u/Clincoln1234

Riposte mastery skill also works.

Yeah, just let them shoot your Medusa, and you can pretty much clear the ranged squad like a Minotaur clearing the melee squad.

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For newbies who don't know what I'm talking about:

Riposte spells give you a "parry" ability, so you can counterattack before the opponent's about to attack you.

So if a ranged unit tries to shoot your Medusa, the Medusa will shoot it first;

If it kills the stack, your Riposte mastery skill will reset your counter attack, so you will see all the ranged squad tries to attack your medusa, and gets eliminated in one turn.

I was at 1200 MMR 10 days ago. I'm not smurfing or anything, coz I constantly lost to about 3 players who were at 1200 1300ish as well.

I played 25 games since last week, and surprisingly, I won 22 of them. The system started to match me with some better opponents. I had no idea before the game started, so I beat him and felt like I beat some 1300MMR dude; then I checked his MMR, it's 2400??

Then the system sent a 3000 MMR dude twice in a row; Again, I didn't know he was at 3000, and just beat him twice in a row too.... (Exodus, 2:0, 2:1). A 3100 MMR dude eventually stopped my 12-game win streak. I'm now at 2100MMR.

But I'm more confused than happy, because I don't think I have improved by this much during 1 week. So I checked one of the dudes that constantly beat me when we were both at 1200 MMR; he is now 2400MMR too and has a very good win streak too.

What's going on?? Suddenly people just get 1000 MMR better? Or is the MMR inflating so much?

This dude reached 4700 today by doing so and reached rank 1

https://preview.redd.it/q0udb21hdvah1.png?width=3422&format=png&auto=webp&s=238a46f381637594ab9057102f33173807e55698

I think anyone who played enough pvp knows where this is coming from.

By dispell-like I mean those can reduce duration or remove buff / debuffs.

Why this suggestion?

Some buffing and debuffing spells in this game are too powerful, sometimes you can outright win a battle by a single cast of a spell if the opponent has no way to dispell it.

Of course there are spells to dispell, but these spells are not always available:

- you may just be unlucky to not unlock it.

- you just cast another spell and you are a might hero

- you cast inner light last round, it's in cd. They have 5 spells to debuff you but you have only one spell to dispell.

- you can dispell one target, but your entire army is debuffed, you want to dispell again

- opponent has a chain link, your dispells are banned

Temple is a good example, it has faction skill that can dispell and have units that can dispell too. So in above situations, they got an alternative dispell for emergency.

Other factions are less lucky, if they can't cast the dispell spells, then they have no other alternatives to dispell.

Thats why I think every faction should have at least a build path towards another dispell ability. E.g.

- have an alternative creature upgrade path to get a creature with dispell

- have a dispell sub skill in some general skill tree, like resistance or wisdom

- have a new common artifact that can let you cast dispell

- or just offer more dispell spells in each magic school, and they should be in higher tiers (so chain link can't forbid them)

In this game, many of the spells, skills and creature abilities are around "countering opponent's focus charge". But I bet most people just almost permanently ignore them, since it's very obscure to see them work.

On the other hand, some abilities like the Hive queen's AOE can catch you off-guard.

I know that good players track the opponent's focus points in mind, but this is absurd for average players. And no, this is not a good skill check -- memorizing how many hits you send out and receive is not an intended skill for a HoMM game, and I doubt it's ever intended to be.

Hiding information is fine -- it's by design hidden, and it's completely hidden: like the fog of war and enemy creature's count.

Showing information is also fine -- make it public and everyone can see.

But showing some public information (hits you give and receive), but hide the way to access it (you have to count them in your mind) is not fine or fun to play.

I believe, by making the opponent's Focus bar visible, it will make another dimension of the gameplay -- focus point buff / debuff -- accessible to most players, and make the skills/spells around focus more meaningful to use.

Think about how many times in your strategic thinking you actually consider something like: "I can't hit the enemy now, because this will give them full 3 charges, so he can use XXX ability" -- almost never right? Because you don't know for sure how many focus charges he has. Making it visible will make this level of thinking available. So it simplifies things, but it makes the strategy depth deeper.

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Before you disagree (I know people online by default just disagree with others), think about the opposite question:

If the game had the opponent's Focus bar visible already, and I post another thread: "Suggestion: Hide the opponent's Focus bar", would you downvote this thread or not? This will help you realize which option you really prefer.

If you think about it, it's actually very surprising that a game with a complex artifact system doesn't have any "consumables". I can't think of another game that allows you to customize your character's loadouts, but there aren't any consumables in the game.

I'm wondering why?

E.g. some ideas:

• A potion that gives you 40+ movement, one-time use.
• A one-time high neutral spell scroll, e.g. you can tp home with it once.
• A potion that gives you +3 morale for this round.
• A potion that gives you +5 defense for this round.
• A one-time spell scroll. Can be a "Masterful" version. Can be very powerful since it's just one-time use.
• The hero can only equip N consumables for combat usage. Some skills can add more.

