Is Kestrel the new Petal?

As it was stated in the vainsocial webpage, Kestrel had the lowest winrate by far in the last update. Also as a Kestrel main, I can say that she is quite s*** right now. After few updates of trying to balance her, the devs seem to have given up on her and nerfed to the ground both her wp and her cp path until further notice. Hopefully they don’t repeat the history of petal who was pretty much a potato for like a year, just because the devs had no ideas how to balance her, especially since Kestrel is one of the few heroes who needs some skills to play and is able to pull very great plays. Do you guys agree, or am I letting my sympathy for her trouble my evaluation?

I think I still see a few good Kestrels in my solo games, and I even know a few who are really good at her, but personally, I don’t enjoy using her as much anymore compared to several months back. Maybe it’s just cause I’ve gotten pretty rusty with her, but when I play her these days I just struggle a lot to contribute to teamfights

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She is a tough hero to balance - because as soon as she is strong she is oppressive. I think the main focus of the balance team has been on trying to make sure no one is too oppressive in 5v5 - Kestrel’s kit is one that really suits 5v5 - she is potentially the best split pusher in the game so I am guessing they are cautious about buffing her just yet.

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Also the fact that her CP path is inherently unfun for the opponents means that when CP Kes is meta, everyone just want to die.

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Yea. I find it hard to use CP but whenever I go against someone that’s mastered it, I just want the game to end lol

Lol i can relate
Off topic @idmonfish can you remove the “at least 30 characters” thingy?

CP Kestrel is still very annoying to play against regardless of the patch. Always thought she’d be a strong splitpusher in 5v5 cause of her range superiority.

We might - emphasis on the might - reduce it slightly - we won’t get rid of it completely. But we are giving it a week or so to see how it goes.

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We will see, 5vs5 was just released - it will need a few patches to balance the things out.

they dont know how to balance.

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lol isnt this wat is happening to alot of heroes that seem too op and they dk what to do abt it and just shut them down. pretty sad to see this happen to some of my fav heroes likd lyra bf idris etc.

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I agree with Lyra and Blackfeather becoming potatoes (especially Lyra) but Idris is actually pretty ok for now.

Up until making changes for 5v5 (aka the 2.9 health changes) the balance in VG had been superb for a very long time - if you compare it with other mobas - there was less variance in the winrates of heroes for example than League which is impressive given that 5v5’s naturally have lower win rate variance per hero than 3v3’s. (This is because each individual hero has a greater impact on the outcome of the game in 3v3)

I think we are often unrealistic about what good balance looks like in VG because we had excellent balance for so long.

I’ll happily agree that right now things are unbalanced both in 3v3 and 5v5 - but the same processes which got us to an excellent state of balance in the first place in 3v3 are now in process with 5v5. I have a fair amount of confidence that we will get back to a state of excellent balance again.

I do of course have a horse in this race insofar as I am part of the core testing group so I may just be biased, but just looking at the winrate variances from the api it is clear that 2.9 and 2.12 are thus far big outliers in terms of balance in 3v3 - most of the time, the balance is much much better,

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I do agree that balance was great last update barring Varya and BF kek. I think completely changing 3v3. Have not played 3v3 since the patch so I have no clue what the 3v3 meta is like. Adagio is probably stupid good tho! I do agree that 5v5 definitely needs a bit more balance cause some heroes are way better than others CP Fort or Fort in general is really good from what I have seen and from when I played Fort, so I am happy about that! Divey comps seem really strong right now cause of the different avenues for ganks, so Assassins are insane Especially Tako

I am a Petal main and am having a hard time with her range. It seems so much weaker than other players.
5v5 is going to take a lot of getting used to!

Though I did go up against an awesome Kestrel player.

Lol, petal range is pretty obnoxious while empowered, she outrages saw by 0.6 after her trampoline empowerment. Weapon power petal may see a return.

I think they’re just pushing her off to balance her later cause she can get way too strong if you don’t take everything into consideration, as her cp and wp play pays are completely different from each other.
And they also tried to balance both 3v3 and 5v5 in the same update so they didn’t have much freedom to work with.

Nivmett: ‘Just a simple update for 5v5 so here is 0.2 range’ it sounds like ‘OMG how the f*** you still here? OK, you want a buff like all other carry, right? Here is 2 cents. Go buy a candy!’

At least increase her A’s range -_-

Actually thought that CP Kestrel would be strong in 5v5, vision is key and it’s harder to maintain on the larger map providing Kestrel ample opportunities to set up ganks in game. The fact her abilities are AEO also makes for her being OP.

What makes you think Adagio would be strong in 3v3?

If you’ve not played I can tell you CP Vox, Koshka and Krul are broken, CP Vox more so, he is simply oppressive from about 8 minutes. If you finish a game without total DMG over 80k I’d be suprised.

I’m semi complaining, I’ve always loved CP Vox so I’m glad they’ve done something to bring him back, think they probably need to tone down his AEO abilities (ratio of 70-80% perhaps) and increase his single target DMG slightly (maybe 60-%). At the moment that 100% bounce ratio and the distance it can bounce leads to your killing people you can’t even see lol