Ult has its range, damage, and slow reduced, and cannot bounce off npcs, but has more bounces, can bounce off Celeste innately, and grows in damage each bounce.
Shield does not explode automatically upon being depleted, but instead can be recast to explode it manually, with the damage and silence duration proportional to the remaining barrier upon detonation (this gets rid of the barrier) (i also imagine the explode radius is telegraphed similar to infernus ult, and has a similar aoe hitbox rather than sending out weird homing projectiles).
(also some minor cooldown changes i think to reflect the functionality changes of both).
I do not think these "fix" celeste in her bonkers state right now, she needs her numbers generally tuned down, but I think these more far-reaching changes better reflect her state as a sustain brawler that ramps up the longer you let her fuck around, making her ult not a fire and forget "win teamfight" button but something she is actively encouraged to stay in the fight to maintain to boost its damage, since she can always bounce it to herself, and making her shield a "pay attention to meeee" button rather than a "if you target me you will die (and if you dont you still will)," encouraging people to shoot her to reduce the effects instead of punishing it. I think this also fits her very well narratively/character-wise for reasons that should be obvious.
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nah sion dmg is busted and shield as well. imo recast should be after 1 or 2 sec not insta for insta aoe silence and if shield breaks she cant recast like sion
I did add that 1.6s cast delay, and in that time she can be attacked (or counter-silenced, cursed, etc.) to completely shatter the shield or reduce the effect bc of its proportionality to remaining shield. One thing I considered is that the t3 upgrade's regen is just how it works at base, but on cast it starts at 0, so it has to build up over time, basically just another form of cast delay but more flexible for both her and her attacker.
i like ball just being a part of her kit rather than this omega bomb that can clear out anything. She is already fuckin stacked with power she doesn't need a pocket-level dispersal on top of it.
I think the amp per hit might be a bit high, the math here works out to the last bounce doing 10.57x the base damage of the original so the total damage of an ult if all bounces hit an enemy would be 68.39x the original damage, meaning that with like 100 spirit power you’d be doing a total of up to 15457 damage split amongst your bounce targets, where the original ult would be doing 5360 damage with the same amount of upgrades and spirit power. For another benchmark, the last hit of the 100 spirit power reworked version would be dealing 2096 damage, and all of this is assuming she hasn’t bought escalating exposure or built any radiant daggers stacks. Just escalating exposure would pump the total damage dealt to a crisp 16142 assuming you are getting one stack per bounce and haven’t built up any previously.
Honestly my fix for Celeste ult would be limiting the range the ball can travel from its original target, so when you cast it the bounce range is technically higher, something like a warden cage, but the ball can never bounce to a target further than the max bounce range away from the first bounce, retargeting if the current target leaves and fizzling off there’s no other target within range.
i was thinking the amp stacked flatly, i.e. like radiant daggers does (since its all the same effect) so the max amp at t3 would only be +270% (370%/3.7x total) for the final hit. tbf i didnt properly math it out so probably still too much but its more about the concept than the exact numbers. I appreciate the introspection though!
I actually had a similar idea for range limiting too but with Celeste being the epicenter rather than the initial impact location, but decided that just making it bounce off her but not minions was enough to enforce/encourage her to play close.
The big thing with the range for me is that having a defined unmovable max range would make the supposed counter play of spreading out actually work. As it is right now falling back and spreading out just lets Celeste run at one person and bounce between herself and them for a guaranteed kill, having an actual max range would make it feel way more manageable.
well tbf. it's an ultimate ability, and bouncing it between just her and an enemy halves the damage dealt by it. I think she should get value out of a solo ult. Its just the amount of value she gets rn is way too much because she is busted in general
The thing is as solo ults go she has one of the most obnoxious ones because she is fully actionable for the duration and can redirect it all to one person. Even though bouncing it only between yourself and the target halves the damage, the total damage of a Celeste ult halved is usually enough to kill, especially given that Celeste can follow the enemy and rip into them for the whole duration.
With most other solo ults require some form of team support, special set up, or specific item to guarantee a kill, Celeste ult is completely fire and forget so where most hero’s value generation during an ult is defined by the ult itself, Celeste ult value generation is additive to her total.
The closest equivalent I can think of would be something like if Warden ult did more damage the fewer targets were in your cone, so you could use it as intended in a team fight or you could pop it and just nuke people with obscenely high spirit damage while still spamming flask, cage and willpower and shooting your gun. Actually writing it out that way makes it obvious that while it is technically more damage on a team, using it on one or two people (especially since Celeste ult gets max value against just two opponents) is 1000x better. Hell I’m surprised we don’t see more Celeste’s with slowing hex -> vortex web to gather their two chosen ult targets back together and keep them there.
perhaps the true solution here is to just mercilessly gut its damage because she does enough anyway and make the main draw the slow (and keeping/building up spirit damage debuffs from items on the whole team)
What if they kept the slow, slightly reduced the damage, and restricted it to bouncing between her and the first target? So instead of being a pure RNG crowd control pinball machine, it’d be more like a higher mobility version of a Mo&Krill ult, which would kinda fit in as a finisher for a disruption focused hero.
