Love the game! Just some thoughts on things that I think would improve the game:
I love how you've buffed most caster ults (and lots of abilities in general) so that they're on a much shorter cooldown so that the caster can potentially use the ability more than once if they live long enough and have the mana, Crystal Maiden, QOP, Witch Doctor, antimage, Windrunner's are all good examples of heroes made more fun and viable due to their fast ult recharge, but there are a lot of heroes who feel like they should get some sort of built in CD reduction on their unnecessarily long ult cooldowns Jakiro's ult (especially since his aghs duration is already nerfed and his ult doesn't stack so refresher isn't a good option on him), Bane's ult, Omniknight's ult, Bone Clinkz's barrage are some examples of spells that I think are currently on too long of cooldowns.
Bane's ult should scale duration, so that the player has incentive to level him past 6, Banes nightmare also almost always just gets broken instantly, even if you try to put it at the end of his cast order. AI to place it on other heros and have other heros ignore them... or some damage threshold for breaking the sleep might help this ability to feel like less of a must-swap.
There are some heroes who currently have some pretty terrible level 25 talent choices, like Omniknight, who's guardian angel talent will reduce the cooldown, but it's still so high that he's not going to cast it twice in a single battle without a refresher or octarine core, even his purification 25 talent feels underwhelming, better to just put purification on Ogre at that point. lvl 25 talents should be exciting! I wasn't going to mention the level 10 talent choices, since there's already another post about it, but I had an idea that makes me want to discuss it. So certain heroes like Bone clinkz (searing arrow multishow), Medusa (splitshot applies modifiers), CM (3 sec bkb) have a really good lvl 10 talent, and then a normal level 10 talent, and it really makes the hero much better when you get the right talent. Perhaps one solution to this issue would be to make the other level 10 talent help you build the character differently. So for example Bone Clinkz good talent is searing arrow multishot, perhaps his other talent could be -10 seconds on barrage cooldown (solving the cooldown problem on that spell that I discussed earlier). similarly, Medusa's alternate lvl 10 talent could help you build for snake/Aghs by buffing her snake in some way... maybe making it penetrate spell immunity & cost 0 mana. That way you would have an early idea of how to best build the character to maximize the usefulness of the talent you got.
Lords - Lord Rubick in particular feels a bit underwhelming, which is sad, because I really want to like him so much. Lord Rubick's powerups come too slowly and you will generally only get 2-3 per game. It definitely can be powerful to be able to guarantee aghs for certain heroes, but a tier 3+4 item every 7 rounds definitely doesn't feel on par with the power level of most lords. Plus it should also be taken into consideration that using the Rubick lord means that you're more likely to see aghs scepters and aghs shards come through your shop that you no longer need AND some heroes don't currently have an aghs scepter or aghs shard powerup, making you ever so slightly more likely to have wasted item rerolls. Maybe I'm just playing him wrong, but I play enough that I can safely say it's not a common sight to see Lord Rubicks taking first place. I'm not sure why his frequency was moved from 6 to 7, but it definitely feels to me like 6 rounds would be better, but either way I think he definitely needs something extra. It could be a slight buff like Dark willow's magic resist reduction. He could give extra cast range or magic resist to all units... Or something more exciting, like if rubick gave agh's blessings instead of agh's scepters, that would make him much more unique and have some late game value due to the extra slot potential, particularly if that was the only way to get aghs blessing in the game.
It would also be a nice quality of life upgrade if The tavern button would glow when Enchantress hit 0 cost to upgrade, it's currently easy to miss when you don't play her often.
Tie Forgiveness - it would be nice if once per game a tie would only reduce you to 1 hp, instead of eliminating you. It's very disappointing when you're making a comeback in the mid-game only to be eliminated on a tie. You could disable this rule once the player count is down to 2, just so it doesn't drag the 1v1 phase on.
Late Game Mana Regen: It would be nice to have some better tier 4-6 mana regen, currently if you're not CM lord, there are certain mana hogs that will always burn out very quickly without early bloodstone & tier 3 spell prism stacking. Adding a new high tier mana regen item or just putting better mana regen on a few existing tier 4-6 caster items like Octarine Core, Seer Stone, Timeless Relic, &/or Tome of Divinity would definitely be a welcome change that would give more late game viability to certain mana hungry heroes.
