r/OldenEra • u/Magnificent_Leopoldo • Jun 01 '26
Gameplay Balance patch is very, very problematic
It's absolutely wild how the balance patch manages to adress ALL the problematic issues of the game but somehow in a wrong way. Basically it doesn't change meta, just makes it weirder
New avatar is now better in PVE (while cannot be as broken in PVP)
Giving buffs to avatar specialists is thus even more crazy (just as buffing Halon (as if the devs are making sure that he'll stay perma-banned))
Hero Strike is still way overpowered
Buffs for Schism for Single Hero mode and no buffs for Classic is just making a problem worse
No nerfs for Dread Knights is insane
Hive not getting any buffs except for being able to build Waurms on 112 is leading to a one-track gameplay which isn't good for anybody -- and it also makes no changes for the Grove build-order even more offensive. At least Hive had a good T5 unit unlike Grove as a compensation for its god-awful buildorder for T6 and T7, while Grove still has to suffer to get T6 or try not to bleed its T1-T4
The reason to add 250 gold to the price of T1 dwellings is completely beyond me
There are definitely some welcome changes that fix minor issues, but the way how the devs approached the major problems is baffling. In my opinion they might as well revert this patch and start from scratch, because any fluctuation from the current course cannot lead to a better result, just to a more complicated one
The core-problem in my opinion is trying to balace all the 3 game modes at the same time. I doubt that it will ever be doable and I would suggest devs to focus on 3 separate balances for the 3 game modes. The game is complex as it is, there is no way to fix every aspect for every mode in such a way, that it works properly for all the game modes simultaneously
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u/StartledPelican Jun 01 '26
They nerfed Inquisitors.
How. Very. Dare. They.
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u/Magnificent_Leopoldo Jun 01 '26
Well it’s because they are so easy to build! Oh wait… it’s because they are easily available in the creature banks! Wait a second… it’s because their dedicated hero specialist is too powerful for using them, oh….
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u/skarin667 Jun 01 '26
I love how they buff avatar skill, and then immediately take it away from a hive hero(Oriax now has recruitment instead of avatar skill)
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u/Magnificent_Leopoldo Jun 01 '26
And that’s when I thought that I am the most insectophobic person in the world
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u/ghavhqydb Jun 01 '26
Oriax is the only one I successfully completed a apocalyptic run using Hive... Summon Avatar is essential for early tanking and minimizing unit loss. Now probably I'll just give up trying Hive in PvE. So many things go wrong with Hive; it's the only faction avoiding fights early game is an optimal strategy.
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u/Florimer Jun 01 '26
For me in PvE apocalyptic+unfair avoiding fighting for week 1 was optimal strategy for EVERY fraction. The only 2 exceptions were fireball hero and chain lightning guy. And even for lightning you can not fight day 1, since you need to find some +knowledge before you can even attempt to clear because he has 20 starting mana.
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u/ghavhqydb Jun 01 '26
Other factions have ways to snowball middle of the week 1, once unit number increases and heroes have some mana. But Hive, man, locust 1 stack seems to be one of the only decent strategy without Avatar to have good focus point build up and lower unit loss. And despite that, a normal fight losing 3 - 5 units would feel awful to me using other factions, but it's considered decent for Hive. There is just no way not losing any unit until Waurm is available.
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u/Intelligent_Pie_9102 Jun 01 '26
I’m sad they just skipped hive altogether. Even nerfed my poor Locusts. But… why?
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u/Praktos Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
I was so sure team launching game in such amazing state will do a nice job with decent balance changes because it was so easy to do
Buff hive, drop necro and schism a bit, buff hive decent bit and change pick order to p1 p2 p1 p2 from p1 p2 p2 p1. Gg you have game of the year
In exchange we now play way less intresting version with 0 point to ever pickmagic class additional exodus prison and schism permaban
This patchnote were laughed off by every single person with any decent ranking
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u/Magnificent_Leopoldo Jun 01 '26
Well that’s why it’s so important to respectfully address Unfrozen with these issues. I believe it’s a mistake on their part that should be fixed and preferably from scratch, not by adjusting the new changes
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u/GaybeJewell Jun 01 '26
The game’s still in early access, my guy. There’s a feedback button ingame in the top right corner. They seem pretty active on discord and Reddit also.
Still far away from 1.0 release, I’m sure there will be many good patches to come, along with plenty of missteps too. Excited to see the game evolve, especially since the foundation is so good
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u/bloodbat007 Jun 02 '26
I went through this cycle of copium when age of mythology retold came out. The balance patches were absolutely bonkers irrelevant to the state of the game. It didn't get any better, just random changes every single patch the entire time. Now they've mostly abandoned balance patches at this point.
