Cause he feels so weird for me. It either feels like i don't heal enough at 1v1 ones, nor can i survive a team fight. I thougth that he might be just a niech anti-tank, but suprise suprise that doesn't work for me either. I can't outrade anyone for some reason.
Mind you i consider myself utterly terrible.
I didn't play much Arthas until recently, post-"rework." I've seen people complain about his rework failing, or him still being messed up in some way... But man, at least in QM, he feels amazing! I really enjoy this character. I typically do high damage, end up soaking a good amount of exp, and contribute massively to teamfights. I do not die very often.
Do people generally feel good about him right now? What builds are Arthas players running? I'd love to hear some general sentiment from people more experienced with him, plus some advice on playing him!
The build I've mostly been running on him so far is:
[Lvl 1] 1: Frost Presence (W)
This quest is easy to stack in a reasonable length of time, and even just the passive and the 15-stack Reward feel AMAZING to have. Landing W is basically certain.
[Lvl 4] 1: Shattered Armor (W)
Frost Strike seems like a cool alternative but Shattered Armor is basically just guaranteed extra damage onto anyone you root, so that's nice.
[Lvl 7] 1: Immortal Coil (Q)
Actually all of these talents seem pretty dope, particularly Icebound Fortitude, if it's good against the enemy comp. The extra self heal from Immortal Coil adds to your survivability and allows you to throw in some offensive Coils to help burst down a pick. But where it REALLY shines is with the lvl 13 I choose.
[Lvl 10] Either ult depending on if map has good chokes for Sindy or the building disable is clutch
[Lvl 13] 1: Deathlord (Q)
If you get a double Coil off with this talent and the level 7 talent, you get a HUGE chunk of health back, do some free point and click damage, AND it can actually slap and save your life when you're getting low on health. Want to make sure you stay alive while low on health and waiting for the coils to return to you? Further synergy from the next talent!
[Lvl 16] 3: Anti-Magic Shell
This talent is nuts. You basically become invulnerable for four seconds and god forbid the enemy should do damage to you, it ends up healing you. This is incredible for baiting out spells, escaping enemies, and setting up for massive heals off a double offensive Coil. Again though the alternate talents DO look promising!
[Lvl 20] Either ult upgrade (though that double Trait talent actually seems like it'd go super hard if you picked up a high number of stacks?)
Altogether this build feels very strong. You accentuate the power of your most impactful ability (W) and gain enormous talent synergies to increase your own survivability and threat through a stronger Q. The only thing left on the table, really, is more sustained dps from an AA/(E) build but that feels pretty memey imo. And a more bursty Trait-focused build is ignored but I usually end a game with around 40 Trait stacks and it seems to get the job done just fine.
Miserable experience to be against a deathwing in a match where neither team has a healer to begin with so the main downside to deathwing just isn't present anymore.
I recently tried to play my first ever online match and I thought I'd let the team know that I was a new player. The response I was met with was to "kill myself immediately". Now, this post isn't to appeal to the nonexistent internet police and say: "Wahh, wahh! The internet man is being mean to me". Rather, I wanted to know what the community consensus is to new players. Are they in any way valued as they are a glimmer of hope, however faint, that this game can retain any sort of player count, or are they frowned upon as people who take perfectly good matches and ruin them? (Don’t give me the cop out “it depends on the player” because that goes without saying, I’m asking what you would say most people think.)
Can someone please help me escape bronze hell? Almost every single game I have 1-2 people just straight up throwing. I really want to grind ranked and be competitive, I haven’t done it and I’ve been playing this game on and off for over a decade.
If anyone wants to grind, let me know! I’m also pretty good 😎
Thought I’d jump on the PTR to check out the rework. There’s a stack counter that stops at 20/9999. No matter how many heroes I hit after reaching 20, it never increases. I’m sure blizzard is gonna get a lot of useful PTR feedback from this talent change.
In honour of HoTS imminent and confirmed return to mainstream blizz had to get Carbot ETC!
Zergling, Thor, and Swarm Host are only technically represented, through the mount, the Odin, and Abathur, but I think because of those they're unlikely to be used.
I don't remember if the rank at the bottom right side of statistics page in profile is the rank you had at the end of the season, or the highest rank you had during that season.
Which is it?
Lunara is fine I guess. She's often a decent choice, sometimes a terrible choice, but never the best choice.
She can feel oppressive if the enemy team has bad AoE heals, and a slow, melee heavy team she can dot up and dance around.
