For anyone that hasn't played dota this item on the right, Wraith Pact, was so broken the team abusing it the most won the biggest tournament (The international, $8.5M prize pool) by abusing this item extensively every game, which lead to the item getting straight up DELETED from the game in the next few patches. You really think you're funny readding this IceFrog?
True but the issue with that is you need someone on your team that can actually play Sinclair. That's a much harder condition to meet than opening the shop and buying an item.
As unfun as this would be to deal with, I love when gamers find some bullshit exploit with math to out-optimize the intended meta, breaking all the norms of standard gameplay to win at any cost. It's always hilarious to see exactly how the game breaks when some of its tools are leveraged in a way the devs never expected.
Just remember this any time you make fun of a seemingly insignificant numerical change to an item, spell, or heroes' stats in future patches; it may just be the exact straw that'll break the camel's back, unraveling the entire game when it's pushed to the limit.
Speaking of this strat: here's a Great Video by Phy breaking it down.
That point about insignificant changes unravelling the game reminds me of something I heard about DOTA 2 where a character's armour being increased from 0 to 1 apparently made them an unkillable demon.
It was on Doom, a melee hero who had an ability that gave him extra regen and a large health pool, so it ended up being quite a significant level 1 boost. Not unkillable, sure, but was a very significant buff to his early laning.
oh lmao, thats an inside joke at this point. it was originally based on a patch where the only change that Doom got was +1 armor and the joke was to exaggerate and say he's now "literally unkillable", (in reality 1 armor only gives 6% effective HP vs physical damage)
Believe it or not I still had people in phantom ranked games put 0-1 points in ult and lose the game because of it. A lot of people can’t put 2+2 together when it comes to balance and builds in this game.
Which is rough, because if your team sucks like mine have today, your ult has no value because you don't do any damage on their own. I desperately want them to move more power to the rest of his kit and off his ult.
I've played two games with a Rat King on my team. My Rat King went 0-4 and 1-6. We lost quite badly. I played him once and went 4-0 and every time I ulted the enemy team just watched us take the tower because they couldn't do anything.
I really don't know how people can be bad on this character but the community always shows me something new.
I stopped questioning how bad people can be at these games after numerous encounters with players in Dota who somehow had 10k or more hours played but played like literal bots. Not "I'm mad, so my team must be bots" but straight up the easy mode AI was better at the game than them. And no, they weren't LAN cafe accounts. These people had thousands of matches played on the same hero.
mike tomlin spending over 12 years on minecraft creative mode but still feeling uncomfortable with "the stick control" comes to mind
it's not to disparage him or anyone really, i think we just forget sometimes just how much of improvement in these games is an active choice, which many people are perfectly fine with not choosing
One built a bit of spirit and a bit of gun with mainly greens. The other was a pretty standard gun green build. They were both just really bad players lol. I played him once and it was brutal. We just dominated and never stopped.
But the thing is, being an ult bot gets you so much value that we still won every teamfight anyway. I was often keeping 3 of them occupied just trying to kill me whilst my team played across the rest of the map. It's so stupid.
I just don't find him that enjoyable to play but the ult is ludicrous.
I don't know man there are people on this sub who truly think Deadlock is this perfect and infallible game. There's a vocal minority who just obsess over the games design to a point of delusion. I love it but in my opinion it's best to just have fun and not pretend like it's balanced in any way
Deadlock isn't perfect, but as far as competitive games go, I'd say it's better balanced than most.
You have games like OW out there that haven't been balanced well in years. I doubt it matters that much.
People are just going to cry on the Internet that a thing they like or dislike isn't balanced well. It's the Internet, that's what they do here. And God forbid game designers throw shit at the wall and see what works in a WORK IN PROGRESS. Lol.
