Nobody is abusing bubble if you really can’t destroy a 10 hp bubble even with those circumstances then you suck also spell damage also affects bubble buffer so I don’t see it as indestructible as you claim.
I don't think buffers are extremely op, but giving the non spell versions a ticker would actually make sense.
Receiveing a new version of the st bonus every two turns is not op, check. Spot bodyguard for 35hp and no restrictions or hp decay is not op, check.
As pox nora interactions go, I bet buffers work inconsistently with defensive abilities. I really feel like the buffers take damage after the sl bonus. I honestly would not be surprised if the bubble ability works independently from bubble of protection.
To be fair, Bubble doesn’t stack on the same champ. The bubble has to be removed in order to gain a fresh one. Also, though it is a very minor point, the champ with Bubble isn’t doing much if it is constantly using Bubble as it is a 5 AP ability.
See, this is what elitists generally allude to when they say peoples' opinions who don't play at the top ranks don't matter. I'm not a full blown elitist (yet), but I generally tend to side with that camp as people like ronin, kalasle, and *sigh* maaaybe even @Etherielin on the rarest of occasions, are generally few and far between. While being a top player certainly doesn't mean your opinion is worth jack ****, if you were to pick from a pool of players for knowledge and reasoned analysis then that's generally where you should start. And by "generally," I basically mean always. To be fair, as many truly great players have left, the top ranks have become merely "good" players and so they may spread disinformation, as they've never really experienced an era where a top game was decided by whoever made the first mistake. This is what we mean when we say @TinyDragon is way worse than he used to be, because he doesn't get punished for making mistakes and the game is not basically over. -The following is going to be Ballballer actually being helpful, so if some of you already know this then cool beans and **** off ***Education Time*** Markoth's statement that damaging abilities will always be better than healing ones is almost always correct. Truly ridiculous defensive abilities/combinations have existed in the past and gone under the radar, whereas damaging ones of similar strength would have been hotfixed immediately. An example of a broken defensive ability/combination was the deck Gutsa made, in which nexus aura + resilient+ shroud basically made it so that you couldn't take the little ball of champions walking towards you. Ghern general's prenerf flagbearer ability or prenerf voidshield + regeneration also come to mind as truly brutal defensive abilities. And finally, Voil used to have an ability that allowed cavernkeeper or voil guard to be immune from all damage if standing next to another voil, which meant that if the opposing deck lacked the ability to move your champs, the game was basically over. ^I mention these past examples to show that I can indeed recognize the rare occurrences of defensive/healing abilities being stronger than damaging ones. Well maybe I didn't mention specific healing ones, but healing is more of a general concept than a huge amount of scattered abilities. With that out of the way, let us move on to the general theme of Poxnora at top play (different from top rank nowadays as, again, there are too few great players). I'm sure most of you have heard it before, but Poxnora is a game of one-rounding. As in, me doing 25 damage each to 2 full hp champs is not even close to as good as me doing 50 damage to 1 champ. The reason being, that by killing one champ, I've fully removed that champ's dmg, spd, and abilities from the game. Wounding 2 champs still allows both of them to counter attack on the next turn and do more combined harm to my champions. A 1 hp champ does just as much damage as a full hp champ in this game, which is why finishing an enemy champion suddenly and efficiently is the path to success. Again, as with everything, there are exceptions. Hitting enemy champs from long range over time and whittling down their health is a perfectly viable strategy and one that can be utilized to devastating results during standoffs or with the right deck. Long range champs with a DOT exemplify this particular strategy. --So how do Dark Favor and Divine Favor fit into the above?-- I'm just going to use their max ranks to demonstrate, so Dark Favor does 9 damage and Divine Favor heals 12. To the unassuming eye, Divine Favor is clearly the winner here. It number is bigger and it costs less nora. (I am, admittedly, unsure of the exact price of each ability, but I believe they are not too disparate to overcome the advantage dark favor holds over divine favor). But, less us remember the purpose of Poxnora, one rounding. And let us also remember that the person controlling the Dark Favor champ get to CHOOSE when to deploy it. Dark Favor is an instant and uncounterable 15%-20% reduction of all opposing champs' health. It does not give a crap about any of your champ's defense abilities and can be used as tactical nuke to abruptly change the balance of the game. Millenial Icequake is a spell that costs 100 nora and deals 20 damage to every champ on the field. Dark Favor does half that and only hits opposing champs. But maybe you say "Ballballer, you're old and washed up and your memory is hazy. People overestimate Dark Favor 3 because it only exists on Xulos, who was/is the best hero in the game. It just seems way better than it is, because you associate it with Xulos chewing your face off." Okay, let's look at divine favor 3 then and analyze its effectiveness. Divine Favor 3 is a great way to flip your opponent the bird if he's done damage to many different champs you control or to rescue one of your champs that you