Legends of Runeterra
Let's talk about Hecarim
Submitted 4 years, 8 months ago by
DoubleSummon
Don't you guys think the card is a bit overtuned?
How would you nerf him? or maybe nerf the rekindlererBADCARDNAME probably The Harrowing as well.
I mean dealing with a Hecarim is hard but manageable the problem is the next 2 Hecarims that come Back to Back turn after turn..
For me.. I had 2 copies and crafted the third one today.. it feels so unfair to play the card or against it.
How would you nerf him? 7 mana? remove overwhelm(only shadow isles with this keyword IIRC)? nerf riders?
Maybe you think he doesn't deserve nerfing and it's ok every second deck is shadow isles.
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Don't you guys think the card is a bit overtuned?
How would you nerf him? or maybe nerf the rekindlererBADCARDNAME probably The Harrowing as well.
I mean dealing with a Hecarim is hard but manageable the problem is the next 2 Hecarims that come Back to Back turn after turn..
For me.. I had 2 copies and crafted the third one today.. it feels so unfair to play the card or against it.
How would you nerf him? 7 mana? remove overwhelm(only shadow isles with this keyword IIRC)? nerf riders?
Maybe you think he doesn't deserve nerfing and it's ok every second deck is shadow isles.
5 mana 3/3 no fear no overhwlem and the riders being a 2\1
i would make riders 2/2 and remove overwhelm from level 1 [ make you work a little for the keyword not having it since the start] i think it will be nerfed next big patch it is so much power for 6 mana.
The problem with Hecarim is they just packed way too many different threats into one card. That may seem obvious, but what I'm getting at is that such a complicated card is extremely complicated to nerf. He is oppressive in many different deck types, but it's for a different reason in each of them.
His baseline problem is the crazy amount of offense he brings for 6 mana, so increasing the mana cost might make sense. Overwhelm isn't an issue at all when he's just a single 4/6. But a higher mana cost won't stop the insanity that happens when you clone him.
His synergies with other Shadow Isles cards may lead you to examine those other cards to give him a backdoor nerf through them, but these synergies aren't a factor in his most egregious abuse cases.
When you make Ephemeral clones of him, the problem is that he buffs Ephemerals AND has Overwhelm, so it seems like one of those properties needs to be looked at. But as mentioned above, those things aren't the biggest issue when he's not being cloned.
This leads me to believe a stat reduction is in order. He would be fine at 6 mana if he were easier to kill, and his Overwhelm can be mitigated without removing the keyword if you just reduce his power. So maybe a 3/5 would be fine, leaving all the rest alone.
At the very least, Hecarim needs to lose Overwhelm as stated OR has his stats changed from 4/6 to 3/6 OR 4/4.
Also just keep in mind Hecarim is a terrible card when not attacking or behind.
Hearthstone: Me vs Firebat -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09NCE81owjo
Dropping his health would, in my opinion, be massively impactful and likely disproportionate. Even going down to five health would be huge, because Hecarim needs to be on the offensive and anything that limits his ability to simply attack every turn is going to be swingy. Attack reductions would be less damaging. Honestly, Overwhelm is the part of the card that could most easily go without damaging the Hecarim vision or breaking the playstyle. I don't honestly know why they gave him Overwhelm at all; you're already wanting to chump-block the 3/2 spawns, so it's unlikely you'd have more chaff to block the pony with as well.
The above is predicated on the assumption that you actually think he needs a nerf, of course, which I absolutely do not. I think over the course of the past month roughly a third of the champions in the bloody game have had someone on here wanting nerfs to them.
That said - Rekindler does need a nerf, and has needed a nerf for a long time. When I first saw that card I was utterly flabbergasted that it even got printed - the level of value represented is just absurd. It's not even locked into a 'Play' effect, so you can resummon the damn thing to repeat the effect. It.. It should not be...
I see you when you're sleeping; I'm gone before you wake
I'm not as good as turn 4 Barnes; But I'm at least a Twilight Drake
Nerf Rekindler into just a play effect or make it a 8 mana card. It's beyond stupid to see someone get three hecarims. Shadow riders need to be 2/1. Overwhelm needs to be removed. Either all of those or he needs to be an 8 or 9 mana card.
Shouldn't nerf the Shadow Riders. In fact, they should be the main focus of Hecarim, so his base stats should be reduced...or just his mana cost increased.
I think that the 6-mana slot is way too efficient. He should be at 7 or 8-mana. In return they could reduce his upgrade requirement to make pure Ephemeral decks more appealing.
Also yes, Rekindler is absolutely <snip> and needs to either be at least 2-mana higher or have garbage stats
//sinti: removed profanity
I tried having fun once.
It was awful.
I'd advocate a stat nerf to 3/5 and/or weakening the summoning aspect: Either reduce the Riders to 2/1 or, as I'd prefer, let him summon only 1 instead of 2. I could see Overwhelm being removed or limited to his level-2 variant, too.
I would first remove overwhelm because it doesn't even suit him that well thematically and removing it won't hit him too hard. If that's not enough (which it probably isn't) I would say either a small stat nerf (-1 attack or -1 health) or reducing the stats of the spectral riders to 2/2 (although this does remove the consistency between Hecarim's riders and the riders summoned by Onslaught of Shadows.
And I agree that The Rekindler can be pretty dumb as well. I think a 1 mana increase would be a step in the right direction.
Frankly, I think The Rekindler should see a much more radical change than a simple stat or cost nerf. Leave it as a 6 mana 4/4 and change the text to resurrect followers. It's crazy that Shadow Isles has access to so many uniquely powerful removal and card advantage tools.
With Hecarim, I think FortyDust hit the nail on the head - there's kind of too much going on with him to make any simple nerf stick. (Except maybe a cost nerf, but those tend to either fail or make a deck so slow as to not be competitive, which is probably too swingy a nerf.)
I do think one thing you could do to limit his power is changing his level up condition. Bystekhilcar argued that he needs to go on the offensive, making any health nerf very swingy. I think that's wrong, and I'd argue that his level up condition is a big part of why it's wrong*. Because Hecarim's level up condition is a "you've done X" condition and not an "I've seen X" condition, you don't really need to worry about having him stick to the board, so long as you can consistently get a new copy of him.
As DoubleSummon mentioned in the original post, the first Hecarim is often manageable, but the redundancy of a deck running Hecarim, The Rekindler, and even The Harrowing (not to mention some of the best card draw in the game) means you have to deal with a lot of Hecarims after turn 6. It also means your opponent doesn't really care whether you trade with him - if you don't, your opponent gets to deal tons of damage, and if you do, you lose some resources and your opponent powers up his or her late game Hecarim plays. It's win win, especially if you trade and your opponent has something like Rhasa the Sunderer in hand.
So, really, to nerf him, Riot needs to decrease that kind of consistent win/win scenario the deck can produce. I think changing his level-up to be something more like "I've seen 4+ Ephemeral allies attack" goes a long way to making him weaker in the mid game turns, but leaves The Harrowing as a kind of game ending play. (Maybe also decrease his HP a tiny bit to make trading with him on board a little easier.) If he's still too powerful after that, you could probably do one of two things. Option one, nerf his leveled up version to say "Ephemeral followers have +2|+0" to avoid cases where several leveled up Ephemeral Hecarims power each other up a ton. Option 2, nerf The Harrowing so that it resurrects unique units.
* You could probably drop his health to be so low that he wouldn't be able to attack (e.g. at 3 HP, he'd be very vulnerable to all manner of removal before combat). If his health were so low that he could never get an attack in, that would be a very swingy nerf, but I think he could easily go as low as 4 HP and it wouldn't make much of a difference in terms of how these Hecarim decks operate today.
Regarding The Rekindler, I don't think it would be appropriate to nerf it unless you can come up with a couple of other decks where it's truly oppressive.
If Hecarim is pretty much the only time Rekindler is a problem, that points to the real problem being Hecarim. In fact, Rekindler could make a good canary in the coal mine for detecting troublesome Champions in general.
Played about 10 games today and almost all of them were against SI/ Demacia decks. That deck is basically braindead. All of the units are fearsome, so you can't low block them, and the game is basically over when Hecarim comes out. You always burn all your resources and then he just comes back next round with full mana and a rally.
