What makes a hero good nowadays

Vainglory Discussion Heroes, Builds, & Items
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This is a topic that is part of a bunch of topics covered in @ThePinkOtter’s recent post which I believe makes a lot of good points and great suggestions. This has to do with what it takes for a hero to be good:

Currently @ThePinkOtter mentions 3 criteria for a hero to be good in the current meta:

  • Can survive CC chains (Captains and tanks)
  • Can avoid CC chains and wipe teams (Heroes with high range poke or CC immunity as well as mobility)
  • Powerful snowball potential (Fed assassins)

Now this is going to be in my own words. Why are certain heroes good? Magnus is good because he has high range that scales very well as well as a powerful CC ability. Why is Skaarf good? Powerful poke and can siege turrets easily because of that as well as deal tons of damage if he can hit you a lot with his passive. Why is Reza good? He has the best mobility in the game in ADDITION to his extremely high burst. Why is Grumpjaw good? Extremely tanky and high base stats. Why is Lance good? Extremely tanky and VERY high base stats. Why is Taka good? Sticky, CC immunity, and high damage. Why is Gwen good? High mobility, CC immunity, powerful stun, and high burst. Starting to see a pattern here? A good hero’s kit tends to revolve around high mobility, very high base stats, CC immunity, or having powerful CC of their own.

@ThePinkOtter also mentions Kinetic and describes her as a bruiser without the weaknesses inherited from being a bruiser due to her being a ranged hero while hitting the other criteria such as mobility, CC, base stats, and sharing the aspect of powerful poke that Magnus and Skaarf share.

Now let’s take a look at the most recent bruiser hero, San Feng:
He hits EVERY category I mentioned hence why he is actually pretty good and why I expect him to be a top tier top laner. He easily has the MOST overloaded bruiser kit of the entire cast, but it is exactly what a bruiser needs in the current meta to be viable.

  • Mobility: His weakest aspect, but he has a dash from his A

  • Base stats: His B has extremely high stats, is one of the faster heroes being tied with Grace and Fort for movement speed, above average base weapon power, and pretty much the most health in the game due to his passive (And even then his base health at level 1 is above average for his role where his late game health is only low due to his passive from having effectively over 4k health in fights from using his abilities)

  • CC Immunity: Both his A and B grant him CC immunity on overdrive which is just absurd

  • Powerful CC: His A has a stun when attacked in counter stance and his ult has some of the best CC in the game. Not only does it stun, but he also pushes heroes away which will make his ult not only bait blocks, but can also still provide some CC after the block due to the push.

No other bruiser has a powerful kit like his. They generally revolve around damage, but “good bruisers” are just glorified captains like Grumpjaw. Rona cannot survive for long as her only means of escape or sticking on someone is her A which is usually her initiating ability, Blackfeather requires fights to go on for a while for his burst to really work due to his A, and Glaive’s ONLY utility is his A which still requires him to build damage due to not having much else after that wile Yates serves his purpose…but more efficiently. The pattern HERE is that damage based sustain heroes are not viable. Why? Because they’re the MOST susceptible to CC of any other kind of hero. If you give the enemy time for their cooldowns to go down, then chances are you’re getting CC’d mid-fight. Blackfeather is the best of all the traditional bruisers, but that is only because he has two abilities for mobility whereas Rona and Glaive only have one, which just makes their job that much harder.

What bruisers lack compared to other roles is that they kit needs to work to mitigate their weaknesses and not DESPITE their weaknesses (Which lead to bruisers becoming extremely annoying to deal with like 5v5 release Rona). Magnus is still squishy and has low mobility, but makes up for it with high damage and range. Captains (should) not be able to 1v1 healthy enemies, but make up for it with powerful utility and frontline capabilities. Assassins have low defense and usually cannot sustain in close quarters fights, but make up for it with high mobility and burst. Bruisers are susceptible to CC, but the only way to make them work is to remove that weakness because SEMC added so much GOOD CC to the meta that it is necessary to make bruisers good at all and the only way to make a bruiser good without making them practically immune to all CC…is to give them more mobility, but sustaining fights without poke is difficult, so you need burst to kill enemies before you go into CC hell and you essentially have to make an assassin if you do not want to give a bruiser loads of CC immunity and make them nearly unkillable.