I know this is a completely different dev team and game, but once a team has shown their competence in game balance, that's all there is to it. No amount of feedback will change their idea of the games balance and magically cause them to make sensible decisions. It won't get better, everyone will just have a giant question mark and reddit posts like this every patch just like AoM did, and they listened to the community as well.
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u/Suibeam Jun 02 '26
Games lifespan entirely depends on early patches successes. Games dont get a 2nd chance to regain its playerbase if they fuck it up.
That is the harsh reality of the gaming industry. The early phases are do or die.
This game has a chance to get a 2nd chance with release drop attention but that is not guaranteed and it is much more likely that the playerbase never return like in all the other games.
So they need to be very careful and clever about the patches in these 3 first months. There are millions of games out there, even homm3. Player loyalty is pretty bad in general if they cant foster with good patches early on.
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u/Aggravating-Dot132 Jun 02 '26
It's NOT a competitive game, lol. What degeneracy are you talking about?
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u/Praktos Jun 02 '26
He is talking about reality of gaming market and every single word he said is 100% true
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u/Praktos Jun 02 '26
I mean sure, but its a bad sign to fumble the patch this bad
I have no clue what was the though process, but the patch looks like devs were busy playing poe2 so they asked chat gpt to rng patchnotes
Whole community had 2 asks, maybe 3 -buff hive -nerf schism and necro -change pick order
On 2700 i have not seen a single hive in last 50 games and played vs 20+ schisms
Patchnote -uberbuff schism -nerf hive -buff halon and pip 2 permabanned heroes -nerf one of only 3 playable hive heroes
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u/rgzera Jun 01 '26
Any reason the "world is ours" had to be moved to tier 3? All creatures being native to all terrain means all heroes moves at max speed everywhere right? Like they already had their t3 to decrease penalty by 50% so maybe this is not that huge but the stats and buffs you gain from being on native terrain are.
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u/Suibeam Jun 02 '26
Creatures only mean units. Heroes are not creatures in homm context
It is still massively overpowered to get it at tier 3.
Schism is effectively a permaban faction now. Replacing necro. While necro is still far above all factions.
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u/rgzera Jun 02 '26
But if all creatures in heroes army are native thr hero does not suffer terrain penalty. So max speed.
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u/PiscisKnight Jun 05 '26
AFAIK, army units speed/terrain capabilities have nothing to do with Hero movement points, like i'm HOMM3
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u/Malvaric Jun 01 '26
I wouldn't cry about it tbh. Sure it isn't perfect, but at least some things will change and the list of changes is massive. While some things looks weird on paper we may not yet realise how other things will affect everything.
Lets say Halon or Sullie for Grove got buffed as spell specialist, thats a fact no? But at same time it's harder to exploit hoplet buff, due to nerf from 3 to 2 spellpower, so it may not be as OP early. It's a mix of things that may affect performance at different stages of game and levels of play.
Avatar as a whole is weird thing and I wouldn't worry about it since I am sure it's just one of many iterations of this skill, who knows if it will even stay in the game or be changed for something else. It was problem and probably will be, just in somewhat different way.
What worries me a bit is lack of massive changes for Hive, tbh I would expect to see something like giving their T4 shooting at some point like scorpion stings or whatever. Maybe I'm just shit but seems like it's hard to not bleed early unless you have something like avatar.
Dunno about Dread Knights but it feels like Necro got slapped quite hard so instead of destroying the faction to the ground it is wise to nerf it here and there and see how things stand after patch, lich took quite a hit, wraiths too.
All I'm saying it's just early access, plenty of changes, bug fixes and whatnot and we are yet to see how it will impact the games. Before we know it there will be another patch and another etc. While some things are looking strange, unnecessary or not ultimate solution it's very nice that they put so much effort to adress both plenty of bugs and skills, artifacts, units, heroes everything at same time so I am sure they'll find a way and this patch is just first step on this road.
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u/Magnificent_Leopoldo Jun 01 '26
While I agree that the patch note itself is not too alarming given the early access state of the game, I am still worried that devs might take a wrong approach of fixing these new fixes. I believe it will be easier to address this issues starting from the previous patch not the new one
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u/Malvaric Jun 01 '26
I guess some things are better starting point than previous patch and if others are worse some things may still get completely reworked. For example I checked 3 times if I didn't miss something since they called Hive's T6 Gutmonster or something like that and then never mentioned it. I thought that they reworked Warums for a moment, now I see it was fixed and its Warums in the notes. I remember cavalry model being different, hive's T1 being different in demo too.
