SC2Mapster

Bug: If you cast Salv's Medusa Sting on a flying target, Salv will semi-permanently gain the Medusa Sting's crit buff on all his attacks. This doesn't fade even after several minutes or death. If you use Medusa Sting on a land unit, he will lose the buff again when the Sting's effect ends as normal.

Bug?: Salv's Medusa Sting cannot hit flying targets.

Bug: When starting a new game, about 10% of the time the interface bugs out and you don't get the prompt to choose a specialization(tank, healer, magic dps, etc), and the frames for Salv's quick healing or Psion's shield recharge next to player names, Marks of death, nuclear charges, etc. don't show up and are invisible. You DO get the dialog where you can select premanent level bonuses, though(+2% damage, etc)

Blaze is somewhat balanced. If he's always attacking with the healing effect (whatever it is that gives you 1.5hp/shields per attack) on Protective aura and you spend all of your money on armor, then I doubt you could die, and can probably beat the game. But the trick is getting the healing effect-until you have both shields and life regen from that, it's not easy. But yeah, once you get that, you can probably stay Fury Presence unless you're fighting a boss, then depending on your upgrades you might need to go back to the armor presence.

Only really played Blaze so far, and I love him. He's very hard for waves 1-4, by 11 you should be good until 21 (just farm the King Propagator, I do it every game. It takes a long time for good stuff, but it's nice) and after 21 then you'll be having some troubles again (well, I do). If you max T2 gun/armor/airstrike/season and you can't kill stuff on wave 21 then you aren't trying.

For those who think airstrike is rigged: it doesn't take armor into account. It's spell damage ("ability damage") and can easily be powerful, thus the 50 Fury cost (although depending on the build you can probably still spam it like its nothing)

@Bejita463: I didn't know you can heal people who are at full - never bothered trying (I use plus-icons next to names, these do not allow healing full health/shields targets).

If you can heal people with full health, then it's just silly.

P.S. Just did a Blaze game on hard. I tanked lvl20 boss in zerker presence, no assistance from anyone. Shields never dropped below half. I had full fury upgrades, around 2/3 through T1 armor and was in T2 air strike upgrades. Didn't even have to drop into def stance. Bloody sick.

@luckyo1: Go

I'm sorry, but you are wrong. Healing does not require that anything actually be healed, and this is very easy to test. Go into a solo game with Salv, bring up the stat menu, and start healing yourself. You'll get 3 exp every time. If memory serves, Salv has 245 energy at max level, and Psion has 265. Since both heals take 25% total energy, Salv can cast it more often.

@Resistance682: Go

If you think I did not understand that you were saying Blaze is not ridiculously stronger than he should be, it is my post that was not understood. To quote myself "I haven't ever played Blaze and had the people I was playing with think Blaze was well balanced."

I like Blaze too, but I don't understand how you can be any good at using him at all and say with a straight face that the things you can do with him are okay.

Extravex: if the point of air strike is to be somewhat random, but high damage skill, then it needs a very reasonable chance to either fully miss or miss enough missiles to actually not have a meaningful impact.

As it stands now at lvl 5, with 8 missiles the chance of it missing any single trash infested in strike range is essentially negligible - all small infested in range typically die with first two missiles, and in some rare cases where they do survive 2/8, 3rd kills off whatever is left. This is most likely because AoE range of each individual missile is larger then you probably intend, or perhaps because SC2 tries to auto-aim missiles?

I've noticed the risk effect of random spread only on airborne targets (overlord, overseer and the long range siege infested unit), that appear to be much less vulnerable to air strike, especially small overlords that tend to need 3-4 full air strikes to die. By comparison most gound SIUs die to 1-2 strikes late game and 2-3 mid games as they seem to sponge the damage of (almost) entire strike. This in spite of having more HP then small overlords. This may be something worth looking into.

Also, smaller trash infested absolutely need to live through about 2 missiles if random effect is to be felt at 8 missiles. As it stand now, you one-two shot them, which is why people can afford to invest in armor early - the aspect of "overkill" comes into play here, allowing for more freedom in choosing your spec.

@Bejita463 On the topic of exp gain, healing and shield healing requires damage taken. Psion is better here because shields are the thing to go first. Also because of blood based life/shield gain from attack talents most players will not take all that much damage you can heal.

