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This is basically a stun, but on steroids. Nobody wants to see their hero doing the exact opposite of what they're telling it to do.
Actually... This kinda exists in Wyvern's ultimate, i suppose?...
This can only work if it got a short duration - maybe like 4-5 seconds in which you can, uh... Cast ONE skill of the opponent for free mana and either not putting it on a cooldown at all, or putting it on a lower cooldown (maybe like half of the original).
Casted abilities are stopped once the enemy switches back to his team.
So: take control of an Enigma: cast blackhole, the process takes 2 seconds, so the blackhole exists for 2 seconds that remain, and goes on halved cooldown - so that enigma can't use it again right now, but can use it very soon after.
Also, Valve made a big deal about nerfing all the stuns, but it I honestly didn't notice much about the actual impact in-game. It certainly FEELS like there are still plenty of long stuns, as well as tons of other CC. Things like slows, disarms, roots, silence, etc.
Think about other big teamfight ults, like Void when you can't react in any way for 4-6 seconds. Or being silenced (Silencer) as a support while some carry murders your health. Or struggling in vain to reach the enemy as a carry while Treant roots you through BKB. Is my suggestion really worse? At least it's only single target, unlike very other ability we both just mentioned.
What Valve listens to isn't my only concern, but I will say that after the first siltbreaker style even I made a big post with a long list of 10 items as to why DotA wasn't good for a PvE world-of-warcraft style event, and what Valve could do to improve on it in the future. And when the next event rolled around, nearly every single one of my complaints had been addressed.
Was I the only person in all of DotA to voice these concerns? Doubtful. But the more people that talk about them somewhere, the more likely someone who can do something about it will take notice.
And secondly, I just enjoy the conversation. Talking things out with fellow fans, seeing what their reactions and thoughts and ideas are. For me, the posting itself is enjoyable.
It would be very toxic to control people to grif their ults/spells
I do like the idea of a hero that turns friendly fire on. Imagine how big the shaker ult would be. He could take out 10 heroes at once!
2. holy conversion: giving charges makes chen able to rebuild his lost creeps instantaneously, after your team had just spent 10 spells to clear them, which seems not nice.
2.5 holy conversion: only one unit to control? that is rather lame, that we had to buy dominator just to get more creeps. also you had facets for that.
3. divine favor: you give armor, they take less damage. you give health regen, they heal themselves when otherwise cannot. so you get a hero/creep that can tank tower hits for example? that's neat. now all you need is to get your creeps near you.. nice i can just recall them all here while i sneak in the jungle, then i put divine favor to them, then... wow i can push tower! all i need to do after that is to stay in safe area and don't get caught.. for that i don't need divine favor boost for me isn't it because i don't get attacked in first place?
4. hand of god: control enemy hero > drop their items > delete them!!
personally i think chen is just fine. in fact if you wan't to buff him you buff the creeps.. let's say increase stormcrafter mana capacity. that would be one hell of a buff.
Its not hard to understand why. Chen was probably my best hero back in the day with visage. I haven't or barely played it in years. Why? well whats the point? Teams in any rank from (what i have found) divine 4 and down don't push and get objectives. Players prefer to farm, delay the game for whatever reason, usually for kills and farm or just a poor mind set.
Chen is a push hero, end the game early type of thing. Player's mind sets are different as many do'nt understand the win condition. So chen is a big risk to play as a support these days.
The idea of a mass-conversion ultimate is certainly something to consider though. Maybe with a longer duration but a smaller area. So if you have time and map-space you can stack a camp several times, then have it all charge out of the jungle at the enemy at once. Or if you need to defend a lane that's being pushed, you can turn an entire enemy wave back on itself.
It would be absolutely hilarious, hahaha. A real rocks-fall-everyone-dies-armageddon-board-wipe moment.
Bloodthorn is like, a ~4500 gold item. It's not exactly an easy investment for a support hero with a single damage spell, and a lot of other buttons to push.