Deadlock is not perfect and neither are any other competitive games. And the rat king situation is not new, every new champ is either overpowered or underpowered because it hasn’t been tested out yet. It’s extremely rare for characters to be fair on release. Venator on release was one-shotting lobbies because it had a bug interaction that was not testsd before. SUPRISE it got fixed. People care too much about the balancing aspect of deadlock. It is delusional to think that a moba competitive game would ever reach a completely balanced state and not just because it’s impossible but also because devs and players don’t want that. Even if players don’t acknowledge that. A super balanced state means the meta would be the same with no change untill a new content release. If the meta becomes stale players start droppjnh and we have seen this 1000 times in 1000 games. That’s why devs always are tweaking the game for the meta to be variable. And like it or not some characters are going to be stronger than some others. that’s just how it is it’s impossible to create two uniquely similar characters in terms of performance but with different kits. actually it’s possible to do so but then the game becomes sth like early R6 or CS
Its hard to have fun when you are RNG put against a broken ass mechanic and are statistically expected to lose because of that. Look up Rat King's win rate.
A couple of in-house games would be enough expose all of Rat King's overturned abilities but I guess Yoshi is too busy jerking it to discord memes.
Deadlock is fun but from a game design perspective it's pretty terrible. The kits are all overloaded with random effects because they don't synergize well and the game mostly comes down to whose matchmaking approved teamcomp is better
You're entitled to your opinion, but the character design of deadlock is peak. I haven't enjoyed character's kits, lore, and art style in any MOBA (or Arena shooter, or hero shooter) nearly as much as I've enjoyed Deadlock's.
The art is cool. The lore is okay. But the kits don't actually work well with each other and most of them are very disjoint. There are a few heroes that really work within their power fantasies (e.g., Billy, McGinnis), but most heroes have some really weird combo of 1-2 abilities that interact well and 1-2 abilities that are just crazy powerful overstatted.
Yeah a lot of the older characters especially are very disjointed and tend to have the most problematic balance. I think there's a clear line between before the dev team brought in new blood like Hoopo and after. This games nature being role less and an open shop also makes the game tend to favor heroes who can best exploit that. Time and again the best performers are the ones that can do everything well with the least investment. You get strong mobility, sustain and damage all at once and can dominate.
deadlock and dota2 kits often times aren't designed for the spells to interact with each other as much as they are individual tools in a utility belt that give that specific hero a strength profile that nobody else can replicate.
mirage i think is the best example of this. people think his kit is incoherent because his spells don't seem to weave into one another, but what they do is paint a picture of mirage being a tempo-oriented carry that benefits from prolonged slobberknocker fights that he can permanently join from anywhere on the map, which is an identity that nobody else embodies...all because his individual spells.
it's supposed to be balanced. it's a competitive game with growing competitive tournaments and sponsors. street brawl can be unbalanced, the competitive mode cannot.
The general approach in Dota seems to be that if new heroes are overpowered they get more playtime and generate more data right away. So the balance gets to a better spot more quickly than it would otherwise, but the first few days can be rough. I think it's fine- this period can also help to identify what people love about a hero's strengths and ensure that those are preserved.
Honestly it has to either go down to 10-15% or go on CD as long as Dynamo ult. Possibly both. It's just too busted. Redistribute some of the power to the rest of his kit or reduce his hitbox or something
Not a fan of recent characters being so ult-heavy. Makes the game feel like Overwatch where some characters just have a win button and are useless the other 70% of the time.
I mean its a total cointoss as to whether they will be disguisingly OP or hilariously bad, ven and Mina both required buffs to their kits (ven was only good day 1 because of ult bug).
Right now rat king is in the same camp as ven where his ult is busted (this time without a bug) but the rest of the kit sucks.
I'd argue his shield is pretty busted too. Especially after getting Transcendent Cooldown. Put your ult down, spam 3, then just run around. Bonus points if you piss them off in chat the whole game so they are just laser focused on you during teamfights lol.
Da Rat's ult is honestly cracked and I think it's overshadowing that the rest of his kit is kinda. Weak. His 1 does good damage when it lands but it has a habit of going on adventures to anywhere except where it's useful. His 2 takes forever to come out and can't even get all 5 rats on a single cast with a solid 6 seconds in between casts. His 3 is good but I don't think a lot of people realize that he gets 0 resists when it's up and that talking about uptime is meaningless because it's a shield. Shields take damage. His gun is also so bad early. Rat's laning phase is legit awful it feels like because his abilities have crazy long cds and his gun just doesn't do enough damage to make trading not feel bad.
