1. Semi-inside joke. Pyro was a character in my previous map, Left 2 Die (renamed Left 4 Death because bliz stole the name apparently). Pyro was a marauder hero and he did his little fire jig in that game. So I figured may as well keep it in there for the few fans =P. All of the heroes in L4Death are cameo'd in this game. Ace, Dex, Pyro, Hawk, Rush. I tried to keep their abilities pretty similar to what they had in my last game, but within reason of porting to an arena kind of game.
2. Its hit scan. No travel time. I may increase the collision radius of the tracelines soon.
3. Yeah I actually kinda agree now that you mention it.
4. I'll look into it.
5. Thats actually a known bug with Ace that has something to do with stunning him while he's using Wild Shot, not related to pyro.
Keep in mind this game is in BETA, its been out FIVE DAYS, games like DOTA, have been out for YEARS, and are STILL NOT BALANCED.
Right now after rigorous playtesting I can conclude only one thing needs fixing:
-Rush: Probably the biggest issue right now is the fact his pull is completely unstoppable if you are hit with it. You can't reactively escape the pull if it hits, because it is un-escapable. I'm aiming to fix this relatively soon and make it so escapes break the pull if you pop it before the actual force effect takes place.
Also, the crater thing I was talking about earlier, I think it's Onyx's AOE bomb thing, the crater it leaves behind blocks a lot of the skill shots for some reason.
No, it doesn't, because its not even an object.
Also Forgebond doesn't slow/disable you because i changed it. Just wasn't a useful skill the way I had it.
1. will you add a cinematic to the beginning, and perhaps a little story?
??? No cinematic. Here's the story: Bunch of doodz go into an arena and beat the shit out of each other.
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2. will you add stories for all the characters?
Yes. Nothing too lore heavy. This is a fighter-esque game not the next installment of Harry Potter.
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3. which character is coming next, aegis or the firebat ? >:)
Pyro will be out in about 5 minutes.
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4. will we be having more archetypes, or we will just have the four roles (guardian, assault, psion, support)
Sticking to these 4 arch
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5. what is the percentage/flat amount of bonus damage counter classes get against eachother?
20% damage bonus towards their counter class. There's no penalty vice versa.
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6. will there be a solution for only four maps ;;
Until blizzard supports map linking online no.
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7. what is an example of an ex move? i am looking forward to those (other than rush's speed boost)
A couple examples of EX special.
Revolver: Sunder becomes Earthquake, still spawns a fissure but the stun lasts 3 seconds (instead of 2) and does more damage.
Rush: Psionic Grip becomes Death's Grasp, does more damage and roots instead of snares for 5 seconds.
Ezzerat: Detonation: Hakai (the snaring one) does more damage and roots instead of snares
Ace: All grenades become "Photon Grenade" which applies all 3 debuffs in the blast radius
Alseir: Glacial Strike becomes Cryoblast, a stronger version which roots instead of snares
Onyx: Lava Spire becomes Cataclysm, a larger radius version that stuns for 4 seconds instead of 2.
Dex: Drones become "Summon SABRE", summoning his pet mechanical cat to fight for 10 seconds. The tiger has a charge, cleave, and stun effect.
Sarina: Burst of Life becomes Burst of Revival, an instant cast version which heals for twice as much.
Hawk: Snipe shots become "Death's Gaze", a 0.5s cast version of lethal shot
Pyro: Shattering Shell becomes "Hell Rain", an AOE version thats hits all targets in the AOE with the shattering shell effect.
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8. is rush's tremor and psychic grab supposed to deal damage? i don't see that in the tooltips
They both do like 20 damage or so.
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9. is it possible to grey out some abilities on the right time and kind of.. make it a little clearer on tooltips? i don't remember hawk's stealth mentioning she could only stealth if she didn't engage in combat for 8 seconds, or that sarina's burst of life required 25 charges (it looks still available at 15 or 5, which is kind of confusing, would be helpful if it was greyed)
All stealth effects require you to leave combat for 8 seconds. That means no attacking or being attacked for 8sec.
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EDIT: I think i found a bug. Recently, i played on Valk Summit, and i tried to use Rush's psionic pull across the river, but the river just blocks it? Is this intended? Another comment: Is ezzerat supposed to chain stun? I dropped from full health to 0, and i couldn't do anything.
