Balancing the Barbarian

[LPhillips]

So, I've been having fun with the new heroes. I can't say that it has worked out for me; I've just been noobing around with them and watching my enemies catch my armies with their pants down. Everywhere I send my heroes, the enemy's Barbarian is somewhere else eating the normal armies.

Anyway, I'd like to suggest a balance change for the Ambush ability. Currently, the Barbarian hero is a god on small maps, and useless in mid-late game on anything else. Throw a few ghosts together with some fodder, and you can kill the Barbarian in one try (or two if you're unlucky). This seems a bit unbalanced. Now I don't have the solution to the Barbarian on small maps; the only thing I can come up with is banning him from certain maps (and I'm not suggesting that yet because I believe we will find a better solution). However, I think we ought not to be able to render him useless with Ambush. Ambush should not kill 5 hit points in one shot. Originally it killed 2 (one unit).

My proposal is to make a successful Ambush roll remove 3 hit points from the enemy unit before normal battle rolls. This would mean that a Barbarian who has 4-5 HP is not instantly killed. However, the Assassin and/or critical stacks would still be effective at their jobs, now needing 2 successful rolls to kill a well-leveled Barbarian.

There also needs to be a change in the tooltips and descriptions of the Ambush ability everywhere they exist (reflecting the change to the ability).

[KGB]

Currently, the Barbarian hero is a god on small maps,

I was thinking that on the Slipstream map he'd be especially god like. At L4 he gets Ash Walk letting him slip across the lava into the middle area of the map. With his power he can take those neutrals himself bypassing the need to get to the other end of the map to enter the middle. And he can raid the opponent on the other side of the lava as well. Probably renders Slipstream obsolete as a map.

My proposal is to make a successful Ambush roll remove 3 hit points from the enemy unit before normal battle rolls. This would mean that a Barbarian who has 4-5 HP is not instantly killed. However, the Assassin and/or critical stacks would still be effective at their jobs, now needing 2 successful rolls to kill a well-leveled Barbarian.

I would not like to see this change. What you are describing is now no longer the insta-kill power of ambush but rather the Trample/Crushing Blow skill that did multiple points of damage per hit. At some point I expect a multiple-points-of-damage-per-hit skill to get added into Warbarons (A Titan seems like a good place for it) so I don't want to have duplicate powers.

Plus the Mammoth has 4 hits and now ambush would no longer be able to kill them in 1 shot either. The threat of ambush is exactly what keeps the Barbarian and other powerful units/heroes in check. On small maps you can build 4 Orcs and have a 21% chance to kill a Barbarian hero from ambush. More Orcs means even greater chance to kill him.

You know what you are getting yourself into when you take a Barbarian. No one forces the hero on you. He's still going to be extremely good on small maps. Even on medium/large maps he'll still be great for capturing neutrals. In the mid/late game his value won't be on offense, but rather on defense. He can stay at home with a single Pegasi and guard your realm destroying enemy stacks/heroes who venture into your lands. Very few people send stacks of ambush units on offense because they are not designed for that because they are weak in actual combat.

Plus as much as you hate ambush killing your Barbarian I hate 1 Grand Archon ruining my L9 Paladin by negating all his command bonus. But I realize the Archon serves the exact same purpose as the Ambush units do.

KGB