You can still have a cooldown on the actual use of the ability; it was more about letting the ability grow organically. Right now Chen can max the ability before 10 minutes, but at the same time most creeps are cannon-fodder past 15 minutes. So it's like Valve is struggling to balance against a very narrow window, and that's why there are a bunch of features to set floors (not really buffs) for HP and movement speed.
With charges, even if you maxed the ability early you could only only control a group of weak creeps or 1-2 large creeps, but then as the game went on you could slowly control more and more strong creeps, and even eventually ancient creeps.
Yeah I definitely wanted to talk about this more; sorry it's taken so long for part 2. Work has been hella-busy this week.
I admit that I hadn't really considered the effect of using Divine Favor on the creeps themselves, but I still feel like it's an overly-complicated ability that's trying to do too much with a single button. If these are really all things that Chen needs, then we need to find a way to spread them out a bit and focus on balancing them 1-by-1.
Also an excellent point- I had not considered destroying items when I made that suggestion. I would certainly be open to the caveat that you could use items but not move them from their slot, for balance.
Part of the issue that, as I mentioned above, the balance-point for that seems to be very tricky. The second half of the problem that it makes Chen WAY more dependent on micro than almost any other hero, and I'm not sure if the power-complexity-balance tradeoff can ever be fully resolved, as it stands.
Again, I feel like the balance-point has always been finicky, but since it really only affects a very small percentage of heroes, Valve has never wanted to expend a lot of resources making it more appealing. Which leads us to a chicken-and-egg scenario, where Valve doesn't want to waste time and effort on a niche playstyle, but at the same time that niche won't become widely popular until Valve makes it easier to integrate to a normal game.
I'd be perfectly happy if Valve put a little more TLC into creeps in general. Stuff like more active use of abilities, over-time scaling, possibly patrolling routes or more interesting lane-paths/variability, etc etc etc.
Yeah, I'm with you there- I see it WAY to often that people take "I can't fight without being farmed" mentality as gospel. Except that it's not about your personal farm so much as your TEAM's advantage. Show up to a teamfight, throw out a stun or slow from the back ranks, get assist gold. 9 times out of 10 I'd say it's more valuable than killing another neutral camp
If you have a great laning phase, but then just piss off to sit in the jungle, all your doing is giving the enemy time to catch up. And your supports can't push alone when there's no pressure elsewhere because the entire enemy team can rotate.
But this is turning into a more general rant instead of just about Chen, so I'll stop there, lol.
Again, again, I'm willing to admit that the balancing creep-control can be tricky, since most of the time they are meant to be cannon fodder. That's why you've got weird peusdo-buffs with mechanics seem almost nowhere else, such as "minimum HP". Because the ability, if maxed first, is OP, and if maxed last, is UP, and there's barely any middle ground.
That's why I think it would be easier to switch to a more easily understood percentage-based (+25% HP, or something like that) system, but have a different way of limiting
how many and what power creeps Chen can control.
Basically, lets say that the max level of creep that you can control is tied to the tier (point in) Holy Persuasion, but you also need 1 charge per creep-level, and the ability itself only gives you 1 charge per tier. But you get more charges from every kill and itself. So if you put 1 point in Holy Persuasion right out of the gate, you can control one level-1 creep. A second point lets you control level 2 creeps, but you still only have 2 charges, so you have a choice between two level-1 creeps OR just one 2nd-level creep. Alternatively if you leave it at level 1 but move around the map using penitence to get assists, you could have a whole bunch of charges but all your creeps would need to be level-1. You see where this is going, I think.
That way even if you maxed the ability as fast as possible, you can only get one strong-ish (medium or large creep) until you start earning more charges from fighting. BUT, then as the game progresses, (and assuming you're doing decently) the ability continues to scale, with every fight adding to the number and strength of creeps you can control. All without needing further buffs from talenst, shards, etc, which frees up those resources TO DO OTHER THINGS.
