Breaking down the Gul'Dan patch notes - Part 3

Blizzard released a patch to the PTR on Tuesday that made some of the biggest changes in a long time with many talent reworks for heroes across the board, including changes to many warrior heroes.

Read the full patch notes here

Blizzard announced a rather large patch on Tuesday that would be changing many heroes in the game. This week we've analyzed a couple of different changes coming across the board, but there are some pretty significant changes coming to warriors in the game, making them more well-rounded to suit multiple styles of play.

The One Who Collects

Dehaka got the first changes to his kit since his release in March, tweaking his talents a bit to even them out across the board.

It took a lot of pressure to get the balance team to make some adjustments to Dehaka. With absolutely no changes since launch, we finally have a few tweaks to help bring up some struggling talents”

Nearly all of the changes to Dehaka were to his talent, giving him a better diversity of choices. One of the big changes came to one of his level 1 talents.

 

• Enduring Swarm
  • ?Increased Spell Resistance from 25 to 50%

 

This change adds quite a bit of sustainability to Dehaka, if this talent is chosen, which helps him become even more of a tank. Another major change is his level 20 talents.

 

• Change is Survival (R)
  • ?Also lowers the cooldown of Adaptation by 30 seconds in addition to its current functionality.
• Apex Predator (Z)
  • ?Decreased cooldown reduction from 30 to 25 seconds.

 

Both of these changes are pretty significant and really seem to level out his 20 talents. The 30 second reduction to Adaptation is huge. This skill gives Dehaka so much survivability and with a 30 second cooldown reduction it just became a lot more of a viable talent pick. Apex Predator seemed to be a must pick, but the 5 second nerf on it levels the playing field to offer multiple good talent choices.

Not so fast, Muradin

There is one relatively small change to Muradin's Dwarf Toss that will have a huge impact on the way he is played. 

 

• Dwarf Toss (E)
  • ?No longer grants Unstoppable while leaping.
  • Now grants Muradin Resistant (25% reduced damage taken) for 2 seconds.
  • Cooldown reduced from 12 to 10 seconds.
  • Mana cost reduced from 70 to 55.

 

Previously, the Unstoppable aspect of Dwarf Toss quite literally made it take priority over any CC skill towards Muradin. More specifically, a well timed Dwarf Toss could get Muradin out of any root - the main one that comes to mind is completely avoiding a Xul root. This one aspect allowed for a lot of different skilled uses, and with that gone it's a really significant change to Muradin's kit. Blizzard's reasoning behind this was rather interesting.

The logic behind this change is as follows – We want to buff Muradin for all ranges of play EXCEPT our pro-scene. Of course this is where the Unstoppable leap is abused the most, and even though there is some great skill-cap behind knowing when and how to use it, it gives him an incredible amount of power and definitely hurts the pick-rates of our other Warriors.”

In competitive play Muradin was by far the most picked warrior in the current meta, and it's interesting that Blizzard is trying to buff him except for in competitive play. This change will definitely take a crack at that, and it will be interesting to see how his pick rates change after the patch goes live.

Reckoning is at hand

In the patch notes Tyrael's talent options got a nice rework that will allow for some diversity in building him more as a bruiser or as a tank. Almost all of his talent tiers have been reworked to allow for a better choices, not forcing players into having only one viable talent option. 

Tyrael’s Talents have been stagnant for some time, and we saw an opportunity to spruce them up. We’ve added some power to his lesser-used Talents, and given him some new ways to bring more utility to his team. While we understand that many players will miss Angelic Momentum, we felt that it was best to remove it from Tyrael in order to have more design space to add other Talents that manipulate the cooldowns and durations of his abilities.”

Two of Tyrael's talents were reworked with some brand new functionality.

 

• Even in Death (Trait)
  • ?Now also increases the damage of Archangel's Wrath by 25% in addition to its current functionality.
  • Moved to level 1
• Retribution (E)
  • ?New functionality
    • Increases the Movement Speed bonus of Smite from 25% to 35% and increases the duration from 2 to 3 seconds.
  • Name changed to: Swift Retribution

 

The addition to Even in Death is a very interesting change. Causing Tyrael's trait to do more damage might make it even more beneficial for him to play aggressively in certain situations. If it's a significant enough increase it could really be something to look out for. The Retribution movement speed increase also makes the talent a more powerful, following Blizzard's hopes to even out some of the talents.

As a nice side-note, Stitches "Helping Hand" talent was added as a baseline toggle to his kit, allowing him to toggle whether he wanted to have his hook pull allies or not. This is an interesting new mechanic that might bring some revival to Stitches.

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