Posts from TBM - Tournaments balance mod

I can't say anything about the other changes, but many of the changes I've already mentioned negatively affect the balance. In general, this mod can be called "tournament-ready" with a stretch; there's too much arbitrary content and changes based on the subjective viewpoint of the creators (excessive bias towards defensive gameplay for humans, adding heroes from campaigns, removing key abilities of some creatures, excessively strong buffs/nerfs, too radical a change to luck, artificially limiting development options, etc.). But there are also good changes. Overall, the expression "my tournament, my rules" can be applied here. There is a certain balance in this mod (but whether it is better than in the original game is a question).

Couldn't have said it better myself.

It's somewhat ironic that in the reviews on the Heroes for Fan channel, the author of TBM often criticized the creators of other mods for their arbitrary content and imbalance, and did so in a rather nasty and mocking way. Apparently, he eventually decided to show his vision of balance, but the result is something mediocre. A very questionable balance with a focus on creativity.

Sir, it seems you are not well-informed; the TBM mod is a good, balanced tournament mod. It can be used for tournament games, as players from the RTA, TE, and original game disciplines participated in its development. Three excellent players – Imladris Elf, Samuan, and Vlad Anisimov – were responsible for the balance. They participated in various tournaments and know firsthand what balance means. I promoted the mod to make more people aware of it.
My reviews have more likes than dislikes, which indicates their objectivity. If you don't like my guides or reviews for some reason, no one is forcing you to watch them. In the worst case, if you want to prove your point, you can create your own correct review or constructively criticize any of mine, but I doubt we'll see that happen... Everyone is good at talking, but that's all.

Sir, it seems you are not well-informed. The TBM mod is a good, balanced tournament mod. It can be used for tournament games because players from the RTA, TE, and original game disciplines participated in its development. Three excellent players were responsible for the balance: Imladris Elf, Samuan, and Vlad Anisimov. They participated in various tournaments and know firsthand what balance is. I promoted the mod to make more people aware of it.

You're probably right. I really wasn't aware that TBM is a good, balanced mod; apparently, only you and those who developed it are aware of this, and the rest simply don't understand that it's good.

My reviews have more likes than dislikes, which indicates their objectivity. If you don't like my guides or reviews for some reason, no one is forcing you to watch them. As a last resort, if you want to prove your point, you can create your own correct review or critically analyze any of mine, but I don't think we'll see that happen... Everyone is great, but only in words.

The number of likes and dislikes is not an indicator of the objectivity of reviews. For the most part, it's the same audience, the majority of whom are trolls and schoolchildren who enjoy this kind of nasty behavior. The more silly jokes you make, the more likes you get from them. It's simple.

Just for fun, make a video on any topic, even one not related to Heroes, and upload it to your channel. The main thing is to behave exactly as you do in your reviews. I'm sure the number of likes will hardly change.

We can argue about this for a long time, but there's not much point in it. Judging by your argument with zahar0z and other modders, you consider yourself something like "free and unbiased press," working to improve and promote the mods you review. Therefore, there are two options: either you are simply being hypocritical (which is more likely), or you are living in your own illusions (and that's already an alarming sign). In both cases, conversations and arguments with you will be a waste of time. The forum participants have expressed their opinions, and whether or not to take them into account is up to each individual.

You're probably right. I really wasn't aware that TBM is a good balance mod.

We could have stopped here.
I'm the guy who makes guides and reviews, and whether or not to watch them is up to each individual.

Constellar, Remix, are you going to discuss a mod or a channel?

Constellar, Remix are you going to discuss the mod or the channel?

I don't mind hearing specifics about the mod. Where exactly is the imbalance and why, but the person keeps reminiscing about the past and trying to express their dislike for my channel and for me personally. It's amusing to read :0

Greetings, dear forum members. Once again I'd like to apologize for posting on the forum so rarely. I usually try to read it and only leave feedback at the moment a new version of the mod is being developed, which is why this phenomenon is so rare :(

A huge thank you to everyone who left their remarks regarding balance and gameplay, in particular to Mr. Derael for such a detailed and rich reply.

Overall, I agree with most of the criticism directed at the mod, strange as that may sound. The thing is that during the development of the third version, the main task set before the modders and balancers was to speed up the gameplay and, consequently, to shorten the duration of tournament games. Therefore, some of the changes aimed at speeding things up somewhat knocked the balance out of whack. However, the main objective was accomplished quite well, since the average game time in the second tournament — 8 h. 47 min. — was reduced to 5 h. 32 min. in the third.

Didn't see a fix for the dwarven runes

Unfortunately, that fix isn't expected either. As the statistics from the last tournament showed, dwarves have the highest restart rate among players and one of the lowest win rates. So we plan to strengthen the dwarves, not weaken them. I'd like to design a system in which dwarves can use runes much more often in breakthroughs, since right now they are in principle the weakest faction in breakthroughs, but less often in finals. Therefore Mr. Nargott's suggestion:

Dwarven runes are fine (in the original). It's just the overpowered rune of greatness (for the final) that effectively doubles the usage of all runes. You should have banned not the upgrade, but that one.

... looks very good. Another huge problem is the presence of the Scholar skill on Ingvar. That's one of the harshest abuses in the game. We'll think about what to do about it at the level of the game's resources. And we also plan to revert the resurrection rune back to 40%, but with a significant cut to the growth of the first three (possibly four) tiers. At the level of the skill wheel, high-percentage war machines and 2% logistics will be brought back.

As far as I understood, the mod is intended for small and medium maps (since playing long games in tournaments doesn't make much sense).