[as written, the above suggestion is not balanced- there aren't enough options of level 1 and 2 creeps on the map to make it viable, for starters; its just for illustrative purposes]
Chen really does have a LOT of healing- in a game where Valve mostly tried to avoid dedicated healers (because it doesn't want stalemates where 2 groups of unkillable tanks square off) Chen has basically 3, once you add in his Scepter ability.
Martyrdom is yet ANOTHER mechanic (sacrifice a creep to heal a target) that I would classify as "mechanically interesting but tricky to use". It's the kind of thing I might stick on a hero who otherwise had pretty simple abilities, but not on Chen who already has so many buttons, HP bars, and cooldowns to keep track of. It's like you're driving a stick-shift race car, and now every time you want to activate the nitro-boost you need to solve a rubick's cube. If you're racing a guy in an automatic, your car might technically be faster but he's only got 2 buttons to push, lol
And from the matches I watched last week, Scepter doesn't seem to be a popular item on Chen, which isn't ideal for any hero, but especially not a support.
ANYWAY, thank you all for your input- I'm glad that people take at least a passing interest in this sort of thing. I'll try to get the the rest of my thoughts posted today, so y'all can hopefully see me start to tie some of these suggestions together.
COMING SOON: Facets, Talents, and Scepters!
Anyhow, without further ado, lets dive right in and start with…
TALENTS (mostly ‘cause they are easy)
I don’t have a ton of specific comments here at the moment, except that I really feel like Chen’s talents are a missed opportunity for helping to differentiate builds. Right now Chen has only the 1, but you can definitely see in some heroes how several talents that all buff one ability, or you can definitely see a set of talents geared towards some conceit, like tanking/survivability, damage dealing, or support.
Chen’s level 10 talent is a choice between a buff to Penitence’s damage, and a cooldown reduction on Divine Favor’s teleport. Aaaaaand Dotabuff tells me that 90%+ of people take the damage buff. Which strongly supports my previous comments that’s there’s hardly ever a real good reason for Chen to be separated from his creeps. Especially not so often that the cooldown-reduction is worth taking.
The only other comment I have at this time is that the level 25 talent is a choice between a buff to Hand of God healing amount, or that the ability applies a strong Dispel. Of the 2, I think the dispel is tactically more interesting, and could be quite nice throughout the early and mid game. It’s a pity that most matches end with only the mid, and maybe the hard-carry ever getting that high level. Almost certainly never a hard-support, and even if the game drags on that long, most carries will already have ways of dealing with debuffs, etc. This is a feature that I would love to see swapped to something else, like a lower-level talent or maybe Chen’s shard.
Next up on the agenda…
Stats! (and itemization, a bit)
Did you know that Chen is a Universal hero? I didn’t. Mostly because there’s almost zero reason for him to be, and no benefit derived from it. If you told me that a committee at Valve was sitting around, wracking their brains for heroes to fill out the Universal roster with, and someone said “he lets use Chen because it won’t have any effect whatsoever on his gameplay and no one will ever notice” I would believe you 110%, no questions asked.
I’ve never seen a Chen go tank (Strength), and there’s not really anything in his kit to make that viable, heals notwithstanding. And the only Agility builds I’ve seen are because someone randomed him and didn’t want to deal with all the micro, so they just went right-click-nuke, trying to make the best of a bad situation.
Anyhow, nearly all of Chen’s most popular items are aura-based, and boost things like Armor, or Regen, or give you lifesteal (Vlad’s), bypassing Str, Agi, & Int entirely. And many of the best items for Universal heroes are those that boost all stats, like Skadi… except Chen isn’t a right-clicker. Or maybe Scepter… except that’s not a popular item on Chen. Or the S/K/Y trio… still not a right-clicker, or much of a nuker. Or Dagon…except that Chen already has to many buttons to push. Or maybe (what else builds from ultimate orb?) Lotus orb, maybe… not bad but again it’s yet-another button to click in combat, on an already complicated hero. Linken’s sphere… again not bad, but Chen likely has other sources of regen, and it’s expensive on a non-core hero.