He can't pull through unpathable terrain. Also Ezzerat can potentially stunlock you to death. Use your escapes wisely.
The best advice ever given to me by a game designer much much more experienced than I:
"Your customer is usually wrong. The first mistake you can do is give in too much to the vocal minority".
Not to be a dick or anything, just I play my own game a LOT to get a feel for the overall balance of things, from all perspectives, if I see a reason to nerf/buff something I'll do it. If I see lots of complaints about X or Y then I'll look into it, but I'm still not going to change it if it doesn't need changing.
The hotkeys should be pretty intuitive. They all line up as your main attacks: ASDFG
If you put your fingers on the home keys as though you were typing, they're right there, in perfect line. The secondary abilities, QWR are the same for every character and they're right near where your main keys are.
They really don't have an easy way to adapt hotkeys in the editor, so unfortunately its kind of an "adapt or GTFO" thing. I'm not changing the hotkeys, and I think they're a relatively silly thing to gripe about.
okay ive played about over 50 games and hawk IS great, she is beast, but her risk is just way too high someone gets close to you, you miss your shadowshot, your dead. especially with ezzeret or rush.
Then she is working exactly as intended! Psions are generally high risk high reward characters in general. If you make a critical mistake as Onyx or Alseir, you're just as dead as you are as Hawk.
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one more thing about sarina: i find that dex does a better support job. burst heavily counters her. in team fights its always 2 vs 3, and your healing beam cannot take that dps. your burst of life will make you lose valuable time and you will lose overall more hp. however she is still the best 1v1er even against rush and revolver, all i had to do is run around, heal myself, dodge, spam w and salvation everytime i got triple stunned. then i popped ult, when they were low i engaged. i think the bandage type spell is a good idea, to patch up a lone dps getting pounded on, for more utility. though she is good when both teams are not fighting, where she has time for burst of life
1v1 is a Support should be able to handle a Guardian, simply because guardian dps isn't that high. I can beat Sarina as Ace though, pretty nastily I would add. And I can take a Dex very easily with Ezzerat, just because if he stops to throw nanomeds down, I'm beating on him pretty hard because of his immobility. I think the fact that Supports are working as I intend them to be, is a fact :p
I can only imagine the trolling people will do with Aegis (Sentry hero)...
@thebaron87: Go Simply, a hero that takes a whole lot of skill to use, but causes massive amounts of damage, is badass; some will try, some will fail, and some will succeed. Making it easier for one portion of the players isn't going to satisfy the whole of the playerbase. It's very possible to make everyone happy, though it requires either a lot of intuition, or a lot of knowledge to create that effect. ;3
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Having characters with incredibly different playstyles but also different levels of skill to play well is a great thing to have in a game. This leaves more dynamics and more options to the player. If someone really enjoys a specific character's style enough that they want to put the effort in to master them, it creates this subculture around the game. See for instance, Litchi or Carl in Blazblue. When you go up against either of them, you can't help but respect someone who put the time and effort in to master those characters. They are EXTREMELY hard to be good at, but they are extremely good characters when played well, and its always impressive to lower level players to see someone play a character they can't get a grasp on. This makes more challenging characters more rewarding for players who want to feel unique in their option choices, and also to make a bit more of a mysterious playstyle that much more awe-inspiring.
Its like any game you played, you see characters heralded as "weak" and "terrible" and then you see players dominating with them at high levels of competitive play. Like even in WoW...you never could disrespect a Hunter that was top 10 in his bracket...because Hunters (at least when I played in arena) were really REALLY hard to perform well with in high level arena play (Vengeful Gladiator #1 on Rampage BG in season 3 talking here for 3v3). You'll see a lot of people play the "easy" characters naturally because they're easier to pick up and easier to master.
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A time limit is a viable option; as earlier stated, 5 minutes would be perfect for matches with a kiting healer, Sarina vs. Sarina, or Ezzerat vs. Ezzerat . Having the outcome based on remaining health will take out many of the mechanics and connotative ties to what makes a fighting game enjoyable in the end.
Outcome based on remaining health though, there is no other way to really do it. This is, of course, assuming a round goes longer than 5 minutes. It really won't, most of the time. The addition of the First Aid ability for all heroes may change the metagame slightly.
