Wrath of Heroes: The addition of Felicia

As I'm talking to you, the first phase of the open Beta for Wrath of Heroes is concluded. The outcome of the Beta is truly average, all in all people have noticed several bad points the game currently has, they also had to endure a very unfun play experience through teams filled with burst ranged dps, "1-pull you are dead" Volrik, and a scarcity of healers. In the middle of all that, Mythic announce the future comeback of another hero, Felicia!

 

 

For those of you who have been around for a long time, you without a doubt remember Felicia. And you also remember the carnage she used to wrought down on the battlefield. Shortly after, after much whining, she was removed and the developers said she would come back in a better, improved form. Well, as you can see, she is the exact same. From the first look, nothing in her has changed. But hey who knows.

Although I can commend the addition of new heroes in a Beta that is suffering from the low number of heroes, I regret that among all the ones they had they chose Felicia, a ranged DPS, and by that one of the most obnoxious there is.

Why? Simply because the game is full of people stacking Ilyana. Why would they? Because she is the character with the most burst, thanks to her abilities favoring crits, and has a passive that increases her damage by +5% per other Dark Elf like her in your group. To put it simply, alone she has good damage, with 3 others like her, she has +15% more good damage. And to boot the other Ilyana get the bonus too. Pretty big boost for a team if I may say.

This has led to lots of Ilyana swarming the game. Not only can you get kills easily with her (which is important in this game), but you have the range advantage. This with the fact that the only healer in the game is better away from melee, Ilyana is set to dominate.

What could counter her?

First, what is the eternal enemy of a ranged "cloth" DPS? A pure "tank" melee DPS of course. Aessa being THE melee DPS of the game right now, she is bound to be a good character to counter Aessa? Well 1v1, sure! If you have the intelligence of faking a pounce and make them waste their 4th ability then use it to close the gap, you can bash her good. However ,even then it will be a close match because she can just burst you down.
Now let's put this in a more "realist" context, 6v6. Since this game is hardly a game where individual skill alone matters (since some heroes are made to dominate some others in the easiest/scrubbiest way possible), you have to judge a character in how he will interact among and against a group.
Aessa when facing a group of Ilyana will get slaughtered right now. That simple. Her only hope is if the warband is fully dedicated to melee, which would mean at least 1 Glowgob, 2 Volrik to pull people in melee at a reasonable rate, and the rest being Aessa. Using that you can all use the 5th ability of Aessa to survive the gap between you and the enemy team. I tried this strat with a player (Grakulen) that was streaming for MMORPG.com, and we lost 2 matches, each struggling to survive. Unfortunately this spec is not the best for dps since Volrik dps is far from optimal, which lead to a lack of kill points, However you have a good chance of surviving if your Aessa use their 5th ability well!
In the last match we did, we decided to just go for a full Ilyana team, and guess what? We won.

Ilyana is a problem right now, one that is exacerbated by the lack of melee heals, and heals in general.

Now you can really question the motivation behind adding another ranged dps to this mix. With Ilyana already dealing massive damage from afar, now you are going to have solid CC in the ranged field! Felicia, with Conflagration of Doom, Rain of Fire, and Fiery Blast, will bring solid CC and make it even more difficult for the rare people trying to rock melee!

Either the developers are massively unaware of the situation in the game right now. Or they have more heroes coming for the next session, which would be most welcomed. Or worse they are just capitalizing on the 'selling' factor of Felicia, after all she is a chick and seems to have less daddy issues than Ilyana!

In either case, we can only hope for Mythic to realize that the situation is dire, the ranged problem and the gold problem are showing a pretty bad picture of the game and its starting to get some media attention. If the game is branded as a bad that early (which will happen really fast if the game is deemed as devoid of depth or Pay2Win), it will die in the egg.