In fact the only all-stat item that I can think of that really syncs with Chen’s kit is Holy Locket. And that’s sort of small-potatoes in the course of a whole game.
Going back to Scepter and Shard for a minute, I really do think adding Strong Dispel to Chen’s shard would be a nice change, especially if instead of dropping on Hand of God(his ultimate) it added to a non-ultimate ability instead. Either moving Hand of God to non-ultimate status when we replace it with something else, or adding it to Divine Favor/Penitence as part of the buff-effect. And we can move the control-ancient-creeps to a talent or something (maybe the level 20 talent) and it’ll be part of the more organic charge-based scaling for Holy Persuasion.
Moving on to Scepter, as I said it’s unpopular. Largely, I think, because the effect is both complicated and un-interesting. It gives your creeps the Martyrdom ability, so you have YET ANOTHER button to push in combat, and adds a third heal to Chen. In a game that normally doesn’t like healers.
Oh and also it makes the HP-regen aura from Divine Favor global for your allies, but by the time you get Scepter, I doubt most people will even notice. Passive auras tend to be at the their strongest early on (like CM’s was before they nerfed/reworked it), and by the time any Chen gets Scepter, most of your allies will probably have more HP regen just from their stats.
So what to replace it with? Well, if we can condense and simplify some of Chen’s other abilities and free up on key on hotbar, I think this would be a good place to add a new ability (because lets face it, Chen is always going to be complicated so lets just lean into that, so long as at least SOME of the complexity is a choice).
This can be our new Divine Favor ability, which as I described before should have the ability to both recall Chen’s creeps to him as well as send them away from him, with the same rules as TP boots. I think having the “drop creep army into an empty lane to push” feature is less OP when it’s shackled to a 4k+ gold item.
Miscellaneous
I wasn’t sure where else to drop this, but one of Chen’s abilities (Holy Persuasion I think) gives you gold as if you killed a creep when you convert a creep. But I don’t think farming gold is really Chen’s problem though, especially since often the best place for him to be is pushing an empty lane where he doesn’t have to worry about the enemy showing up and murdering all his creeps. I think a better version would be to give you the XP as if you killed a creep instead, since Chen is currently almost always the lowest/second-lowest level player in a match.
Alternatively, I would love to see some way to REDUCE THE BOUNTY on Chen’s creeps. As I’ve alluded to several times, one of the biggest risks with Chen (especially late-game) is feeding the enemy with your horde. A level 10 talent that was something like “the gold bounty on Chen (who is often a slow, squishy support) is reduce by 30%; this effect is doubled on minion’s controlled by Chen”, would be really nice, IMO. It would definitely appeal to people trying to learn the hero, but that’s OK because there are already plenty of talents that make a hero simpler or more complex, or favor one sort of playstyle or skill-bracket.
Facets
Moving on, I save the juiciest bit for last because this is where I think we can make some real qualitative changes to Chen.
I was surprised when I first saw the DK had 3 facets, because I thought all heroes would just have 2. So you can imagine how double-surprised I was to see that Chen had >>5<< facets! ….
Except both DK and Chen suffer from the same lack of creativity in design, in that all of their facets are just slightly different flavors of the same thing. For DK it’s splash damage and riders on his attacks, for Chen it’s summoning 1 different kind of creep.
Except it’s not even a specific creep- the ability it gives you has a chance to summon the largest creep with an active ability (usually the preferred one, I assume) or the lesser creep with the aura. Because being able to summon one specific creep at any time to your side was just too OP? (I have to say, I’m not buying it, Valve.)
Also, why are Wildwings & Golems not in the rotation? Did something think that 5 facets was fine by having more was just ridiculous?
So I want to reduce Chen’s facets back to, with one of them being Holy Persuasion, as described elsewhere, for everyone who wants to go full-in on the creep army. And the second Facet will be Summon Convert, so we retain a little of Chen’s flavor but it creates a whole new build, one in which the player can focus on Chen and doesn’t have to worry nearly as much about the micro.
