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I have consistently seen people remark that CD is either a bad pick or that there are better picks than him. So let's break CD down. I have played him for 20% of my games, 167 games in all, and I will list what I believe are his general problems:
1) He is very unreliable against ranged carries, especially those with mobility skills like Valkyrie. You need to be close to them but they don't need nor want to be close to you, and they lose nothing for not being close to you. This disadvantage of positioning is similar to the one Draconis has - the main difference being that Draconis has 600 range and so can still attack them at range if they try to kite you. What this tends to mean is that CD needs an early Shrunken in order to survive getting to where he needs to be in a team fight, bringing us to the next thing.
2) He is highly dependent on what he is facing, unlike much safer ranged carry picks. When the enemy team consists of Monkey King, Aluna, Armadon, Gravekeeper and Witch Slayer like my latest game it's very hard to chase a target long enough to build up charges and he thus cannot do as steady damage as some other pick could do that is not under an obligation to not be further away than 600 range for a split second. Everyone knows what CD will try to do and it's easy to negate - everyone knows what FA, Valkyrie and Silhouette will do too but it's much harder to negate.
3) Conduit is said to be an ''anti-carry'' skill but in my opinion, it's CD that gets countered by many other carries. Let's list all the carries that can extremely easily screw up conduit in some way: Puppet, Swiftblade, Nomad, Madman, Night Hound, Valkyrie, Silhouette, Doctor Repulsor, Keeper of the Forest, Drunken Master, The Dark Lady, Chronos, Zephyr, Magebane, Scout and Predator. There are in fact few carries that can't instantly negate conduit if it gets cast on them and these heroes tend to be underplayed themselves: Soulstealer, Flint Beastwood, Shadowblade and the likes. If CD doesn't put up conduit on the enemy carry, not only will he not have done his job properly but he is also putting himself and the team that relies on him at a much higher danger. Why? because if their carry starts attacking CD while the conduited DS is running away, what will CD do? what can he do? nothing. It's not helped by carries that get null stones either, like Emerald Warden.
4) CD directly relies on not being counterpicked. You might be able to pick something which is pretty good against the enemy carry otherwise, but against CD, you can pick heroes that make him useless. Let's list what can not only remove conduit from themselves, making them nigh ungankable, but remove it from others too - Jeraziah, Electrician, Keeper of the Forest, Monarch and Accursed. To be countered by some of the most desirable heroes in the game is to be in a bad spot.
5) CD is one of the few, perhaps even the only carry that can't fight other carries if they have Shrunken Head - a high priority pickup for many carries. Unlike Silhouette for example, CD's damage is many times lessened by an item that other carries want to counter the rest of CD's team anyway. He is nigh-powerless against a Monkey King that combos him, activates SH and autoattacks then combos him again, a Predator that leaps onto him, activates iron skin, SH and then iron skin again, a Swiftblade that ultis, spins and then activates SH and on and on. This also makes it predictable what CD will do because he truly needs to keep the enemy carry down by ganking it - if your carry farms and CD farms too, it's no contest who will win. In fact I feel that defining CD as a carry is a mistake, he's got much more in common with Soulstealer than Silhouette (although it's quite hard to find ranged hard carries rather than ranged heroes that are always good but are even better with farm, but every ranged carry with a SH and enough damage to kill him faster than he without conduit kills them will outcarry CD).
6) He tends to need support at all points of the game but with the exceptions of preventing people from dying by conduiting their chasers and having useful clearvision both single target and aoe he cannot do anything in support of someone else - ie. he has almost no utility at all compared to other carry picks. This means that a CD + Magmus + Torturer will be fundamentally weaker than FA + Magmus + Torturer when the two teams engage eachother unless FA's team somehow lets CD get and keep conduit up on someone despite the numerous ways that it can be countered even if you don't counterpick him. A roaming Monkey King, Drunken Master or Valkyrie is thus more dangerous to the enemy team than a roaming CD because all he can do is clean up situations that are already won because you have a 3:2 hero advantage or whatever, like a Keeper of the Forest without his ultimate, he cannot create them himself. So you might ask ''but Monkey King is also a hero - why does it matter what hero it is if it's a 3:2 advantage?'' and it's because, at risk of sounding hypocritical or non-related to my previous point (or is that just me?), CD relies on such advantages and careless play by his enemies or he can't do anything. He has no lethal burst, no disable setup skills, he can't set up wins - only take advantage of them.
7) Even if you get conduit up it's only situationally useful again because of the lineup you're facing. FA + Magmus - Hag - Keeper + Bubbles, besides not being troubled by you yourself anyway for reasons I mentioned elsewhere and focused on in the previous point, won't care if you get up conduit or who you get it up on when it's a team fight and one team is killed or practically killed in a few seconds.
What do I draw from these experiences? I don't know.
As you probably figured out in the beginning of my post, Corrupted Disciple is my favourite and most played hero - I've tried and failed to like other heroes more than him. But the last thing I want is to buff him more than just right and I do not want to see people who are actually bad go around and faceroll with him, it would be a worst nightmare. Yet, I feel that for one reason or another Corrupted Disciple is not at the right place right now. His numbers do not needs buff, rather it's his functionality, he just doesn't work well compared to what you could pick instead,
Thanks for reading. I hope I can create good discussion with this thread.
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So... what you're saying is... that CD should be a hard carry instead of a semicarry?
I feel like I should mention concerning point 4. Parasite can actually eat some of CD's conduit, then swap the debuff/buff with CD to make para a major powerhouse.
Overall I tend to agree with you. CD is generally a weak pick. I think a lot of the problems that he has could be solved by making his conduit not break immediately, but after say 1-2 seconds after leaving the radius. He is very much a counter pick for carries and Shrunken should hurt him pretty badly. He suffers from highly mobile carries of course, but still overall I think he could be a little stronger
BUNNY LOVES YOU!
CD is my most played and I'm going to tell you right now that your suggestion is an incredible buff that's not needed. You'll basically win the laning phase starting from level 1. At the very least, you'll out-CS your opponents HARD (which you can already do right now).Originally Posted by Rosgath
I think (not sure) what he's saying is that cd lacks utility for a semicarry, and isn't a hard carry as wellSo... what you're saying is... that CD should be a hard carry instead of a semicarry?
Here's what I think, CD is basically all about damage. He might build survivability but still the end product is that he does lots of damage and little else. MQ is in a way similar. They are carries with lots of damage output and offer very little outside of that. They rely on having good ms, have a somewhat crappy range, and no form of escape aside from their ms. Both need shrunken to really survive while dps'ing, and both tend to build somewhat tanky (the SH/geo/wingbow/WH line of carry items, as opposed to shieldbreaker and such).
But, at least MQ does scale pretty hard now, while CD mostly relies on his buff, which is easily removable.
Frankly if you pick CD in a serious game it's almost mandatory to get a Jera as well and build nullstone on CD
E: oh yea and ban parasite and elec
"Proclamation was made, in the King's Name, for all Persons to keep Silence" - House of Lords Journal, Volume 20, 24 June 1717
The original poster gives Armadon as an example of what type of hero ruins CD.
Lets see who can figure out how that is wrong and how biased he must be.
For everyone else, three seconds is all CD needs to be a stupid fast tanky hero to a stupid fast carry that no one can kill. Those three seconds are called Corrupted Conduit. I could only imagine how much damage he does with 5 seconds of Conduit. 10 is unspeakable!
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"All they do is expound their store of knowledge. They excite themselves with their ranting; their disapproval swells them with a feeling of importance and sick victory, they thrive on spoiling the pleasure and trashing the creativity of others."
The Minister shares her opinion of critics. ~ Kino's Journey
it all really depends, is CD getting lvls? are carries nowadays going for a SH first item? Is CD going into a teamfight and only focusing the other carry? Is his Q really that bad that its not picked up? this is a team game right? so support should not be uncommon, i didn't know that ganks are suppose to be an unfair match-up, its suppose to give the lane a chance to comeback and win it, so they won't be doing so bad mid-late game. Also, is this balance disscussion just talking about his corrupt conduit? it be great if you talked about CD as a whole hero; great attack animation, his straight up ring of nuke, the ability to punish people for focusing him, and him to completely scare the enemy team with his presence.
I do agree on point 4, but your team should be ready to counter-counter their counter to the counter of your counter of their carry
the points about SH, why cant CD get a SH? like most carries? does he have to completely rely on his conduit to give him his scaling late-game dmg? nope, he can still be built as a carry; yes, but CD doesnt have any form of crowd control ability, so a CD player has to recognize that his movement speed and positioning is very key in the game, but the whole point of CD is to be a tanky dps; able to survive, dish out damage.
CD is a hero that does not really require a lot of farm, but needs lvls, with his lvl advantage, he is able to gank, chase, and carry. I know the main focus of this balance discussion is about his conduit, its a great skill early-mid-late game, but CD as a whole with a competent team can easily keep a team on their toes, before levl 6
While his anecdotal evidence itself is badly flawed, I still think his argued point is valid.
CD is underpowered currently. He's easily countered and offers little to the table that plenty of other ranged carries can. I just don't buy the argument that his role is that of a mid-game semi-carry when other heroes just plain do it better and it feels like his skillset has wasted potential. You want a mid game semi-carry and you're picking CD over heroes like
why?
Last edited by Good_Apollo; 04-21-2012 at 04:22 AM.
Thanks. I didn't think you had
No. CD already is a hard carry if people let you get conduit up, +/-200 damage is never irrelevant, but it's really easy to counter and because he needs to get conduit up he doesn't have the same options of more straight-up DPS that other ranged carries that build stuff like geos, shieldbreaker etc. do which means he relies on an easily countered ability in order to carry whereas the other heroes are much safer. CD is unique in this because off the top of my head, no other carry is so countered by something that carries get to counter the rest of CD's team.
This is the problem - if it did, out-CSing people in the early game would be ridiculously easy. But if your idea was to be implemented it could be so only on level 4. Although I don't think the soft counter of breaking conduit by getting far away is a problem and I don't think it should be that easy to get conduit up. My problem is more that his conduit is very easy to remove without even trying much (600 range carries with leaps and null stones, other carries with shrunken head, elec, jeraziah, monarch etc.) which is a problem that no other carry to my memory has. It's not an easy problem to solve though.
Yep. That's why if anything it'd be implemented on level 4, but yeah, not really needed imo.
The MQ comparison was pretty good. If MQ's R scaled with attack damage and that's what she relied on to carry, it would be much like CD (except that null stones wouldn't counter it of course). Countering CD is something you do anyway as a side effect of just picking certain heroes or getting certain items - what other carry is so badly neutered just by pickups? he's a carry who gets countered by the same things you use to counter non-carries. What other carry suffers from that?
No. Not what type of hero. Kraken doesn't stand a chance against CD, neither does Ra etc. what makes Armadon good against him is something that should be clear to you if you've ever played either hero against the other but I'll break it down for you anyway:
1) Snot storm slows CD to a crawl. Not only makes it much easier to run away from CD since he has no cc, it also makes it much easier to break conduit no matter who he put it on. It also makes it much easier to focus down CD thanks to the stacking -armour. But what would Valkyrie care if you slow her down? she's got 600 range. She doesn't rely on always being within 600 range of a certain target. If she needs to she can jump in any direction so she can either escape a sudden turn to focus her or catch up with fleeing enemies despite being slowed.
2) Spine burst, armordillo and restless together make it nigh-lethal for CD to try to kill Armadon unless he's attacking from the front with stacked conduit charges. Consider that the extra damage you do just helps him to unleash more spines faster, that he's faster than you thanks to his Q+R and that standing near another target to get conduit up means stacking spine burst where Silhouette could just stand on the fringe and avoid them.
Armadon isn't a problem when you can lock him down with permanent cc and kill him from the front but that doesn't make CD good against him, it makes cc good against everything.
CD can get a SH as well but he won't get any less ripped up by the enemy carry with a SH for it. Not sure what the connection is here because SH doesn't really give you late game damage. And if people aren't getting SH on their carries when facing CD, that's the same as people not carrying TPs etc. you can't say that CD is good because people don't get SH against him. You can't base a hero's viability around the enemy's mistakes.
You summed it up. Why pick CD when you can pick those and similar heroes? Arachna too is suffering from the same ''why pick her'' but for different reasons. CD isn't weak, he's impractical, and I'm not at all sure how to address that because it's his design.While his anecdotal evidence itself is badly flawed, I still think his argued point is valid.
CD is underpowered currently. He's easily countered and offers little to the table that plenty of other ranged carries can. I just don't buy the argument that his role is that of a mid-game semi-carry when other heroes just plain do it better and it feels like his skillset has wasted potential. You want a mid game semi-carry and you're picking CD over heroes like
Thanks for reading and commenting all of you.
Last edited by Salem1; 04-21-2012 at 08:43 AM.
I honestly find it painful to read all of that OP. Maybe I'm getting old, and need to suck it up - but I do feel the adage of 'if you can't explain it simply, you don't fully understand it' is warranted. I shall persevere and reply.
1) everyone is unreliable dps-wise against evasive semi's like Valkyrie. Not really a sticking point about CD himself.
2) again, another gripe about evasive semi's, not necessarily about CD himself.
3) conduit isn't an anti-carry skill, conduit allows the hero to build the best of both worlds and **** on people in the midgame. aka before shrunken head/nullstone.
4) again, you're talking about omnicounters - not a specific gripe about CD himself. not to mention, all of these heroes have been in the game and in vogue when CD has been at his various peaks of fp/ban status.
5) I think you misunderstand why you pick a CD and where he shines, and to be perfectly honest - there are a LOT of midgame carries who struggle to DPS directly 1-to-1 against BKB'd carries like they used to pre-BKB. That's kinda the design behind an actual midgame carry, rather than an "all-game" carry. Besides, nothing wrong with sticking Conduit on a comparatively useless support in a teamfight while you power away at other people. CD with 7 charges on Conduit is still going to tear through people with BKB irrespective, because if they're going straight BKB, they lack that 140 damage that you're getting + whatever bonuses you have.
6) this is your only real sticking point here, in that CD doesn't offer as much proactive benefits as a lot of your "all-game" carries. what you aren't considering is that conduit really isn't as trivial a factor as you purport it to be. he offers RAW damage and a lot of it, with the movement speed and projectile speed to punish people with it given an inch.
7) "one team is killed or practically killed in a few seconds." this is really bad hyperbole. you're also really hung up on the idea that cd is an 'anti-carry' despite disproving the notion earlier on pretty easily. doesn't make for strong arguments.
Last edited by `11411181; 04-21-2012 at 12:52 PM.
Yet another issue caused by new heroes and power creep. Heroes, who have no escape mechanism and can only offer damage, are no longer valid in HON nowadays.
For instance:and to certain extent
^ThisYet another issue caused by new heroes and power creep. Heroes, who have no escape mechanism and can only offer damage, are no longer valid in HON nowadays.
For instance:
this is the cause of a lot of the balance problems in the current game. Too many kitchen sink heroes.
Anyway if breaking conduit early isn't such a big issue and it's more the fact that most carries rush a shrunken, why not make conduit physical? It'd still be counterable by void talisman and nullstone, but to a far lesser extent.
BUNNY LOVES YOU!
Not in the same way as CD. Valkyrie jumps away from Flint and he keeps on killing something else. Valkyrie jumps away from CD and she just broke his conduit, making him negligible in that fight. You don't think removing up to 200 damage is an anti-carry skill? why not? you can't forget that it doesn't only give you damage. You can use it on supports but you'll not use it to its full potential, quite literally so if that support also dies really quickly and leaves you with just a few charges and no one on their team with drained damage. How is that not a specific gripe about CD himself? what other carry is countered both by physical immunity, magic immunity and buff removal?