Basically, most of the things in the game can be made consumables. I think adding consumables to the game will open another dimension of game strategy and make it more fun to play and deeper in strategy. E.g., you find a Masterful Web spell; you save it. Later, you encounter 100+ animated armor (the very slow and tough enemy), and you use this Masterful Web to solve the fight, which you shouldn't be able to. So you can even plan your next turns based on the consumables you have available.

Now that the hero can hit things with heroic strike, and even a subskill called Combat, I find it would be very interesting and open more strategies to make the hero targetable during a battle as well.

I'm not saying we put the hero on the battlefield like HoMM4. The hero still stands outside of the battlefield, but we can let units target the hero. It's similar to how we can target the catapult during a siege.

How it works if I were to design this:

• Hero stands outside of the backfield, but next to the middle hex of the first row. It has 3 adjacent hexes; enemies on those hexes can melee attack the hero. Hero never counterattacks.
• Ranged units can shoot the hero as well, but should do greatly reduced damage (e.g. 50% in addition to the range penalty).
• Certain magic can damage heroes, but most magic can't target the hero.
• The hero starts with some HP. If it loses all its HP, it becomes incapacitated.
• Hero's HP should scale well in the late game. E.g. scale with the total HP of the army. So the hero won't be one-shot in the late game. Same with the hero's defense value.
• The battle doesn't end just because the hero is incapacitated; All units of the incapacitated hero still stay on the battlefield. One still needs to wipe out the entire army to win the battle.
• An incapacitated hero loses all bonuses to its army; Its army functions like in a town without a hero. E.g., the incapacitated hero provides no additional attack and defense, no buff from artifacts, and can no longer use heroic abilities or cast spells. But the buffs from laws still apply.
• Additionally, as a special penalty, the army of an incapacitated hero loses the hero's morale and luck bonus and gains -2 morale and -2 luck instead. They also lose 1 initiative.
• An incapacitated hero can't flee or surrender.
• Incapacitating a hero should be a rare scenario; It's similar to defending a town by killing the catapult. It should be very hard to pull off.
• Certain units, skills, artifacts, and magic deal extra damage to heroes. So it can open new builds and new ways to approach the combat. Similarly, there will be units, skills, artifacts, and magic that protect/heals the hero.

I believe this will open another dimension to the combat and make the strategy of the game even deeper. Admittedly, it would be hard to balance how hard a hero can be incapacitated.

Anyway, just a fun idea to share, not expecting this to be ever implemented in the game lol

Problem

I'm not sure about other players, but I only pick Magic heroes in PvP now because of Avatar. The current Avatar is just too good. It can solve some fights with 0 casualty where you should have been wiped out in one turn.

It's more of a problem in PvP. A well suited avatar can have 6 or 7 or 8 HP, which takes so many hits to die. No matter how strong your army is, you have to waste this many attack opportunities to kill it. This can easily waste one round worth of attack opportunties to just eliminate it.

And its damage is ridiculous: I had one game on Exodus. On the 2nd fight, I had like 30+ power, and my avatar just killed 10 vampires (tier 7) units with one hit.

And you can summon an avatar next to enemy's ranged units and just follow it all the way to permanently block it from shooting...

On the other hand, if you are a Might hero, good luck, your Avatar is just garbage. There is no other subskill that can be comparable to Avatar. You may have offense and defense -- but my avatar kills 10 tier 7 with one hit, and tank 1 round of focus fire -- it just does more damage and absorb more damage than your offense and defense. And, beyond all this, my Magic hero can also learn Offense and Defense skill, which is as good as a Might hero's!

Suggestion

1. Revert the change making Avatar takes a number of hits. Give it a proper HP, so one can out-scale it with better stats / army.
2. Reduce its damage output.
3. Scale Avatar in the following way to make it equally available to Might and Magic hero. It costs 0 mana after all, why is it a Magic hero only skill?
   • Its attack scales with the hero's attack (e.g. 1.5x hero attack)
   • Its defense scales with the hero's defense (e.g. 1.5x hero defense)
   • Its damage scales with the hero's spell power (e.g. 20 damage per power)
   • Its health scales with the hero's knowledge (e.g. 30 hp per knowledge)

This way, if you are a might hero, you can have a low HP, low damage, but high attack / defense avatar, it's still tanky and deal damages.

If you are a magic hero, you can have a high hp, high damage avatar, but the attack / defense is lower, which is a fair trade-off for being a Magic hero.

What do you guys think?

Hi guys. I am e a long-time HoMM3 and HotA player and also a map maker. I have recently just put 100 hours into this game. The game is amazing. I have made some good suggestions in this game in the past, like the Pick Ban Rule Problem; I hope what I'm about to say makes sense too:

I see some comments here and there about Morale and Luck

• On one hand, people think they are OP. A single morale trigger can alter the outcome of an entire battle.
• On the other hand, some players think the Morale / Luck skills and specialists are not worth getting into, because a single (not so) rare artifact (like the monster head) can neutralize 3 levels of Leadership skills and an entire hero specialty.

