Wrath of Heroes BETA: Albodi Character Breakdown!

After Nethys and Gromki, now is the turn of Albodi, the latest hero from Beta 3.

"Albodi the Scarred, Chosen of the Dark Gods. His strength lies in exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents. Armed with a warpstone-infused weapon and devastating determination, Albodi is terror incarnate." - From the Beta 3/Character Reveal post on wrathofheroes.warhammeronline.com

Smart people think alike!

Albodi the Scarred is based on the Chosen career in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The Chosen career was the tanking choice available for the Chaos faction, the Raven Host. Sporting heavy armor, demonic powers, and the favor of the Dark Gods, the Chosen was truly an iconic class, featuring a tanking style based around aura buffs/debuffs.

Like every hero, Albodi has 5 abilities:
• 1: A basic melee attack dealing some average damage (around 25 damage) | Physical
• 2: 5 sec CD - A strong attack that deals more damage | Physical
• 3: 10 sec CD - An aura debuff that prevent any affected enemy from being able to dodge attacks.
• 4: Withering Strike: 20 sec CD - Now the way this ability works is still a mystery to me. My current take is that it increases the current CD of ALL abilities that are currently on-cooldown on the target, for example if you have an ability with 8 seconds from being off-cooldown, if you are on the receiving end of a Withering Strike, the ability will go to 16 seconds remaining before being off-cooldown and usable | Physical
• 5: 30 sec CD - A strong melee attack that snares the target for 10 seconds. Yes, 10 seconds, crazaay!

Albodi also has a passive aura that snares (slow down) any enemy in his vicinity.

So, to sum up his abilities line-up, Albodi actually act like a tank! As a tank, he has average damage, like it should be (I'm looking at you Bax)! Also as a tank, he has good control, with a snare that pins the target on the same spot for a whole 10 seconds. Ten seconds at the same position for characters like the Shaman or Kolrith, who rely on kitting as their sole defensive tactic (where character like Felicia and the Sorceress have access to CC), is a death sentence. Also with a passive aura that slows down enemies close to you, Albodi is great at annoying the opponent.

Now, with its 4th ability, Withering Strike, Albodi can be a pain to deal with for healers! Using a very simple reasoning, Albodi potentially cut in half their healing output. Well, actually, it's more complicated than that, as (if I'm correct on what the ability actually does) it only affects abilities that are currently on-cooldown, so you actually have to watch the target a bit to make sure you are catching an important ability. If you are facing a Conrad for example, you can assume that he will use their 2nd ability (an AOE heal/attack) very frequently and that he will have their 4th ability on-cooldown, which means that not too long after you start attacking him, you will likely catch an important ability and decrease the healing potential of the Warrior Priest.
Withering Strike is an amazing ability, unfortunately because of its pretty important cooldown, you do have to consider when to use it, for example you could use it in a defensive manner to slow down the damage coming from a dps attacking you, however you would also let this healer heals to its heart's content, wasting a lot of the ability's potential.

A funny detail I noted while playing Albodi was the amount of melee damage certain characters could mitigate with their armor.
For the 25 damage (if I remember correctly) dealt by Albodi's 1th Basic Melee Attack I recorder those damage on Bax, Albodi, and Aessa targets:
Bax was dealt 12 damage, ~13 damage mitigated
Albodi was dealt 18 damage, ~8 damage mitigated
Aessa was dealt 21 damage, ~4 damage mitigated

It seems like Armor in WoH is organized around "ranks" of armors, each rank giving 4 armor, with so far 3 levels observable. OF COURSE, Bax has the most armor *roll eyes*. However as you can see, Albodi still has probably among the best amount of armor in the game.

Despite his good armor, Albodi is unfortunately far from being a durable hero. And this is, by far, his one flaw. In order to be able to apply his two crippling abilities, Withering Strike and his 5th, Albodi need to be able to stay in the fray and stick to his target. Unfortunately, he is as likely as most heroes to drop fast when focused. Albodi could really use more survivability.
Now, we don't know what Bioware-Mythic is going to do with the tactics system, but there is a lot to hope for, as this could be the final aspect that would make WoH deep and customizable enough. What I'm hoping for through the tactics is to be able to either add more abilities or more significant effects (no more 10% effects please) to our characters. For example, something as simple as being able to give your Kolrith a small CC would transform a very underwhelming hero into a potential killing machine! In the case of Albodi, you could finally give him the survivability he is craving for.

Now, as a little bonus, I will show you the hero I designed November 18 2011 on the 6v6v6.com forums.
Ulmarik, the Raven Lord
Chosen

1: Favoring Strike
Physical | No cooldown | 5 ft range
Deals 33 damage and gives you 1 stack of Fervor.

Fervor increase your armor moderately, stacks up to 5 times, and last 5 seconds.