The mod is intended for maps of various sizes. If you look at the templates built into the mod, you'll see that there are templates both for medium and for huge maps. Cases where players plan their leveling and game strategy relying solely on the template and the map size are not uncommon.

1. Demons.
In my opinion, they went a bit overboard with the nerf to the Hell Steeds. I doubt that one aura is comparable in usefulness to an attack that causes Fear combined with higher initiative and damage. Moreover, the aura only triggers at the start of the next turn, and by that time the ranks of the steeds may well be thinned out. The buff to Nightmares is of course nice, but very often preference was already given to them anyway; I can hardly imagine who would take Hell Steeds in their current state (I may be wrong, since I almost never play on small maps — perhaps the damage from the passive at levels 10-20 is too high). The buffs to the other creatures are generally justified; the demon army is rather weak in the early game. I especially liked the idea with the Fire Demons. Although the buff to the Arch Devils is also unclear — I, too, always preferred them compared to the Arch Demons, since the latter's ability has limited application due to their low movement speed. Of course, the ability to grab the enemy's shooters on turn 2 is very useful, but they'll only be able to hit them on the third turn.

Whereas the Arch Devils have the ability to summon Pit Lords, who can also open gates, significantly increasing the size of the army.

The effect of the steeds' aura is often cut in alternative tournament mods, and quite significantly (by 5-7 damage per creature). It seems to me you're greatly underestimating the power of this ability. In the mid-game, a common move is gating the steeds under tier 6-7 units and bringing the main stack up to them as well (which, thanks to their enormous initiative and mobility, is quite realistic). So, on medium timings, purely with one aura you can kill 3-4 tier-7 units. That's very powerful.

Arch Devils, as practice shows, are taken less often. Usually in rushes, due to their higher speed and initiative. The ability to summon Arch Demons very rarely plays in finals because of the difficulty of executing it. And in breakthroughs it almost never plays. Arch Demons, on the other hand, are one of the top priorities for focus fire against shooter and caster builds, where corner positioning behind walls/mines or in a box behind tanking stacks is extremely important. Plus, they can play in breakthroughs where you can hit neutral shooters with the same steeds and then pull the steeds back out from under infantry strikes. Since Arch Demons can only pull on the second turn, they usually fly forward to the maximum extent under direct shots from shooters and strikes from infantry, but since their priority is high enough, these strikes and shots are not taken by other priority stacks like steeds, hounds, or imps. Thanks to this, Demons and Pit Lords can gate in their full numbers, which is very important for a demon. And the stack itself is quite tanky and not so easy to focus down, which doesn't guarantee its complete destruction even under maximum focus.

2. Necropolis
The bone archers are also ambiguous. Total damage increases by 30% with Archery + UU (though this is partly compensated by the enhanced Evasion, which is now simply a must-have against any faction except demons). As a result, skeletons with UU and Archery will deal 13.75% more damage to a target with Evasion, but they will have 20% less health (without buffs), which makes defense even more important for the undead. Undead with a good build have become even stronger; undead without a good build have become even weaker (if they didn't roll Offense or Defense).
The vampire change is also perplexing, and makes Ornelia even stronger. Of course, the fact that their growth was reduced is not very pleasant, but the total numbers won't suffer too much, since vampires are the first priority for resurrection with dark energy. So this change is more of a buff, since it makes them much fatter (Vampire Princes are 25% tankier, and Vampire Lords are 28.6% tankier). As a result, it will be even harder to get rid of them. The change with the sleep ability is also not entirely clear — it already sleeps for 2 turns, not 3. The reduced chance is compensated by the increased HP, so he won't suffer much.
The lich change, in my opinion, doesn't make much sense. The nerf to Arch Liches (because a single point of damage won't compensate for the loss of 2 Attack) and to High Liches (who lost 4 Attack altogether and, incomprehensibly, 0.5 damage) is quite strange. The fact that Raise Dead is now at Expert level will hardly save things (essentially we're sacrificing damage and the cloud in order to cast one more half-hearted raise, because 2 Expert resurrections are roughly comparable to three normal ones). In my opinion, they remain unequal as before — the first are still stronger in long games, and the second are now even better in rushes.

The skeleton change was made back in the first TBM and is considered one of the most successful changes in the mod. Here, the collisions between the upgrades were removed, where bone archers were extremely unattractive both in finals (where they were taken only with an archer build, and even then not necessarily) and in breakthroughs from week 3 onward. They were less tanky, but at the same time also dealt less damage. Now the archers are a clearly defined damage-dealing stack that is very good in breakthroughs, which partly solves the undead's problem with breakthroughs in weeks 1-2. At the same time, in finals this is not a must-have stack, since at the height of the "hype" there was a period when they were always taken, and they were mediocre because they lost shootouts. The most notorious case was the final in the first tournament, where ~1000 archers with Stand Your Ground lost a shootout to 160 Nomad Centaurs that the opponent had been losing all game long. The only thing I have to agree with is that the "Evasion" and "Archery" perks are indeed somewhat over-buffed, so in the new version they will be cut to 25%.

The vampires, along with the reduced growth, also had their hidden "power" parameter increased. The creature cost formula in dark energy depends on this parameter, so in the TBM mod vampires require more dark energy than in the original. Therefore, you won't be able to raise them in equally gigantic numbers. And the very idea of rebalancing the creature was borrowed from Heroes 6, where vampires were a low-damage tanking creature, which is why they lifestealed weakly — all the more so with the reduced growth. A blinding factor of 3 means that any chance to blind will be multiplied by 3. That is, a single vampire in the original, when striking a super-fatty stack — say, a thousand cyclopes — has a blind chance of 5%*3=15%. That's what a factor of 3 means. Now, with a factor of 1.5, the chance will be 5%*1.5=7.5%. And if you do the pure math, in the original the total HP of weekly growth was 40*5=200. In the TBM mod the total HP is 50*4=200. That is, there's no difference in HP, but the factor has been halved.