EDIT: San Feng’s dash has way more range than I expected (Also his B deals way more than I thought) only cementing the fact that a bruiser needs to be overloaded and just plain broken just to be viable. He can build 0 damage items and out trade most of the cast…

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Idk I’ll have a firm opinion on San Feng when I get to play him tomorrow but he’s just a good all-round character. It’s not like he can carry matches, he still needs his teammates to take advantage of his tanking abilities. His B has a high base damage meaning he’ll be good early and mid but will drop off late game. He’s balanced and RB basically ruins his kit whenever you are against him.

Otter’s suggestions weren’t that good imo and should be taken with a grain of salt. They mentioned something along the lines of Lance and Lorelai being bad heroes.

Heroes imo can be good in and they want to be! BF’s kit still has all the criteria you have stated yet people claim he’s garbage so what can be done about that. Imo he’s good but whatever. Joule is an overall tanky hero with none of the attributes you have mentioned but yet she is good in her own right because she has her B and a slow.

What makes a hero good would be how well their abilities (including perk) flow together. Look at Reza, Anka, Magnus, Silvernail, Vox, Lorelai, Skye, and some others. They are able to be as popular as they are even though some are in a weak state (Vox, Silver and Skye). Heroes with “corrupt” kits become favorites only when they are above average notable examples being: Joule and GJ. These guys are doodoo every other patch. Combos are limited and straight forward. It shows one aspect of hero design being: reliability vs. complexity. When both of these attributes are balanced then you end up with an amazing kit like Silvernail and Reza or even Idris. Why not even Baptiste applies to that. Any hero that only goes through number changes I would say is a hero with a perfect kit.

As long as they don’t become a complete mess like Petal I would say they are fine.

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It’s been a long time since I played krul , but I played him recently just to try him , he is very weak , no damage and not tanky , like semc wants to change heroes , wanted to make reim bursty and not a tank , same for krul by buffing his cp path , so it is more and more a burst over sustain , so I think the main thing make a hero good is the damage , even if you see cc important , cc without damage is useless , the cc helps you deal the damage and prevent the dodge .

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Which has relatively low cooldown and forces you to stay in place until the channeling stops. Isn’t specially great as a mobility tool.

And takes forever to hit.

Actually, there are a relatively high amount of heroes with that speed.

True, but his channeling are also absurd.

People that wasn’t affected at the start of the ability aren’t affected at the end.

But he isn’t a bruiser like rona and Glaive.

Early game yes, late game no.

Interesting note: reza is the only assassin whose damage can completely be negated and is one of the worst assassins in team fights due to the easy bodyblock.

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Blackfeather is a dualist. Excells at 1v1s and cannot be a bruiser since bruisers are tanky and can deal a good amount of damage.

As it should be, but it can still be worked around by a Reza with a simple B+A combo instead of the A+B one.

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That’s what I’m saying…

Wastes too much time in a teamfight.

I don’t think you should be able to completely negate all the damage of an assassin whose only job is deal damage.

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I was expanding on your short “hes not a bruiser” response.

Is that exaggeration on completely? The changes on his A, B, and perkmake up for the loss of damage imo. Pre 3.10 changes his overall kit didn’t rely as much on his perk as he was supposed to be.

When he was released, the main focus was to apply Firestarter and dash in for the burst. But as stated before, it wasn’t that important as it should in 3.9.

Now they brought back the focus onto his perk and its working from what im seeing.

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Oh! Thanks then.

It isn’t. His passive can be blocked, which means that during the duration of RB or any CC immunity he can’t damage you.

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Reflex block has a cooldown of 40 I think and the same goes for Aegis. Most CC immunity abilities have a cooldown higher than 5.