I think both sides are correct, and here is my suggestion to fix these problems.

1. Morale and Luck rebalance.

If you can choose to max one thing: Morale or Luck? Before you answer, let's do some simple math. Let's compare 3 Morale vs 3 Luck:

• 3 Morale: +12% chance to act again. Let's put all the other benefits of another turn aside; just say you use the additional action to hit again; that's a 12% chance to do 2x damage = +12% damage on average
• 3 Luck: +18% chance to do 1.5X damage. That's + 9% damage on average.

So even if we just compare the damage output, 3 Morale has 33% (12% : 9% ) more return on investment, let alone you can do much more than just hitting again.

Suggestion:

• Luck should always trigger Maximum damage.
  • Reason: it's still weaker than Morale in general, but at least it has its own specialty and people may choose it for certain unit combos
• [This will be a controversial one] Movement alone should stop triggering Morale.
  • Reason: One main problem of Morale is its randomness messing up your planning: You spend 1 full minute to plan each move of yours and predict the enemy's move. You checked those knights will be 1 hex away from reaching your ranged power stack. Then they get morale... You fucked up. Now if a unit just moves this turn (not hitting or using abilities), it won't get morale. Then the game can become less random and have fewer wtf moments. Morale is still good; it can still trigger on hitting or using an ability, so it's still devastatingly good. But hitting again is a 1x vs 2x problem, whereas from unreachable to reachable is a 0x vs 1x problem. The latter is much worse but it happens to be easy to solve with this simple change.

2. Artifacts rebalance

Just like you won't simply find a rare item and then you suddenly become immune to all magics, the neutralization of Morale and Luck shouldn't be put on a single rare artifact.

Suggestion:

It should be at least an artifact set of 3 or 4 artifacts to give the effect of neutralizing Morale or Luck (one artifact set for each).

For compensation, this artifact set only neutralises the enemy's positive morale (or luck), and your army's negative morale (or luck); It doesn't affect the enemy's negative ones or your own army's positive ones. So it's rarer, but much stronger.

This way, the morale skills and specialties are more reliable and playable in PvP.

3. Addition of Morale & Luck buff/debuff magic

If you think about it -- it's weird that countering luck & morale can only be done by artifacts. (Some creatures do, but you can't get a good number of them just for luck & morale). It seems this game doesn't offer any morale & luck-related buff/debuff yet (or I may have just missed?).

Suggestion:

Provide buff and debuff magic that increase or lower the morale/luck. Then finding the artifact set to counter morale/luck specialty is just an optional/ideal way, not necessary. You can build around certain magics for that, which opens much more counter and counter-counter plays. For example, we can introduce 6 magics into different schools:

• Tier 2 - Single target - lower the enemy's luck; [Scale with magic level, not power].
• Tier 2 - Single target - increase the friend's luck; [Scale with magic level, not power].
• Tier 2 - Single target - lower the enemy's morale; [Scale with magic level, not power].
• Tier 2 - Single target - lower the friend's morale; [Scale with magic level, not power].
• Tier 4 - All enemies - neutralize all enemies' morale. [Only target all enemies at lvl 4]
• Tier 4 - All enemies - neutralize all enemies' luck. [Only target all enemies at lvl 4]

In any PvP game, the one who Bans first must Pick first, otherwise it's unfair. I think this is common sense in all competitive games. I just tried the PvP game today, and I was surprised this game has a “Ban First Pick Second” rule?

I think the dev didn't realize "banning first is a disadvantage", because when you ban first, you may ban something that your opponent wants to ban as well, so your opponent can save their veto and spend them on others.

If you don't see how unfair this is -- let's assume the game is not strictly balanced, the strongest faction is A, then B, C, D...

First Ban Second Pick rule:

• Player 1 bans A
• Player 2 bans C, picks B
• Player 1 picks D

Result B vs D

Yeah, the thing is, player 2 won't ban B when he can just pick B

This is especially problematic when the game has exactly two OP factions (like right now?), there is no way for Player1 to stop Player2 from getting an OP faction and no way for Player1 to pick one OP faction. (If Player1 doesn't ban A, then Player2 just pick A and ban B )

On the other hand, under First Ban First Pick rule:

• Player 1 bans A
• Player 2 bans B
• Player 1 picks C
• Player 2 picks D

Result C vs D - Solved the two OP faction scenario.

But you may be wondering, how about player A plays smart, and bans C instead, so if Player 2 bans A, it can pick B?

Then player 2 can just ban D. So Player1 picks A, and Player2 picks B, still A vs B

What if there is only one OP faction? Is even A vs B unfair?

No. In this case, Player1 plays smart and bans C; Player 2 can just ban A; Player 1 picks B, Player 2 picks D. It's B v D, but both B & D are balanced (presumption is only A op).

Conclusion: the first-ban-first-pick rule is battle-tested, and much fairer.

The current first-ban-second-pick rule is unfair and the worst when there are two OP factions.