High Liches are a very niche upgrade that is used only in the BD/answer strategy, where it's specifically the power of Raise Dead that matters, and they also help somewhat in breakthroughs. Therefore, with our fixes we decided to emphasize their strong sides and make them, stat-wise, a defensive upgrade that is harder to punch through with physical damage. I won't spoil it for now, but in the new TBM their value will grow significantly — I guarantee that.

3. Orcs. The buff to Nomad Centaurs is of course nice, but without reworking the maneuvering AI, nothing will change in principle. At least they're now good in battles against neutrals. I liked the change to the Daughters of the Sky, although the fact that they no longer need to kill a goblin to cast Mass Chain Lightning is a rather ambiguous decision. Although considering that the damage without the 1st level of Blood Rage will be cut by a third, you'll probably still have to slaughter the goblin. At the Expert level they will generally wreak unspeakable havoc, but on tournament maps it will be hard to push them up to Expert level, since you can only dream of UAs, because reaching 1000 or even 750 rage points will be very difficult. Although with the Battle Cry and Education branches it's possible, but you'll have to spend the hero's precious turns. And there, opponents will be hit by a Chain Lightning of 3200 damage, launched by 30 Daughters of the Sky. The regeneration boost will also hardly affect anything, although the Shakk'Karukat buff makes wyverns quite decent tanks (at level 25 their HP is comparable to that of tier-7 creatures). Although the damage is still low, and they still don't gain rage.

The change to chieftains is also rather pointless — on tournament maps it's quite hard to bring the chieftain squad up to 60; why not reward the player for that achievement? It only becomes meaningful when the player has more than 120 chieftains, which on average is 2-3 months of game time.

Also completely incomprehensible is the buff to the Free Cyclopes — they were made even better at what they were already very good at: crushing enemy squads with the support of the hero and chieftains. With the higher initiative and a speed of 7, under a +1 speed war cry and with a haste aura, they will be a very serious threat to the enemy, and they are not affected by the classic Storm Wind (which weakens all tier-7 creatures except Titans) or the Misty Veil (which weakens Titans). You get these all-crushing, stunning monsters with a speed of 9 (or even 10, if you take the speed boots). In my opinion the Horde looks like the strongest faction in this mod, purely because of the cyclopes. And the Bloodcyclopes, in my opinion, were weakened unjustifiably. Reducing their speed is justified, reducing their initiative is not. If you compare them to the dwarven dragons, the latter are much more survivable and hit harder. The fact that Bloodcyclopes can also shoot doesn't save them, because the shooting doesn't apply their debuff (which became much weaker after the luck nerf anyway).

The maneuvering mechanic is quite good against neutrals (if you do have to absorb damage with the centaurs), since the counterattack will be 100% rather than 50% due to the melee penalty, and also in finals against enemy control, which often prevents the shot from being blocked. Its only drawback is the behavior of the centaurs with an empty quiver, but that's more of an exception than the rule. So I see no reason to change or rework this ability, given that it's not dead but has its own definite, albeit not very broad, niche for play.

Unfortunately, I can't say anything about the Daughters of the Sky, since so far I've never seen a Chain Lightning under the third blood rage in real combat conditions. I'll leave it as is for now, since the mechanic is powerful and interesting, exerting psychological pressure on the opponent, even if it's hard to execute.

Regarding the chieftains, I have to agree that it's hard to build up their numbers to 60, given the limit of 3 months and 2 weeks. However, this fix was introduced before the clause about a maximum duration of 3 months, 2 weeks, 1 day was added to the tournament regulations. So now it can be reverted, although I don't see any particular practical sense in doing so.

I also have to agree with your points regarding the cyclopes. There were similar proposals from my side even before the third tournament (to equalize the speed of both upgrades to 5 and initiative to 10), but they didn't get the proper support from the community, and so weren't introduced. In TBM 4, I assume, this will be fixed.

4. Dungeon.

The most obvious radical change is the change to the Stalkers. On one hand, 50% armor penetration can allow them to deal decent damage in the final battle, but their main source of damage has always been poison, which will be problematic to apply without stealth. At the very least, they should be given even one point of speed so they're on par with the Wind/Death Dancers, whose growth and all stats except health are higher. I don't play Dungeon myself, but these problems seem serious to me. I can't say anything about the other changes.

As practice has shown, in breakthroughs this upgrade is unplayable, and in finals, if this stack reaches the enemy in 1 turn, it can practically one-shot a tier 6-7 stack under Expert Defense, and the remnants will be eaten by the poison. Adding speed to it is extremely dangerous. Perhaps, on the contrary, it should be cut.

Ironically, based on the results of the third tournament I considered Dungeon to be the most balanced faction, both in terms of win/loss statistics and in my own impressions of playing it. I'm not surprised that so few points were raised about it.

5. Academy.

With the pests, in my opinion, they went overboard. Reducing the attack can still be understood (although again, debatable), but weakening the Gremlins' ability by a factor of 10 is very strange. Even if it's too strong, in its current state it won't work on enemy golems. At the very least it would make sense to leave a coefficient of 2 or even 3 (especially since gremlins are often killed off among the first, and this ability stops being useful even faster). It's also worth noting that this ability was never imbalanced with any coefficient, because the gremlin stack spends a turn to disable the ballista for one turn, meaning they don't attack, and the ballista doesn't die. Whereas Deadly Cold simply kills the ballista without any fuss.
The nerf to the Elemental Gargoyles is also unclear. The main reason to take them was their sufficiently high initiative; without it, they are barely usable. The nerf to the Kshatri is also strange — I rarely took them as it was because they are very vulnerable to practically everything, and now they're altogether squishy. And finally, the boost to the Thunder Thanes is very nice — at last this upgrade has stopped being pointless on small and medium maps.