I would also love it if this new version of Summon Convert allowed you change which minion you could summon over the course of the match, but toggling around the ability somehow (sort of like how Brewmaster’s Brewed Up allows you to swap between different buffs). Ideally in my mind Valve would come up with some custom creeps, so that “Centaur convert” (just a recolor of an existing model that isn’t that much work) had both the Centaur Warstompers stun and the other Centaurs armor aura. Most of the medium and large camps follow a similar pattern- one type of creep with an aura an a second type of creep with an active ability, so honestly meshing them seems like a no-brainer.
And since Wolves are currently the least popular facet, lets just say that all of the “converts” are versions of the large camps. That way we don’t have to worry about golems either, and we can add in wildwings and the pinecone people (who’s actual name I can’t be bother to look up right now).
One final thing- in order to have the creep scale decently without needing to buy a bunch of aura items (since we want a DIFFERENT build than normal) I think it should scale in line with Chen’s stats. Chen’s Strength makes it tougher, agility makes it hit harder/faster, intelligence reduces it’s ability cooldowns, etc. (which makes it a bit more like an illusion than a minion but DotA has done weird things before, anyhow…) And that way Chen might actually have a reason to value his Universal designation, and you can end up with a hero who’s a bit like LD or Enchantress- mainly core on themselves while occasionally leaning on a fairly powerful creep for backup.
Whew, that’s a lot. I’m going to stop here for now, and try to get back to this with a part-3 where I tie it all together with a more succinct summary of the changes I suggest, and less of the scatterbrained sidenotes about why I’m doing something or what pet-peeves me off.
With any luck I’ll get my part-3 up before Act 3 for crownfall drops, lol.
I feel like these are the key aspects of Chen:
1. Controlling multiple creeps.
This can't go. I know I've said to myself over and over something like "dude, if you want to control creeps that badly, use Enchantress, she's just way better than Chen." But even then, I haven't really played Ench, and always pick Chen when I want to control creeps. So yeah, very defining aspect here. Can't go away.
2. Buffs and heals.
This isn't really pronounced for the hero. And similar to above, I've analyzed the numbers on all of his abilities other than Holy Persuasion. What I learned was, of course, not shocking at all. His Q only slows by that much, only good at the buff aspect, but then, the buff is very narrow, only affecting those attacking that target. His E has changed many times, but when it only was a passive ability, its numbers are pretty low, AND IT EVEN GOT NERFED. I was shocked as heck, this ability already has poor numbers, and it got nerfed? Like, wut? His R has the same issue, or a severe one for that. The numbers so damn low, it's like clicking a Mek, but global, BUT IT HAS A WHOPPING LONG ASS COOLDOWN. Like, screw it, why it needs to have that long of a cooldown on top of being weak. The thing is most likely gonna heal one hero or two for full value, then regenerates like three or four heroes for full value. Meanwhile, Zeus ult is the opposite of this ability, and it mostly do 100% value, plus it reveals the map a bit, reveals invis heroes, disables blink daggers for 3s (which can be huge).
Ahem, so, point 2 is also his key aspect. Let's keep it there. Also, aside of having Centa creeps, there's the line of having neutral creep auras and having them sit idly somewhere near teamfights. Those auras are pretty wide, they have 1200 radius if I'm not mistaken. This also contributes to this point of his main aspects. Don't forget that Chen pretty much buys aura items, so yeah, more buffs.
Now, let's get to the abilities.
Holy Persuasion
The spell still does the same thing, take control of a creep, but with these gimmicks instead of the old ones:
a. The converted creep is always healed to full HP and full mana.
b. Its movement speed is set to 320/340/360/380, and HP to 500/600/700/800. (Higher HP gets lowered. No bonus to damage.)
c. It becomes ancient. So, it can't be converted again by Chen's enemies (except by Helm of the Overlord). Devour can't target it unless it can target ancients. And various creep instant-kill effects can't kill it instantly.
d. No matter how it dies, its gold and XP bounty 100% goes to Chen, wherever he is on the map. But if Chen is dead, he doesn't receive the XP, only the gold. This no longer applies if the creep gets converted by Helm of the Overlord.
