The latest Patch has brought many interesting changes to the game but with this post i'm not trying to discuss whether or not the recent tower changes are good or bad and what their primary impact on the game is.
Instead i want to take the opportunity to highlight a problem that i think has been with us for a very long time now and that i had hoped the recent patch would fix. The issue that the structure changes had the opportunity but failed to improve, is the sometimes arbitrary nature of the late game.
The late game in Heroes of the Storm sometimes feels like a coin flip. Of course it isn't a coin flip but it feels like that at times.
You can have all of your structures still intact after a near flawless game, but if the enemy wins just one team fight post 20 and gets the objective, there is a very high chance you loose the game instantly. Emphasis on instantly, i am not talking about loosing the game 10 minutes later after the enemy fought their way back. i'm talking about one team losing in the most severe fashion for 20 minutes straight, and then after just one secured objective marching down a lane, through a fort a keep and destroying the core.
If your composition is just stronger in the late game, or your team finally pulls it together, or even the opponents are simply letting the game slip out of their fingers, if you win a late game team fight in a situation like that you definitely should have the opportunity to capitalize on your victory, get several structures, or other advantages and start a comeback. But in my opinion you should not be able to so easily win the game on the spot after being so massively behind just a second ago and in complete disregard of how the early- and mid-game played out.
Instances like these are thankfully not the norm but they happen way more frequently than they should. The Nexus Anomaly had the opportunity to address this.
With the Core getting defensive abilities and Structures providing more protection, games should feel less "swingy" and momentum should shift not as quickly, because whichever team is on the back foot, their defenders advantage has been buffed and while it makes it harder for the winning team to press their advantage it makes it equally hard for the other team to perform a come-back after momentum has shifted in their favour. at least in theory.
Apparently the effect that this has is not enough though, because the exact scenario i was describing earlier i experienced several times this week.
Our team was dominating, good macro and map control, we won every team fight, barley had any deaths, in general made very few mistakes and most notably, we didn't loose a single structure up until the last objective. while on the other hand the enemy team had lost two keeps up until that point made several severe mistakes throughout the game and were basically falling apart with 20+ Deaths.
Then the first objective post lvl 20 happens, our team barley loses the fight and right at the moment where the enemy captures the objective they manage to kill the two heroes on our team that can de-push effectively.
This was the moment in the game where we made our first big mistake, and it should have been the moment for the enemy team to start a potential comeback. Where they should have gotten the opportunity to recover the ground that they had lost in the last 15 minutes, crawl their way back into the game and if they were able to carry their momentum long enough eventually take the win, ultimately deserved.
Instead what happened is that they just marched down one lane, through a fort, a keep and destroyed the core. After playing a bad game, all it took for them to win was one mistake on our side. All the good plays our team made and the mistakes of the enemy before that moment felt completely meaningless. Moments like these make the game feel more random. It makes structures feel more meaningless.
I went straight into the next game and it was basically the same thing in reverse, me and my team played a horrible game but we ended up winning after one of these late game team fights, it felt completely undeserved. I think most of us have experienced similar games, sometimes you are on the winning sometimes on the loosing side but both times it feels bad, at least for me.
This has been a problem for such a long time now and with the current Nexus Anomaly my hope was that as a side-effect it would combat this issue, but it did not, at least not in a sufficient way.
Possible Solution: Core Armor
It has been suggested many times, but at this point i would really like to see all cores getting the Alterac Pass treatment with armor based on the remaining keeps, because for obvious reasons on that map this whole issue is way less noticeable.
you could even experiment with forts contributing as well, with every core starting the game at 60 armor:
3-lanes maps: 6 structures à 10 core armor
2-lanes maps: 4 structures à 15 core armor
This is the most elegant solution that i can think of to make structure advantage more meaningful while reducing the number of games that are solely decided by just one team fight post 20 regardless of how the early- and mid-game played out. It would make it significantly harder to just run down one lane and go core with all the other lanes still completely intact.
Of course this together with the current new structure mechanics, could make games too hard to close out, but that could be adjusted with number changes to for example to structure damage, HP etc. These numbers and the other mechanics revolving around game length and how to end games would be designed around the fact that every building destroyed decreases the cores armor (with Towers of Doom as the exception ofc). This way it is always ensured that the early- and mid-game have a more noticeable impact on the outcome of a game.
It would also make the game easier to read, especially for new players. Right now, building count is not necessarily an accurate representation of how your chance are on winning a game. you can have every fort and keep up and still lose the game after one lost objective. i have been playing this game since alpha but i imagine for a new player this would feel even more unintuitive.
Core Armor would therefore even enforce the intuitive understanding of how the game should work! destroy enemy buildings, the more you destroy the easier it makes it to win and on the flip side the more buildings i still have, the harder it makes it for the enemy to win. this is a very simple concept to understand even for new players. destroying buildings is the ultimate goal of a MOBA anyway and this mechanic only emphasis that.
I really hope we see Core Armor or something similar coming to the game with the next Nexus Anomaly. What are your thoughts on this? If you are a dev reading this, what is your evaluation of the sate of the late game right now and do you see the things that i have described as a problem? Maybe you can share a bit of the dev teams thoughts regarding this topic and core armor in general, since i'm pretty sure you guys have already thought about how it would look like if core armor would be implemented on other maps.
cheers and all the love
TLDR: Many games still feel arbitrarily decided by one late game team fight, regardless of how the early and mid game went. Solution: Core Armor for every remaining Structure (ala Alterac Pass) as the next Nexus Anomaly!
EDIT: after some comments suggesting that i am against comebacks in general, i'm gonna copy paste here what i wrote in response:
i am not advocating against comebacks. comebacks are amazing and should always be a possibility, nor are these suggested changes meant to simply make all games last longer. in a normal game(which are most games) both teams will have caused some structure damage before the late game hits, in which case the core armor would already be lower. in most games core armor would make very little to no difference. the only games where it would matter are the games that where so one-sided that one team didn't manage to afflict any structure damage at all and then attempts to go core after their first won late game objective.