Enchantress Power for all: One idea I had that may be more controversial, given that it changes the base rule-set - at the very least this would make for an interesting weekly event, What if everyone got the enchantress Lord tavern gold reduction power as a regular game mechanic. The current Enchantress Lord would likely then need to be changed, and Gold values for each tavern tier upgrade might need to be adjusted (I'm thinking the cost of tier 1 would be most likely to need to be adjusted, or alternatively perhaps this reduction effect would only start after a 3-cost tier 1 upgrade, which would incentivize a risk-reward scenario where an early upgrade for the tavern would start saving you money on future tavern upgrades in exchange for an early hero and your performance early game). But overall, my reasoning on giving an enchantress tavern reduction power to all players by default is two-fold.
It would provide a good come-back mechanic for players who are losing early to help them upgrade their tavern later if they can manage to hang in there.
It would allow all players for more variation and strategy about when you upgrade the tavern.
Currently, as far as I can tell, if you're not in danger of losing in the next few turns, and you have 5/5 heroes it's almost always in your best interest to upgrade the tavern as quickly as you can. There can be a little variation about which rounds you do it on, so that you can also buy an item or hero on the 6, 8 and 9 cost upgrades as well, but generally speaking, the sooner you get fully upgraded, the sooner you start getting tier 6 items. When you play the game a lot, it makes for a boring and repetitive 3-4 rounds in quick succession every single game where you upgrade the tavern and maybe buy one item/hero. It's not a particularly fun part of the game.
If tavern prices always got reduced by 1 each turn, suddenly the player who gets stuck at tier 5 with 80 hp would have a chance to eventually upgrade to tier 6. It would still be advantageous to upgrade as quickly as possible, as you get more time where your item pool rerolls using the best tier items + percentages, but suddenly you have options and it doesn't feel like you're just at a huge disadvantage if your performance is forcing you to wait a bit longer to upgrade. It seems to me that it would do a much better job of letting you vary your play style around when to upgrade the tavern, hold off for the value, or buy quickly for power. This change would make it so that there's not one clearly optimal way to play with regards to tavern upgrades.
Love the game! Just some thoughts on things that I think would improve the game:
I love how you've buffed most caster ults (and lots of abilities in general) so that they're on a much shorter cooldown so that the caster can potentially use the ability more than once if they live long enough and have the mana, Crystal Maiden, QOP, Witch Doctor, antimage, Windrunner's are all good examples of heroes made more fun and viable due to their fast ult recharge, but there are a lot of heroes who feel like they should get some sort of built in CD reduction on their unnecessarily long ult cooldowns Jakiro's ult (especially since his aghs duration is already nerfed and his ult doesn't stack so refresher isn't a good option on him), Bane's ult, Omniknight's ult, Bone Clinkz's barrage are some examples of spells that I think are currently on too long of cooldowns.
Bane's ult should scale duration, so that the player has incentive to level him past 6, Banes nightmare also almost always just gets broken instantly, even if you try to put it at the end of his cast order. AI to place it on other heros and have other heros ignore them... or some damage threshold for breaking the sleep might help this ability to feel like less of a must-swap.
There are some heroes who currently have some pretty terrible level 25 talent choices, like Omniknight, who's guardian angel talent will reduce the cooldown, but it's still so high that he's not going to cast it twice in a single battle without a refresher or octarine core, even his purification 25 talent feels underwhelming, better to just put purification on Ogre at that point. lvl 25 talents should be exciting! I wasn't going to mention the level 10 talent choices, since there's already another post about it, but I had an idea that makes me want to discuss it. So certain heroes like Bone clinkz (searing arrow multishow), Medusa (splitshot applies modifiers), CM (3 sec bkb) have a really good lvl 10 talent, and then a normal level 10 talent, and it really makes the hero much better when you get the right talent. Perhaps one solution to this issue would be to make the other level 10 talent help you build the character differently. So for example Bone Clinkz good talent is searing arrow multishot, perhaps his other talent could be -10 seconds on barrage cooldown (solving the cooldown problem on that spell that I discussed earlier). similarly, Medusa's alternate lvl 10 talent could help you build for snake/Aghs by buffing her snake in some way... maybe making it penetrate spell immunity & cost 0 mana. That way you would have an early idea of how to best build the character to maximize the usefulness of the talent you got.