Max number of creeps and max creep level that can be converted remain the same. Cast range remains the same. But mana cost goes down to 90/100/110/120, and cooldown to 15/14/13/12 seconds.
Can be targeted on Chen to instantly teleports all units converted by Holy Persuasion to his location.
That makes his creeps less powerful, but has different upsides like allowing them to die with no drawbacks and disallowing enemies to easily remove them. The fun of having a neutral creep army, and the nightmare of controlling multiple units still exist, but with less power and also less headache.
Making this spell turns the creep into ancient also helps differentiate Chen with Enchantress. With this change, one can say that Chen's creeps are special, they can't be Midas'd, Mind Flaring them won't kill them instantly, etc. This kind of thing already exists in the game in the form of Chaos Knight illusions. Phantasm is pretty much the same as Naga Siren's Mirror Image, but CK can make strong illusions instead. In Chen's case, Chen converts creeps and turns them ancient, which is not what Enchantress can do.
Penitence
This one also remains the same, debuffing a single enemy by shooting a white magic. However, what the debuff does changes. Now it applies Break, Leash, and Muted to the enemy for 1/1.5/2/2.5 seconds, and all attacks directed at it can't miss. The spell also deals 90/135/180/225 pure damage when the magic hits. Mana cost is increased to 110/120/130/140 and cooldown is increased to 17/16/15/14 seconds.
The spell can also be targeted at units controlled by Chen (not necessarily through Holy Persuasion), except for heroes (i.e. illusions) and creep-heroes (for ability draft). Doing so will kill the target at the moment the magic hits it, denying the unit if it's not a creep from Holy Persuasion. When the creep dies this way, replenish Chen's mana by 110/165/220/275.
The idea behind that is to punish annoyances. Pesky passive? Broken. TP in front of your face? Leashed. Want to Manta? Muted. Random high ground misses? Can't happen. Magic resistance? Pure damage.
As for killing your own units, the reasoning behind it is the inability to choose which unit to replace in your "army". How it works right now is that the earliest converted unit get replaced when a new one joins and there's no room left. But how the heck do I know which one is the earliest one, amidst all the chaos that is Dota?
Divine Favor
Completely reworked. Now is an active ability without any passive component.
Targets an allied unit. If targeting self, heal self by 100/160/220/280. If targeting another unit, heal Chen and that unit by 75/120/165/210. If the target is a creep, completely heals the target (Chen is still healed by the smaller amount).
Cast range is 800. Mana cost is 100/120/140/160, and cooldown is 22/20/18/16 seconds.
Has some synergy with the new innate (down below).
Hand of God
Still does the same thing, except that it no longer grants regeneration. This spell also resurrects dead allied creeps within 1500 radius from Chen, and fully heals the ones that are alive. Lane creeps and any creeps that were permanently controlled by any allied player get resurrected. Creep-heroes are unaffected. Neither are siege units.
Heals heroes for 200/275/350 plus 5% of their maximum HP. Also applies basic dispel to all affected units (heroes and creeps). Mana cost is unchanged, cooldown is 110/100/90.
Unwavering Faith (new innate, replacing the current one)
This innate is a passive with this effect:
- Whenever Chen heals a hero excessively, the nearest allied hero from that healed one gains an all damage barrier equal to 60/70/80/90% of the excess healing. Has global search radius. Barrier lasts 6 seconds and stacks independently.
Levels up with Hand of God.
This innate fixes the problem with overhealing. Healing a unit exceeding their maximum health still has some value with this innate.
Aghanim's Shard
- Increases the HP set by Holy Persuasion by 600.
- Allows Holy Persuasion to target ancient creeps.
Aghanim's Scepter
- Grants a new passive ability, Guidance.
- Increases Holy Persuasion creeps' ability levels by 1.
Guidance
Every positive aura that affects Chen also affects all allied units in the map.
Well, this has been lengthy. Thank you for reading.