[2.2.0] Balphagore

[failpants]

Balphagore needs some love. After being released in june over a year ago, he was tweaked and re-tweaked until he got a little too strong. Then a few months later he got hit with facecrushing nerfs which weakened his ult and gimped his stat gain, resulting in him being difficult to play, subpar compared to similar pushing/teamfight-mechanic heroes, and overall one of the least played heroes in the game.

Since then I have been patiently waiting for the devs to come to their senses and make ole' fatty a respectable hero again. He has very fun abilities, but he just doesn't stand up to punishment like he should. Apparently nobody has gotten the message yet, so I feel the need to plead his case.

The problems

-he relies very heavily on his little minions which become next to useless mid to late game, and are equally useless early game against anyone with an iron buckler type item. These minions also require a very high amount of micromanagement in order to position them properly for applying their slow.

-he has 4 very expensive abilities and very low int gain, so he is extremely reliant on items to fix his mana situation early on. If he does not get a decent amount of money early he will be absolutely crippled by his inability to cast more than two spells per fight.

-all of his abilities require him to stay alive for extended periods of time in order to do damage, especially his first skill and his ult. His strength gain for a strength hero is mediocre at 2.7, and combined with his desperate need to fix his mana issues early means that he has a very hard time becoming as tough as he needs to be to succeed. His corpse conversion ability gives him strong survival potential in the laning phase, but does not significantly contribute to his staying power later on. This is especially true when trying to push, since eating an entire creep wave heals him for little more than 100 hp.

-his ult is effective early on, but drops off signifnicantly mid game. He must survive for a lengthy period of time during a team fight in order to even approach max charges, and even then it's rarely worth it. Consider - his ult does 450 damage with a 50% slow, at 40+ charges, which takes about 3-4 enemy spellcasts to reach. At max, which is usually 6 or more enemy spellcasts, it spawns exploding minions which do another 250ish. This would be fine, except these minions are very slow, and very easy to outrun. The problem here is a lack of synergy. The ult is supposed to slow the enemy team for a large amount, so they cannot escape the exploding minions. However, unless you actually target the minions to destroy them, which is almost never more effective than simply hitting the enemy heroes, the slow wears off before the minions explode. The end result is painstaking effort to survive and deploy a full charge ult in the middle of an enemy team, only to have them run out of range of the creeps which are unable to chase effectively and explode harmlessly.


The solution(s)

1. balphagore needs his fattiness back. If we are going to make him starved for mana early, he needs more beefiness to keep him going while he fixes his mana. Consider or . Both heroes with similar problems, but are considerably more tanky to make up for it. I feel very strongly that balphagore needs his strength gain to be bumped back up to at least 3.1, which is what it was initially before he was nerfed.

2. the slow applied by his minions needs to either last longer, or apply an additional effect, such as -attack speed. the attack animation time of the minions coupled with balphagores slow speed makes it very difficult to maintain chase on a fleeing enemy unless you have considerable micro and/or trap him before engaging. The other way to go is to give them something that has an impact on a teamfight besides damage - if they have a stacking attack speed slow, balphagore could stick his minions on the enemy carry to debuff his effectiveness.

3. Increase the speed of the exploding minions, or lengthen the duration of the slow on a fully charged ult to match the duration of the creeps it generates. Having them be fast enough to chase down enemies would make them much more effective, but I feel that it is more in the flavor of his ult to simply lengthen the duration of the movement speed slow. Adding a few seconds to the duration of the tapering slow on a fully charged ult would make a large difference, without increasing the effectiveness of a 40-80 charge ult.

[Rordarok]

Approved.

[[S2]Dawnbringer]

Raised this thread last patch. I mean, the HP regen buff isn't bad for him but pretty much all his competition gets it too. Soooo, yeah. There are just other heroes far better at Balphagore's role. I still believe his minions need some sort of magic resistance so that they aren't annihilated in a single pyro fire wave.

[dandylion]

The best word I can use to describe Balphagor is clumsy. Between his minions potentially blocking him or other people, and the requirement on Regurgitate to basically be breathing down his opponents necks, there's not a lot of finesse to him.

[skowt]

I feel like he'd be so much better if his minions' slow was a static number instead of a stack, and they exploded for 50 damage in AoE when they died.

Boost his MS, maybe the damage on his Q, and he'd be fine.

[ArnoldRimmer]

Give him some MS and tweak his STR gain a tad.

