Stuff I Found

[phox]

The map is ok, I guess, but it needs a lot of work. I didn't notice any bugs in the time I spent looking at it in single player, but who knows.

There were, however, a bunch of stuff that caught my eye.

General:
–The Terrain: It's really, really, boring. You use only one tile or so for an entire path; vary it up a bit!
–Spawn Voice: I don't know if there's a way to fix this, but the spawn voice was REALLY annoying. I'm not so into hearing "Ready to Work" 3 times every 14 seconds or so.
–Tavern Selections: Use Vexorian's selection system. Tavern Selection is old and gives far less info about the hero.
–Innates: Maybe this is personal opinion, but the innates seemed entirely unnecessary, and since not all heroes had them, they made many of the heroes seem like they'd probably be overpowered.
–Tooltips: The tooltips were both undescriptive and confusing. While I may care more then most about lore stuff, it is nice to seperate it from the function. I want to know exactly what it does before I both with why it does it.
–Base Imbalance: I'm not sure whether or not this was just pure bad luck on my part, but each base seemed to dominate the creeps of the base to its left. For example, when I played, the Western Forces were always pushing into my northern forces base.

Heroes: (Just a few choice things I noticed about the heroes that I looked at (which wasn't all of them))
–Passive: A lot of the heroes were really passive; meaning that they had mostly passives and self buffs. Heroes like this tend to be boring to play, since you just buff yourself, then run into combat and attack. When I play a map, I want to be doing stuff during battle. Again, this was not all the heroes, but the Star Knight and Fire-Eater caught my eye in particular for this.
–Icons: A few passives didn't have the passive borders attached. Not a big deal, just thought I'd let you know.
–Chances: A few chances in this are ridiculously low; as in they would almost never happen. e.x. the Star Knight's two passives.
–Depthguard: This hero has 2 problems that relate to one another; firstly, he has a ridiculous number of stuns. By level six, he can keep someone permastunned for about 10 seconds. He has 3 stuns and a slow; kinda ridiculous. Which brings me to my other point about him; if played at all decently, he should NEVER EVER die. 3 stuns, a slow, a teleport, and the ability to swim? He should always get away. On another note, his second skill shouldn't have to be targeted, since it can only effect him.
–Body Builder's Innate: Completely ridiculously overpowered. He can continually pump up his strength through the entire game.

That's all for now. I feel like you really should fix a bunch of this stuff. Particularly the hero design miffed me. A lot of your heroes can only do one thing or so. Also, a lot of them use renamed blizzard abilities, which is not bad, but I couldn't help but notice that the hero you put up before release used minimal blizzard spells, which is kinda misleading.

So, in the end, the map is not bad, but could use a ton of work.

[Burning Rose]

Yeah, some of the things you mentioned are true. If I can ever find a way to remove the spawn voice, I will in an instant. I could actually (With the right tools) probably import blank sounds over those sound files, so I'll look into that.

- I'm pretty damn sure all passives have a passive border, can you point those out to me that don't have one?

- Yeah, the Depthguard I could never really tell with. And I'm going to change Slimy Skin to Non-Autocast without a target, and probably make it a lot less uber-leet.

- The Star Knight I'm looking into right now, actually, and I have a few ways I know of to spice him up I think.

- Personally, the Fire-eater may seem a little passive, but it takes a substantial amount of concentration to play him right. Effectively using Burning Blades is important, and positioning for Combustion and Burning Skin is also important.

- The Body Builder is actually extremely weak without his innate, though i have been looking into ways of balancing it out long-term. Currently, If a game goes on too long he becomes somewhat of a god.

- The Bases always sort of vary: It kind of goes back and forth, like a pendulum. The Trick is to use a correct strategy of units to deal with it and stop the pendulum effect.

- I've been looking into Vex's System, and only a few days ago found out what it actually is. Needless to say, I'm ASTONISHED at how fantastic it is.

- The Chances are something neccisary for scaling, since the max level is 50. However, I'm looking into ways of making them better from the start with less of an increase, more of a Y-intercept and less of a Slope, I guess you could say.

- I'm also working on seperating the Lore from the Spell descriptions, but obviously it's a long process.

- I originally created a lot of the terrain back when i first started modding, and let me tell you it is MUCH better now. I'm constantly improving it; I try to vary it up more at least once a day. I can promise it will be better by the next version

- The Innate abilities all directly correspond to the Hero's playstyle, and have been (or attempted to, like I said I've been playing it solo with computerized Enemy Heroes) balanced with the Hero's other abilities and stats. I do not intend to get rid of them, or add unnecessary ones to other Heroes simply so they can all be alike.

I'd recommend testing it out multiplayer if you can, since I'm making this alone I haven't actually gotten a chance to. I'm kinda busy with Schoolwork right now, but I'm still working on it and plan to have most of these fixed by v0.80.

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it, and if you think of anything that may be helpful in how to fix this, I would appreciate that too

And just on a side note, do you think it has potential?

[phox]

I actually despise the whole concept of the body builder's innate. I hate having to remember to click something every so often and such; it's just annoying. If you're going to make an ability like that, at least make it a passive bonus every few seconds, because I don't want to be thinking about something that I'll use as soon as the cooldown finishes every single time.

As for the spawn voice, I can't remember if this works, but can't you just set the units to have no unit voice?

Actually, I've changed my mind about the fire-eater. He's not too passive, but heroes just start blurring together at 1 in the morning.

The problem with the Depthguard is not even so much with his slow as with his stuns; sorry if you meant this, but it was hard to tell from your post if you acknowledged this.

I'm somewhat unsure what you mean with the bases. Because, unless I defended and got units other then infantry, the western base ALWAYS crushed my soldiers. And within a few minutes they were back at my base, before I even got units very far from it at all. On another note, Infantry are horribly weak, at least so far as I could tell. And Necromancers were godly if you had any sort of melee units in front of them. Then again, that was with no enemy heroes fighting me, so I dunno.

