Strife - 2nd gen MOBA

Ronne_sl said:

Vermillion? More like 5-million~ Lol'd pretty good at that. Forgot how much flavor and ridiculousness the global voice stuff can add. Not sure how I feel about Vermillion in general though, 2 passives leads to a lot of attack move boringness, and his E doesn't seem to extend his range hardly at all.

Really digging it so far. The way they handle last hits is a nice way to ensure supports aren't going to be vastly under fed come mid/late game, and it really opens up a lot of different laning options. I wonder though, does the jungle gold get split as well, or is that all solo?

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Jungle doesn't seem to be shared, at least when I help people kill stuff, the mobs are tagged(like mmo tagged, they change color to grey) and when they die I don't get a gold popup so assume it's not shared. That said the guy in the jungle doesn't get the additional lane gold, was reading the split is like 80% each or something like that. Basically one guy gets 100%, 2guys in lane get 160% per creep, so jungle isn't really that great and they said it was intended not to apparently, it's just meant as a supplement not as a full time thing.

Played a few more heroes, had fun with the alien guy with the rockets and shit, his damage started pretty fucking shit but eventually I was raping people so hard, I went boots of travel too so I'd just ulti/bot all over the map to countergank, was pretty fun. Also liked Malady the pure caster, she has a bunch of very basic skills including a wall, shit's pretty good once you level it a bit to get better range on it(it's fairly shit at lvl 1 but it can do stuff sometimes), I went blink boots on her then stacked CDR+power items. With the 2 different items, I assume they stack cause I had like 40secs ulti(which is laguna blade), pretty fun.

I disliked the sheepstick after building it and finding out it only disarm/silence, it doesn't slow, so the uses are more limited. But yeah that sounds to be the point of the crafting system to an extent, I was thinking of switching something to health+mana regen for an early item that works on everyone but not too sure which one would be the most useful. Haven't upgraded my pet either, not sure I want to upgrade this one or buy the one with a force staff, it is a huge cooldown on it so don't know if it'd be worth it, probably though. I initially thought I'd buy the stealth one but 1.5secs stealth sounds fucking awful(upgrades to 2.25 secs eventually but that's still short as fuck).

UI stuff:

The UI is fairly alright, IF you pin everything. That's alright though I guess, making UI elements removable for people who for some reason don't want to see their cooldowns/health, sounds completely stupid to me in this type of game but eh.

It needs to show a lot more stuff though. It needs an experience bar for one, no way to know when you're about to level that I've seen. It needs to display mana costs on the skills, currently it displays how much mana you need if you don't have enough but it doesn't let you calculate costs for a combo without hovering the skills/knowing the class. I guess it's the same in dota but considering the UI is similar to HoN/more open to stuff(you can check heroes mana directly, you can see their items without selecting them etc), I feel this should be an option like it was in HoN. Simple blue numbers for the cost on the skills.

There should be a scoreboard, or it needs to be more obvious how you access it, I haven't found it, only pops at the end of the game. If it's intended you can't see your team stats during the game, it should at least show their items permanently on the pinned team portraits instead of having to press tab. It should also show your own stats all the time(if the portrait is pinned), last hits and kda. Maybe also the info about your stats that shows up when you hover with your attack dmg, armor, movespeed etc, make it its own UI element you can pin down if you want to see it or not. Team last hits could be nice too since gold is shared, it wouldn't show individual last hits if it's supposed to be hidden but you could see if your team is having issues laning or what.

The Kongor lane screen thing should show how many votes every lane is getting, so you can figure ahead of time which lane it's gonna go to before it spawns.

The cooldown/skill bar part should in my opinion be thiner(horizontaly), I feel the distance between the left skill and the right skill is too big which makes it harder to tell at a glance the state of all your cooldowns. Compress it a bit, remove some of the space between the skills, maybe scale it down a bit too.

Inventory management is a pain in the ass. You can't move items easily, which makes putting them in the right keybinding slot annoying as hell, it seems to work sometimes, but only if you have like a full inventory or something, I think it tries to reorganize it so the items fill up in the right order but I want to put item X on slot Y all the time for example, depending on the binding. The ordering is also "wrong", it seems to be 456123 from top left to bot right, when it should be 123456 like you'd expect, basically switch bottom and top rows. Selling items is extremely unituitive and I wasn't even sure you could until I randomly clicked on a lot of stuff. There need to be a more obvious icon for selling, potentially put it on the other side of the screen. You also can't get the courier to come and grab the item to sell it I believe(not 100% sure when I tested I was in base) and there's no sideshops obviously, so if you're full and want something else it's gonna be annoying unlike using dota/hon courier mechanics.

I'd like for tab to show skill cooldowns of your teammates instead of their items(which is already displayed on the top anyway). That or show the skill cooldowns on the top, either of these. Knowing when your teammates have ultimates and stuff is obviously very useful, and so is knowing when they have a stun, or if they have mana for it.

Think that's all for now.

Edit: Remembered something, the multitap skills. They need to be A LOT more obvious, and at the very least it should be in the description. I wasn't aware they existed until I saw someone throw 2 rockets in a row with what's his face and I was like "huh" then logged in vs bots and yep there it was, some weird ass little thing on top of the skill that seems to show it has charges. Turns out Minerva has charges on her blink strike too, which probably is one of the reason I had so much trouble with her. Oh and if I play in a 9bots game, I should be able to leave instantly, it sucks you have to finish the game.

When you open the shop, there's a trashbin icon near the bottom, to the right of the inventory stuff, it's fairly small. You drag the item on it.

Played Minerva again, definitely much better now that I know you can blinkstrike a lot more, also went with maxing the passive over the blinkstrike to get the 9%shield sooner and went with a couple of health items(the antimagic health item that proc a magic reduction when you get hit every 24secs and then I had health on some other items like iirc the crit item or the attackspeed one) so I was a ton tankier and with multiple blinks I had no trouble chasing people down unlike before. Also synergizes really well with the Sheen item, get free 50dmg everytime you cast an ability, so you blink, slow, attack, ulti, attack, blink, attack, lots of free dmg. It's very similar to how Akali plays really, just hadn't noticed due to terrible UI on that and the skill description not even mentioning it.

Btw if you buy another pet than the free one, the cost of pets go up to 250 for the 3rd. So make sure you pick a good 2nd. I went with the force staff one and upgraded it once so the cooldown is shorter, it's alright, feels like LoL flash but not instant travel so have to be a bit more careful/not as good for initiation. I want to get one more point into it for the slow autoattack shit then probably a 2nd point in my basic mana regen one so it's shorter and I don't rely as much on regen on mana intensive heroes. The rocket guy for example is a huge mana whore.