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Agreed about fog of war; It would definitely enhance gameplay and require more tactics to function. Randomness is a charm for players. Allowing them to choose will make them see how many maps there really are, increasing the need for more maps; there needs to be a sense of mystery, background, and certain aspects uncontrollable to stimulate the feel for the game. Allowing choice will have people wanting to choose what their abilities are as well ;3.
Random factors are NOT good for a competitive game. Randomness shifts the metagame more to luck more than skill. The more random elements you add to a game, the less skill-based it becomes. I aim to completely avoid "random" at all costs when I design heroes. This includes the fog of war idea. Its not good, because you need to know what your opponents are doing, and see them on the map at all times, or it becomes too much of a guessing game and not enough of a predictive game.
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@EchoedRequiem: Go
About Sarina. One way to balance her is to allow a healing cap; however, that would cause disappointment for many people who seek to rely on healing (pretty much a foot to the face). Another way is to have many more abilities that work in different ways that require you to time them accordingly, pulling off chain heals; this would be a bit too complex and would require a lot of planning, however. Another way to balance her is to adjust her current heals to be more based on skill, than on healing output.
Which, the casted AOE heal is becoming. I noticed you really do have to sort of aim it (unless you're targetting yourself, obviously) to hit moving allies.
Channeling heal is fine too, since theres no ponit to make it aimed. Its a strategic decision and also just as positional, because allies can run out of range of it, and it also makes Sarina immobile, and an easy target. Decision making is just as much of a skill as aim, and I really aimed to make playing Support heroes more along the lines of decision-making skill than aiming skill, while keeping their overall healing power relatively "mediocre". Sarina does not have the capability to heal through direct constant damage on a target ally, the ally needs to assist her by avoiding getting hit, using CDs intelligently, blocking, mitigating some of the damage themselves to make her heals effective. This is what the Support archetype is based on. So in an element, for low skilled players healers will just destroy noobs. Its simple as that. In even skilled games, healers only soften the blow, and well timed bursts easily end a match before the healer can do anything about it. It comes down to who does "more".
Here's a better way of putting how I conceptualized the very concentric theme of every archetype:
Guardians: Almost support-like in that their abilities directly aid teammates. Rush's stun abilities keep pressure off their teammates by peeling, disabling, and being an overall nuisance to the enemy. Revolver's Sunder cuts teammates off from one another, and castling saves a teammate from death if used or timed properly. Neither Rush nor Revolver have very "high" DPS output relatively. They have mediocre DPS, but nothing that's considerably overpowering. Outside of their ULTS, they are not that dangerous other in the fact that they can cause you to be put into dangerous situations if their teammates are playing smart.
Assaults: Meant to do fast, high dps, with "okay" surviability. For instance, Ace's primary attack does pretty good sustained dps in comparison to Revolver or Rush. He will drop a target very quickly if you are good at aiming, and keep pressure on constantly. His range also gives him the ability to do this from a semi-safe distance. Ezzerat just rips his target apart, but he's also melee range, so if his target gets free and can move without much interruption, he's not doing much damage. He's also vulnerable to abilities that cut him off, such as Sunder or Psionic Grip. Because of this, his DPS output HAS to be high, because of the positional requirements to play him. He doesn't use ammo, either, so there's no need to reload ever.
Psions: Meant to do slow, bursty but extremely high burst damage. Alseir and Hawk are perfect examples. They both need to manage their energy but they can land burst combos that can decimate a target. The penalty for such abusive power is the fact that they drop like rocks to any focused attacks so positioning is always a requirement. Onyx is unique in that he's more mobile but his damage isn't up front. He can get a quick Lava Surge off, and run, and his damage comes over time. As a result, his burst is low, but he keeps pressure on by keeping DOTs rolling on several targets, making it hard to manage his damage.
Support: Meant to be more decisive and decision-based than aiming and predictive. I've specifically designed their abilities to coincide in this manner so that they have to constantly make good decisions, or be punished for it. Sarina can do some really solid healing, but if she's focused on, she has to focus on healing herself, and this means using 25 ammo for an AOE heal, using her escape ability to keep herself alive (she only breaks stuns, not roots or snares), and using her ult, which has been nerfed a bit. Once these are on cooldown though, her ONLY CHOICE LEFT is her AOE heal. Dex, on the other hand, has to decide between using his drones to control/pressure, or to heal. And the healing bot makes him immobile, if he is on the run, a nanomed will not get many ticks of heals off on him, maybe 3 or 4, tops. That's 66-88hp, at most. One of Onyx's DOTS does more DPS than his nanomeds do HPS on him even standing still. 2 Nanomeds will not heal through being constantly hit, but he also won't be dropping mags, which slow you so you can keep up with him if you keep him snared or controlled. His only heals are not that powerful, and to make them "okay" heals he needs to dedicate all of his drone cooldowns to Nanomed alone, which means he's not dropping Magdrones, which means you're free to keep pressure on him.