First of all, let me say that I just registered here to say that I really appreciate the hard work you did on this map. It's definitely one of the best out there. I've great fun playing it and I'll eagerly wait for future versions. Thanks Etravex :)

Concerning Blaze, I've tried Gachatar's strategy, and was astonished how absurdly overpowered it was. This is no theorycraft, these are simple facts. And no, you don't have to wait 5 hours to annihilate everything :D I invite everyone, in particular immature and dense posters like Resistance682, to just try it and see by themselves before speaking non sense and being rude towards informative users. JUST TRY IT.

I fear a simple moderate "DPS nerf" won't be enough, but I suppose we could try this way and starts from there. At some point, with such a high fury generation, you can just spam Airstrike non stop, which is just absurd. A fury and/or a cooldown increase along with a DPS nerf would be more appropriate, in my opinion.

There is also the survivabilty issue. It seems that Protective Presence is more effective than expected, is it working as intended ?? Seriously, asides from a few SUIs - which you can easily handle with other skills - you are hardly ever in danger.

Once again, in the end, that's just a balance issue. This map is awesome, and I hope you'll keep updating it :)

Cheers.

@Resistance682: Go

You still don't get it, do you? Airstrike's damage doesn't just jump to 8*10k from zero when you put the last upgrade point into it. It scales linearly until then just like every other skill does. Which means that if AS does 8 times the damage of other skills maxed out, it does 8 times the damage of other skills early game with 5 upgrades, 10, and so on. And from my experience SIUs are hit by about 5 missiles at average. Larger (mutated SIUs with the green aura and huge model) are hit by all of them, just like most of the bosses. And with your convenient grenade's debuff it's actually around 150k damage.

@Resistance682: Go

And as I already said, you need an extremely small investment into armor to be viable as a tank, thanks to protective presence more than DOUBLING your armor. You don't need a single armor upgrade until level 15, and even at level 30-40 you only need about 6-8. Sure, that's still an investment. But for losing about 10% of your AS damage you can out-tank Seifers, provided that you got the Desecrator blood skills, which you'd get anyway for the insane life leeching alone.

And although airstrike is a bit random, from my experience it's very evenly spread in practice. I've never seen two missiles falling to the same place so far. From visual confirmation, about 90% of the spell targeting cursor's area is always covered for any given cast. Plus, each missile has a relatively large area, and even the smallest infesteds are hit by 2-3 at average.

@luckyo1: Go

And you're right, you can't fix stupid.

You clearly don't understand the fact that airstrike hits random radiuses and does not guarantee and all-kill, nor can you survive alone with just airstrike. Have fun getting rid of blitzers with no weapon damage upgrade in waves 5+, have fun with your said "OP" airstrike. You don't seem to understand that Blaze is paper without his armor upgrades (which are dismal, 0.2 or something per 195 minerals until you hit 1 armor per 750 min, which you would spent on airstrike instead).

Remember: you don't have enough money for multiple specs, and most people definitely don't play for 5+ hours. And you must be playing with stupid scrubs if you're dwarfing everyone in experience by using Blaze.

That's right, you can't fix stupid. You probably play with people your own level (aka, stupid people) which is why you think Blaze is OP.

Well let me tell you, I can out-EXP you with Salv & Seifer & Psion, possibly Fulgore.

There's a reason why I'm 25 and you're not, little kid. :)

@Bejita463: Go

Oh, I think you interpreted my post the wrong way..

I was defending Blaze, stating that Blaze is NOT overpowered.

@Etravex: Go

Airstrike does NOT do 100k damage alone. It does 11k13k MAXIMUM after 5 hours of gameplay.

4k-5k base damage + 100% ability damage upgrade + other misc. bonuses = 11k13k damage PER missile with RANDOM radius and RANDOM hit chance.

Not sure why everyone is complaining about Blaze - Dead Eye can take out SIU/bosses before they can even reach him, Salv has black hole, Krug has turrets, Fulgore has cloak+VS/DL, Psion has arc and lightning, Seifer has great tanking abilities, etc..

If ur hero is moving faster and stuff doesnt that mean his cloak and fly runs out faster? Just test out Psion with 3 Frenzy's so 30% CDR. His fly is 10 secs max and 15secs CD so with 30% CDR he should be able to almost fly infinitly. .5 secs of downtime. But this isnt the case. Psion still falls down with 5 secs left.