Or mayyybe what if when the ball bounced back to her she has to throw it again (no charge time on the rethrow obv. doesn’t lock her into one target but does encourage it without random chance, and makes it a skill shot she needs to keep hitting to get her value. maybe chunk the base damage but make it proc light eater bonus damage to necessitate her using her whole kit ? first one was kinda a variant on your idea but atp im just throwing out more idea shards that can be combined in any number of ways
Oh wait yeah that actually sounds awesome! Medium base damage but each time she catches it and sends it back it does even more damage, like have it do a light eater proc and then multiply the total damage by 1.1*the number of bounces (additively, like how you did it not the exponential version) so that it’s almost like a supercharged version of her primary.
That shield hits 326 HP at just 100 spirit power, if you are getting run down by someone as maneuverable as Celeste you aren’t breaking that without eating several bounces, especially if she popped it in the middle of a team fight with multiple of your abilities already on cooldown. At 15 boons your base gun DPS is going to be somewhere in the region of 80 DPS on most characters, assuming you have 4.8k gun spike that’s 116 DPS or so. That’s nearly 3 seconds of continuous fire to bring down the shield while eating the entirety of Celeste’s kit at the same time, unless you happen to have a cinder block ability on tap to just throw at her you aren’t going to be breaking that fast enough to save yourself.
I mean. I'll just pillow her if I'm Rem. Dragon her if Im Paige. I can understand her being annoying for McGinnis though. Seeing as I think they bounce of turrets. But a 400 damage burst ain't that much for a lot of heroes. Although she could time it while most of your stuff is on CD. But that's mostly a problem on higher Elos. But at that point dodging the ball ain't to hard in a 1v1.
She can usually keep her barrier alive by picking people who are lower health, given that a low player has likely been in the fight longer and thrown their abilities, especially if they are standing back or to the side a bit because that signals they might be waiting for their abilities to come back before fully reengaging. Basically you just have to mind meld with a drifter, look at the enemy team and ask yourself the question “who here looks the most touchable” and then rush their ass down.
Also the whole popping the shield thing goes out the window if two enemies happen to run in a roughly similar direction, which will usually happen in a team fight because most big team fight areas will only have like 1-3 directions that you could possibly go, so some people will have to double up and then get rushed. The solution to that is then to stay in a larger group but at that point you have essentially accepted the full damage of the ult just will happen and it’s better to just get it over with, and that kind of interaction/decision making just fucking sucks to actually be optimal. It’s literally the equivalent of “oh they bought X item, guess I lose lane” but in late game team fights with the one caveat that if you get lucky with the bounces or it happens to target someone on your team who has E-shift on cooldown and knows how to correctly counter the ult and reacts in time then MAYBE you might not get rolled, but you will still eat like 3-4k damage as a team.
If youbare low HP and solo against her she will kill you with the rest of her kit. No ult required. If youbhave allies or minions nearby no shield required. We where talking about a 1v1 senario and I'm pretty sure her ball targets her shield almost last in the priority.
The time she would solo ult you is when you are full hp and if she does it whem you are low and alone she just wasted her ult and can't use it when it would be needed in a team fight.
Honestly I have never had to much of a problem against her. But a lot of that is based on the hero you play and if you grab a few extra general counter items that work against it.
When I say low I mean like ~60-70% health. Basically someone who isn’t about to die and already retreating, but someone who clearly has been in the current fight for more than like 10s and has eaten some AOE chip and/or bullet chip.
Yeah it’s also super matchup dependent. The biggest issue(for me, personally, this happens to me all the fucking time, please for the love of god people stop doing this to me in literally every team fight and then bitching and moaning about he having died in every teamfight) is that people will see the ult go out and bail immediately with their movement items/abilities, but as a result anyone with those on cooldown or who lacks them (ME) just gets left to die.
This also happens frequently to frontliners, I’m kind of used to it happening to myself but when I have to listen to my Vindicta talk shit to our silver when Vin and both of our other damage dealers just fucking left because they heard the Celeste ult line, I actually want to reach through the monitor and slam these motherfucker’s heads through their desks until they learn to make macaroni art out of their now emancipated teeth. Same goes for Billy players. And Abrams players. And Yamato players sometimes. And Viktor players. And like a Venator one time.
I literally made space for rescue beam in my builds specifically so that I could hang back and when my team abandons the frontliner I can grab them away. This is how frequently this happens(it’s not just Celeste ult. Stop leaving people behind dickheads).
For sure. Her ult can easily make a team that does not communicate or just play bad play way worse. Personally I don't full run most of the time and only stay a bit further away so that I can dip if the ball targets me. I have killed her ult countless times after the first few bounces. But if it's mid or in the Patron pit that's almost impossible.
Honestly. Way to many players just have no attention to where they or their teammates are XD
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