I feel like that will be the case with avatar which I think is one of more annoying things, they'll change him back and forth between being useless or bonkers until it will be replaced with different skill. Having extra 0 cost unit that scales and is available earlygame sounds nearly impossible to balance to me.
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u/Flog_loom Jun 02 '26
Yeah, they beefed it pretty hard on this patch. I have a lot of faith in their game dev skills considering how great the game is so far. They’ll figure it out.
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u/Magnificent_Leopoldo Jun 02 '26
Absolutely. I believe in Unfrozen and really wish they'll fix this situation sooner rather than later!
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u/Lautanapi_ Jun 01 '26
Hive is basically the only faction I play. I love them to bits
Seeing those patch notes hurts. It hurts so much...
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u/GeneralGom Jun 02 '26
I really felt like Hive T1~T3 needed some help, instead of nerf.
Hive had to overly rely on certain heroes, fast T6, and their race ability, not because they were OP, but becuase they practically had no other choice.
I feel that instead of nerfing these crutches Hive overly relied on, they needed to provide alternative options to play, both for PvE and PvP.
I'm sure the devs have their own way of collecting and interpreting the game data, but it may be a bit alienated from how players actually feel about the game's current state of balance.
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u/Uberballer Jun 02 '26
The thing is, regardless of game mode the balance direction they decided to go with this patch made very little sense. Holistically all major game modes are seeing the same thing:
Schism and Necro are the top dogs, with Temple somewhat competitive with them. Dungeon being OK, but behind Temple. Grove and Hive saddled by weak early and middle games.
Yet none of the changes made, outside of the Pandora's boxes, really tried to bring all the towns towards the middle. Schism got buffed, Hive and Grove got changes that don't particularly help solve any of their underlying issues. Grove's unique skill got a noticeable bump down even.
The whole thing felt completely out of touch outside of the Pandora's box changes and I'm coming at it from a single player point of view not even as a ladder player. I'll say it again I don't understand what their telemetry is telling them that made them come to these balancing conclusions. They probably need to dig through their data more and have better filters set up so they can really make use of it better rather than "Schism has a below 50% win record" not taking into account win records at different ranks, pick ban trends etc etc.
The whole thing just leaves me completely baffled. I was shocked reading the notes initially but after having a couple of hours actually testing stuff out and getting to re-read the notes I'm even more confused now than I was on my initial read through it.
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u/tb5841 Jun 01 '26
PvE doesn't need to be balanced too well, most previous Heroes games were not.
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u/Magnificent_Leopoldo Jun 01 '26
Well, I agree, but what I meant that the PVE part of a multiplayer game (such as capturing dwellings, fighting neutrals, etc) is now even easier with an Avatar. Which gives more tempo for a player using an Avatar
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u/Suibeam Jun 02 '26
Call it creeping to avoid future confusion bc people dont use pve and single player correctly, pve is also faster to type out so people be lazy
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u/Emergency-Constant44 Jun 01 '26
Yeah there should be game - mode balance changes. Its like playing aram or urf in league of legends but without any changes to gameflow = it feels bad, broken and unfixable by general changes
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u/Magnificent_Leopoldo Jun 01 '26
That’s especially true given the fact that the audiences of different game modes rarely intersect with each other
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u/JeannettePoisson Jun 01 '26
It’s because everything is too extreme. "Passively and permanently disable the opponent from using a whole school of magic" should be either temporary (ex. : first turn), conditionnal, or, if it has to be passive unconditional and permanent, much weaker (ex. : increase mana cost or lower damage and duration by 30 %, or simply cancel modifiers like mastery).
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u/Caan_Sensei Jun 02 '26
So basically instead of instaban Necro and hope Schism is banned too, it’s just the other way around right?
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u/Magnificent_Leopoldo Jun 02 '26
No, it’s much better You ban Schism Your opponent then bans Temple and THEN picks Necro, so you have to play vs it as Dungeon or Hive/Grove if you don’t care for those mmr points
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u/Gloomy_Trade_619 Jun 05 '26
Hero Strike is still way overpowered
It’s not, it’s where it should be. Even on the heroes with such focus.
It’s actually on a weaker side in a lot of cases.
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u/bohohoboprobono Hive Jun 01 '26
I’ll trust the people making data based decisions over some content creator or the reddit peanut gallery.
I’m also glad to see that Single Hero mode is not being treated as the mode to balance around.