Blaze isnt the hero for EXP Seifer is... Theoretically i guess in a 5 hour game Seifer can get 30k and then some. This takes 5 hours of hard ass grind but the exp is there XD Healers are probly up there too depending on EnergyRegen.

@beerwolf: Go

Not actually true. Salv is 'the' character for exp. Max out energy regen with player skills, choose healer spec, and get regen from blood talents as fast as you can. Throughout the game spam heals constantly, and never allow your energy to fill up. You'll dwarf everyone's experience. This can be done with Psion too, but Psion has slightly more energy than Salv does, and both heals take the same percentage of energy. Salv pulls ahead because of this.

@Resistance682: Go

It doesn't matter how long the game lasts. Blaze becomes ridiculous extremely fast, and remains that way the entire game. This can be done with autoattack as well as airstrike, actually, though airstrike is worse and decidedly easier to see. You can completely replace Seifer with either build, and you ALSO do the same thing as Psion or Deadeye depending on which build you use, only you do it better. I haven't ever played Blaze and had the people I was playing with think Blaze was well balanced.

You aren't using him right if you're coming to different conclusions.

I'm not very keen on the whole "Kills for XP" thing, regardless of AFK'ers... AFKs I've yet to come across. As it is, it's unfair for someone to go Healer or Tank role, and lack XP in Mid game due to their AoEs no longer able to kill anything. And then single target DPS'ers like Fulgore will be lagging far behind... e.g. - If Fulgore's got 1.5k kills, the other DPS would be sitting at around 4-5k Kills... as an example.

As it is, currently, Blaze is THE Character to use if you want to farm XP.... he's almost ALWAYS the character with the most kills past mid game.

First of all, the most likely reason why exp gain is not shared is because of AFKing. If you share all exp, people will just go AFK mid-game and still get full exp. As it stands now all exp you get is from kills you do from auto attacks as well as damage taken during AFK.

I'm not certain I'd want a wave of AFK leveling players to come into the game en masse, and that's what's likely to happen if full exp sharing is implemented. For a great example of this problem on a much larger scale refer to: WoW, Alterac Valley AFK honor farming.

On topic of Blaze yes, you can have both. Technically, all THREE:

1. Fury generation 2. Armor + life leech + shield leech 3. Air strike damage

1. Comes from weapon speed, AoE shot, double shot and range attack upgrades. This should slowly trickle up from wave 1 and get close enough to be maxed by wave 10 at latest, usually some time before it. 2. Armor + life leech + shield leech: Blood (leftmost climbable tree) and stance will carry you as top armor target of the team on wave 1 - wave 15ish depending on luck with blood. At this point, you are already maxed on fury generation (pre-blood), and have a few air strike upgrades, and should start spending about 1/4 of your income on armor. 3. Air strike damage early on (wave 1-5) comes from skilling it up to lvl5 asap, potential blood upgrade (+5%*3 from attack, stackable) and your experience points. Wave 5+ you should start spending whatever you have left over from fury gain upgrades on this. After you max weapons, and before you start playing with armor, you should get several levels worth here as well.

Essentially, you are average on wave 1-5 (1-3 if you're lucky with blood) and use open season during these waves. After those waves, you exclusively use air strike and steadily become more and more deadly until about wave 10 where you finally max your fury gain and start to top everyone else by at least 100% on kills and exp gained.

If you still can't follow instructions above, or are so bad at this game that you still manage to not get above build to perform, then to quote Blaze "you can't fix stupid". Blaze's OPness starts around wave3-5 and continues throughout the game.

@luckyo1: Go

Your theory of airstrike and Blaze wiping out everything is only possible with pure offensive spec, not sure where you're getting that idea from that you can pay for both armor and airstrike spec.

Take into consideration most people don't play 5+ hour games and that you don't get 2k+ minerals per round as you would do in rounds 80+ or whatever.

You all need to take into consideration most IA2 games don't last 5 hours.

Not everyone will achieve max upgrades. Not everyone will get max bloods.

Taking THAT into consideration, Blaze is not OP. I don't care what you say - you can't have both airstrike spec and armor spec, and healing blood spec, armor blood spec, attack speed blood spec, or whatever until 5-6 hours into the game.

We're talking about 1-2 hour games that go from round 1 to maybe 40-50 at maximum. Not everyone plays extensively, and taking THAT into consideration, I'd say Blaze is definitely not overpowered, but rather his mob control skills (AS, OS) are very good if heavily invested into.