Plus the window for immunity from activating the RB is like 2-3 seconds long. And abilities have less than 3 seconds of immunity.

Rezas Scorcher has a cooldown of 6s to 3s early to late game, and that isnt counting :vgitem_clockwork: into the mix.

He has many chances to apply his perk and his B has a charge time of 15s to 10s.

Many chances!

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I think it’s 75 for RB and crucible and 40 for aegis.
It was just interesting, not a big deal, except when you ult, Crucible stops it entirely and stops your dive. Those 2s of duration form the RB hurts a lot when your ult last for 6s as you are wasting 1/3 of it, and it’s 2s you can’t do anything. Imagine an Anka diving in and when she is on top of her target she can’t attack for 2s, then those 2s start to feel more meaningful.

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I mentioned it in the other thread, but the prevalence of CC could be partially countered by buffing reflex block. Characters who are meant to get close and sustain tend to suffer worst from the CC chains, but people also pick high-CC characters more often partially because CC rarely gets negated.

Reflex block should be a 600 gold item, and should be slightly more powerful in some way (perhaps giving more barrier or lasting slightly longer) with a much shorter cooldown.

The heroes who are losers right now tend to rely on getting close and sustaining, but are generally pretty flexible in their builds. Rona, Alpha, etc. can build 2 defenses without hurting their damage potential too much, so giving them an earlier RB is more benefit to them than to the hyper-carries (who aren’t always building RB anyway).

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The problem is, how much cooldown should it have? Because it has to be lower enough so those melee heroes aren’t completely shut down, but high enough so cc isn’t useless, specially for cc based heroes like lance, or heroes that rely on cc like reim or baptiste. Remember that in the last certain abilities already couldn’t hit.

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I actually just made a post going more into detail as to why I think San Feng is not balanced at all

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Honestly I don’t think “too much Reflex Block” should be much of a concern. When you are playing one hero who relies on CC, the the old RB could shut them down, but the meta is drifting towards multiple heroes with strong CC. I think that’s largely because of the nerfs to RB. Below about tier 9 it seems like players aren’t really even bothering with it since Slumbering Husk is easier and generally better for enduring through a CC chain.

RB got nerfed when SEMC was addressing the tank meta, but I think the problem was more that tanks could put out too much damage without sacrificing enough defense/utility. I’m not convinced RB needed the nerf in the first place. In most cases, the highest win % builds don’t seem to be including defenses at all, and Aegis (or Reflex Block) don’t seem to be preferred on builds which use defense which seems to be the player base saying that defense is pointless.

With the current proliferation of CC, I’d like to see RB, Aegis, and Crucible go back to their old cooldown and increased barrier strengths. Also, I think RB should have its price dropped to 600. Something needs to be done to get RB back into the meta as a serious counter to CC. As it stands now, it seems like captains build crucibles (late in the game) and everyone else builds SH most of the time, because there wasn’t going to be any way to survive CC-chains anyway.

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Could shut them down, yes, but its not the same fighting a 75s cooldown and a 30s one. The cooldown gives them a window of opportunity to be useful, reducing the cooldown enough to make those offensive bruisers not that vulnerable could leave those cc heroes with a window small enough to not be useful at all. Its very hard to make viable extremely CC vulnerable heroes having a lot of other heroes being CC reliant.

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I get your point, but there’s usually more than one CC hero in a fight. Putting RB on cooldown for the other four members of a team to exploit is still useful. Back when everyone was building RB that meant 2 uses in a typical teamfight (one from the captain and one from the target). We worked around it, baiting out the RB, saving our big CC for after we saw it, or just repeatedly CCing until something stuck.

There used to be a good reason to choose a straightforward damage/sustain hero over one with strong CC, because everyone built RB and there was always the risk of having your CC countered. Now that risk is largely absent, because RB just isn’t worth building most of the time. I usually play heroes with some type of CC, but I never had a problem going against RB with its old cooldown.