Then -maybe- rework contagion. Or do something with the minions. Just one skill-based tweak though.

[[STLI]Tupimus]

Needs to have an ultimate that's worth calling an ultimate again and something to alleviate the need to immediately build both casting and survival items. You're never going to have money for both.

[yzma]

His minions need magic armor..... they die instantly of any nuke. Remove his silence, buff ulti and give him some mana.

[Xenp]

After reading the thread I feel that buffing the speed of his ult minions would make him have more effectiveness in team fights and put him closer to where he should be. I also think a small mana gain on corpse conversion would solve all his early game mana issues.

Would either of these changes be game breaking? I don't think so. Would either catapult him to the top of the pool? probably not, but I feel it would place him in a comfortable competitive position.

[Physiker]

Totally agree. At the moment Balph is just a 100 % useless pick. Everyone outruns him late. Ppl don't even focus him cause he just doesn't hurt at all. A ulti which needs time to get setup, got small damage and hit's normally 2 hero is a joke.

I would like to see his original idea " the longer he stays alive the nastier he get's - ****ing kill him " being empasised.



- Staff of Master should be added. It should increase max ulti from 100 % -> 125 % and add another effect like a frost wave when enemy team really allows him to reach max % in order to give the minions another boost. Some damage inrease would be necessary too.

- I would't increase int gain. Why ? There are enough item's for mana. Behe doesn't get a int gain either and got the same issues.


- Some small strengh gain would fit the whole Balph idea well. Put it to 3.1 or something thats fine.

Ulti must get tweacked. Early on lane he's totally fine and fit's his role well. Ulti needs to scale late with some kind of slowing, AS slow or additional hp -% - dmg in order to.

Add ****ing Staff !

[Mediocre]

Bullwark makes balphagore a very effective pusher, like keeper. Only keeper farms his bullwark way faster. But still...

Btw, I saw MSI (trixi) play balph in some scrim last week or so. Did very well.

[Physiker]

You can never compare those 2....

1. farms items in half the time
2. needs got get 15 corpses until he can spam minions again - tree doen'st - so the pushing is only nice early...
3. can sneak and escape towers easilly
4. Keepers ulti >>> balphs

Balph needs buff... easy as that. An rather an ulti buff then an pushing buff.

[[GM]Gridlocked]

I have seen a rather good suggestion for giving Balph a SoTM effect where he gets charges from teammates casting spells ad 50% the rate he would from enemies.

[[S2]Dawnbringer]

^Perhaps implement something where at a certain charge % (maybe 20) enemy spells have their costs increased by 20/30/40 (or 10/20/30)% or something like that.

[EEs]

Buff default strength by 2
Increase strength gain by 0.3
Minions can traverse through minions and heroes.

[[IaF]Skyve]

DogKaiser just said that Balph probably needs some kind of rework more than buffs/nerfs on the honcast podcast.

So yeah, guess that's what we can expect in the future?

[[TGZ]stuvis]

I really think that his silence is really messed up, because it does the opposite of what he wants with his ult. They should start with reworking his silence into something that is actually useful.

[Anakha]

IF a remake was to happen, it would be that Balphagore would be given Sage's Lore in some form and most likely on Q, since it is garbage. W works perfectly fine because it allows you to control spellcasting whenever you desire. Stop asking for remakes because you're all literally too stupid to think about the use of skills past the most obvious of implications.

[Hubaris]

Balph just needs numbers buffs. Thats really it.

His Q needs to either scale better, have a better slow, or do more damage, because its almost impossible to catch someone with that lumbering 285 move speed oaf.

His silence is fine, people who don't understand the concept of a silence and how it controls battle flow obviously need to see outside of the "forced synergy" they want to make.

Minions either need a magic armour buff or some sort of survivability, they do more than enough damage.

His Ultimate is still good, a massive snare, AOE damage and minions. Not to mention that chaos that ensues and people scattering to not get nuked on by volatiles.

Bump his Strength up so he can focus on mana items, and then see where he goes from there. The problem he has is that if he focuses on push, he loses teamfight presence and bulkiness. And vice versa.

[Tony`]

If you think about it, Balphagore's Q skill is actually really garbage, lol. Like compare it to any other Q in the game and I'm pretty sure it will be worse. Meleeish-range negligable slow and damage...high manacost. Only good thing really is the corpses. I say buff his STR gain, boost damage of a full charged ultimate so heroes don't laugh at it. Lower CD and manacost of Q. Give small magic resistance to minions.