The pests have tier-3 creature stats with an overall growth of 20. Isn't that a reason to cut a couple of their stats? As for the pests' ability, it was initially buggy, since 1 gremlin could disable a stack/machine with 100 HP. 11 gremlins disable the enemy's full ballista with 1100 HP. 20 gremlins disable a catapult with 2000 HP. 8 gremlins disable a castle tower. That's way too imbalanced. As for disabling golems, everything is fine there. To disable one Steel Golem, you need 2.4 pest gremlins, and to disable one Obsidian Golem, you need only 2 gremlins. The ratio of gremlin to golem growth is 20 to 9, that is, there are 2.22 gremlins per golem. That's a guaranteed disabling of a stack of Obsidian Golems, and disabling of Steel Golems when 7.5% of the stack is killed. Plus, it's worth considering that the gremlin coefficient in heroes' starting armies is higher than the golem coefficient, so conditions are possible where the pests disable the Steel Golems right at the start of the battle. The ability itself doesn't require constant spamming on the ballista, since it resets the ballista's initiative to 0 and prevents it from growing for one turn. Given that the gremlins have an initiative of 12, and abilities' 1-turn duration is calculated at an initiative of 10, that's at least one gremlin shot in the interval between two pest-uses (and often 2 or more with a mini-action on initiative). And the ability itself is much more stable than Deadly Cold for a number of reasons:
- it isn't resisted
- it doesn't require investing one whole branch and at least four perks, plus in a number of matchups Chaos isn't needed at all
- cold spells still have to actually roll
- considering that warlords are quite tempo-driven, you might simply not have time to build up Deadly Cold

The main reason to take Elemental Gargoyles lies not in initiative, but in the enhancement of Chaos spells and greater survivability. Initiative, on the other hand, plays against low-mobility factions like Haven and Dwarves, which makes the upgrade overpowered and in need of a cut.

Kshatri are a super-DD stack for their tier. If it isn't taken apart quickly, a cat-tastrophe can ensue. It's the same system as with the Dungeon lizards. If a stack is ultra-damaging, it must suffer in survivability, otherwise it's an imbalance. In our fixes for the cats, we tried to maintain that system.

6. Haven.
The weakening of the shooters, while justified, is again in my opinion exaggerated (especially against the backdrop of the Evasion buff). The change to the Griffins is interesting, but again ambiguous. Although it makes the readiness-based tactic very viable (though, considering the buff to Evasion and Archery, there's a suspicion that even with the boost to counterattacks that won't be enough to choose such a tactic). Although the potential is huge — I can already imagine how strong Irina can be with such a build (the main thing is to manage to pop Defense before the opponent strikes; the low initiative hinders that). About the knight nerf one can say the same as about the shooters — justified, but perhaps overdone. Although in a defense-oriented tactic it's not bad — you can put them in a box with the griffins. Overall it looks as though Haven was hard-nerfed (perhaps they really were among the strongest in multiplayer, but it looks like an overreaction). On the plus side — the attempt to open up the possibility of playing through defense and counterattack.

Haven's shooters deal too much damage considering their growth. If in the final this matters to a lesser extent, due to the wide abundance of counterplay from enemy shooters, then in breakthroughs and tempo-development strategies it matters a great deal. That's why the decision was made to "slightly nerf" these units. As you can see, the cuts aren't too critical, since these units weren't imbalanced, but Haven's tempo was trimmed a bit — in particular the tempo of Vittorio.

The Griffin change was introduced not so much for balance (infinite Dive didn't show itself as an ultra-value in breakthroughs and finals), but in order to fix the neutral griffins. There was a bug with infinite Dive, due to which the neutral griffins kept taking off constantly, and as a result you could clear them out with a level-1 hero by poking with your finger and maneuvering away from the Dive with an initiative single-unit stack. So we had to get a bit creative and come up with a synergistic ability to replace Dive. "Bully" was chosen.

The Knights were nerfed because, thanks to their Training, in TBM version 2 Haven's win rate exceeded 90%. There were concerns that cutting Training together with cutting the steeds would be too much, but the results of the third tournament showed that Haven's win rate was 54% (7 wins / 6 losses), which looks quite balanced and doesn't need adjustment.

7. Elves.

The Hornet Swarm is now strengthened. Why buff one of the already strongest tier-1 creatures is unclear, but why not. The buff to Nymphs is doubly questionable. The buff to Death Dancers is triply questionable. Native Lands has been weakened (on one hand, they're now strictly worse than the haste aura; on the other hand, maybe +2 really was too much). I would suggest an alternative change — rework the skill wheel so that you can take either Native Lands at +2 and, say, Empathy (for instance, so that Native Lands stems from Empathy), or the Haste Aura, but NOT Native Lands. That is, either 1 everywhere with optional Logistics, or 2 on grass with mandatory Leadership. Then Native Lands would still be strong, but harder to get, and it wouldn't be possible to stack crazy +5 to speed (+2 Native Lands, +1 Haste Aura, +1 boots, +1 shrine).

