Cp burst, my bread and butter is still dead so i’m still salty.
Welp, time for hibernation until a year later smec undos “balancing” and cdr plus burst works again.
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Honestly TB feels good right now. There is a pretty even split between DPS crit build, Sustained Breaking point builds, and tension bow builds.
The main thing is a tension bow carry will have trouble carrying a teamfight, which is why most bot laners are opting for SM/BP or SB/TT as first two items. Leaving tension bow for your 3rd damage dealer in top lane if they are WP, which they usually are considering you can’t just play strait tank with SC anymore. I don’t think it needs another nerf.
How about Lyra, Adagio, Idris, Anka, Silvernail, even Alpha has been used a couple times in all stars and WESG to decent success.
The only poor picks in 3.8 are bruisers, and a couple weird heroes like Petal, saw, taka, koshka, and such. 3.8 is very balanced overall.
If you say so lol.
303030303030
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What don’t you agree with? all the heroes I mentioned have good wr, or are good pocket picks at high level. Adagio and Lyra were super successful during all stars event, Anka is borderline op, and Silvernail is probably the best bot lane (but very difficult to play)
I have really mixed feelings about the new meta. I feel like there are a lot of good ideas, and a lot of potential for improvements, but a lot of stuff is screwed up right now too.
First, laning feels much more consequential now. Last-hitting matters more. That’s a plus.
The negative is that a bad laner will drag down a good captain more than they used to. It really, really sucks when MM is constantly putting tier 3 and 4 laners in with you, because they are the ones who will need babysitting in their lanes, and their existence starves the captain.
Overall, playing captain seems a lot less consequential, and a lot more frustrating. On the one hand, you need to protect threatened lanes, but if you do that then you will be level 8 with nothing but fountain built 15 minutes into the match. It’s really miserable, because the more you try to work with your team, the more you starve. Captain gear seems to be more expensive too, which just compounds the problem.
Jungling is mixed. There are ways to make it work, but a long, long list of heroes who just aren’t viable. The general problem is that the meta seems to favor tanky heroes and WP heroes, and the change to Stormcrown hurts heroes with slower clear speeds. There aren’t many good choices in the jungle, and the role doesn’t seem to have much impact on the game. It would probably be better overall to play it as captain#2. Still, there are a half-dozen characters who aren’t just back-up tanks that can still play jungle well.
Tension Bow is a good idea, executed horribly. The nerfs don’t seem to have helped because the problem was never the burst damage or WP (it’s a good idea to have an item for players who want to build that way), but the pierce. It’s a horrible, horrible idea to make an item the best for burst damage and help it to counter armor. Take the pierce off so players can build against it, or so that we’ll be forced to build Bonesaw if we want the pierce. Most of the rest of the WP items would work well if TB was not a dual-use item.
Armor items in general are bad. I think that most of it is because every build includes pierce, so there is just no point to the armor stat for heroes that only build 1 defense. The second problem is one of value; shield items protect against everything, but armor is only for WP attacks, yet building them to tier 3 has similar costs. Metal Jacket is 2400 while Slumbering Husk is 2600, but SH can help you survive all sorts of attacks, and is probably superior because it will help you through burst damage. Atlas and MJ should probably both cost about 1800 (with lesser reductions to the cost of tier 1 and 2 armors). Armor is a niche item that you buy to counter certain heroes, so it should generally be a lot cheaper. You typically need to give up something important to get armor (since other defenses really aren’t optional).
CP is overall on the right track, but many heroes could use tweaks. For example, The short range of Celeste’s basic attacks isn’t merited if she isn’t meant to be spamming her A. Also, CP heroes in general could probably use some help with their clear speeds (that’s a particular reason that so many CP junglers are so bad. Maybe an Aftershock-like item that starts at tier 1 (and builds into Aftershock and Alternating current). CP has a general problem in that all of its healing and it’s buffs to basic attacks don’t start until tier 3, so it’s a lot more difficult to farm with, especially in lower levels. With cooldown and energy nerfed, and greater focus on farming, there are a lot of heroes who have rough CP builds right now. Several heroes really need to have their CP paths tuned up a bit; it’s fine if not every hero is good in both paths, but CP is really hurting (with basic-attack CP heroes as the exception).
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RIP me. I’ve barely been playing at all - I play a lot of Vox when I do - but I have yet to try Eve. At this point I’m building from muscle memory, since I assume that everything is going to change next update anyway and there’s little point in re-learning items.
On that note, I built TB first on Gwen a few days ago and it took me a good two minutes to realize it. RIP
Also, I’m not a noob 
- I’m T9 on two accounts. I’m just that out of VG recently
I disagree about the captain part. As a captain you should stay in mid lane the majority of the time, and only rotate when you really need to or your mid lane recalls or goes to clear jungle with other players.
If you do this you actually end up with a solid amount of gold due to the extra minion in mid, and can have a big impact as you are always ready to help your team with the river. In general captains fill a much more active role now because you essentially have to mid lane, which means trading, denying farm, and contesting cp buffs, even last hitting when you mid is away (which often lead to funny captain vs captain match ups).
As a captain main 3.8 is far more enjoyable and let’s me demonstrate my mechanical, as well as macro skill with proper rotations and farming.
This may be less true in lower tiers, as in tier 10 I have yet to get a mid lane that can’t last hit, and you can count on your team to know the meta which makes communication easier when everyone is roughly on the same page.
Most are out of vainglory, even the ones of us that still fire up the game. It’s just not that fun to play as it once was (say hi to 2.8 and earlier) + the out of game exp is also worse in every way. We play mainly because of false hope, time and money invested and routine.
3 Likes
I can make both WP build paths work but after playing all of them TB one just feels slightly stronger. I used to be able to carry games with stuff like Skye but now it just feels like I’m playing a supportive role on those heroes and waiting to pop off on someone but all the burst from everyone else just ends fights too fast. Maybe it’s just that people aren’t building defense anymore resulting in more burst rather than ramping damage.
The way I build stuff is usually getting a little bit of everything and going deep in each item. So I get Weapon Blade and BoE. Then I get a blazing salvo with the 1150 t2 WP item. I build into SB then TB then TT. And I finish my build with either SM or TM depending on what I want. I haven’t had the need to use RB in a long time because positioning in this game has really become an actual skill that negates the need to purchase an RB.
It’s a tier thing. At tier 7 I rarely get in a match where no one is tier 4 or below. The standard behavior for a laner when the captain is present is to ignore minions and focus on poking the enemy. I’m not sure if ironguard is a decent buy on 5v5, because there is no way to make it proc.
If you get a good mid-laner, then your team’s weak links will be in the side lane and you can not ignore them. If you do ignore them, then they AFK (which is kind of a best-case scenario), they feed, they lose all of their turrets in one push, or they abandon their lane and steal from other people. When I get pulled into tier 9 and 10 matches its refreshing.
Laning is great for me with the new economy because it’s so impactful. But captains basically don’t have an impact now because they earn 40% less than before. You can’t lose two lanes just so you can gear up.
Playing captain is just miserable now. They just need too much gear and it’s too expensive. Often, the only way to do it is to steal last hits from your laner, but then they are likely to go start stealing from whichever area is not threatened.
Junglers have some of the same problem, since they will also need to pick up the slack if one or more of the laners is horrible, but they have a bit more freedom to roam, and they tend to be much more efficient at farming.
I used to like playing captain, but I’ll mostly avoid it now. I’m more likely to win if I play Lorelai or something, feed myself, and then come play like a captain at the end of the game.
When I’m not playing a lane it feels like SEMC put zero thought into the economy. I mean, they clearly didn’t think about how a captain is going to deal with bad teammates. All your gear is more expensive and less effective, and you get 40% less gold whenever you go try to save people from themselves! Have fun!
EDIT — For perspective, when I lane I usually earn around 14k or more, win or lose. When I jungle, I might earn that much, but it can be as little as 10 k if the lanes need constant babysitting. Captaining it’s as little as 7k, and almost never over 10. Usually 2-3 members of my team finished at 7-9k, which is basically just the gold over time plus any extra for kills, assists, and turrets.
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Will just lay out my experience without numbers - every time that I didn’t build only offence on mid/bot, I ended up losing or atleast dragging behind. It’s SEMC fault, most likely to shatter the tank meta. Defence is just not giving enough to make it useful (- late game and mostly 1 defence item, but I did and quite a lot see others play successful without a single def item in bot/mids and even junglers). Building offence and position good + having a decent captain is A LOT better vs balanced offence/defence builds. It’s just my personal experience and from what I see on others builds (t10 bronze/silvers/golds), all feels the same way about what to build.
Oh theres samuel and vox coming. I m full build ringo. I am hiding in the bush. I can 1v2 them ez.
starts shooting Oh yeah vox is already at half health! TB proc up, got BP stacks, lets eliminate samuel.
Oh yeah samuel at half health in 1 hit. Ezzzzzzzzzzzzzz oh wait wut. I had 20 bp stacks and still got eliminated. How? Both of them got the husk. Ez. Thats the meta right now.
Buying 5 damage is just not efficient no matter how good you are. You get diminishing returns on damage, to the point where the extra couple of seconds you’d survive with 1 defense is more effective than the extra damage you’d do before that, not to mention the utility value of reflex block. There is a reason the pros start buying defense after 3, sometimes 2 damage items, and never build 5 damage.
Of course on backlines or assassins, you’l be going 4 damage most often. On melee warriors or bruisers 3 damage. This seems like the right place for defense to be in, and you actually have a lot of meaningful choices now.