The problem with hawk isn't just the difficulty curve, it's the little things, like not being able to shoot up hill properly, not knowing how long her range is (well I guess that ties into the difficulty curve as well cause once you use her enough you'll know those things) but still, I would appreciate one of those spell circles, or the ability to "shift right click" to quick order her illusions. Or even if it told me how the cd of her stealth worked so I'm not always raging on why it's never activating. (not being able to shoot up hill is my major gripe, especially in that metropolis map, followed by the shit poor hit registration. Although her ult seems to be enemy homing :O that thing will hit a guy as long as I'm pointed in their general direction, even if I clicked no where near them. also, there have been several times where I asked someone to stand perfectly still, selected them with my snipe, and had it not register a hit.)
Perhaps you might not understand the aiming system then. I should probably clarify this. If you draw a line from the barrel of your weapon in 3d space to the target unit, and it collides with terrain, it cannot hit them. This goes for ANY TERRAIN, ramps, walls, LOS objects. If you're shooting at the bottom of the ramp on Metropolis, and trying to hit a target in the middle of the high ground at the very top of the ramp (the starting area) you do NOT HAVE LINE OF SIGHT. No character can fire in that same arc. All the traceline based abilities in the game work exactly the same. So if Hawk can't hit it, Ace can't hit it, and Revolver cannot hit it either.
I also believe that a lot of doodads get in the way of abilities, there was one time in the hades level, I believe right after revolver used his ult, and the remaining spell effects blocked all the skill shots. Like, there was now a crater there that wasnt there before and no one could shoot past it. I'm guessing perhaps there is a dummy unit or something that is being registered as a spell target? it was weird. I'll give more details if I can get it to happen again.
Hawk is a very positional character, in fact, there is a very good reason the maps are so full of objects that block fire. Its to create that need for knowledge of the terrain and positioning requirements to hit with certain abilities. As said above by hihi, Hawk is definitely not a weak character, but she is potentially a higher learning curve to master than Ezzerat. I have only seen one other Hawk that's really "getting" the playstyle and dominating people with her pretty hard. Me included. In fact I'd almost ask if he had an aim bot he's so good at hitting shit with stealthed lethal shots. her obvious weakness being her reliance on stealth, immobile targets, and positioning, but because of her intense burst capability, i'm a bit worried about how her metagame will be when more people catch on to how to master her, just because of how strong her attacks are. But at the same time, she's pretty balanced in that without that burst, she would be truly useless as a hero.
The point isnt that he isnt moving very far, it's that even when he stands perfectly still, gets ulted by rush while being dpsed by the frigid winter guy, he comes out with more hp then when he started. He's also a great counter to hawk considering his G removes her snare. I heard tell that you nerfed Sarina a little but left Dex alone, I strongly STRONGLY urge you to consider the possibility of him being OP at this time, play test him a lot and you might see what I mean.
That's impossible. In any case, Dex doesn't have any burst heal, his ONLY heals are periodic, and requires a 5s cooldown that only lasts 10 seconds maximum, and his heal doesn't move. To bolster this I gave him a shield he can use on a semi-long cd. If you can't kill Dex with Rush & Alseir, thats really not that Dex is OP, thats you're doing something wrong. Alseir puts out WAY MORE dps than nanomeds can heal if he's constantly landing hits on him. Which, if he's slowed (as he should be if you land a glacial strike) he's toast. And if he isn't moving, that's even more questionable on your part. I play Dex pretty often and can definitely say he's tankier than Sarina, and has slightly higher dps capability because of how his shotgun works, but Sarina destroys Dex in the healing department, where Dex can tank better, but his heals are severely lacking in comparison.
Currently support characters are such a huge game changer, you can at least pretend it's balanced when there's no support on either team, but when one has a support and the other doesn't, it's already GG.
Its really not as big as you think. A 3 DPS team is fully capable of beating a 2 DPS team. Teh question is, are you keeping the pressure on constantly? Are you applying the RIGHT KIND of pressure? My friends and I ran a premade tonight, in fact. Our comp was Rush, Alseir, Ace, or Rush/Revolver/Alseir, and no team with Dex OR Sarina could hold their ground for very long. You put pressure on a target, and you switch targets constantly, forcing the healer to have to make critical decisions. You can't play defensively as a 3 DPS team. If one runs, and you spend all your time chasing, you're leaving yourself open to get dominated by how healers work in this game. If the healer runs? Fuck 'em, turn around and kill somethnig that's not near their healer now. Because the healer then has to either sacrifice healing themselves and risk losing a DPS teammate, or they have to put themselves in danger again. Positioning yourself to cut off the healer from the team and force them to fight on your grounds is how you win.
This is how WoW arena worked too. It felt like you HAD TO HAVE A HEALER to do arena, but this was far from the truth. And healing in WoW was much worse than this comes close to.
Sarina is more balanced than she was, but I still feel she's a little higher on the rig scale, perhaps make chained heals less? i.e. if she uses her D then follows it right after with her G, her G does 50% less healing than it normally would, like a little healing debuff that persists 2 seconds after casting?
She needs one way to "uh oh" heal, and her G is it. She has no survivability without emergency heals, but keep in mind these are on longer cooldowns, so you have to time your burst around them. Don't blow all your cooldowns when she has all of her emergency heals up and wonder why you get lol'd on.
If you give her the time to heal up that's your own fault, but if she tanks three ults and comes out perfectly healthy cause she quick heals with D, G, perhaps throw an F in there and it gets pretty annoying. Especially because she's moves at the same speed as everyone else so she can just kite till the CDs are done and do it again.
I dare you to tank through 3 ults with Sarina and live to tell about it.
That said, Sarina right now I think is barely mediocre after I gave her AOE a cast time. I'm still keeping an eye on the support side, and I have never really felt like the Support heroes were ever overwhelmingly strong. I usually start laughing when people run from Dex or Sarina in a 1v1 fight. If you're stuck in such a situation where you have to 1v1 either or, the worst thing you can do is give them any time where you aren't putting pressure on them. The moment you let up on them, is where you get dominated. And the players, skilled players who know this fact are who are going to make them seem OP.
Also with Dex, sure he can kite like a mofo, but he also has to sacrifice the ability to heal to do so, because of his immobile nanomed, and the fact he has to keep Magdrones up in order to kite, wich means he can't drop Nanomeds. ALL of his drones are on the same cooldown activator, so if he uses one drone, he can't use another for 5 sec. This means if you see him dropping turrets and magdrones, his nanomeds are on cooldown as well but there are no nanomeds healing him.
That being said, even doing premade in-house games with friends who play the game a lot, and know the ropes it still never feels like Sarina/Dex are that game breaking, it may or may not be the skill level of your teammates contributing to the fact you're having a hard time against a decent Support player. Skill really is the game breaker more than just the character alone.
No.
Still looking into some weirdness with character select & game end.
@Gutenloqk: Go
New updates: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/1756038856?page=5#89
I will continue updating this, I have no other projects in mind right now.
1. Semi-inside joke. Pyro was a character in my previous map, Left 2 Die (renamed Left 4 Death because bliz stole the name apparently). Pyro was a marauder hero and he did his little fire jig in that game. So I figured may as well keep it in there for the few fans =P. All of the heroes in L4Death are cameo'd in this game. Ace, Dex, Pyro, Hawk, Rush. I tried to keep their abilities pretty similar to what they had in my last game, but within reason of porting to an arena kind of game.
2. Its hit scan. No travel time. I may increase the collision radius of the tracelines soon.
3. Yeah I actually kinda agree now that you mention it.
4. I'll look into it.
5. Thats actually a known bug with Ace that has something to do with stunning him while he's using Wild Shot, not related to pyro.
The game isn't really ready for an official release yet. Give it at least a week or so and I'll 1.0 it probably.
@BuuGhost: Go
So that's what makes it do that, its set as UI?
I see, I'll fix that ASAP.
-Just to address balance issues.