The buff to Master Hunters is unjustified — +1 to initiative, OK; a higher stun chance, no. The nerf to Forest Rangers is ambiguous. Instead of lowering the initiative, it would have been better to weaken the passive (from 50% armor penetration to 30%). Well, they'll act a little later — they'll still one-shot any creature stack. Moreover, elves are the only ones with full-fledged luck (everyone gets an average of +25% damage at 5 luck, while elves get 50%, which more than compensates for all the nerfs and makes Elven Luck an ability with no alternative). In my opinion, the change to Luck and Elven Luck is one of the most imbalanced changes in the mod. Although the changes to skills are almost all for the worse. The imbalance of the senior druids also hasn't been fixed — on the contrary, they've been made even more survivable.

The buffs to the sprites and Death Dancers are tied to their extremely low growth. A creature's strength must be assessed not by nominal values, but by the ratio of its strength to growth/cost. By this measure, sprites are nearly the worst tier-1 unit. I'd rather not comment on sprites, since they will be seriously reworked — a lot of criticism from players has been voiced regarding the knockback swarm. The Nymphs, on the other hand, were buffed to increase their attractiveness and the equivalence of the upgrades. From a balance standpoint they didn't need to be strengthened; it's just that no one ever took them.

Death Dancers needed, very much needed, a buff. Firstly, because of their extremely low strength for a growth of 9. Secondly, because of the lack of alternatives in choosing the upgrade. Thirdly, because of the absence of defensive dancers suitable for standing in a box.

You're not taking into account one very important factor: the difficulty of rolling any particular perk. So, rolling Elven Luck and Native Lands as an elf is very hard — a 1-in-4 chance, which makes these perks unstable for leveling. And elven rushes at high speed and initiative are nerfed by the absence of a high-percentage attack and by the presence of defense on the Dungeon. It's also worth considering that by taking Elven Luck we sacrifice resists, which for a fragile elf suffering from Chaos is often very critical.

The imbalance of the druids lay in the fact that they were better as supporters thanks to the Channel, and as shooters thanks to higher damage. And now, by taking druids with the Channel, the elf loses a bit of combat power.

8. Dwarves.

Weakening the damage of the Mountain Guards is pointless, even with the buff to Defense. The Berserkers' passive is still much stronger, and on top of that their damage has also increased. The second upgrade is as bad as it was. The Thanes are now even better than they were, even though they're no longer immune to fire. The Earls became a bit faster but more fragile — an ambiguous change. Arkath's Dragons, as before, are much worse than the alternative, and remain so. The problematic runes remain so, though to a lesser extent (at least they can no longer be used three times, but they can still be used twice).

I disagree with the first point. The Mountain Guards are currently significantly stronger than the Berserkers on the following counts:
- against shooters
- against Chaos
- against infantry when charging over 3 tiles or fewer
- against Frightening Roar, the Fear of steeds and bears, and the paw strike
The only advantage of the Berserkers is mobility. And if we don't need mobility — as, for example, in archery or Armageddon strategies — the Mountain Guards are many times better as a purely tanking stack. And tanking stacks usually suffer in damage.

I agree about the Earls and Thanes. These units need a rebalance.

Arkath's Dragons are better in damage and destroy the enemy's static strategies. I don't know — they're perfectly fine units with their own tactical niche.

The runes will be reworked, as I already wrote above.

I already talked about Archery and Evasion — these are now two must-have abilities.

Not a must-have, but very strong. Just above I agreed that they need to be cut to 25%.

Cursed Ground is still practically useless, as is Mana Burst and Banish.

Cursed Ground is very strong in early finals. In the mid-game it's normal. In the late game it's weak. It depends on timing, but overall it's a normal formula, and it helps in breakthroughs.

Mana Burst is very strong in damage at all timings. A very narrow application niche, which is why the effect is so strong. Or are 400-500 damage per cast weak?

Banish, on the other hand, is about nothing — here I agree. Perhaps I'll cut it out of the wheel and leave it purely as an ability from the Ring of Banishment. That should increase the ring's attractiveness and remove the garbage from the wheel that clutters up leveling.

For some reason, Reinforcements has been weakened.

Because Reinforcements even without the 10% crit chance is a rather good average perk. And the 10% crit chance not only triggers rarely and is uncontrollable (via the triggered crit you can finish off a stack and fail to resurrect it with the tent), but also allows you to boost the damage from a Demonic Strike up to x4, and with Krag up to x8, which can, on pure randomness, turn the course of a final. In general, more problems than benefits from this so-called bonus.

Barbarian Luck, as I understand it, gives a flat 5% damage reduction; imho it would have been worth just fixing it, rather than turning it into yet another clone of Reflection (especially against the backdrop of the general luck nerf). If the undead can get -20% damage, why can't an orc with 5 luck get -25%? Or at least -4% per point of luck. Or, as a variant, make it so that each time it takes damage from a spell, it's reduced by 25% but only on a lucky roll (if that's implementable).

Unfortunately, that's not implementable without recompiling the game's source code. The plan is to use this perk in place of Reflection (changing all the links, descriptions and icons to suit Reflection), boosting its effect to 20%.

The new "Protect Us All" is interesting, but in my opinion too overpowered. In effect it's equivalent to reducing damage from all sources by 9% (including magic and ranged attacks) + a small bonus to the chance of combat effects.

It was assumed that its feature of only acting during the first battle at the start of the day would make it balanced, but in practice it's almost always possible to arrange for the first battle to be the final against the enemy hero. So the perk will be reworked.

The nerf to Wide Gates of Hell is completely unclear — they were already worse than the Gate Master, and after the change they're almost twice as bad. (That is, a 50% chance to additionally summon 20%, versus Gate Master's 100%.)

