Direction for New Vindicator

[[HLN]OJPhoenix]

Hi there

I'm curious about the direction intended for the New Vindicator since the remake?

The recent remake on Vindicator has sparked a massive amount of discussion on the forums arguing about whether or not he should be reverted and whether or not he's completely crap now as a result of the remake.

Vindicator's Role used to be that of a Counter Pick and a Carry (unsure if Semi or Hard but one of the two). Post remake I can only see the Carry role has come through, there seems to be some Counter potential still in his new Glyph of Silence and his existing ultimate: Final Chapter.

As such I'm wondering what direction they wanted to see Vindicator go from here, his Counter capacity is significantly less than what he was but his Carrying remains about the same, albeit without the inclining INT gain. As such it feels that he has been overnerfed, I believe the change was necessary, he was ridiculous, but now it feels Vindicator has gone the reverse to not being a threat at all.

I wish to spark a debate, a serious debate, about what the community would like to see from Vindicator, I have a number iterations in mind myself that I would like to have a discussion on. These are all my opinions though, I would like to hear some staff opinion on the Remake rather than potentially making a discussion on something that the S2 doesn't want for Vindicator anyway.

[xanderK]

With the Vindicator rework, the design team had a couple of goals.

1. Make the hero less "annoying"

2. Keep his relative strength

3. Make him more active


In his previous form, Vindicator had two specific issues, obviously with his Q and E abilities.

His Q, Sage's Lore, was incredibly strong in the laning phase and had the potential to completely shut out certain heroes but had little to no effect on others. As the game went on, this ability became almost useless in most situations.

His E, Glyph of Silence, had a similar effect. This ability rendered some heroes almost useless without Vindicator having to do anything at all. In the same tone, it had almost no effect on other heroes.

From the point of view of the Vindicator, this promoted a bit of a boring, passive playstyle, especially as the game went on. For the opponents, Vindicator was extremely frustrating to play against, oftentimes without providing any sort of indication of what's happening.

As for his role, he went from being used almost exclusively as a counter to being a full fledged INT carry. He could perform this role in the past but only very late game due to the Intellect stealing mechanic on his old Glyph.

In his new version, he reaches that point much earlier in the game. The passive attack speed bonus helps greatly here and the new Brain Drain ability steals 3 Int per target hit. Keep in mind that this ability is on a 6 second cooldown at level 4 and deals 200 damage. This spell alone makes him a lot more active throughout the game as well and he can use it to farm as well, again making him more effective earlier.

His new Glyph has been the target of a lot of discussion, simply because the previous version has such a large effect on gameplay. The new version is much less annoying to play against and forces your enemy to think about how they need to play against you. Heroes like Fayde, Wretched Hag and Flint Beastwood have to adjust their playstyle to be able to play effectively against the new Vindicator. In addition, since he scales earlier, he's a bigger threat and thus a focus for the enemy team, which silences them.

So in the end, those goals were achieved: he's less annoying to play against, he retained his relative strength and he's more active.