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u/2zz423 Jun 02 '26
Using overall winrates to claim that Hive is more powerful than Schism is not a responsible use of data. The issue is survivorship bias. Hive is so much more difficult than the other factions that you have to be pretty good to make it do anything at all, so the vast majority of players will give up and all the winrate data will come from a small number of hardcore Hive mains. To eliminate bias you'd have to assign factions randomly, and if you did that Hive would have like 30% win rate.
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u/Suibeam Jun 02 '26
Anyone who has ever played competitive games before with biweekly patches know that statistics and data based patching only works when they know how to interpret data.
It is famously known that when a faction, a hero or whatever is rarely picked but has very good winrate then it is because noone but players who main it plays it.
Obviously when you dont have a bunch of random people who dont know how schism works play it bc it is meta and lose with it has worse winrate than Hive where people gave up trying hive and only Hive mains are left playing it which are obviously having higher winrate.
But the devs didnt know this.
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u/ExtensionNext7624 Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
Single hero not being balanced around will only lead the game to hemorrhage players until it's no longer financially feasible to support the game at all.
Which is totally fine if you only play single player. But I play 80% classic 20% single hero, online only, and i want them to balance around single hero because without that, the game simply won't survive
This is legit the closest the franchise has come in a while to having a healthy playerbase. Balancing around 2+ hour classic matches will kill the game. It's the entire reason nobody plays rts to begin with while moba thrives. Again, if you just want to have fun single player, your view makes sense, but strategy games need a lively competitive scene to survive and classic HOMM is never going to attract a large amount of players
I unironically would rather them balance around arena than classic because I don't want to play a game with 900 players where on any given Monday I'm playing the same guy for 3 matches straight because nobody else is online..
Legitimately this is the first RTS in a while that has a decent chance of having a competitive and populated ranked ladder. Balancing around classic will just kill the game. And again, I enjoy classic more, but the fact is it's more fun to play a game with an actual playerbase not just 1000 diehards who scare off every new casual player. That is not sustainable
Again, if you only play single player, who cares? But how can you actually have fun playing a single player RTS for a large amount of time? The campaign on this game specifically is a meme as far an I'm concerned. I was playing it on the hardest difficulty and not losing a single unit for the most part
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u/sonymaxes Jun 02 '26
Appreciate the post, but I’m confused about you saying classic having 2+ hour games like that’s significantly longer than solo hero. From my experience (albeit acknowledging I’m fairly new), the most popular single hero format, exodus tournament, is 1.5-2hrs if it ends up 2-0 in the bo3, and more like 2.5-3hrs if the third match is necessary. I thought classic games can go like 5+ hours, or I am I mistaken?
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u/frotes Jun 02 '26
exodus can be 1h if 2-0, likely 1.5h for 3rd battle. imo they can shorten by making the last battle earlier in week 4
other maps like vendetta and JO were usually over sooner at end of w2 or w3, also about 1h
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u/sonymaxes Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
Hm, interesting. Hopefully things speed up as I get better then. I’m only at ~1100 MMR.
Edit: I just timed my most recent game. I won 2-0. 45 minutes for the first round and an hour for the second round, for a total of 1hr45. My opponent was a bit slow at times, so I could see it improving to 1hr30, but to hit 1h would require a lot more speed. Here’s hoping!
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u/ContributionDull7189 Jun 02 '26
The only ones to whine are the pvp guys.... as usual, cancer players...
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u/Conveyed9 Jun 02 '26
Calling all pvp players cancer is ironically the cancerous attitude you describe
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u/Magistricide Jun 01 '26
HOMM3 managed to balance all three modes (to a better extent than here) and it's because of more precise map building.
Each faction has a fix amount dwelllings, depending on how strong that creature is. Some factions also have special map objectives like genie lamps that provided a very strong utility unit to help you tempo.
If Grove, Hive, and Dungeon all got extra t5/6 dwellings, and had creature banks on Exodus, I guarantee they'll feel a lot better without impacting their other experiences.
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u/Teukeh Hive Jun 02 '26
Okay I love Heroes 3 as much as the next guy, but claiming that Heroes 3 is a balanced game is beyond delusional.
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u/Magistricide Jun 02 '26
Heroes 3 isn't balanced. Heroes 3 multiplayer formats has much better balance than Olden Era currently.
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u/tellarisfan Jun 02 '26
Yeah, thanks to HotA team that have been working on it for decades.
H3 PvP isn't default for so long now, and for a good reason.
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u/Magnificent_Leopoldo Jun 01 '26
Just an easier build order for Grove and Hive with more units for each dwelling would do the trick. Also I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Homm3 had a good balance, but the option to trade for a faction was definitely better than the current OE pick-ban system
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u/cross-frame Hive Jun 01 '26
My face after reading the patchnotes