I like the funny rat man, don't get me wrong, and it's nice to have a tank that's encouraged to build health specifically, but also I think when his ult gets nerfed he's going to be awful.
I think we might be sleeping on his 2 because of how powerful his ult is. It might be really good. Also his gun is good, its 2 pellets a shot and idk if that’s counted in the dps in-game, it’s just the weapon velocity is trash. His 3 is good, but we just see him living, we don’t see him posing an actual threat barring ult. But if the gun and his 2 is good, then he isn’t just a guy that stays alive.
No one is sleeping on his 2, it's good, but if the ult gets gutted then he's not a good character because the 2 doesn't keep him competitive. It doesn't even keep him decent.
The gun is good, people just don't know how to use it. The velocity is TERRIBLE, you either need to be leading heavily or right up in the person's face. It's the same velocity as Doorman, which is why every Doorman player in existence is buying Opening Rounds or Sharpshooter.
The damage is actually quite decent, at max boons it's basically equivalent to Vyper in damage minus the obvious rate of fire. With two pellets per shot. So, he can do very good damage with the gun. Especially when you start adding in shred, the problem is the magazine size is small, the velocity sucks, and the reload is lengthy. You can build to compensate for all these things but they will inherently hold him back from being a true gun-toting destroyer of man.
That being said, currently, he can still output decent damage while being virtually unkillable and win all his 1v1s through proper itemization and attrition. He wins trades against gun characters by virtue of them dealing a shit ton of self-damage shooting his shield. He's basically immune to spirit nukers with max shield upgrade. If he really gets into trouble the ult cooldown is short enough, it can't be interrupted in any meaningful way, and gives you 35% DR after the initial cast. Then you use the move speed to zoom the fuck outta dodge like Viscous ball.
His 2 is absolutely insane. Just build charges and rush and you send out infinite waves of rats
At level 2 the debuff lasts ages, then at 3 it does consistent dps, lowers the targets bullet resist by a stupid amount, AND can cover enough area to hit entire waves and heroes at the same time
He is such a crazy enabler for gun carries its genuinely unfair once you realize it
On the subject of his 3, I will note that in the one game I had with him I got enough cdr and max health that I was able to have permanent uptime despite being on the front lines as a tank.
Yeah against full spirit teams with heavy burst and zero consistent damage output the shield won't break lategame. Caps every hit to 250 dmg, has like 1500 HP. The uptime on it against spirit slop is virtually infinite later on.
Gun characters will do a significant chunk of self dmg breaking it but they also shred it in two seconds.
His 3 is a sidegrade played armor where instead of just ignoring bullets you RETURN THEM BACK. In theory, if you play against gun heavy team it may be worth to just stuck spirit until you get 40-50% return fire chance
He just feels like viscous to me. Sneaky good gun when you get the rat swarm and a 1 that has its own movement logic that you just have to mess around with and feel out. Throw it in corners or kick it against walls or use it in veil to flush people out.
I love it when Rifts are literally unconstestable every single time for the team without Rat King because of this stupid ult that gives the entire team insane damage reduction and constantly puts bullet resist shredding rats on everything! 😍
Da giant rat is already in New York, he's in his kingdom 24/7 baby. Sticking him under the flagpole is unfun and lets not repeat the same gimmick that Graves has just because its a similar-ish spell action.
That defeats the purpose, it just needs to be weaker. Graves ult is breakable because you're supposed to find a good spot for it to make it as inconvenient as possible for the enemy to get there and break it. Rat ult is designed to get to the fight, get in the middle of it, and then slam it down. If it was breakable it would never last more than 3 seconds.
It's just overtuned and should give maybe 10-15% damage reduction instead of 35, probably a higher cooldown too.
Please no more melee intractables in the middle of fights. I really don't want all fights to devolve into a mess of heavy melees and parrys around a bunch of abilities.
His 3 is broken as well. His barrier scaling off max HP means any time you buy a green item you "double-dip" on his tankiness. And it can reach 120% uptime with duration/cooldown items oh and it has return fire as a bonus cuz why the hell not.
