody or more than one person, they can pretty much instagib you and then you really can't do much about it unless you gank or you chain disables on them...

[Dr Rawr]

except for the part where you need about 20 armour just to reduce is by 50%~ so if the bow does about 500 damage its still a spammable 250 damage hit every 20seconds. also bow is aoe, scales, super range, decent mp cost for an int. i dont think you should try comparing it to dagon seeing as it can reach much higher damage. last thing, every game ive seen with lunar bow, who ever gets it first seems to win. also getting armour to counter an int, but its usually also have a nuke that does spell damage....

[Pesco]

Brownbeta got a bow.

And he lost :V

[Dular]

Tried it myself on a Sanae with a fully upgraded rocket as well and I was late game, so I was doing about 600 damage with the bow.

... I think I prefer the rocket if I had to choose between the two.

[Dormio Ergo Sum]

Well, I was going to save this for once the week ended, but since people seem to be posting about it now.

First of all, bow is relatively easy to farm and every item inside the buildup is beneficial to an int.
On top of only requiring 4k gold, the build up consists of 500/500/500 (Lunarite), 450/500/150 (Yagokoro Doll), 400 (Fruit Knife), 1000 (Lunar Landing Rocket Manual).
In other words, it's an extremely easy buildup.
But most people aren't complaining about that, so let's move on.

The nuke. It costs 120 mana to cast, which is nothing for most ints.
Assuming that an INT rushes it and gets it during the early/mid phase, they should have roughly 50 INT at that point, which means that the bow is dealing 340 damage before reduction. Most people should have around 1~1.5k HP (2k for STR) at this point, but relatively low armor. Which means that you get a nuke that should do roughly 1/4 of the enemy's damage that is spammable.
It only takes 165 total INT to reach the damage of a level 4 Gungnir. And 165 total INT is not that hard to get.
It scales rather well to the lategame, assuming that people don't get armor.
"Oh, but you can just get armor to counteract it." A problem here is that, by getting armor, you're only counteracting a single nuke. Ints don't usually rely on auto attacks and have several other nukes, so armor should be pretty useless against everything else they do.

And then, with a nuke like this, it should be hard to aim, right?
I mean, Gungnir travels slowly and has that weird hitbox and Nue's Arrow has that windup time and doesn't reach as far as Gungnir.
Well, the Lunar Bow's nuke has neither of these things.
The arrow travels quickly, is fairly wide, hits multiple units, and has no windup time.
In other words, the only thing that should be giving you trouble with aiming the bow is the fact that it's an item and therefore its hotkey is far away from the rest of your skills. (Unless you use third party programs to remap your keys)

So, uh, yeah. I dislike the bow.
The question is, though, is the bow as stupid as the only other item to get banned? (Camera)
I think that, at this point, it's borderline leaning towards yes.
It's definitely up there among the stupid items, and I would definitely like to see it nerfed. Perhaps the INT modifier could be reduced to something like 2.50x?

[trancehime]

"Oh, but you can just get armor to counteract it." A problem here is that, by getting armor, you're only counteracting a single nuke. Ints don't usually rely on auto attacks and have several other nukes, so armor should be pretty useless against everything else they do.

Armor counters most hard-carries that rely on auto-attacks to do damage, and I have noticed that in our community, Corruption isn't a very popular item as opposed to several months ago. Armor also mitigates creep damage late-game. Armor is incredibly useful, so I'm not sure why you're looking at it from such a narrow-minded perspective. The reason why nobody ever actually invests in armor is because half the time you want to get stuff to kill faster, because ~*~killing is good~*~, except when you're the one getting killed and everybody forces their own builds half the time. Remember a recent game with PX where he had Tewi and was tankier than Tenshi because he had 30+ armor and after that began to stack HP? Yeah, eHP is a really frakking big deal in DotS and eHP isn't just stacking HP, it's also armor stacking. This is why I say Agility heroes have it easier, because they get high natural armor scores.

errata:

except for the part where you need about 20 armour just to reduce is by 50%~ so if the bow does about 500 damage its still a spammable 250 damage hit every 20seconds. also bow is aoe, scales, super range, decent mp cost for an int. i dont think you should try comparing it to dagon seeing as it can reach much higher damage. last thing, every game ive seen with lunar bow, who ever gets it first seems to win. also getting armour to counter an int, but its usually also have a nuke that does spell damage....

Except 20 armor isn't very hard to get - Myon Balloon; okay you're done. Most girls have high natural armor scores in the first place, so I'm not sure how reaching the 50% benchmark is a big deal. Actually, if anything, I'd complain about how incredibly easy it is to get for what it does - 1500+1100+400+1000 (4000) - is really freaking cheap for something that has the potential to deal 70% of almost anybody's life and 4000 PTS worth of items is actually really easy to get given that kind of build-up... Also, Dagon is pretty much the ONLY thing you can compare Bow to, and Bow is pretty much superior to it in all ways simply because it scales! If it never scaled, or had a nerfed INT modifier, then it'd pretty much be on par with Lv5 Dagon. And we already have Scarlet Rocket, which is the token Dagon of DotS anyway.

Again, "armor to counter an INT" - I say armor counters a lot of shit in this game; inanely high tower damage, inanely high creep damage, auto-attacking hard-carries, etc.

... I think I prefer the rocket if I had to choose between the two.

Well Rocket has this thing where it stuns people.

Lunar Bow is designed just to outright kill people. I think most people would take the latter.

[Dormio Ergo Sum]

Corruption isn't a very popular item as opposed to several months ago.

lolwut? The reason why you don't see corruption as much is because most people don't like to pick the AGI carries that would normally use it, since almost all of them are so stupid.
I didn't bring up team composition because that can vary wildly. I mean, if the enemy team has a lot of rightclick carries, then of course armor will be great. If they have a whole bunch of nukers with a few bows, what do? And you're making the assumption that the ints won't be nuking you down with magic damage. Remember, bow is just a small addition to their plethora of nukes.

And on the topic of Tewi, there's also the part where her ult reduces incoming damage by 1/3.

The SDL has this thing where its buildup is worse that the Bow's, costs more, and is rather useless until higher levels.

[trancehime]

I didn't bring up team composition because that can vary wildly. I mean, if the enemy team has a lot of rightclick carries, then of course armor will be great. If they have a whole bunch of nukers with a few bows, what do? And you're making the assumption that the ints won't be nuking you down with magic damage. Remember, bow is just a small addition to their plethora of nukes.

the only major and actually popular candidate for bow who has a bazillion nukes is Patchy.

Eirin just has Game of Life which, while it DOES hurt like a mofugger, is easily run out of (unless you lag or you're just dumb). I have seen Amra try to go for Bow on Hina, but I haven't really seen it do much more than 450+ damage in the late-game... When you actually get Bow is a big deal too. I'm not trying to say that it isn't ridiculously dumb but some of the things you're telling me are a bit hard for me to believe, especially since I've never actually seen a dedicated nuke-team in for-fucking-ever in DotS (at least in any games I've played here) ... There's almost always at least one or two carries on the enemy team.

Re: SDL
I got a Lv3 SDL in 17 minutes. As Hina.

It is NOT hard to farm for it, meng.

[Dr Rawr]

which leads us to the same point we need a myon and zun glasses/green dam to counter heavy nukers like remi or byak who both have high int and deal large amount of spell damage. why should i have to devote every game where some nuker buys a bow and need to waste 2-3 inventory slots just to not die in 10seconds from them.

a similar game ive had before, ww was mystia and for some reason was able to dps all of us to death. it wasnt because she had killing items, all she had was 2 tacticus and a sukima. the reason she was able to do so much was because of her aspd she got. saying armour lowers the damage sum~ is also narrow minded, yea it can lower the damage but having crap tons of aspd is was agi carries have what most others dont have. ever see a 6 lunarite eiki? able to ruin people just because of her being able to attack so fast.

also note the thing about most hard carries in dots is that most of there auto attacks that amplify there damage or just get by armour so no it doesnt really help against them or to a degree where they deal so much damage armour doesnt matter

im pretty sure remi,byak,eiki,koa,kaguya and any other nukers in that range deal enough spell damage/ have enough int to make lunar bow hurt(note hakkero is typical for any of those also)

last note tewi has that aura thing that reduces damage by 44%

[Dormio Ergo Sum]

Re: SDL
I got a Lv3 SDL in 17 minutes. As Hina.

It is NOT hard to farm for it, meng.

I'm saying that it has a worse build up than bow and is more expensive. Getting that first 5~6k item within 20 minutes is not that rare.

which leads us to the same point we need a myon and zun glasses/green dam to counter heavy nukers like remi or byak who both have high int and deal large amount of spell damage. why should i have to devote every game where some nuker buys a bow and need to waste 2-3 inventory slots just to not die in 10seconds from them.

