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Heroes8 years agoGosu "GosuGamers" Gamers

Community Spotlight: Is Lunara's damage simply not good enough?

The short answer is yes and Reddit user BlazingRain has the math to prove it.

I love playing as Lunara but I got to admit, she feels heavy. I have to lift a lot of proverbial weights to be effective with her and, when I do win, it's after an intense series of micro movements  that feels extremely rewarding to pull off.  So rewarding, that it's tempting to forget all the times where my heroes fragile HP pool left me dead instantly due to the slightest mistake, or the times where I positioned my self perfectly to get in multiple auto attacks on a hero and they still somehow survived.

I have mixed feelings about Lunara. There is no doubt that she is a really fun hero to play, but mowing down squishies with Falstads is also fun. So is critting for upwards of 400 damage a shot with Raynor. Fun to play and competitively viable are two very different things and Falstad and Raynor manage to do both of them effortlessly.

Lunara is having some problems with the last part and BlazingRain has cleverly explained why.

The author of this post crunches the damage numbers of Lunara, Falstad, Raynor, and Valla in order to juxtapose perfect damage situations (think absolute ideal skill usage and auto attack precision) with how realistic it is to achieve this scenarios in an actual match. That last part is an important thing to consider, as it really doesn't matter if Raynor can laughably outdamage Lunara when attacking a target dummy. Real opponents aren't target dummies and Lunara's speed and CC are designed to make dealing damage while on the go easier and more consistent.

In a perfect world, these two heroes would excel in different ways equally. Raynor would be lethal if undisturbed but have a hard time when the fight turns mobile, Whereas Lunara could make up for her lack of consistent DPS by being a bit more slippery when things get messy.

But, as BlazingRain's math shows, this isn't the case at all:

Above is Valla's damage. Below is Lunara's damage. If you think this difference is bad, take a look at the burst damage numbers in the thread. Spoiler: Valla does between 4233.9 - 4945.9 damage while Lunara does around 2632.5.


If you aren't into numbers, this quote by BlazingRain sums it up nicely:

"A Lunara played absolutely perfectly does less damage over time than any of her main rivals, while also having worse burst...A bad Lunara actually does less damage over time than most warriors."

Or, in other words..

"Her damage potential is much harder to realize than any of the other ranged DPS heroes released so far. But a high skill-cap hero needs to be rewarded with improved damage for their efforts. Otherwise, why bother using them?"

It's a good question to ask: why should I play a glass peashooter when I could be playing a glass cannon? Getting high damage numbers as any other ranged assassin isn't a hard thing to do. This is especially true when compared to how hard it is to get barely adequate numbers by playing Lunara.

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