Minor balance fix ideas

[Lone]

Ballista
-One idea is to make ballistas fire the same way as cats. I can't imagine counter-arguments to this change, but we'll see.
-An alternative, and ugly (but potentially easier) idea is to remove them all-together and give humans cats as well. Cats are race neutral and I'm pretty sure even the icons of commands would not be an issue by default. However I can see people disliking this which is understandable.

Paladin, holy vision
-When you cast holy vision, the game camera automatically centers itself around the casting square. Due to the latency, and cast-time this makes holy vision unnecessarily difficult to use. (pre-target dks, combine with exorcism, combine with polymorph on sea maps). The idea is to just remove the part where the camera shifts to the casting location and let the player retain control of the camera.

Paladin, heal
-Heal is technically useless. An idea to make it easier to utilize is to make it function like exorcism. Make it so, that you do not need to target the unit you wish to heal, but the game automatically tries to heal every unit in a certain (let's say 4x4) region after it is cast. To make it even remotely useful, players would usually need to use multi-cast, but at least it could be potentially utilized now and then.
-I doubt making heal only function on allied units could be a problem. Exorcism already only works on enemy units, so it should not be too difficult to code this. However, assuming heal does get changed, to AoE, then it could still heal enemy units, requiring the human to have better timing, or mouse accuracy, tho I'd vote against this. Lastly, mana cost could be decreased to 4 or left untouched.
-Alternatively, it could just be changed to cost 50 mana, and heal 50 hp, and leave it's mechanics as it is, but it's still gonna be useless. (Maybe combine this with a cheaper upgrade, ah whatever)

I assume we have access to the base code, as latency and lumber bug were fixed.

Imo, none of these changes would break the game, the change in power would be extremely small, and humies could add a tiny bit of diversity. Personally, I would not touch anything else as I have no other safe ideas. Playing vs humans gives a very different feeling. Playing Hu vs Hu is again very different (worse imo), hence I would not want to try to really balance the races. Also, I think perfect, or even 'good' balance is impossible. I see no harm in these ideas tho. Regarding nostalgia, I love the spell sounds of paladins. Lastly, I like seeing (or being) a good human player fighting an almost as good orc player.

Thoughts? Positive, negative, neutral all welcome, just please communicate properly!

[tk[as]]

My thoughts: no.

[Warbux]

i like sum of those ideas... i dont like the auto heal tho .. if wed do ne thing id say jus make paladins spawn quicker... like if its 120 time to pop give it like 90 instead .. an wit that humans only need to make like 1 or 2 extra raxes instead of making double the amount of orcs

[Thumb$]

many games has auto play ...perhaps this is good! specially the auto heal part!

[shesycompany]

maybe u could take exo cast and tell it to target u and freindly..and cast heal instead of exo

[Lone]

Tk, that was concise! Just to clarify, you are against all of these ideas right?

I wouldn't say it's 'auto' heal. It would work like exorcism or death coil which is an already existing wc2 mechanic. Auto heal, I believe would mean that paladins without the players control, heal their allied units (alike priests in wc3, if auto-cast is turned on)... For wc2, such auto-heal efforts would be futile in terms of programming/testing, and also unwanted.

APM-wise, heal multi-cast would take about the time of lusting 5 ogres: select all paladins + press ctrl 1 + select 1 paladin + press 'h' for heal + press alt 1 (multi-cast) + left click on/around target. The first 2 steps can be dropped, if paladins are already hotkeyd. Even so, spending apm on heal will be questionable unless you are a very fast player perhaps. At most I'd say it is AoE heal, not auto-heal.

Regarding faster, cheaper paladins (or knights)... Humies have different strengths and require a different playstyle. I would suggest we avoid helping paladins to straight up fight lusted ogres. Personally I'd welcome such a change, for a testing period at least, however I am almost certain most of the others will find it too major of a change. We can try to make a poll for it tho, and hear what others would say about it. In the end we could get to ideas together that would be welcome by enough players (80%+ given this is a classic).

[Lone]

maybe u could take exo cast and tell it to target u and freindly..and cast heal instead of exo

In terms of code (and preserving wc2 mechanics), that would be the solution (also pay attention to factors like exo only works on undead units). I think self-targeting spells don't already exist on wc2, so I'd avoid that for nostalgia and coding reasons.

[shesycompany]

well it is told to work on undead..it has a twin spell that is raise dead...ive tried putting heal on it but will crash right now as it uses the click on unit cast type.

i was hoping for more options that blizzard left in....kinda like custom puds

[tk[as]]

i personally dont see any reason to modify the mechanics of the game outside of what was intended. lots of people have suggestions to do so. im always opposed =/

[tk[as]]

when i say "outside of what was intended" .. the latency that we currently play at (even when set to low) is not how the game is actually supposed to play.

Go play vs a computer in single player and watch how responsive your units are.

I didnt think it was possible to get that level of responsiveness on the multi-player level until a few years ago when some members of the community toyed with the idea of moving the community to a server "voobly" which is ipx connection i believe. while testing it, it was very clear that the units were much more responsive than playing on pvpgn

[shesycompany]

yeah kali pkt 4 u can play fastest and stop units....dosbox also when me and tupac tested it out but idk how it would fair in alot of people playing without latency that smooths the network..

which is another idea kali is free now and one could use that for bnet...just an idea ..and cotton would be besides himself with joy seeing people in his kali

[{Lance}]

I assume we have access to the base code, as latency and lumber bug were fixed.

Stop trying to modify war2.  This is what Wargus is for and you DO have access to the native code there.  In war2 you do NOT.  Its all bubble gum and duct tape when you try to modify the original war2.  Wargus exists for a reason.  It's so that modifications of war2 could be done NATIVELY.  You can take wargus and make it IDENTICAL to war2 and then re-modify it until it's no longer war2 if you want.  And it is fully multi-user capable when coupled with a Metaserver (same idea as PVPGN).  Host your own Metaserver,  bam, done.

[Lambchops]

Stop trying to modify war2.  This is what Wargus is for and you DO have access to the native code there.  In war2 you do NOT.  Its all bubble gum and duct tape when you try to modify the original war2.  Wargus exists for a reason.  It's so that modifications of war2 could be done NATIVELY.  You can take wargus and make it IDENTICAL to war2 and then re-modify it until it's no longer war2 if you want.  And it is fully multi-user capable when coupled with a Metaserver (same idea as PVPGN).  Host your own Metaserver,  bam, done.

Wargus is horrible. It feels nothing like WC2.

Just because they ripped the graphics and used them in a completely different game engine doesn't make it any more like wc2 than farmville.

Please google "native code" then say some more clueless shit that makes me lol. I like it

[Lambchops]

I didnt think it was possible to get that level of responsiveness on the multi-player level until a few years ago when some members of the community toyed with the idea of moving the community to a server "voobly" which is ipx connection i believe. while testing it, it was very clear that the units were much more responsive than playing on pvpgn

IPX is not supported by IP (the base internet protocol). That is the whole point of Kali. It is an IPX emulator. It encapsulates IPX in TCP so it can be sent over the internet.

Any change in latency would be an effect similar to all players connecting through the same VPN, and has nothing to do with IPX.

[Winchester]

If you bring in a farmville player, told them that flame shield is the worst source of reliable damage and told them to face lambchops using only this for damage, they would easily complete this "challenge".

Lambchops would then immediately get mad and try to frame them for hacking afterwards despite the fact he himself was hacking in the game. You still need to stop cheating by the way. Take it to single player at least if you can't help yourself clown.


Tl;dr nerf flame shield so people can handicap themselves even more when playing lambchops