Why a "nerf"? You're slightly misunderstanding the mechanic of this perk. If the so-called "luck" triggers on gating, then the summoned stack will be 1.5 times larger than the one that should have been summoned (1.5, because the luck coefficient is currently 1.5; in the original this coefficient is 2). If it doesn't trigger, then the gate will be called as usual. In the original, the chance of Wide Gates triggering is 10%+5%*luck, which gives a maximum trigger chance of 35% at 5 luck. In TBM, the trigger chance is 10%*luck, which is equivalent to the standard luck mechanic with a maximum trigger chance of 50% at 5 luck. This isn't a nerf, it's a buff. Stability is increased and the coefficient decreased, which makes the perk far more appealing than in the original. Well, again, in my humble opinion.

The Hellfire buff is imbalanced. Just saying — it also works on creatures summoned through gates. And, for instance, a single imp can deal 150 damage for free. Splendid. Especially overpowered with BD. The mana cost wasn't there for no reason.

The mana cost was removed due to its uncontrollability. You take Hellfire (especially if you didn't want to take it, but it's a prerequisite for an important perk), enter a battle, plan out your mana for a given breakthrough with the next ones in mind, and as a result, due to frequent triggers — in particular on finishing off single-units — you don't even have enough mana for buff spells. That very much slows down the tempo of demons, which, by the way, is already suffering, and doesn't let you fully control the course of the battle. The only thing I'll agree with is that the damage for 0 mana is indeed very strong, so it will be reverted to the modest original 10+5*SP.

Counterstrike — given the rest of the Haven nerfs — is weak in almost all tactics except the one built around Griffins.

+50% to counterattacks — weak? Alright. I'd rather not risk buffing it, since our tournaments have only just recovered from the 90% win rate of the humans :)

Retribution for demons is of course good, although their Offense branch is already overloaded with useful skills. (Whereas the bonus from Expert Attack itself is just tiny — 15% only in melee, compared to 25% in both melee AND ranged from Retribution, or 30% damage from Archery.)

Buffing the attack itself is pointless until there's a clear dominance of mages over fighters. Even with a 15% attack, mages don't always stand and withstand the pressure of fighters. And boosting the attack to 10%/20%/30% would kill caster builds outright.

It's not entirely clear why Fire Arrows were removed from factions other than Inferno (someone really loves Deleb). Just make it so that taking them would require a ballista or a rapid-fire ballista for other races — then they wouldn't clog up the skill tree.

This was done to weaken the tempo of warlords. In the first and second TBM, we ran into a huge problem related to warlords showing up on week 2 and killing opponents without any chance whatsoever. Given that the paths to GO and transitional dwellings are often guarded by units of at least tier 6 with a high Defense stat, the absence of Fire Arrows hits the tempo of breakthroughs pretty hard, which gives players a chance to have time to develop before the enemy warlord arrives. For demons, on the other hand, Fire Arrows were kept — firstly, because of the difficult path to them, which doesn't allow you to level them up at an early timing; secondly, to preserve the combat effectiveness of machines for Inferno even in the mid-game and late game, since Inferno by its nature is a faction of powerful warlords, so the probability of machines for them was raised to 15% and a number of nice perks were left in.

It's also unclear why Forest Leader was removed — for elves, Offense is in my opinion the best stat, and they get little of it. In Education there's now nothing for them to take except Mentoring. The same goes for dwarves, and undead, and orcs. In my opinion, then, for all races there would be sense in removing everything from Education except the skills leading to Mentoring (or simply nerfing Mentoring, like they did in 5.5).

Forest Leader was removed not because of the two Offense points — that's a good, balanced bonus. Forest Leader was removed because of the ability to farm yourself dancers from tier-6 dwellings by leveling Mentoring. We try to remove all abuses of army, stats, mana, and spells wherever possible. Education is for the most part a magical branch, not a combat one, so in Education we kept nice bonuses and perks for mages, not fighters. It makes sense for a fighter to go into Education only for the extra stats and the mana from the bald guy — that's true — but that was precisely the game-design intent... :confused:

Also, for some reason the Defense branches of the Warlock and the Knight were swapped; I haven't seen the review, so the idea behind such a change escapes me.

Because a difficult path to BD is critical for magical factions, not combat ones. So the path to BD was made easier for Haven — BD isn't as toxic on Haven — and harder for Dungeon, because early BD on Dungeon is very strong. A similar path to BD is also planned for mages and necromancers.

They nerfed the Sword Wall into the ground. Now you can't toy with the neutrals.

Well, I still haven't understood — are you characterizing that as a plus or a minus? Or, in your opinion, is it normal to clear Utopias and ultra-hard breakthroughs with impunity, beating the timings by 2-3 weeks? :confused:

Divine Wrath was weakened by a factor of 4 (KARL!). I don't understand why everyone dislikes it so much, but I assume it's imbalanced on small maps (well, the Earth Shock scaling for 100 frags is indeed strong).

This is one of the hardest spells to balance. We decided not to follow in the footsteps of RTA and didn't ban it, trying to preserve this interesting and original spell — however, in the original it's very strong. In TBM it deals normal, optimal damage when it stacks with Resurrection, and without Resurrection the damage is laughable. Most likely we'll buff it, and significantly. But here it's very easy to cross the line and turn the spell into an imbalance or a situational imbalance.

Vampirism was cut hard — in my opinion, too hard.

On Expert Darkness it's the same as in the original. Only the duration on levels below Expert was weakened, so that you can't too easily abuse Vampirism by getting it from a scroll or a tome. Otherwise, it's still a very strong spell.

Stopping Cold was weakened. Although in the late game it was more likely strengthened, thanks to the greater increase in damage.
A nice buff to Magic Arrow. Well, OK, though it's unclear why. And in general, almost all Chaos magic was strengthened. OK, nice for the dark elves. Although without stealth on the Stalkers, it's still not very good. Oh, wait — Armageddon was weakened. Dark elves are now crying.

