AIRHEART - CHAOTIC, SOARING, SELF DAMAGE

[pressnifty]

HERO SUMMARY
Airheart is a mobile flyer hero who can tank damage while dishing out heavy spirit damage and using a rocket launcher for her gun.



Airheart is a rabid inventor who is constantly seeking a thrill, and eventually she got sick of having to call in to the hospital to help with her broken bones and wounds so she cybernetically enhanced her body, replacing her heart with a plane propeller. She uses her boosters on her waist and feet along with her main propeller in her chest to enable her to zoom around the map and feed her adrenaline junky needs.

I'm not sure of her reasons for joining the ritual. I think either her wanting to just straight up become a full cyborg who can never die and fly forever could be cool, or maybe she relents her new cyborg form and wants the patrons to give her back her human body but make her immortal/super durable. If you have ideas, let me know!

GUN
DPS: 80
BULLET DAMAGE: 55 (+0.9 boon scaling)
EXPLOSION DAMAGE (2.5m): 25 (+0.7 boon scaling)
BULLETS PER SECOND: 1
AMMO: 10
RELOAD TIME: 3.1s
BULLET VELOCITY: 120m/s
FALLOFF RANGE: 20m - 70m
LIGHT MELEE: 50
HEAVY MELEE: 116

Airheart can manually control a rocket by holding left click, following your cursor. Your primary can also let you rocket jump with good timing, giving you extra jump height that synergises with your hover and increased jump height at the cost of damaging yourself.
Airheart has the largest fall off range. This is justified by her slow bullet velocity making them easy to dodge and facilitates letting her spam rockets from a distance.

VITALITY
HEALTH: 800
HEALTH REGEN: 1.5
MOVE SPEED: 6.4m/s
SPRINT SPEED: 1.6m/s
DASH SPEED: 0.7s
STAMINA: 3
STAMINA COOLDOWN: 4.5s

Similar stats to Abrams but with slightly more health.

PULSAR TORPEDO


This is Airheart's safe spirit damage and survivability tool.
This ability deals a percent of your damage taken in the last 3 seconds as bonus damage. If you took 200 damage in the last 3 seconds, you'll deal an extra 40 damage. If you took 1000 damage in the last 3 seconds, you'll deal 200 extra damage. This means that this ability becomes stronger with your vitality investment allowing you to tank more damage without dying to dish it back, healing for a percent of the damage dealt that scales with your spirit investment.

KAMIKAZE


Kamikaze enables movement identical to Grey Talon's Ult but with a higher minimum speed. This means youre harder to slow down and control while letting you travel faster. You can also continue to shoot your gun and use abilities in this state. This means you can zoom around your enemies with your rockets and benefit from the increased velocity making them easier to land.

The explosion damage and stacks gained procs individually for each hit enemy, so it is encouraged to hit as many enemies as possible with this ability, throwing yourself into the fray. This can leave Airheart pretty vulnerable, and so you must build survival items or fly into weakened targets. This ability will also be your main source of firework stacks for most of the game, encouraging you to hit the most amount of enemies possible also giving you more stacks than hitting 1 target.

The T3 enables Airheart to continue fighting and increase her survivability after landing to support a tanky all-in playstyle.

ROCKET POWER


The active enables you to be more mobile and dodge several abilities in the game. Rocket Power and Kamikaze are both disabled by movement ability silencing items/abilities, meaning that item counters her effectively.
This ability synergises with your natural hover and to give you better angles to aim your Rockets (primary fire) and their AOE explosion.
This ability can also be used to help you engage onto enemies and disorientate them, using it to zip into and around enemies during fights (similar to lash and his grapple) while gaining stacks for your ult. The knockback further displace enemies for your team to follow up on while your enemies look at and focus you.

The passive enables you to hover and gives your jumps extra height. This enhances Airheart's overall game feel as a floaty flyer type of hero in lane/early on in fights when she's poking from a distance or brawling you 1v1 after using her mobility tools.

FIREWORKS


Fireworks is empowered by procing your other abilities. You could either hold onto your stacks more often, using your ult less in a game but having greater damage OR you could use your ult more but with less power - overall encouraging player choice. The insane Spirit Damage of fireworks is evened out by the very telegraphed 10s countdown audible around airheart (similar to infernus's ult SFX or talon's bird SFX while it flies) .The reduced range also balances the ult meaning you'll rarely kill more than 1 or 2 enemies with it and forces enemies to panic and scatter to not be within the explosion radius.

