Windranger deserve nerf?

Thing is, Shackleshot is the Meat Hook for wind ranger.
Its a skill based shot that pays off greatly in case it connects. Nerfing it in any way could be just like nerfing hook, or making it that easier to pull off.

So we need to look at an alternative. Windranger has:
1.Awfully fast cast animation
2.Has a skill that's not gonna be counterd until mid late game, unless you talk about magic damage. So we can think of playing with her strength gain.
3. Ultimate provides her with max attackspeed. This goes thru spell immunity making it disastrous, in late game, provided the team has some sort of cc or her stun catches the unfortunate target.



4.I think we all agree here, that support/offlaner windranger is not that OP. Its the mid WR and the carry WR that makes people ***** about her. There's a fat chance that an offlaner WR can transition into late game power house given some space/time. So we need to look into this as well

5. Her in lane harass and ability to farm from far away makes her such a good laner. You can think about changing her initial damage,
6. As her skills are valuable to her, in order to survive or attack, we can look at a scaling cost, or look at reducing her int gain and starting int( a combination or either)


Now we don't want to break this hero. She is absolutely pivotal to the coming meta, just as the coming meta will mark a sea change into the game. What I can propose here is nerf the int gain or make her skills hurt her mana pool a bit. Taking this further, we can increase her Shackleshot cast point. and none of this, I hope, will affect the support windranger more than what is necessary. This can force her to go force staff before aghs, and possibly make her buy arcan boots in dire circumstances.



What say you?

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I think is see michimatsch's point. but it would partly address tat problem statement.

You're forgetting a very simple fact about dota my dear winter frog.

There is no such thing as a skillshot in dota.

Every skill in dota is reliable. With items such as Blink Dagger or Eul's Scepter of Divinity, you can 100% reliably land any skill.

So it's completely unfair to make "skillshots" much stronger than normal skills because they are "unreliable" or "skill based". They're not.

Blink Dagger + Shackleshot is 100% reliable. Just line up with 2 heroes and shackle them. Shackle has pretty much no cast point and the projectile travels pretty much instantly. No way to miss that.

Skills such as Meat Hook or Sacred Arrow are only even allowed to exist because they are actually Pudge and Mirana's 'ultimates' (since the rest of their skills are extremely weak to compensate). So even if blink/euls + hook or Euls + arrow is incredibly OP (thanks for the euls range nerf btw, now it's much less so)...Pudge and Mirana have very little to bring to the table outside of this, so it's balanced out. WR however...outside of blink-shackle...she can vaporize any hero in less than a second.

So WR right now is pretty much Mirana in terms of "skill" shot initiation, except with an actual carry steroid that can solo any hero.

Want to make dota a game about actual "skill" shots? Make it like League of Lemmings...remove Euls from the game and nerf the hell out of dagger. Screw these items anyways. And rework every possible setup skill like Nightmare and similar to not be 'skillshot on static targets for dummies'. I would actually kind of like that, having to actually aim skillshots instead of relying on cheap positionning and setup tricks.

So the disable from Pudge (which goes through BKB) and the invisibility from Mirana are useless because they have hook and arrow which are so much better? I disagree, and specially with Mirana, since if you build an Eul's for her you're pretty much condemning her to a role which isn't exactly that of a hard carry (Pudge should always go for the Blink anyways, with that I agree).

Concerning Windranger I still agree that if you do want to nerf something, you should either nerf shackle or her ulti a bit (uptime with Aghs for instance), or maybe even both. Not the evasion, because that isn't that overpowered, there are other heroes which can dive and she basically relies on that to escape all physical damage, give someone an MKB and she melts (not even gonna talk about magical damage because we already know that). Yes, you have to counter her, that takes effort, but then again so it takes to counter Huskar, Doom, Meepo, Anti-Mage and every other meta hero and so on, it's part of the game.




God forbid. You want to actually compensate people for spending hours training hooks and arrows instead of actually making them have to think during games to weight in factors like the positioning possibilities of Blink Dagger?! Also reworking set up skills makes for even less teamplay and possibilities of interesting combos which are a part of what makes dota so great.

Why are you suggesting to make our game more like Janitsu's game? Hamster, come back to the right side of the force, pliz.

Perhaps I posted too late to garner attention with my post. I think the bigger problem is not in Focus Fire itself (although I wont mind it receiving tweaks), but Shackleshot is an incredibly powerful disable. Some alternatives I found:

1. Reduce stun duration on secondary target: This way WR became more of the single target DPS that she is and make this skill not an autowin teamfight CC. This spell is ******** tbh. Half the stun duration on secondary targets wouldnt do too much harm imo
2. Reduce cast range: Although this is nullified by Blink Dagger
3. Reduce latch range: Perhaps a bigger nerf than the other two I suggested, range nerf need be well thought

I wish not to face a WR in my games. I'd be okay if my friend plays it though 4Head

edit: nah, focus fire is probably just as much ********

They're not useless, they're just ultimates that are much weaker than their non-ultimate counterparts hook or arrow. I was simply saying that Mirana and Pudge are heroes with one insanely strong skill and their other skills being rather weak in comparison, a bit like Nature's Prophet with his Teleportation.