SI spells give them every tool they'd ever need Frenzied Scitterer needs a nerf, Arachnoid horror needs to be 3 mana, wraithcaller needs to be 5 mana, glympse needs to be 3 mana. The whole board gets swarmed because the deck is so fast and cheap
I made the deck myself and it honestly doesn't even feel fair for my opponents. You can run elusive down so hard that it's sad.
The game is borderline unplayable right now.
Hecarim needs more than a single nerf, in order both to fix is power level and the combo with The Rekindler and The Harrowing. Since the other two cards are not particulaty oppressive per se, I'll focus on the hero:
Maybe there are also other SI cards that may requires nerfs, but for now Hecarim seems to be the most problematic.
"For what profit is it to a man if he gains the world, and loses his own soul?"
I just wonder how did he not get hit when they nerfed elusives, wonder what's the actual win rate of decks containing 3 hecarims.
While there's no question that the Hecarim/The Rekindler combo is uniquely frustrating (I suspect in part due to the overall power level of SI to begin with), I don't think it's inappropriate to think about whether each piece of that combo is itself broken.
The average 6-drop in this game is about a 5/6, so when The Rekindler's play effect triggers, it's basically guaranteed to put stats on the board that are at least vanilla and given you an effective "7th Champion" in a game that wants you to build around Champion cards. This effect is best abused with Hecarim because he makes The Rekindler a 6 mana 14/14 spread across 4 bodies in a game with fairly limited removal and AOE tools. There are other champions that get close to that too, and have relevant keywords to make them attractive choices for abuse (Tryndamere or Darius, for example). They're not as good though, by some margin, so they aren't being abused yet. But if all they do is change Hecarim, I expect you'll just see one of them take over for these decks.
This is a pretty shocking suggestion. Leaving a card in the game as a "canary in the coal mine" is a disastrous way to design a game. This design philosophy basically means that every time the balance team screws up in a way that interacts with that card (in this example, makes a broken Champion), the resulting problematic metagame is worse than it needs to be.
If this were Hearthstone, I'd be inclined to agree, because those guys have no qualms about letting a bad meta fester for months at a time.
But Riot is committed to biweekly patches, so by the time a broken card surfaces and becomes truly oppressive, it's probably only another week at most before it's corrected.
That's a fair point - the frequent patches give Riot a lot more room to have these kinds of amplifying issues without ruining the game for an extended period of time.
That said, I think it really would be pretty easy to abuse the SI shell with other Champions today from other regions (see my previous two examples), and whether or not the amplification is the core of the problem, it's something players will latch on to as being a significant, negative impact on their enjoyment. There are lots of other card games to choose from, and players will only suffer so many bad metagames supported by The Rekindler before it becomes a nerf it or leave it situation.
But they mentioned a balance patch is something they will do monthly.. the second patch of the month is a content/light patch, They could for sure put a nerf if it's pressing enough but it wasn't for them last patch so I think they will wait until 2 weeks from now.. We are expected to see QoL,skins and bugfixes this Tuesday, and no balance changes.
I don't think that's a good barometer, personally, because all you'd be identifying is champions that give a lot of value/inevitability. The only reason Trynd isn't being played alongside Rekindler is Freljord's late game push got nerfed badly after closed beta.
Judging new champions by merit of 'does this make Rekindler broken' basically means new champions stick to 5 mana or below and are either stat-sticks or understatted value, tbh.
I see you when you're sleeping; I'm gone before you wake
I'm not as good as turn 4 Barnes; But I'm at least a Twilight Drake
Obviously it's not the only measure -- just one of many. Why do people insist on jumping to logical extremes?
I've been trying desperately to dream up a way to combo Darius -> The Rekindler -> The Harrowing into a board full of 10 attack overwhelms, but I just can't do it.
Surely you can get at least two or three?
The problem with Hecarim is that you need only two to create a full board of attackers with extremely high Power.
For Darius, Dawn and Dusk is the more common way to close out a game.
The issue is more that, unlike Hecarim, Darius is a fairly big tempo loss until he levels up. And he's fairly difficult to level up on curve unless you build your deck aggressively, and then the deck is just trying to do too many things at once.
I like your suggestion of Dawn and Dusk a lot more.