FFA Masters League

Hi all,

With the patch 1.31 hitting the PTR, I'd provide the following feedback to Blizzard. I tried to summarize it to the most important stuff and I'm happy to hear your feedback.

---

Dear Blizzard,

Thanks for the massive 1.31 update that will hugely impact all of us. It will improve the streaming quality a lot and comes with plenty of helpful tweaks that spice up Warcraft 3.

While balance changes will perhaps never consider FFA and 4vs4 to a degree we hope it would, we want to share our feedback nonetheless. Assuming that there’ll be excessive feedback, please find below the most important FFA balancing thoughts.

1.31

Undead was one of the strongest FFA races already and the changes in 1.31 are a huge buff, considering that the vast majority of good FFA undead players are going to war with 100 supply gargoyle armies. 400 movement speed combined with unholy aura (520 = basically max speed) is a frightening buff, but even that huge adjustment faded into the background once we discovered the other stuff in the patch notes.

There is simply no way any race will ever be able to fight fair air battles against undeads anymore if the new Ritual Dagger doesn’t share a cooldown with Heal Scrolls. In its current version, triple hero undeads can basically apply 3x Heal Scrolls + 6x Ritual Dagger charges within a 30 second battle (restoring 1.050 hp).

And last but not least, the new Incite Unholy Frenzy, which is absurdly overpowered and will hopefully never go live. Taking into account that 100 supply gargoyle armies can be clumped up easily before casting this, it’s straight up a 20% percent buff to FFA undead armies on top of the other buffs.
 
Pre-1.31

The biggest “showstoppers” in FFA are transmute and charm, as they punish enemies for turning gold into units. Increasing the cooldown for both to at least 90 seconds would have a tremendous effect on our game mode.

Keeper of the Grove arguably helped elf to overcome the nerf of Panda in FFA. However, the new tranquility, providing more value than a combined invul potion and heal scroll once a minute, is too strong. A cooldown of 120 seconds might be more reasonable.

Thanks for listening to the communities!

Best regards,

HighTac
Admin of FFA Masters League

Transmute and acid bomb are OP, and I agree with all the other notes on UD (although Carrion on Mech units needs to be nerfed or removed)

But my main point is that Charm is absolutely not OP in FFA.

If you pick DR, you are choosing a hero with only 2 useful spells (Silence, Charm), low battle potential, weak hero arena skills, and doesn't synergize with HU (and only rarely with UD). Charm having the current cooldown is perfect. If it had a longer cooldown, it would no longer be chosen as a hero by ANYBODY.

Also with Charm, you can see the stolen units on the map, and it affects your supply. With Transmute, your gold count is hidden and it can be used with no downside, which adds to the OP of Transmute, and the balance of Charm.

If charm was nerfed, I wouldn't choose DR with orc, or with hu or UD. And if I chose it with elf, it would only be on very small maps where you don't expect to go higher than level 6 or 7 before the game ends.

Sacrificing a gargoyle to have a scuffed heal scroll with half the area effect is OP how? Relax guys, rofl. I'm actually a bit worried about Incite Unholy Frenzy, I like the current version more where you have to prioritize which units to use Unholy Frenzy on, but at least the buff will mean that gargs will perhaps finally be able to beat hippos in 1v1 if the undead player microes better, as it should be.