Keep in mind this game is in BETA, its been out FIVE DAYS, games like DOTA, have been out for YEARS, and are STILL NOT BALANCED.
Right now after rigorous playtesting I can conclude only one thing needs fixing:
-Rush: Probably the biggest issue right now is the fact his pull is completely unstoppable if you are hit with it. You can't reactively escape the pull if it hits, because it is un-escapable. I'm aiming to fix this relatively soon and make it so escapes break the pull if you pop it before the actual force effect takes place.
No, it doesn't, because its not even an object.
Also Forgebond doesn't slow/disable you because i changed it. Just wasn't a useful skill the way I had it.
@Gutenloqk: Go
Use it with the counterstun.
??? No cinematic. Here's the story: Bunch of doodz go into an arena and beat the shit out of each other.
Yes. Nothing too lore heavy. This is a fighter-esque game not the next installment of Harry Potter.
Pyro will be out in about 5 minutes.
Sticking to these 4 arch
20% damage bonus towards their counter class. There's no penalty vice versa.
Until blizzard supports map linking online no.
A couple examples of EX special.
Revolver: Sunder becomes Earthquake, still spawns a fissure but the stun lasts 3 seconds (instead of 2) and does more damage.
Rush: Psionic Grip becomes Death's Grasp, does more damage and roots instead of snares for 5 seconds.
Ezzerat: Detonation: Hakai (the snaring one) does more damage and roots instead of snares
Ace: All grenades become "Photon Grenade" which applies all 3 debuffs in the blast radius
Alseir: Glacial Strike becomes Cryoblast, a stronger version which roots instead of snares
Onyx: Lava Spire becomes Cataclysm, a larger radius version that stuns for 4 seconds instead of 2.
Dex: Drones become "Summon SABRE", summoning his pet mechanical cat to fight for 10 seconds. The tiger has a charge, cleave, and stun effect.
Sarina: Burst of Life becomes Burst of Revival, an instant cast version which heals for twice as much. Hawk: Snipe shots become "Death's Gaze", a 0.5s cast version of lethal shot
Pyro: Shattering Shell becomes "Hell Rain", an AOE version thats hits all targets in the AOE with the shattering shell effect.
They both do like 20 damage or so.
All stealth effects require you to leave combat for 8 seconds. That means no attacking or being attacked for 8sec.
He can't pull through unpathable terrain. Also Ezzerat can potentially stunlock you to death. Use your escapes wisely.
@Seegan: Go
I'm not so sure about double support. It'd take forever to kill things.
@SouLCarveRR: Go
The best advice ever given to me by a game designer much much more experienced than I:
"Your customer is usually wrong. The first mistake you can do is give in too much to the vocal minority".
Not to be a dick or anything, just I play my own game a LOT to get a feel for the overall balance of things, from all perspectives, if I see a reason to nerf/buff something I'll do it. If I see lots of complaints about X or Y then I'll look into it, but I'm still not going to change it if it doesn't need changing.
@SouLCarveRR: Go
The hotkeys should be pretty intuitive. They all line up as your main attacks: ASDFG
If you put your fingers on the home keys as though you were typing, they're right there, in perfect line. The secondary abilities, QWR are the same for every character and they're right near where your main keys are.
They really don't have an easy way to adapt hotkeys in the editor, so unfortunately its kind of an "adapt or GTFO" thing. I'm not changing the hotkeys, and I think they're a relatively silly thing to gripe about.
Then she is working exactly as intended! Psions are generally high risk high reward characters in general. If you make a critical mistake as Onyx or Alseir, you're just as dead as you are as Hawk.
1v1 is a Support should be able to handle a Guardian, simply because guardian dps isn't that high. I can beat Sarina as Ace though, pretty nastily I would add. And I can take a Dex very easily with Ezzerat, just because if he stops to throw nanomeds down, I'm beating on him pretty hard because of his immobility. I think the fact that Supports are working as I intend them to be, is a fact :p
I can only imagine the trolling people will do with Aegis (Sentry hero)...
Random factors are NOT good for a competitive game. Randomness shifts the metagame more to luck more than skill. The more random elements you add to a game, the less skill-based it becomes. I aim to completely avoid "random" at all costs when I design heroes. This includes the fog of war idea. Its not good, because you need to know what your opponents are doing, and see them on the map at all times, or it becomes too much of a guessing game and not enough of a predictive game.