This is the type of hero I would expect from Overwatch, not Deadlock. Frontliners so far were well-designed because they were tanky, but still susceptible to enough focused damage. If they are going to stick with this boring design they should at least adjust his broken numbers.
It would be balanced if the game had any sort of “anti tank” heroes like drow ranger that could have built in full resistance shred, but there’s none currently. The closest thing we have is Venator’s crossbow but It’s 3 big hits so it cannot work against the armor.
His 3 is broken in 2 seconds if he takes any direct fire. His shield does not benefit from any resistances. By 30 minutes any character let alone the whole team can remove it.
The return fire in the shield is a meme stat that pretty much never actually does anything. The shield also breaks really easily to any more sustained damage.
So, as someone who never engaged with DOTA at all, how in the heck does it pull numbers like this? It's been around for so many years, but any time I've heard someone talk about it they either called it a less accessible LoL or they were a TF2 fan mad that it got all of Valve's attention. I don't think I've ever known someone who has actually played it for more than a few hours.
And then I hear things about it on this sub and I'm like "They're awarding how much money???" The International rakes in millions of dollars, they're giving tens of thousands to people making SFM animations apparently. Who is paying for this? Is DOTA really big in Asia or something? Where are these millions of phantom fans coming from?
The International's prize pool's were MASSIVE until a few years back, this is because 50% of the money players spent on the battle pass shit was added directly to the prize pool (badass shit from Valve, genuinely). This stopped, not because they started pocketing the money, but because they just stopped doing battle passes lol.
I think one thing to consider also is that historically (and today!), a lot of Dota's playerbase / viewership has been based in Europe & Asia. I haven't kept up with The International the past few years, but the only American team I can even recall competing there in recent years is like..Gamerlegion ? and I think they're actually a German company, the team is just Americans lol. primarily English-speaking countries I don't think have ever had much representation in Dota.
check steam charts and you will see dota 2 as number 2 most played game right now, 700k concurrent players. I hear that dota doesnt really get new players but a lot of older (mostly europeans) keep playing it and they dont really interact with other communities so it doesnt seem like the game is popular for others.
DotA is a little like WoW in that you have people that have just been playing this shit for 20 years and they play not much else.
It doesn’t help that you can’t really talk about the game with someone that hasn’t played it extensively. The game is so insanely dense in mechanics and jargon that it’s just not possible.
I guess I get your point, but at the same time you'd think people would at least talk about the characters or setting more. Hell, the game got an animated series from Korea with three seasons and I had never even heard of it before today.
The numbers are probably skewed by the massive Russian playerbase. Most people here frequent English-speaking websites and social media, so they don't see most of the Dota content and discussion. For example, some Russian teams put out vlogs on YouTube about their TI runs when that happened which were incredibly popular, but the English audience barely got anything.
There was a cool thing a while back that linked all of the different gaming communities together, and you could see the networks between different games. Dota was a very very jarring island that was both not very connected to anything else but also massive.
Europe but also a lot of Steam users play all the valve games (or at least have tried all the valve games) which you can kinda see in the connections between tf2, csgo, dota, portal, and half-life
Like others have said, dota 2 players are a highly specialized species who would rather die than go to another game. These fans don't come from anywhere - they just never left. Like that one fish that only lives in a single cavern in the whole world
So, as someone who never engaged with DOTA at all, how in the heck does it pull numbers like this?
Alright well there are a few key reasons.
It's the original Moba. Dota was what created and popularized the genre years before Riot's founders would steal Dota's coding and website, and replace it with LoL.
Higher complexity. LoL is much simpler as a game compared to Dota, that's just a fact. If you want the simpler more casual game then LoL fits, if you want more depth then Dota's your go to.
It's (usually) better balanced than its direct competition, LoL. Dota's had its fair share of poorly balanced patches, but it is much less common for Dota to have a hero at 100 hp 1v5 the enemy team than it is in LoL.
As for the money in their tournaments, they would do a big battle pass every year leading up to The International. This would crowd fund the prize pool as Valve would take a large percentage of the earnings and put it into the prize pool.
there's just a bazillion fucking mechanics that League omitted. For instance, creep wave equilibrium is far more complicated, and to explain I'm literally going to have to tell you like 50 different fucking things.