And Rawr cut me but that's pretty much what I was going to say.

last note tewi has that aura thing that reduces damage by 44%

Oh, I forgot it got buffed again a while back.

[Dular]

Alternatively, we could bother SiG to bother the dots devs to make it.. Say.. Cost 20% total mana or something.  The power will scale, but so will the cost.  Every int hero using skills runs out of mana pretty dang fast.  After a minute of flinging my spells as a late game patchy(Like, 3000mana), I'm down to 0 instantly.

[Helepolis]

Enjoy the bow until end of the week, because it is returning into the ban can. Until these dumb devs do something about it, but we already know the answer to that.

Also, SDL is more "fair" item in comparison because it got nerfed few versions ago. SDL used to hit like a truck, remember?

[CloverNaght]

suddenly after motk problem for short time, many posts comes
anyway wall of text go

I'm trying Yuyuko. Which one is better, control rod or adamantine? Hakkero might be out of the question, because I can't farm 6000 points.

>yuyuko
>farm lily adamantine
>lolgg

Re: Lunar Bow
Lunar Bow is a really silly item, but I think what most people fail to realize is that the damage is physical

more like scythe problems. Many STR users whos underfarmed farming that thing same as underfarmed ints farm lunar bow and expect they can do zomg shit lolfail

Tried it myself on a Sanae with a fully upgraded rocket as well and I was late game, so I was doing about 600 damage with the bow.

shes a bad lunarbow user for me dunno why

Corruption isn't a very popular item as opposed to several months ago

its true i only uses corruption for hatate momijay and youmu

also low hp high armor=low EHP
high hp low armor=not so big EHP

[trancehime]

I'm saying that it has a worse build up than bow and is more expensive. Getting that first 5~6k item within 20 minutes is not that rare.

I'm pretty sure SDL is just the Fruit Knife and the Manual and the recipe. And the recipes themselves only cost 800. So I'm not sure what you're quantifying as "worse," to me it just seems like you're hating on SDL just because you require 4000 gold to attain its maximum potential... Furthermore, 800/SDL level really isn't as bad as you're making it out to be. And again, you guys make it sound like I'm defending Bow; I'm not, I'm just trying to reason out some of my views on it.

>Getting that first 5~6k item within 20 minutes is not that rare.
In bolded - the most important point I want to get across - in practice, getting all sorts of expensive shit quickly is really damn easy here (for some reason).
This kind of argument sounds like it'd be sound on paper, but in practice, people DO get all sorts of expensive shit quickly. The fact that Lunar Bow is much cheaper than SDL just cements how fucking stupid it is.
THAT is my major complaint towards Bow. If you're going to make an item do that much ridiculously powerful shit, at least make it ridiculously hard to get.

also low hp high armor=low EHP
high hp low armor=not so big EHP

That's why you get high HP, high armor.

u dum

[Dormio Ergo Sum]

I'm pretty sure SDL is just the Fruit Knife and the Manual and the recipe. And the recipes themselves only cost 800. So I'm not sure what you're quantifying as "worse," to me it just seems like you're hating on SDL just because you require 4000 gold to attain its maximum potential... Furthermore, 800/SDL level really isn't as bad as you're making it out to be. And again, you guys make it sound like I'm defending Bow; I'm not, I'm just trying to reason out some of my views on it.

Wait, it's only 4k? Oh, they changed the price when they nerfed it, right. Forgot completely about that.
Wait so are you for or against bow. Your stance is really confusing to me, here.

[trancehime]

Wait, it's only 4k? Oh, they changed the price when they nerfed it, right. Forgot completely about that.
Wait so are you for or against bow. Your stance is really confusing to me, here.

I'm against the bow but not because of what it does, but because it's so easy to get FOR what it does.

Really, I've lost hope on the developers actually properly balancing their item numbers, so I just go with what's there. But for the sanity of the other players, it's especially important that such ridiculously broken items need some ridiculously hard requirements, right? It's only fair.

[Helepolis]

Ye, I was also under the impression Hime was not defending bow, but more like having a general debate about it (unsided). Explaining both the good and bad sides.

Regarding armour/HP against bow: I was going to say: "can't block what you don't have". Building HP + Armour isn't something you do at #1 option. Even tanks don't built tank items because you will do shitty gimp damage mid game. (inb4tanksaresupposetotankandnotdealdmg). I, myself,  am not going to spent money on HJbug + myon and be cute mid-game or "prepare myself" against bow. Only Kaguya does that kind of shit. As an STR user, I rush 9 out of 10x Scythe. As INT I rush ghgm/stopwatch depending on what we need. I don't play bitch AGIs so screw you :V

In average farm games, you get your first expensive item (scythe, ghgm etc) around 25min. If you got fed, you will get it below 15 for sure.

If you're going to make an item do that much ridiculously powerful shit, at least make it ridiculously hard to get.

Pretty much this. Hakkero makes up for the bonus because its 6000 (like Michael Jackson). Bow does this not. The 42% godly AS and active == broken item == dumb.

[CloverNaght]

That's why you get high HP, high armor.
u dum

i was just clarifying it
ANYWAY THANURIS IS THAT YOU
also balancing lunar bow is p hard i bet even icefrog got headache trying to balance that shit if bow exist in dota

[Helepolis]

Shit items remain shit. You can tie a ribbon to it, but it will remain shit.

There is no way bow is able to be balanced, because they try hard to make it an OFFENSIVE item. The whole idea/concept of firing off an item piercing and requiring little skill to pull off is a major fail. Even if they give bow a 60s CD, it would remain a shit item. We don't need a Lunar Bow in dots. If they would remove it from the game, I would go: "Nothing of value was lost". Use SDL more if you care about ranged damage items.

[Captain Infinity]

You can't balance items like Lunar Bow, yeah.

Everything about it is conditional to the point that it's impossible to make it not too powerful and not too useless.

I'd go into more depth about it as I have in the past, but I think everyone knows that I was always of the belief that the item didn't belong in DotS. At all. Much like DrRawr doesn't belong to a group of doctors. At all.

And as for items for INT heroes, depends on which hero. There are generic builds for each hero but yeah. I don't see any INT hero really needing DPS items like Watermelon Sword.

[Pesco]

Imma just say we should balance the game by upping our standard of play :V

Really, we're a smalltime playgroup that's afraid of new stuff. I think I've only seen one or two kills with bow shots. Not much in the way of being poked in lane with a bow. So
                             

[Dr Rawr]

So youre saying we should balance a game by allowing even more op things? Sound like dots dev logic

[Dorakyura]

I don't like these koreans  , picking all melle carrys against Iku, Medi and Merlin, welcome to public games

[trancehime]

I don't like these koreans  , picking all melle carrys against Iku, Medi and Merlin, welcome to public games

Actually, I picked Medicine after they already confirmed.

It's because I really fucking hate carry teams like that, so I intentionally counter pick because I'm an ass.

Imma just say we should balance the game by upping our standard of play :V

I think I've only seen one or two kills with bow shots.

You haven't played enough games with rushed Bows, then. I played a game recently with M-Reimu (Patchouli) and Thanuris (Eirin) on my team, and they both got Bows, and proceeded to demolish everybody with them. :V I think it just widens the gap in skill between players and causes some intimidation towards those who want to enjoy a fun game.

There's nothing stopping you from playing on Gayrena if you want to play on No Man's Land terms, anyway.

[Helepolis]

Pesco u b trollan.

[Pesco]

No Hele. From a mod's perspective, why should only the lower end of players be catered for? I don't have to like the opinions of people who play every game to win, but their say is just as valid.

[Dr Rawr]

if people want to play around with the bans we got theres always gayrena.

most of us who have been here longer or are experienced all seem to know that bow is a pretty gay item.

its up to the mods on who they want to agree with and decide if it should be banned or not.i dont think they should take majority

[Helepolis]

No Hele. From a mod's perspective, why should only the lower end of players be catered for? I don't have to like the opinions of people who play every game to win, but their say is just as valid.

From a level designer / scripter / danmakufu / map editor point of view: A good editor, always tries to ensure pleasure (gameplay) above sorrow (greed). Pleasure flows from balance, good gameplay.

You cannot compare a 'mod' to a full scripted game like DotS. Different elements, different styles.

TL DR: Lunar Bow is not (as judged by many players) a vital item for the gameplay of DotS. It does not add game play. It does not add any vital strategy (such as disable items). What Lunar Bow adds is pure jerkness in the form of retarted game play. Which is for any mod, game, level, mutator considered: bad

[Pesco]

Mod as in us moderators of this section.

[Dr Rawr]

Also note the only thing that scales as hard as lunar bow is youmus ult, and we all know shes gay tier agi