Which, the casted AOE heal is becoming. I noticed you really do have to sort of aim it (unless you're targetting yourself, obviously) to hit moving allies.
Channeling heal is fine too, since theres no ponit to make it aimed. Its a strategic decision and also just as positional, because allies can run out of range of it, and it also makes Sarina immobile, and an easy target. Decision making is just as much of a skill as aim, and I really aimed to make playing Support heroes more along the lines of decision-making skill than aiming skill, while keeping their overall healing power relatively "mediocre". Sarina does not have the capability to heal through direct constant damage on a target ally, the ally needs to assist her by avoiding getting hit, using CDs intelligently, blocking, mitigating some of the damage themselves to make her heals effective. This is what the Support archetype is based on. So in an element, for low skilled players healers will just destroy noobs. Its simple as that. In even skilled games, healers only soften the blow, and well timed bursts easily end a match before the healer can do anything about it. It comes down to who does "more".
Here's a better way of putting how I conceptualized the very concentric theme of every archetype:
Guardians: Almost support-like in that their abilities directly aid teammates. Rush's stun abilities keep pressure off their teammates by peeling, disabling, and being an overall nuisance to the enemy. Revolver's Sunder cuts teammates off from one another, and castling saves a teammate from death if used or timed properly. Neither Rush nor Revolver have very "high" DPS output relatively. They have mediocre DPS, but nothing that's considerably overpowering. Outside of their ULTS, they are not that dangerous other in the fact that they can cause you to be put into dangerous situations if their teammates are playing smart.
Assaults: Meant to do fast, high dps, with "okay" surviability. For instance, Ace's primary attack does pretty good sustained dps in comparison to Revolver or Rush. He will drop a target very quickly if you are good at aiming, and keep pressure on constantly. His range also gives him the ability to do this from a semi-safe distance. Ezzerat just rips his target apart, but he's also melee range, so if his target gets free and can move without much interruption, he's not doing much damage. He's also vulnerable to abilities that cut him off, such as Sunder or Psionic Grip. Because of this, his DPS output HAS to be high, because of the positional requirements to play him. He doesn't use ammo, either, so there's no need to reload ever.
Psions: Meant to do slow, bursty but extremely high burst damage. Alseir and Hawk are perfect examples. They both need to manage their energy but they can land burst combos that can decimate a target. The penalty for such abusive power is the fact that they drop like rocks to any focused attacks so positioning is always a requirement. Onyx is unique in that he's more mobile but his damage isn't up front. He can get a quick Lava Surge off, and run, and his damage comes over time. As a result, his burst is low, but he keeps pressure on by keeping DOTs rolling on several targets, making it hard to manage his damage.
Support: Meant to be more decisive and decision-based than aiming and predictive. I've specifically designed their abilities to coincide in this manner so that they have to constantly make good decisions, or be punished for it. Sarina can do some really solid healing, but if she's focused on, she has to focus on healing herself, and this means using 25 ammo for an AOE heal, using her escape ability to keep herself alive (she only breaks stuns, not roots or snares), and using her ult, which has been nerfed a bit. Once these are on cooldown though, her ONLY CHOICE LEFT is her AOE heal. Dex, on the other hand, has to decide between using his drones to control/pressure, or to heal. And the healing bot makes him immobile, if he is on the run, a nanomed will not get many ticks of heals off on him, maybe 3 or 4, tops. That's 66-88hp, at most. One of Onyx's DOTS does more DPS than his nanomeds do HPS on him even standing still. 2 Nanomeds will not heal through being constantly hit, but he also won't be dropping mags, which slow you so you can keep up with him if you keep him snared or controlled. His only heals are not that powerful, and to make them "okay" heals he needs to dedicate all of his drone cooldowns to Nanomed alone, which means he's not dropping Magdrones, which means you're free to keep pressure on him.
Perhaps you might not understand the aiming system then. I should probably clarify this. If you draw a line from the barrel of your weapon in 3d space to the target unit, and it collides with terrain, it cannot hit them. This goes for ANY TERRAIN, ramps, walls, LOS objects. If you're shooting at the bottom of the ramp on Metropolis, and trying to hit a target in the middle of the high ground at the very top of the ramp (the starting area) you do NOT HAVE LINE OF SIGHT. No character can fire in that same arc. All the traceline based abilities in the game work exactly the same. So if Hawk can't hit it, Ace can't hit it, and Revolver cannot hit it either.