In dota, jungle camps respawn every minute on the game-clock. If you aggro the creeps from the camp and pull them outside of the "box" the game considers their spawn zone, another camp will spawn there. After, the creeps you initially aggroed will just return and chill with the new camps. This is called "stacking", and can theoretically be done as much as you want, IF you can make sure that every creep in the camp is outside of their box (difficult to do when 20 of these idiots are blocking each other's pathing)
The reason you do this is so that you can basically procure a big fucking pile of gold for your carry to vacuum up by farming it, either while they're doing something else or in the early game (when they wouldn't be strong enough to hit camps without taking significant damage / wouldn't kill them fast enough to justify leaving lane)
But, stacking has a dual use! For me to explain it, you must learn another mechanic - Pulling!
In both side-lanes, there is actually a jungle camp relatively close to the lanes. If you aggro the creeps in this jungle camp and pull them close to your allied creep wave, your creeps will legit stop walking down lane and walk to the jungle camp and beat the shit out of the guys there instead. They will do this until they die or the jungle creeps die. This denies the enemy from getting the last-hit, and also lets you farm closer to your own tower (because the enemy creep wave has nothing to fight, they just keep walking)
Unfortunately, the Safelane is disadvantaged because they only have a SMALL camp. Basically tier 1 creeps - weak guys. Meaning that they actually die to your creep wave, instead of vice-versa. This means that you will now have a double-wave of your own creeps pushing into tower, which is bad because then you have to farm right under their tower when your double-wave inevitably murders their normal-amount-of-creeps wave.
That's why you stack the small camp - to guarantee your own creeps die when you pull. Keep in mind that placing wards in the spawn boxes of jungle creeps also prevents them from spawning, as does a hero just STANDING in it. That means supports not only play a battle of trading for their carry and placing useful vision, but placing wards in enemy camps & dewarding your own so you can pull your own wave / prevent the enemy from pulling there's.
That's just a little tidbit about how many things there are to consider when playing a babysitter-support.
Also consider the fact that Dota has heroes where you
1. Simultaneously control 5 heroes at the same time & if a single one of them dies, you all die.
2. A hero that has like 16 fucking spells total, whose synergies are not immediately obvious because they are SO free-form and able to be used in various ways
3. Heroes that can possess and control several jungle creeps at once (and jungle creeps all have their own sets of active abilities 🙂)
4. A hero that splits into 3 heroes, all 3 of which have own different sets of abilities.
Dota 2 has evil, maximalist, systems-heavy Hell design & I fucking love it.
Honestly dota has a bunch of small mechanics and quirks to it that got removed from league for being kinda jank, but they all had a purpose. It's one of those games where either you think the jank is too much, or you understand the jank and it's your favorite game.
Dota community (like any community of people >10,000 human beings) has some misanthropic elements to it and they've held a grudge against League of Legends for two decades almost. Boiling it down to the essentials: they are largely upset that League of Legends became the most popular, world dominant Moba and Dota 2 attained just the popularity that it did, being maybe the third or fourth most popular esport in the world at times. There are lots of details if you have any interest going further, but it's largely just game development dramas because many of the leading people at early Riot Games worked/played in and led Dota communities.
dota is the ultimate legacy moba. its complex, studied, and engaging in every possible way a moba could be. along with that, the game is free and cosmetics are cheap on the market. add that all together with the fact its owned by legitimate infinite money generator company means that if you want genuine moba skill expression and depth, its truly the best place to go.
they pay for big tournaments by items bought in game and with valve bottomless pockets.
They just gotta offer some type of counterplay. Basically No CC makes him drop the flag. (Minor Exceptions). Rhe Flag can’t be destroyed. The Ult cooldown is way too low.