You say there are ''a lot'' of mid game carries which struggle against SH carries. Which ones do you have in mind? And as I just said there is something wrong with sticking conduit on a support, particularily one who's about to die (usually the closest one I'd say). 7 charges is near max, that's 7 seconds of stacking conduit. That means for 7 seconds your target survived, your conduit didn't get removed and the target always stayed within 600 range of you. And that's my point, CD relies on this but brings little save an aoe nuke compared to the utility of other carries that I'm growing tired of repeating.
You say that CD just gets 140 damage like conduit is not only reliable but reliably goes to near max. Flint with shieldbreaker and savage mace is pretty good too, Sand Wraith with hotbl, mock, vestments and whatever is quite good, so what?
It's not hyperbole for actual team fights which is what I'm talking about, not shifting skirmishes.
I'll be honest and say that whether conduit is trivial or not depends on team makeup. But, just for theory's sake, we assume that one team - no matter which one - got the jump on the other and unleashed their ultimates on them. Isn't conduit fairly trivial here? one team already got demolished in practice and CD will just clean up, that's at least my usual role in team fights which is understandable BUT outside of those there are better picks as well.
Those are pretty good comparisons. They have to my knowledge not really been nerfed into being significantly worse even if they've taken nerfs - it's their style which is just obsolete. However I think it's hard to tell if this is because of changes introduced by S2, at least I don't have the oversight to decide that, because a lot of top-picks are dota heroes. Stuff like hag, torturer, magmus etc.has always existed, but suddenly some heroes turned less relevant anyway.Yet another issue caused by new heroes and power creep. Heroes, who have no escape mechanism and can only offer damage, are no longer valid in HON nowadays.
For instance:
Making it physical would be a sweet change. No longer would CD need to steamroll the early and mid game so that he is overfarmed compared to the enemy carries just to have a chance against them in late mid game and late game 1 on 1s. And now people will say, ''but what about Soulstealer? he's also countered by SH!'' yes. But look at what else that hero brings: an aoe ultimate that does thousands of damage and debuffs too which is not countered by null stone, buff removal and which is immediate. CD's impact on a team fight is not nearly as large or immediate. That's why I think CD is good at dominating games you're already winning provided you have the right team setup but he doesn't fill a role that couldn't be filled practically as well by another hero that also does more.
Last edited by Salem1; 04-21-2012 at 04:30 PM.
That's why you don't conduit the valk with leap off-cooldown... There ARE 4 other heroes in the enemy team, and it's very likely that at least 2 will be easy to keep latched on with conduit. After you leech enough charges, go bash on the key target.
Proof that LoL players are definitely brain damaged and have no clue what they're talking about :
Chronos was extremely bad early game and could only KS with his blink then blink away as he would die in 2 hits. Xin is like Pyromancer early game, can towerdive anyone once he gets to level 3.
Getting into scenario debates was never the intention of this thread...
You're going to base 80+% of your points on that one flawed ideal, and then don't want to be called out on it? OK.
I just know how many ifs and buts can go into theoretical scenarios but it's not possible to avoid completely because I can't make a post comprised out of in-game material... I'm too tired to make a long post about this now, if you disagree with me about conduit's unreliability and/or CD's lack of utility and safety compared to other carries, fine...
PS. Why would Valkyrie need to use her leap to break it?
Last edited by Salem1; 04-21-2012 at 10:46 PM.
If you don't want to debate theoreticals, then don't present your points based on them. If you want people to accept your conclusions, they also need to agree with the path you've taken. And like myself and other people have pointed out - you still get the best benefits of Conduit even when you can't put it on their carry hero, but only another.
What? CD needs looking at? A superb nuke. Insane mobility. Damage buffer. An ultimate not to be underestimated. If you can't figure out when and where to place and use conduit, then that's just a level of play. He's just off the meta wagon. There's safer easier picks out there that can do the job with far less ability
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