Hawk is a very positional character, in fact, there is a very good reason the maps are so full of objects that block fire. Its to create that need for knowledge of the terrain and positioning requirements to hit with certain abilities. As said above by hihi, Hawk is definitely not a weak character, but she is potentially a higher learning curve to master than Ezzerat. I have only seen one other Hawk that's really "getting" the playstyle and dominating people with her pretty hard. Me included. In fact I'd almost ask if he had an aim bot he's so good at hitting shit with stealthed lethal shots. her obvious weakness being her reliance on stealth, immobile targets, and positioning, but because of her intense burst capability, i'm a bit worried about how her metagame will be when more people catch on to how to master her, just because of how strong her attacks are. But at the same time, she's pretty balanced in that without that burst, she would be truly useless as a hero.
That's impossible. In any case, Dex doesn't have any burst heal, his ONLY heals are periodic, and requires a 5s cooldown that only lasts 10 seconds maximum, and his heal doesn't move. To bolster this I gave him a shield he can use on a semi-long cd. If you can't kill Dex with Rush & Alseir, thats really not that Dex is OP, thats you're doing something wrong. Alseir puts out WAY MORE dps than nanomeds can heal if he's constantly landing hits on him. Which, if he's slowed (as he should be if you land a glacial strike) he's toast. And if he isn't moving, that's even more questionable on your part. I play Dex pretty often and can definitely say he's tankier than Sarina, and has slightly higher dps capability because of how his shotgun works, but Sarina destroys Dex in the healing department, where Dex can tank better, but his heals are severely lacking in comparison.
Its really not as big as you think. A 3 DPS team is fully capable of beating a 2 DPS team. Teh question is, are you keeping the pressure on constantly? Are you applying the RIGHT KIND of pressure? My friends and I ran a premade tonight, in fact. Our comp was Rush, Alseir, Ace, or Rush/Revolver/Alseir, and no team with Dex OR Sarina could hold their ground for very long. You put pressure on a target, and you switch targets constantly, forcing the healer to have to make critical decisions. You can't play defensively as a 3 DPS team. If one runs, and you spend all your time chasing, you're leaving yourself open to get dominated by how healers work in this game. If the healer runs? Fuck 'em, turn around and kill somethnig that's not near their healer now. Because the healer then has to either sacrifice healing themselves and risk losing a DPS teammate, or they have to put themselves in danger again. Positioning yourself to cut off the healer from the team and force them to fight on your grounds is how you win.
This is how WoW arena worked too. It felt like you HAD TO HAVE A HEALER to do arena, but this was far from the truth. And healing in WoW was much worse than this comes close to.
She needs one way to "uh oh" heal, and her G is it. She has no survivability without emergency heals, but keep in mind these are on longer cooldowns, so you have to time your burst around them. Don't blow all your cooldowns when she has all of her emergency heals up and wonder why you get lol'd on.
I dare you to tank through 3 ults with Sarina and live to tell about it.
That said, Sarina right now I think is barely mediocre after I gave her AOE a cast time. I'm still keeping an eye on the support side, and I have never really felt like the Support heroes were ever overwhelmingly strong. I usually start laughing when people run from Dex or Sarina in a 1v1 fight. If you're stuck in such a situation where you have to 1v1 either or, the worst thing you can do is give them any time where you aren't putting pressure on them. The moment you let up on them, is where you get dominated. And the players, skilled players who know this fact are who are going to make them seem OP.
Also with Dex, sure he can kite like a mofo, but he also has to sacrifice the ability to heal to do so, because of his immobile nanomed, and the fact he has to keep Magdrones up in order to kite, wich means he can't drop Nanomeds. ALL of his drones are on the same cooldown activator, so if he uses one drone, he can't use another for 5 sec. This means if you see him dropping turrets and magdrones, his nanomeds are on cooldown as well but there are no nanomeds healing him.
That being said, even doing premade in-house games with friends who play the game a lot, and know the ropes it still never feels like Sarina/Dex are that game breaking, it may or may not be the skill level of your teammates contributing to the fact you're having a hard time against a decent Support player. Skill really is the game breaker more than just the character alone.