The rebalance of all of Chaos was prompted by a number of reasons. Firstly, the starting breakthroughs for low-SP factions like demons and elves. Now the demon won't cry so hard if he rolls Spikes with Lightning instead of Arrow with Boulder. Secondly, the rather late extreme timing of the final battle — month 3, week 2, day 1. At that timing, everything should work, including Chaos. If Chaos in any of its forms becomes unplayable at late timings, we lose a juicy chunk of gameplay. Thirdly — boosting the breakthrough power of mages. In TBM2 mages were the weakest faction in breakthroughs, due to the inability to build up decent damage from offensive spells at the start + the poor healing of gold golems.

Maeve now casts Mass Haste at the first level. Well, they made the most overpowered late-game hero also strong at the start. Wonderful.

Yes, and she casts it in every breakthrough right and left. Although... wait a minute, she's a human and she has huge problems with mana... An inconsistency, however :confused:

Axl has become outright strange. Well, OK.

Agreed. We'll fix it. Huge problems with this hero, starting from TBM1.

Talanar is an imba with druids in the final, even with the cut Divine Wrath. Against neutrals his specialty is useless, so in a real game the hero isn't particularly strong.

As practice shows, the average hero — in the presence of resurrection — is weak; in the presence of Divine Wrath in the guild — weak. It's not as rosy as you imagine in your mind, and the hero needs additional strengthening :smile07:

Ilfinn is in my opinion the weakest elven hero. In the late game she's of course strong, but in tournaments the effect of her passive is minuscule.

She buffs the most buffed-up stack against a fighter and the most survivable one under a hail of casts against a mage. With a duplicate resurrection or regeneration she performs simply superbly in breakthroughs as well. I don't know why you took such a dislike to her — the hero is wonderful.

Ossir, given all the changes, is incredibly strong. He easily gets Elven Luck, and his specialty works better with Master Hunters than with Forest Rangers, who were hard-buffed. Elven archers have never been this strong. And if he finds a Unicorn Horn Bow and full Dwarven Armor, then it's no chance at all.

Ossir is strong, but not imbalanced. The game provides a huge number of counters to shooters, and Ossir's archers are no exception. Elven Luck, I repeat, is very hard to roll, and we lose an important perk with resistances. Despite the buff to Master Hunters, the archers' growth has been reduced to 6, which rules out the possibility of taking losses on breakthroughs. Otherwise there's a chance Ossir will reach the final without a specialty :)

Faise with Avatar of Death is rather amusing. If he crawls to level 27 it's twice so. Better not to take him against undead or dark elves. The only weakness is the Ring of Cold — everything else can be reflected with a good chance. In my opinion, on him this specialization is even more imbalanced than on Arantir.

I admit my mistake — he is overpowered. The difficulty of balancing this specialty is to blame, and I messed up the numbers royally. So he will be SIGNIFICAAAAANTLY weakened, if his new specialization is kept at all.

Garuna has become a bit stronger. In fact, already at level 21 she'll give +5 to Offense for every killed squad, and this bonus shouldn't be underestimated. Even already at level 6 the bonus will be +2 to Offense, and cleanups involving single goblin squads will strongly boost the damage of your striking squads. Overall I approve of this change. Although in the late game she can get up to 8 Offense for every killed squad, and that can quickly get out of hand. It's not hard to imagine a lone Warmonger stack with 100+ Attack. From rage alone he'll get at least 11 Attack and 48 from the passive (plus the hero's stats and artifacts).

Reality is harsh. The maximum level that's ever been reached in the entire history of the tournaments was 29. And leveling to 35 is altogether unreal. So there's no point in speculating about +8 Offense per stack killed. The hero is very strong, agreed, but he's much more vulnerable to enemy Darkness and in principle isn't imbalanced, so he doesn't need weakening.

The Hageth nerf is unjustified. In my opinion, on the contrary, bonuses should be added to heroes whose specialization is too weak. The centaurs are far from the strongest creatures in the orc army — if you compare them, say, to the crossbowmen or the Forest Rangers, they unquestionably lose. Moreover, orcs don't have access to resurrection and magic to minimize losses, and Hageth/Krag are the only ones who can somehow cope with that. As a variant — her specialization could be weakened, by analogy with Vingael (whose specialty is incomparably stronger even in its weakened form). But in my opinion, everything is fine with her as is.

A very strange point. Hageth not only brings a large number of key units on breakthroughs, not only strengthens them, but she should also allow them to shoot first in the final — and, most terribly, in breakthroughs — allowing you to one-shot the scariest stacks and turning breakthroughs into pure fun and a game of tier. And the centaurs are far from the weakest units in the orc army. In defensive builds they're altogether key. Such a well-reasoned argument in many respects slid into complete heresy when it came to Hageth. Please don't do that anymore :(

Telsec has become even stronger, even though he lost access to war machines, and now orcs have no warlords at all, just like mages. Apparently the mod's author has a special love for Deleb and doesn't want her to have any competition in that regard.

The mod's author tries to give starting perks that synergize as much as possible with the heroes' specialties and aren't garbage — which we could observe in the original heroes. And if the mod's author had a special love for Deleb and warlords in general, he wouldn't have taken away their starting machines and Fire Arrows and increased their cost in the forge, ahem.

Speaking of demons, they turned Nibros into a pile of garbage, giving him the most useless specialization in the game. Mages could at least justify such weakness of this specialization with the Wizard's Seal, potentially doubling the damage (though in fact they couldn't). What it's doing on a demon is altogether unclear. His old specialization was quite strong; the new one is absolutely useless. This is yet another of the biggest problems with this mod — it doesn't balance the heroes' specializations at all; rather, the imbalance has gotten even worse.

