The map is good and there is a nice synergy between the heroes, naturally some comboes will always work better than others. You usually do better if you have a hero with some tanking capability and a hero with some healing capability, but other than that you are pretty free to pick the hero you prefer, if playing the map with a 4 player group. I haven't played it all the way through with all heroes in multi-player mode, but I did play all heroes in single-played mode, just modified the map by adding a few power-up tomes in the start to be able to beat the map.
I do have a bit of nitpicks, hopefully you'll take this as the constructive criticism that it is.
- The psychic has a wonky short-cut key. The C key, which is supposed to activate Psionic Blastwave instead activates Kinesis. Couldn't find any shortcut key for Psionic Blastwave.
- Use the same formatting for different abilities. In some abilities you have the shortcut key noted after the ability in brackets, like this:
Innate Ability - Kinesis [X]
Other have standard WC3 formatting, where the shortcut key is denoted by having a single letter made yellow, like this:
Mind
Virus - [Level 1]
I would suggest that you change it to use the same formatting across the board.
- While it is always good to include a few puzzles, I gotta admit that I got really tired of the maze that acts as a second half of unlocking a door in one part of the dungeon. The areas that you can walk in without getting ported back don't seem to be precisely the areas marked by the terrain, so you kinda need to "know" the course to walk it without getting ported. It hurts replayability when you need to do that course every time you want to play the map again.
The puzzle with the four activatable squares is another example, it doesn't have any appearant system to it. I even experienced when playing solo with the Hellios hero that it gave some message: "Your powers do no align with...". I couldn't get any further, tried the squares 5-6 times in random order and never managed to get past it. Had to quit in the end.
- In the beginning there seems to be a theme to most monster packs (like the wasps or the undead packs), just like there was in the original battlechasers, but later on you seem to skip the themes and the monster packs are mostly just seemingly random monsters piled together. It would be really nice if you could keep to a theme throughout the map. There is not really any system or sense in the monsters later on, it just seems like a random bunch of monsters that you have already used that get put in together.
- It doesn't seem like all heroes are even in regards to power level. I played all of them, and found some of them to be a bit lacking in regards to relative power, both solo and in group. The voodoo hero seems a bit lacking in regards to power, he seems to loose out in debuffing capacity to a hero like the necromancer, and his offensive "omph" seems to be quite lower than the other heroes too. The assassin also seems a bit weak, the poison is really weak and cumbersome to use. Even if you target every mob and poison them one at the time (which means tons of microing), it still causes far less damage than other damage abilities.
Some of the heroes are also a little bit wonky in regards to theme. The base heroes are actually really good, I liked the theme and feel of all of the base heroes, but the secret heroes seem peculiar. The psychic doesn't really "feel" like a psychic, it feels like just another mage hero, only power it has that feels psychic is the mind-control thing. The Gilgamesh hero is also a bit wonky, I like the chieftain and blade berserker heroes a lot more, it just doesn't seem like the Gilgamesh hero has much sense to his powers. A melee hero with some form of chain lightning?
- Bit more fountains would be great. I hate when you have to just.. leave your computer for 5 minutes because you need to fight a boss, and you need max health / mana before you go. Avoid these long breaks, it won't ruin the gameplay to have more fountains in-game.
Anyways, I loved the map, many good ideas in it and some heroes I really liked. Thats why I have so many things to comment on, because I played it so relatively many times
I loved the Hellios hero in particular, but also the Templar and Elemental Caster heroes are on my top list. I give this map a 4/5 grade.
Approved