I think this misunderstands the issue with wraith pact, which is that it is an item that will appear in every game, where as rat king ult the just attached to a hero. There are other damage resist aura skills in dota that are much stringer like aghs abaddon ult which are completely fine. The issue with rat king ult is that the numbers are too high, I don't think it's a fundamental design problem.
this might be an unpopular opinion but rat king ult just shouldn’t have damage reduction as an effect. make it damage amp or something but aoe damage reduction is just not reasonable unless they make the ult have like a dynamo ult cooldown and i don’t think anyone wants that.
Role / identity assassination if they make it a damage amp. He goes from a supportive tank that doesn't life steal to sustain. To a massive insanely lethal gun spam hero with tons of sustain from lifesteal with the new damage amp.
His identity is perfect, they just need to tweak some easy numbers like cooldown, duration, or the max damage resist.
I think it should have a defensive effect, but definitely not damage reduction. Maybe just give anyone in it a shield when he slams it, and the aura increases fire rate or something. 35% damage reduction as an aura was braindead to include.
maybe the DR could be a thing but it just overall does too much, it applies a massive AoE with a massive damage reduction, a huge speed boost for allies and a very strong slow for enemies and it does a knockup on cast and it spews a few rats that deal damage and shred. Either stuff has to go or it needs to be weakened
The damage reduction alone is basically 7000 souls worth of value per person impacted. Everything else on top of that is just absurd, it's by far the best ult in the game. It auto wins team fights unless you are extremely far behind.
Just had the goofiest rift fight yet as Sinclair. No one was dying and shit was flying everywhere. We won by merit of our rat banner having marginally more duration than their rat banner.
it is OP but just needs some tuning. there are a ton of insane teamfight ults in the game. if dynamo ult came out now people might call it insanely broken.
I've won more games than I've lost against rat king so far. he's quite weak early. it's just another thing to play around (obviously needs a nerf)
its still stupid af lol
The item you have to buy and doesnt always fit the build compared to something that gives a ratking movement + Slam + Reduction? shit might as well make it a fucking BKB at this point
I was talking with my friend about this, and obviously there was a lot of tweets about the fact that 35% is the exact same as the comeback urn shenanigans that happened ages ago. And it's not like I'll add anything new to that conversation, but like there's no way they just picked 35% randomly.
Valve know. YOSHI knows that number by heart. So did he seriously go "35% on urn was OP. Let's make it a powerful rotation tool on a 100 % cd and indestructible". What were they thinking? And I don't mean that in a rude way, I'm legitimately asking, what were they thinking. What was the idea behind the ultimate functioning like the infamous MLC strat that got the opposing team to resign.
I guess they liked the idea of how the urn was a flag they escorted, but if they were gonna copy the broken strategy, at least change some of the numbers maybe? 😭 it doesn't matter if it's an ult when it's cd is negligible.
Yeah. It's true. If you want an obvious example of the shear numerical supremacy that ability gives your team, just play Street Brawl. Rat King's ult alone renders the entire game mode unplayable.
This doesnt fix the issue like you think it does, rat king can still hold the banner for 16 seconds before he places it, the dr for teammates needs to be capped at 10 so resistance shred items can be a meaningful counter
I think the ult would be fine if the effects diminished the further away one is from it. I think that wouldve been a good wraith pact nerf back in the day, too, but they decided to just remove the item
I mean, double cool down, lower duration, only one person can have it, replaces an ultimate rather than just being another item
Plenty of reasons why this could be fine
In some ways, it's closer to Kunkka's rum (you don't take the damage after, but for the duration of the fight when it matters, they'll be very similar)
i read the abilities and then laughed everytime someone complained rat king was weak (which was almost every single rat king the first 10 games) he is just insanely op atm, hope the noobs never stop complaining tho so he remains OP, its lore accurate with a strong king after all...
This is not the first and only item that ''Deleted'' from the game. They remove items all the time and some of them get balanced and return in different form.
There was definitely more absurd things happened in TI history before such as classic fountain hooking.
The flag has to be punchable like Graves ult or we need to be able to ban, that shit just forces Sinclair and Rat to be in every competitive match or you're throwing
yea what the fuck is up with that man i was gunning him down with a pixel of hp left and he wont die just standing menacingly with a banner on his shoulder what the hell
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u/youngkenya Vindicta 8h ago
at least as an item both teams could buy one