In oppostion to WR that has 2 high impact skills : shackle, and her ult.




Except that Mirana is as much a hard carry as Crystal Maiden is.

Mirana has no carry potential. Being an agility hero doesn't make you a carry. Being agility doesn't give you more DPS. It just gives you more armor when you build damage items. Steroids give you DPS, and Mirana doesn't have one (unlike WR). She gets easily kited. Etc. She scales very, very badly with damage items.

Actually Euls is the best build on her. Even now after the nerfs. Because a reliable 5 second stun is better than building damage on a poor carry. Her best role is as a #3 or #4.

A WR with only 3 items can pretty much wreck a 6-slotted Mirana. I've tried this in lobbies once.




There's only one hero in the game that can dive a tower for 6 seconds (actually more like 7, because disjoint) while taking literally zero damage though.




Every single Pudge ever rushes blink, and they often go euls as well. And most Miranas go Euls. So currently, the game is telling people "why did you waste those hours training hooks and arrows when there's an ultra cheap item that does that job for you while also giving you a billion other advantages like maga regen or an escape mechanism?"
The game is not compensating them for their training right now. More like mocking them :)




Vacuum into Ravage into ghost ship...That's an interesting teamplay combo.

Sacred Arrow on a Nightmared static target...That's just cheap cheese that requires no skill and zero teamplay.

IMO skillshots should be, well, skillshots. The very existence of setups kind of defeats the purpose, because then they don't reward skill, they reward cheese.



I still wouldn't play a game without TP scrolls, denying creeps or melee carries (kek), and besides I like my money in my pocket. So I won't move to League of Llamas.

But honestly dota has several important flaws that other mobas don't have. I feel that generally dota players are so caught up in mocking their counterparts that they don't have the insight to realize this.

I would even say that Crystal Maiden is more a carry than Mirana ofc ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

On the rest, we agree to disagree :)

Except for the flaws in mobas. That's actually very true, we should always look to other mobas to search for improvements. Ending the likes of Blinks, Eul's and other set-ups is not one of those for me, though. Fek skillshots.

But yeah, I can't see a way that Shackleshot isn't getting nerfed. Literally everyone is complaining, so it will happen eventually.

You should not underestimate the amount of carrying power mobility skills give you. Storm with 20+ Bloodstone charges used to be(and still is with like 25+, actually) the best carry in the game(and is one of the best INT carries in general), or if you want a more relevant example, QoP, who is sometimes built into rightclick exclusively because of her 6 second Blink. Ofc Mirana's "blink" has much longer CD, but she is an agility hero(being AGI and thus getting way more DPS out of each point in AGI than other heroes does not make you a better carry? What a bunch of bs) and thus can carry pretty well even withou8t straight steroids(aside from Leap AS boost). She actually hits pretty hard with even 2 slots.

The reason for carry Mirana being unviable is because she is too weak for pos 1, very underwhelming as pos 2 and is too squishy to reliably get farm in offlane. I think she could still work as a "reserve" carry in a duo-offlane with some good hero like Ogre.

That's completely true, but it just doesn't apply to Mirana.

Mirana isn't Weaver. She's hardly a mobile hero at all! Leap isn't even used a mobility skill because it's a necessary part of her combo : Sacred Arrow -> Leap -> Starstorm.

Essentially she already needs to use Leap to kill because otherwise she has no way of getting in position once she lands arrow. So once she does her combo...she's pretty much out of juice, and out of mobility as well. All that's left to her is getting kited.

And even Weaver who's ultra-mobile and completely unkiteable has big problems as a carry because he lacks a damage steroid and has bad manfight.




Having high stat gains does give you better DPS. But being an agility hero on its own doesn't. AGI heroes build damage with AGI items, strength and intelligence heroes build damage with raw damage items and/or primary stat items, but at the end of the day being agility only gives you synergy with agility items like Butterfly or Manta Style, and doesn't increase your DPS in any way compared to strength and intelligence heroes with raw damage items.

Take an AGI hero with +2 gain to all stats, and an INT hero with +2 gain to all stats, *both heroes have the same native DPS so the same carry potential*.

The only thing that could make Mirana a potential carry is her 3.3 agility gain. But that's hardly enough. If Crystal Maiden had 3.3 intelligence gain and 3.3 agility gain, she'd have the same DPS, so she'd be a far better carry. Because CM is unkiteable with her two disables and Mirana is extremely easily kited.

That's why INT heroes like Windranger, Silencer, Invoker or even Enchantress with good steroids have 100 times the right-click potential of the "bad" AGI carries like Mirana or Viper.

Primary stat has nothing to do with damage output...only primary stat *gain*. Most agility heroes are carries because they're designed to be carries, with steroids and stuff. But it's a huge mistake to think that somehow being agility gives you better damage output than strength/agility heroes with similar stat gains. It doesn't.


EDIT : Janitsu, helpful as always. Kek :)

You are playing with forces beyond your knowledge


+u r so bad that when you play, your team reports enemy players for ddossing you while you are seriously just that bad haha #eREKT

I think Dota needs to learn marketing from League, and league should learn how to balance, and set gameplay from dota.