But what do you pay for having a pimped out AS/OS spec? You have no armor until round 60+, you need to rely on healers, you need to rely on Dead Eye / Krug to deal damage to heavily armored bosses as OS is rendered useless on bosses later on. But if you went AS, you still won't do great damage until you've specced Magical DPS + 10% Ability Dmg (x10).

Oh and did I mention you still have to run around to survive until you have good armor in round 80+?

Did I mention not everyone plays 5+ hour games?

@Oddlot0930: Go

Agree, completely. And Etravex himself said this before, that this is meant to be a team game. So, why not have shared exp? That would give people incentive to help newbies, etc so they contribute more and have more fun playing the map.

Though, afk'ing could be an issue. Issues would be afk'ing with randoms, in which case, a "kick afk'er" button could fix that. But that won't work for deliberate afk'ing when something like 2 people work, while 2 chill and get free exp. I suppose something like base.exp.gain*current.apm or something could work.

Although I'd prefer to see each job being able to sustain just as monstrous of an exp amount simply from doing their job. As in, SUI's being worth more exp for deadeye and fulgore. Heals and tanking moves giving more exp for salv, psion and seifer.

This might be kind of out there, but here goes. Could try reworking the system, so no one gets exp from trash creeps. SUI's and bosses give generous amounts of shared team exp, but which alone doesn't amount to much. The bulk of the exp will come from using abilities. Each will have an exp amount attached to it. Normal attacks will also earn some exp (.1 per attack or something like that). That way afk'ers don't get much for their time and those who play actively with abilities and proactively hunting SUI's get a lot more exp. Could even have bonus exp for completing boss rounds quicker. Just a thought.

What do you guys think?

The thing is though, Etravex will nerf blaze horrifically, then everyone will just complain that he's been fucked up. There's never going to be a winning argument. And I'm not griefing my team mates, I'm trying to urge people to HELP them. Tell them effective strategies for neutralizing certain enemies. If I play with a rubbish player, I try and give them as much advice as I can, so when push comes to shove, I'm not the only one taking kills. I want the people I play with to be better, so that I can have a more enjoyable experience. if this means I have to spend time mid-game explaining tactics, then so be it. If I see my team mates are lagging in kills/xp, maybe a salv is sitting there doing nothing, I might point out that while he's doing nothing, he can still get 3xp a heal even if the person he's healing has full health.

Maybe at this juncture, at least experience wise, it might be better to gauge it towards goals and playstyle. Such as boss kills, and continued with the ability xp gains. I think that you should just drop kills for creeps all together. Not permanently, but it's a short fix to players gaining MASSIVE amounts of xp while others suffer. Without killing being the objective for xp, you have more players using more skills, and being more tactical. Rather that just sitting there and getting kills while afk for an hour.

Would just like to confirm what the sensible people here are saying. Discovered Blaze's OP independently before this discussion went up.

I consistently get 2+ times anyone else's exp, independent of their skill level. Even lvl 20+ anything elses couldn't even come close to my damage output. Mind you, I was lazy and went attack power only for a while. To confirm: You do more damage than deadeye 1v1 (with maxed ability damage bloods goes up to 200k per salvo I believe, makes headcarver jealous) You heal faster than salv with the regen blood talent(1.5shield+life/10 times a second) You have more armor than seifer at less cost(take one damage from normal mobs, about the same from bosses when in protective) You have an ability that stops dead anything you want, besides bosses and roamers, while adding 50% damage (next best thing is psy charge, but even that isn't as imba) Your AOE does multiples more damage than anyone else.

I've tested all this multiple times. If you say he dies to imploders ... that's it actually, nothing else should even scratch you, then you should learn to target fire. Even then, I left my comp for several rounds at a time past 50, only to come back to him still sitting there killing stuff.

Of course this could be easily fixed, if the rocket's CD was increased to a solid 6 or 7 seconds. But as it stands now, the nerf on fulgore and deadeye was completely unjustified compared to this build. I don't think they'd come close even with the double barrel on top of the new weapon mods. And this guy doesn't even need unlocking : |

EDIT: would only fix the damage due to rockets. He'd still be an imba aeo tank pew pewing everything in sight with his chaingun, taking 3 damage from any boss with his protective. Got to 200 or so armor, put bosses to shame.