Lords - Lord Rubick in particular feels a bit underwhelming, which is sad, because I really want to like him so much. Lord Rubick's powerups come too slowly and you will generally only get 2-3 per game. It definitely can be powerful to be able to guarantee aghs for certain heroes, but a tier 3+4 item every 7 rounds definitely doesn't feel on par with the power level of most lords. Plus it should also be taken into consideration that using the Rubick lord means that you're more likely to see aghs scepters and aghs shards come through your shop that you no longer need AND some heroes don't currently have an aghs scepter or aghs shard powerup, making you ever so slightly more likely to have wasted item rerolls. Maybe I'm just playing him wrong, but I play enough that I can safely say it's not a common sight to see Lord Rubicks taking first place. I'm not sure why his frequency was moved from 6 to 7, but it definitely feels to me like 6 rounds would be better, but either way I think he definitely needs something extra. It could be a slight buff like Dark willow's magic resist reduction. He could give extra cast range or magic resist to all units... Or something more exciting, like if rubick gave agh's blessings instead of agh's scepters, that would make him much more unique and have some late game value due to the extra slot potential, particularly if that was the only way to get aghs blessing in the game.
It would also be a nice quality of life upgrade if The tavern button would glow when Enchantress hit 0 cost to upgrade, it's currently easy to miss when you don't play her often.
Tie Forgiveness - it would be nice if once per game a tie would only reduce you to 1 hp, instead of eliminating you. It's very disappointing when you're making a comeback in the mid-game only to be eliminated on a tie. You could disable this rule once the player count is down to 2, just so it doesn't drag the 1v1 phase on.
Late Game Mana Regen: It would be nice to have some better tier 4-6 mana regen, currently if you're not CM lord, there are certain mana hogs that will always burn out very quickly without early bloodstone & tier 3 spell prism stacking. Adding a new high tier mana regen item or just putting better mana regen on a few existing tier 4-6 caster items like Octarine Core, Seer Stone, Timeless Relic, &/or Tome of Divinity would definitely be a welcome change that would give more late game viability to certain mana hungry heroes.
Enchantress Power for all: One idea I had that may be more controversial, given that it changes the base rule-set - at the very least this would make for an interesting weekly event, What if everyone got the enchantress Lord tavern gold reduction power as a regular game mechanic. The current Enchantress Lord would likely then need to be changed, and Gold values for each tavern tier upgrade might need to be adjusted (I'm thinking the cost of tier 1 would be most likely to need to be adjusted, or alternatively perhaps this reduction effect would only start after a 3-cost tier 1 upgrade, which would incentivize a risk-reward scenario where an early upgrade for the tavern would start saving you money on future tavern upgrades in exchange for an early hero and your performance early game). But overall, my reasoning on giving an enchantress tavern reduction power to all players by default is two-fold.
It would allow all players for more variation and strategy about when you upgrade the tavern.
Currently, as far as I can tell, if you're not in danger of losing in the next few turns, and you have 5/5 heroes it's almost always in your best interest to upgrade the tavern as quickly as you can. There can be a little variation about which rounds you do it on, so that you can also buy an item or hero on the 6, 8 and 9 cost upgrades as well, but generally speaking, the sooner you get fully upgraded, the sooner you start getting tier 6 items. When you play the game a lot, it makes for a boring and repetitive 3-4 rounds in quick succession every single game where you upgrade the tavern and maybe buy one item/hero. It's not a particularly fun part of the game. If tavern prices always got reduced by 1 each turn, suddenly the player who gets stuck at tier 5 with 80 hp would have a chance to eventually upgrade to tier 6. It would still be advantageous to upgrade as quickly as possible, as you get more time where your item pool rerolls using the best tier items + percentages, but suddenly you have options and it doesn't feel like you're just at a huge disadvantage if your performance is forcing you to wait a bit longer to upgrade. It seems to me that it would do a much better job of letting you vary your play style around when to upgrade the tavern, hold off for the value, or buy quickly for power. This change would make it so that there's not one clearly optimal way to play with regards to tavern upgrades.
Thanks for your time!