Warcraft III: Reforged Patch 1.34.0

[Bribe]

Siege Engine changes make it WAY less effective against buildings, would now be more offensive as anti-light air, while becoming very weak to capital air units. I think they added the ability to target ground units as recompense.

The Circlet semi-nerf, but with a toggle is a creative solution to that controversial item.

The Animate Dead thing is very welcome. It always frustrated me that my reanimated units could not absorb any damage to protect my other units. The disease cloud thing is flavorful. It would be decent against Dryads and Spellbreakers.

Surprised to see Demon Hunter getting a buff, but at least we're not seeing 100/200/300 Mana Burn.

The Mountain Giant rework is interesting.

 

[deepstrasz]

The Animate Dead thing is very welcome. It always frustrated me that my reanimated units could not absorb any damage to protect my other units.

Yeah but you could use those units to block/lock enemy units or protect yours from melee damage.
Anyways hope the changes won't break custom maps/campaigns.

 

[Bribe]

Yeah but you could use those units to block/lock enemy units or protect yours from melee damage.
Anyways hope the changes won't break custom maps/campaigns.

Yes, that could be a benefit, but I've rarely seen this ability in pro-level play. The units will absorb auto-attack damage in any case now.

The main example as to why invulnerability is bad is Big Bad Voodoo. When I was reading about the Witch Doctor before TFT came out, I thought "holy crap that [Big Bad Voodoo] is going to be way overpowered". But what it really ended up doing was painting a crosshair on the poor guy.

 

[Armelior_is_back]

The only siege weapon that wasn't made of tissue paper is now a mechanical mortar team ?

Hey, maybe the... questionable balancing means the "new" custom campaign stuff actually works since "one step further 2 steps back" is probably still in effect

 

[deepstrasz]

The main example as to why invulnerability is bad is Big Bad Voodoo. When I was reading about the Witch Doctor before TFT came out, I thought "holy crap that [Big Bad Voodoo] is going to be way overpowered". But what it really ended up doing was painting a crosshair on the poor guy.

If only you could find one of those potions of invulnerability and use it just right before starting the spell or use an anti-magic potion, at least.

But yeah, or rather nah, some of the melee changes are more than bizarre; tank winking at ya.
Mirror Image dealing damage could prove deadly on level 3 and high level Blademaster +level 3 Critical Strike and good items. A better idea would be for the Wand of Illusion clones to do that damage.

 

[Bitterman]

Some interesting changes there!

• Blademaster Mirror images now do 10% of the Blademaster’s base damage. (about time)
• Animated Dead corpses can now be killable and have diseased cloud if researched. (cool)
• Ghoul Frenzy now adds 30HP to ghouls’ base health. (about time)

But what on earth is this?

• Siege Engine now has heavy armor.
• Siege Engine can now attack units. ???
• Siege Engine base damage reduced from 44 to 22.
• Siege Engine barrage damage increased from 14 to 16.

This patch warrants its own thread.

THEY FIXED SIEGE ENGINES!
In fact, pairing Mortar and Siege engine combo will be good

 

[Homor]

You're not far off but a few points:

• Despite all the bad PR the product sold well. In the end the refund drama had a trivial effect on the bottom line. We tracked both refunds, and people who re-bought after refunding.
• Despite the popular narrative the BNET player population was substantially larger after RF launch than 2017 - pre-launch, and remained so through Dec 2020. Based on hosting volume today this still seems to be the case.
• As long as the infinite refund policy exists there won't be a sale. Some people have recently reported having issues refunding, however I'm not clear on how widespread this is. I am quite familiar with it though as I am the origin of the policy.
• The slate of games under Classic Games / Team 1 was profitable. The issue was that they weren't profitable enough, specifically they weren't making at least a billion in revenue annually. This is the expectation in the company.
• RF was the result of decisions being made to satisfy shareholders. We were protected while Morhaime was there, but as soon as he left our world collapsed. Any ongoing investment in the classic suite represented resources that could have been shifted to WoW/OW2/HS/DIV/incubation projects. Blizzard has had enormous trouble retaining talent, and has in my opinion purged too many high-value employees explicitly or through stagnation. Several thousand have been terminated, or driven out for various reasons, since 2017. A near totality of RTS/MOBA talent has departed.
• The recent patches are largely leftover work from 2019/2020 that has been worked on to some degree using borrowed resources. The reason they aren't actually fixing any bugs is because they don't want to invest in doing so. To be clear I believe they are launching these patches simply to satisfy the promise of "multiple patches this year". I have some hope they will hire an outsoucing company next year, however without any understanding of the game I am unsure if they could achieve net gains in product quality and stability. The rushed Zoom feature ignored custom games, which is not a positive sign at all. The current state of the game is, from my perspective, shockingly bad. There appears to be no interest in fixing critical issues such as Mac support seemingly ending, Rexxar being hardlocked, or the game cache issues which affects all game modes. I don't recall a Blizzard game ever being in such a poor state before in terms of high priority bugs. Poor design, poor performance? Sure, WoD was a thing. Three years out the game is nearing abandonware status.

"Sold well" by what standard, exactly? Because Blizz didn't even both mentioning it in their Q1 report that year despite rushing it to meet it. From what I've heard the sales were disappointing.

But considering the budget was slashed to FOUR-FUCKING-PERCENT of what it was originally, "sold well" might be relative. If your budget is $2 and a ham sandwich its easy to make your money back.

 

[HankHell69]

Has anyone had problems with World Editor? I’d rather save myself the disappointment, curious to know if you can successfully load a map that has imported assets? After 1.33 one of my unfinished maps wouldn’t load and crashed the WE instantly. I deleted all my projects. Lost all hope in seeing them completed.

 

[deepstrasz]

Has anyone had problems with World Editor? I’d rather save myself the disappointment, curious to know if you can successfully load a map that has imported assets? After 1.33 one of my unfinished maps wouldn’t load and crashed the WE instantly. I deleted all my projects. Lost all hope in seeing them completed.

You should definitely save your maps as folders as well. That way it's easier to take stuff out that might be crashing the map like textures or "broken" models. The other way is using a program like Ladik's MPQ editor.