The ability deals self-damage and is fairly likely to kill Airheart as she will take a fair amount of damage flying into the enemy. This type of gameplay is encouraged by the reduced respawn time if it does kill. With this and kamakaze letting you fly back to lane quicker then zip makes early game deaths as Airheart less painful than other heroes. This is coupled by her on death explosion damage, that encourages you to all-in and encourage you to commit and get close range when you die.

If the ult does not kill you, you begin to regen for a percentage of your damage dealt. This can result in you healing to nearly full, but this heal takes a long duration, meaning enemies might be able to just kill you in this state while you heal.

The damage dealt is similar to Geist swap, Mirage Beetles or Billy Blasted melees and cannot be resisted or reduced for both Airheart and enemies hit. This makes the ability very useful late game when enemies have built resists or against heroes like Victor or Abrams who like to build resists. This is balanced by Airheart also being unable to mitigate this damage. Being a tank hero who flies into the fray, the resists you may build to facilitate this become useless.
The damage can still be dodged by use of Counter Spell, Ethereal Shift or Barriers.

BUILD IDEAS
GUN


SPIRIT


VITALITY BULK


CLOSING THOUGHTS
Very happy with this hero, though I feel there's a lot going on with them compared to other heroes in the game. I also worry the heals of Airheart's 1 and 4 might be too strong and make her too tanky but it's hard to tell, so any and all feedback and critique is encouraged. Thank you for reading <3

 

[pressnifty]

Some graphics for fun to go with the abilities.

 

[Fluflesnufaluphagus]

couple of thoughts

She should probably have 2 stamina. Jump pad was enough for Holliday's stamina to be nerfed so Airheart would need her's taken down as well.

Relative to her bullet damage, her scaling per boon is really low. This is not to say that her weapon damage scaling damage needs to be buffed, but her bullet damage is pretty insane which makes things weird.

Pulsar Torpedo rips, encourages a very fun playstyle. I don't think it should have spirit scaling on the heal%, there's already spirit scaling on the damage and AP can improve the heal% if it's really needed. (Or Healing Booster ig)

10 seconds is a lot of time, Kamikaze would be one of the best escape and rotation tools in the game. Both of the flights in the game at the moment are balanced around making you a really easy target for skillshots, as well as guns in general. 10s of flight where you're difficult-ish to hit and your already cracked gun is even better is kinda nutty. "Grey Talon ult but you're the owl and you end up at the detonation point" was Wrecker's ult for a minute and, while this isn't as powerful as a proper ult, it's pretty good.

Which is a lot of words to say "you should probably take the duration down. And maybe also give it the Ava/Majestic Leap restriction so they can't just leave any fight they don't like."

As an engagement tool it rips.

Rocket Power does a hell of a lot. The active is a very powerful mobility tool, as an engagement tool or an in-combat mobility tool it's cool. But trying to punish an out of possition Airheart would be very frustrating without Slowing Hex. I'm assuming the damage and knockback stats are only for the active and that the bullet knockback is much lesser. But bullet knockback would be very frustrating to play against in a game as movement & momentum focused as deadlock. Thoughts on Super Hops depends how hoppy the hops you get are, but at this point she has enough movement that she doesn't need it. Won't necessarily break anything, but the more aspects a character/ability has, the more difficult they are to balance.

Fireworks also does a lot, but we'll start with:

10 seconds is a lot of time. Infernus ult is a good point of comparison, but with it you have three seconds to try and juke, or just run away as fast as possible. In 10 seconds the fight might already end, or if they start running away it's just a question of if they can go band for band with Airheart (and by band for band I mean MobilityFeature for MobilityFeature). 5-6 seconds is a more reasonable timeframe imo.

Not short enough that Airheart can't just use it to die and skip the respawn timer, hopefully still long enough to avoid.

The spirit scaling on firework stacks is insane, actually getting the firework stacks is cool, and worked into the kit very well; but if you have three stacks that is essentially 3.9 spirit scaling. The numbers involved get silly fast, but that is sort of the point I think? You end up with a character who can just, take someone else out of the game and break parity by having a better respawn timer. Which could be very frustrating to play against. But also they could just stop being a casual and build Counterspell.

The Detonation on every death passive needs some kind of delay I think. Otherwise you never want to 1v1 an Airheart. If it's kind of close then killing her will also kill you.

In conclusion, I talk too much. This design rips, the intended playstyle is good and she's got a reckless vibe that none of the current self damager's manage to hit. With the exception of Pulsar Torpedoes, I think all of the abilities have "too much" going on. Where "too much" means that balancing all of the details, numbers wise, would become a massive headache.