Uhhh, it was mostly some of the innates that had no border. I can't remember the specific ones.

As far as potential, I think if you put in a lot of work, it could be good; but it's clearly a first version, so it's hard to tell as of yet.

[Burning Rose]

Necromancers can be destroyed by a good combination of Wolves and Minotaur.

I have also dealt with his Stuns, because taking a look at them as a whole again (He was my first Hero, just BTW), It was clear that his stuns were too often and too long, even for a stun-oriented Hero.

Yes, Infantry are a little gimped, but I'm not sure what to do about it right now >_< (Besides just upping their stats). It's like the only thing I'm stumped on right now.

The Soundset is kind of important when you use Animate Dead as the Deathwalker, but then not so much. I kind of got used to the sounds after monthes of testing and just sort of tuned them out.

The Body Builder's Innate, combined with the damage he gets dealt if he Conditions with ROIDS is what makes him difficult to play. To effectively manage the innate, you want to use it every time it's up, which can be difficult.

And yes, the sides will push into each other (I call it surging), but relatively quickly without Hero or Unit (As in a strategical change in unit production) interference, an opposite surge comes out from the base. The thing to remember is that once you get far enough into a Base's Path, you deal with both sets of their units.

(BTW, it feels freaking cool to see someone else besides me talking about the map because they've played it. ^_^

[phox]

But the Body Builder's innate is just annoying. It's not fun to have to remember it; you really do need to deal with that.

And yes, I understand the surging aspect of AoS maps, it's just that the west seems to have some sort of advantage, in that they surge forward far more often then the north.

And yeah, I know that feeling. I felt the need to take a look at this map, given that you're the only other person to have made a 3-player aos that I know of.

[Burning Rose]

It's a little messy right now, And I kind of suck at terraining ( >_>), But here's how it's going so far:



I kinda like the Sandy one, but the other's I'm not too big on.

[phox]

Don't feel like you need to make them all different. Just stick with the sandy one for all three. They're all better then the old one, but the sandy one is the best of the three for sure.

[Burning Rose]

That's what i thought. I think I'll keep the area around the tower sandy, and then nearer to the bases it gets more foresty and stone-pathed.

However, this is all a little on hiatus as I try to learn enough JASS to properly implement Vex's Hero selection and a few other systems (Attack Detection, ABuff).

Oh, and if you're wondering, I came up with a MUCH better ultimate for the Dynamo than his current.

[phox]

Which one is the Dynamo?

Vex's Hero selection system has REALLY good instructions that come with it in the map. I don't know any JASS aside from the stuff necessary to clean memory leaks, and I was able to set up Vex's system relatively easily.

[Burning Rose]

I figured you couldn't have looked through ALL the Heroes so fast >_>

Storm Panda = Dynamo
Lorewise, the Caster equivalent to the Fire-Eater.

Oh, well that's cool about the system. I'll look into it tomorrow. For now, I have homework >_<.

[Gorman.]

Chaotic is way godlike!
well, only if he has an army with him, but still, if he has an army then they arent gonna die (coz of his aura) and he can just sit there and every1 dies!

Bodybuilder got too annoying with the innate, make it something like for every minute after 5 minutes that he doesnt die he gets 1 extra str.

Also, can you get boats at all? coz it seems that the big mobs of naga cant be killed unltess u hav a big ranged unit, or a boat, and i do like boats!

I dont think infantry are gimped at all, 10 second build time, so you can have many many more then others can have, if you upgrade their armour or weapons, and then get your chaotic to be friends with them, then they will never die and are super-surgers!

gonna play some OL now =)

EDIT: and yes, west does seem to always doo wayyy better, i think the path is slightly shorter or sumthing *shrug*

[phox]

Ok, just looking at stuff in single player; you still have a lot of ridiculous stuff. In particular a lot of heroes have absolutely ridiculous ultimates. In particular the deathwalker, the bounty hunter, and the fire lord hero caught my eye. The deathwalker's ult does 1000 damage per second until the target dies, then revives him? How is that balanced in any way, shape or form?

There are also still a lot of overly long stuns and just uber nukes.

On the plus side, the terrain looks nice and the west no longer seems to dominate.

There is, actually, one more thing that I noticed before, but forgot to mention. You can see the other team's barracks'.

[Burning Rose]

Yeah, that's part of the single Player. That and a few other functions turn on in when there's only one player.

Personally I don't think the Deathwalker's ult is that OP, considering it doesn't always kill people in time. I may lower the damage a little, or increase the CD, however.

I've also been considering a heavy nerf to the DoT aspect of 'Wildfire', and I still have more changes planned for the Bounty Hunter that I think you'll like.

Obviously, specific examples are very helpful in the balancing process Thanks.

Oh, and those naga aren't meant to be acessed in any way shape or form in a normal Game, unless you want to go swimming with the Depthguard.

And the Chaotic was a big focus of the new version, he got substantial nerfage.

In an un-related note, what did you think of the Celestial and the Arcanist?

[phox]

I didn't really try the Arcanist, but the Celestial was alright. A bit weak, though, compared to other heroes.

[Burning Rose]

/nod
I've been trying to come up with an offensive innate for the Celestial that ties in with his very obvious playstyle. Unfortunately, his playstyle is extremely support oriented, so I don't have any ideas. >_< Damn.

Also, the Deathwalker's ult doesn't do anywhere NEAR that much except for maybe at top level, but everyone's ult is fucking ridiculous at top level. In fact, almost all the Heroes have damn strong ultimates. I like strong ultimates.

I've seen some maps where the ultimates can barely be called such. Personally, I think strong ultimates are better.