This specialty is strong on a demon at the very least because the demon has constant access to Mass Disrupting Ray. That's one of the strongest spells on this faction, through which the demon plays almost always. So on demons this specialty looks quite decent, unlike mages, who are forced to play as a fighter or a warlord, playing off the rays — which constrains the variability of leveling — and on top of that, a combat mage is assembled much more rarely, given the difficulty of rolling combat bases like Offense or Defense.

The new Sorgal is also quite overpowered, especially against factions with a lot of shooters (mages, humans, elves). Another reason why campaign heroes shouldn't be added to multiplayer.

I have no words. I'd like to ask you how often you play out of a shooter box against Dungeon, who can flood that box with a Meteor Shower? I assume, very rarely. Rather, you try to split away from mass casts, and the sooner the better. And the emphasis is more often on mobile, initiative infantry, not on shooters. And the effect itself, at an average level 20, gives a 20% reduction to damage. The Veil, for comparison, gives a 25% reduction to damage. Is the Veil imbalanced? In general, this specialty performs rather poorly in the final, but decently in breakthroughs. However, I can't bring myself to call it a monstrous imbalance.

"Earthquake" when leveled by a hero has become an imba. And by the way, it's unclear why it was removed as a spell from the Summoning school.
The damage from it is now disproportionate to the damage from towers received by the attacking side. The catapult with this skill is now unnecessary in most cases, since it's more advantageous for the defending side to bring everyone outside the fortress walls, including the shooters, and fight as if in the open field.

I would understand if you'd made this ability in leveling through Sulfur Rain, where you'd have to make a painful choice between leveling the ballista and this imba. And the walls would still get broken anyway. But no, this ability is extremely easy to level, doesn't require giving up anything important, and can be obtained at the starting levels.

Earthquake, due to poor development of the spell (I admit, my bad), is still very, very weak. It, as before, depends on leveling the Summoning school, and only with it does it deal decent damage to walls. Without leveling Summoning, the damage to walls is about nothing — 0-100 — which is why no one took it. I will definitely refine this shortcoming.

The spell itself was removed from the Summoning school for the same reason that Holy Word and Unholy Word were removed — because this spell is extremely unattractive and you're always disappointed when you get it in the guild. Mines and crystals always pay off, but you may not even get to a siege. This spell won't increase combat power, but it will clog up the guild. That's why it was decided to remove the garbage from the guild, but not to cut Earthquake itself, and instead leave it in the game as an ability.

It's somewhat ironic that in the reviews on the Heroes for Fan channel, the author of TBM quite often criticized the authors of other mods for arbitrary changes and imbalance, and in a rather nasty and mocking form. Apparently he eventually decided to show his own vision of balance, but what came out is something so-so. Quite doubtful balance with a tilt toward creativity.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll take your criticism into account.

However, it's unclear to me when I criticized other modders in a nasty and mocking form? The only mod review on the Heroes for Fan channel that I took part in was the review of the UNIT mod. Yes, there was criticism voiced regarding the changes that seemed strange to me, but even the author himself, after watching the video, made no claims against me for it: /topic/at/1076536/
Tellingly, the TBM mod uses the visual model of the Shadow Mistress from the UNIT mod, which I consider gorgeous from a visual standpoint. The mod's author made no claims against me for that, though he could have, had I been nasty and unpleasant to him :confused:

Everything seems to have slowed down. Is there any progress in the mod development? Perhaps a new tournament is being planned?

How do I download your mod? There is no link.

The mod is very good. And I am surprised by the fact that it is so well-balanced. Can you tell me when the next tournament with this mod will be held?

Hello, dear friend. It's not really my place to say, but I suspect a tournament will be held soon! Registration is scheduled for April 1st, but I don't know anything more for now.

Hello Samvan, regarding the dwarves, I'll say this: runes don't decide the outcome in the early game because the first two units don't deal damage, they're slow, and the ranged units have 2, 4, and 5 shots respectively. The rest are fine in engagements. But in the late game, runes are amazing for them because they can resurrect on Battle Mages with 30-40% health without losing any, and they can do it multiple times. Also, it's impossible to take down dragons – they have default stats and a shield (I'm talking about late-game dwarves), plus 2 attacks, +50% stats, Unstoppable, and Battle Fury, which is great in the late game. I suggest banning runes on level 6 and on dragons; for the rest of the stacks, they aren't overpowered. And if you want to improve the dwarves' tempo (you mentioned they have a high restart and loss rate), give them a few abilities, speed, and damage for the first and second stacks. This will make a difference in engagements, and using one of the runes mentioned even once in the final battles will be overpowered (in the late game). I don't recommend restoring the updated version – it will lead to abuse on dragons. Regarding the orcs, they are overpowered in the late game because of Bloodlust, and the damage on all stacks except goblins is decent. I suggest fixing the goblin growth to 20, the centaur growth to 12, the chieftain growth to 8, and the Horde Fury to 0.25-0.33 per creature. Bloodlust should be capped at 20-25%, and that will balance the game at all stages. IMO, I'm waiting for a constructive response. And, give the dwarven ranged units more shots, because the war cart costs 3k, which is why they have such a slow tempo and high restart rate. Also, give the dwarven defenders up to 10 shields.

Where can I download this mod?

I read the patch notes, and I liked everything, but I wanted to make some minor edits myself. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the link, so it seems like it doesn't exist, which is a shame.

It's a good mod, it's a shame there aren't any tournaments for it, and that's why it's been forgotten.