2: Seeping Slice
Physical | 5s cooldown | 5 ft range
Deals 72 damage over 5 seconds and snares the target for 2s.

While Raven Chants is active, this ability also deals 72 damage on hit.

3: Discordant Aura
10s cooldown | 30 ft range
Whenever an enemy use a magical ability on you or an ally in range, they will be dealt 11 damage. This ability shares a cooldown with Fluctuating Presence. Lasts for 10 seconds.

While Raven Chants and this ability are active, your resistance (armor against magical damage) increase significantly.

4: Fluctuating Presence
10s cooldown | 30 ft range
Whenever an enemy use a physical ability on you or an ally in range, it increase your damage by a small amount. This ability shares a cooldown with Discordant Aura. Lasts for 10 seconds.

While Raven Chants and this ability are active, the physical damage of you and all allies in range is increase significantly.

5: Raven Chants
30s cooldown | Self, 30 f range
While Raven Chants is active, it reduces all incoming damage by 50% for you and all allies in range. Lasts 5 seconds.


As you can see, my version of the Chosen was based around returning the opponents' attacks against them. As the opponent strikes, you retaliate or buff your team. However since Discordant Aura and Fluctuating Presence share the same cooldown, you have to make a choice and correctly gauge which one of those two abilities should be on.

The design of this hero and the one of Albodi are close in that they give to the tank some controlling effects (snares). Tanks, are supposed to be able to affect/debuff multiple targets, have tools in their arsenal to control those targets, and ways to protect their allies. Without those capabilities tanks just end up being meatbags with poor dps. A tank HAS to be able to make it costly to ignore him, and must be able to monitor the flow of battle, controlling and reducing the effectiveness of key targets dramatically if left alone. Albodi can hampers a target thanks to its Withering Strike, he can affect multiple targets thanks to his passive aura and his active aura debuff, and he can control a target with his 5th ability. The only sector where he is lacking is again his durability. Although this is a bit disappointing, it is by no means a deal-breaker.

What could be a real deal-breaker on the other side is the real problem of Albodi, effectiveness. Although he has great abilities and effects, each of those are either too weak or have such big cooldowns that they end up making him a bit underwhelming. His Withering Strike and 5th ability have too big of a cooldown, which is sad as they are by far his most promising abilities.
His 3rd ability is also very underwhelming. Sure it has potential, and the day dodge become overpowered Albodi will be there to stop it, however the problems with this ability is that, first, the ability asks you to sacrifice an attack every 10 seconds to re-apply the aura, and it also has the potential of being massively useless during an entire match, which is pretty bad in a game where a character only has 5 abilities.

An easy way to solve this would be to switch places between the different abilities. Withering Strike could use a shorter cooldown, and his active aura could also be used as a survivability ability, and his 5th ability could have its cooldown reduced making Albodi a force to be reckoned on while giving him a tool he could use more often for survivability purpose (running away from a gank) or focusing purposes (pinning the healer down). We would end with something like this:

1: Basic Melee Attack - No Cooldown.
2: Greater Melee Attack - 5 sec Cooldown
3: Withering Strike - 10 sec Cooldown - Same effects, would ensure he could control the effectiveness of a target.
4: His previous 5th ability - 20 sec Cooldown - Immobilize the target for 10 seconds. Would need to have its damage reduced, and possibly its immobilization time.
5: His previous 3th ability - 30 sec Cooldown - Deploy an aura that prevent all affected enemies from dodging attacks for 30 seconds. Also make Albodi takes 50% less damage for 5 seconds.

You would end up with a hero that would truly be a menace, even without great dps. He would prevent one key target from truly harming your party which would attract the attention of groups that actually know better.  He would be able to absorb damage, therefore fulfilling his role as a Tank, and finally he would finally be able to operate as a counter to Korelei thanks to its better active aura with damage reduction. He would then truly become terror incarnate.

Don't get me wrong though, even as he is right now Albodi is still OK. However, he lacks this effectiveness that would make him more desirable and more powerful by himself or in a team. And who knows, maybe through the tactics, Bioware-Mythic will give us ways to efficiently reduce the duration of some of his cooldowns and increase his survivability. All in all, I really like the overall design of Albodi and the way he felt on the battlefield. He only needs a few tweaks and he shall makes a fine addition to the final version of the game.

Overall, Albodi gets a 

WAAAAAGH!!!

Now, the 4th phase in the Beta starts this Friday 15 December. It will feature two new heroes, the return of tactics, and a progression system. I urge you to get HYPED and ready to wreck some peeps. After all they deserved it! After Beta 4, I will make another character breakdown on one of the new heroes featured in it, I hope you will be looking forward to it! As always, follow me on Twitter @ControlBlue if you want to know when the next character breakdown will be posted.
Until then, See you in Beta 4.