really need to survive as you retreat from the battle. This is obviously a defensive use, as it focuses on keeping your champs alive. Unlike Dark Favor, Divine Favor's effectiveness is entirely reliant on your opponent in this case. You can't heal things that are dead (which is another reason why one-rounding is so highly utilized by the best players). It can also be used to heal up a champ(s) pushing against your opponent and require them to pump even more resources in to deal with it and possibly tip your opponent over the breaking point. This is a much more aggressive use of divine favor's "defensiveness" and can require a bit more positioning skill, in that you have to be certain your opponent can't one round/cripple your advancing champs. In this case, you can sometimes force your opponent to play into an efficient divine favor for you, as they attack and attempt to push back against the champs bearing down on them. This is where true skill can shine though, because a skillful opposing player might retreat against your advance and gather resources to one round next turn, or attempt to bait an inefficient divine favor from you by damaging your champs juuuust enough so that one-rounding becomes easier next turn and plopping down a divine favor really wouldn't help you all that much. Again, it comes down to positioning and the opposing player still has ways to mitigate your divine favor's efficiency. So, to backtrack, we have Dark Favor on the one hand doing an instant, uncounterable 9 damage to all enemy champs. It is a purely offensive weapon and eases one-rounding, with the added benefit of taking off a large chunk of every other opposing champ's hp. It's not like the person using Dark Favor 3 is going to use it just to use it; a skilled player will ensure that it results in at least 1 death of an opposing champ that couldn't be more efficiently accomplished with another means. And, on the other hand, we have Divine Favor punishing an opponent's gradual spread-out damage by healing all friendly champs by 12 hp. Or, more aggressively, by surprising an opponent trying to deal with your champs advancing on them by giving them extra, sudden health. A huge part of both abilities is their global factor. I can hit your retreating champ or a back row champ for a good amount and don't need to risk any of my champs or their positioning for spell presence to do so. In the alternative, I can heal champs not fighting anywhere close to each other and drastically punish an opponent fighting battles on multiple fronts (as one rounding becomes much more difficult when battles are spread out and you have less firepower to bear against a specific enemy champ.) One might make the claim that damage is actually counterabble by healing (I mean duh, you do damage and then I reverse it), but that person would be wrong. Or, perhaps I should say that person would be wrong in the immediate sense of the word. For healing to counter damage, the person has to actually have the champ still alive to heal it. So, one might make the argument that a subsequent Divine Favor simply washes away a Dark Favor played before it. To be sure, playing a Divine Favor after a Dark Favor might very well be efficient. Healing all of your champs for 9-12 hp is not a bad use of a Divine Favor. And you know you'll at least heal that amount, because every single one of your champs just got hit. But this perfectly encapsulates why, at the end of the day, Dark Favor is better. That Dark Favor almost certainly contributed to the death of at least one of your champs. And there wasn't anything you could really do to avoid it. Sure, you efficiently healed the rest of your champs by "negating" their own damage from the Dark Favor, but you can't resurrect your dead champs or the board positioning you just lost because of it. To sum it all up, efficient use of Dark Favor is better than efficient use of Divine Favor because of the reactive nature of Divine Favor in most instances. The top level of player revolves around efficiency and not making mistakes (which Divine Favor punishes). While Divine Favor is not always reactive, it's efficiency is predicated upon your opponent's actions most of the time and can only be really used in a plan of YOUR design (not merely to punish an opponent's mistake), in limited and oftentimes risky applications. Dark Favor suffers no such limitations and only really grapples with balancing wanting to get Xulos on the field and timing an efficient use of Dark Favor. Also tariff is better than Dark Favor on Xulos, but that's a topic for another day.
That's a nice write up, but it doesn't take into account many things. Like the most obvious one being, that FW uses many low cost MELEE units, sometimes with SHORTLIVED and BERSERK, which means, you aren't just going to be sitting back all the time just because you can't get a 1 round. That will mean you are taking chip damage. I don't really need to defend my point, you can just concede that there are instances where NOT 1 rounding makes sense, Also, I'm not sure what dark favor has to do with the specific argument, "can i get a 1 round " because as you admit, xulous IS strong. Soul bane IS 100% better at specifically 1 rounding units. You play dark favor because you WANT xulous and to one round MULTIPLE units, other wise you would play the spell version. If you are saying that Xulous doesn't matter, it just isn't true.
What is cancer about it? If you aren't going to be appreciative of my post I'm not going to bother. Now beg me to respond to you, cuck.
*sees baller's wall of text* Yeah damage > healing. L2play and one turn things. If you're not using Dark Favor or whatever it's called to finish champs, you're using it wrong.
I agree. To finish CHAMPS. Plural. Or because you want xulous out. Otherwise why not play soul bane? Divine favor is better, glad you agree.