Unfortunately those comps aren't common. While niche isn't bad there's a difference between niche and endangered species.
That being said she's still competent and a skilled player can overcome some of her issues, but I think there is room to improve her.
But you have to be careful because the wrong tweak could make her oppressively toxic.
I'm level 110 with her, and my win rate long ago was in the 60s, and now it's dropped to around 48%. I play less than I used to, and I'm firmly gold/plat, so I'm playing in the beer leagues here, but I think there's some value in noting that change.
My issues:
Her speed boost is weak over long distance, weak over short distance, and just right over medium distance. She's slower than a mount, so going across map is a pain. Any hero with a slow, or a gap closer, entirely negates her speed within short distances that most combats happen in (fucking Deathwing can catch up to her with his melee mode dash, or his ranges mode slow, and suddenly he chunks you down to 1/2 HP while your poison hasn't broken his first armor point). I think her level 20 speed boost should be baseline Z, but nerfed (a lot). Too many times it's just not enough and you end up taking more in burst because the enemy caught up just for a moment than you ever do with your dots. Enemy has any self healing? You do nothing to them, and they force you to back with a single Q. I've had a time dancing around a Xul dotting him up, only for his point and click root to snag me, then his Q does more damage to me than I did to him after a half dozen AA's because of his bone shield, and I have to back.
The meta has been CC and burst for years and she is a sustain hero. They added a mage build (choking pollen at 7) to compensate, which was good, but you're punished for not taking it, turning her into a weaker KT. Just pick a real mage, eh? Make choking pollen baseline, but weak, and turn it into a quest. Let it be a part of her kit to add burst, without it entirely overshadowing all her other fun talents that don't get used.
Lack of wisp talents. I dunno what kinda talent would be needed to make it worth taking, since she has so many "must pick" talents at many levels (choking pollen at 7, abolish/spell shield at 13, poison crits at 16). But man wisp can be dull. Vision is good, but I wonder if it could be more interesting? Two wisps with smaller radius? Explodes when killed applying poison? Small "lightwell" style heal? I dunno, jsut vamping because I find wisp is a boring ability that feels bad when enemy team keeps hunting it.
Lunara's TRASH talents. She has a few. Move speed at 1. Self heal at 4, CDR at 13, Range at 16 (not actually bad but poison crit so so important for effective damage). Self heal is really the worst.
Too much choice at level 20? Ehh not the biggest issue, but all her 20s are decent, but only one outshines and that's what you should really pick. It takes until 16/20 before your poison turns into meaningful pressure and that's just stupid to pass up.
In short, I feel like Lunara is forced to go mage build (Q), which is antithetical to her design. Its existence is a band-aid over her real problems. Lunara shouldn't have to pretend to be Kael'thas just to make her damage matter.
I don't think she needs more damage, more health, or even more range. I think she needs a modernization pass. Shift some of her mandatory talents into her baseline kit in a toned-down form, free up her talent tree for actual choices, and make Wisp a more interesting part of her identity instead of a glorified ward.
HOTS fatal flaw, considering just how team oriented this game is, is that every game is hyper-dependent on the performance of the worst player on the team. The fundamentally better players are stagnated no matter how hard they try. If one is bad or just a troll it’s essentially GG for everyone else. If you don’t calculate your re-queue timing, you’re more at risk of constantly queueing with the same batch of players and your rank plummeting as a result.
I hope they continue to implement mythic quests to give better players a real chance to win. This will eventually filter and balance the rank system too.
I just had a match with a certain Jaina. From the very start of the match she was going rogue, never joining team etc. So we also started avoiding teamfights because 4 vs 5 is an easy lose. So none of our objectives have been done, because we couldnt contest them 4 vs 5.
And then she wakes up and starts blaming our tank why he's not initiating. What was he supposed to initiate? A lost battle 4 vs 5? And later when she joined the team, he did initiated the fight... and she never even dismounted, just kept running in circles till he died. And yes, it was on purpose because she even wrote "oopsie" to mock him. So Stitches started completely ignoring teamfights, because she was trolling him.
Like... whats the strategy here? Does somebody REALLY thinks it'll make them win more games? Because let me tell you - no, it doesnt. She ruined the entire (winnable) match because of her spite.
Whew, this one took a while. I'm going to turn it into a standee since Azmodan's my favorite Diablo character
Anyone know some HL premade channel for HOTS in 2026? Are people still playing ? :)
New patch aba in ptr
EDIT: some additional points:
