SnickerPuffs
Member
Out of the entire Hero Labs roster, Trapper quickly became my favorite. He was an aggressive support, backing up the front line fighters by debuffing the enemy team. Alternatively, he could break away and wander the outskirts, setting traps to catch the sneakier Heroes before they could get the drop on his allies. His kit was arguably the most solid out of the rest of the experimental roster, and his "average joe" characterization was a hilarious breath of fresh air compared to the other more dramatic and important Heroes in the game.
As someone who has repeatedly gone to bat for scrapped heroes, seeing the Hero Labs roster fall by the wayside is a bit disheartening. It's easy to see the developers steering in the direction of releasing fully-realized heroes into the game instead of partially-formed experiments, but those peaks behind the curtain were fascinating to see.
Given my fondness of Trapper, and the state he was in when he was shelved, my suggestions won't be too radically different from his (for lack of a better term) current state. That said, I did want to nudge his play style more towards traps, while at the same time keeping his aggressive support role intact.
(Disclaimer-- while I've been thinking these ideas over for some time, this forum post was written completely off the cuff. Please pardon any typos or formatting errors.)
1) Bottled Phantasmicide
The T5 spirit resist reduction was reduced and made part of the ability's innate feature set, in order to replace the removal of it's innate slow (for reasons I'll explain further on). Besides that, and the new T1 and T5 upgrades, is that the pool now deals DOT to non-heroes. Trapper doesn't have many ways to deal with NPCs, outside of Pest Barrier and using his ultimate, so my first thought was to turn Bottled Phantasmicide into a trooper dissolver. Consider this revenge for all the times a trooper inconvieniently sprung a Silktrap that was intended for the enemy players.
2) Silktrap
Like Bottled Phantasmicide, the innate slow was removed. As a consolation, it also recieved several buffs. Firstly, was that the main cooldown was reduced from 40s to 24s, a 40% decrease, and the base charges was increased from 1 to 2. The DPS spirit scaling was also given a *very* slight boost, from x0.279 to x0.285. Furthermore, Silktraps are
At T1, the traps now fade to invisibility if no enemy heroes are nearby, similar to the Nekomata Ward ability Calico had during Hero Labs. This is inspired by a bug Trapper had on release, where his Silktraps were entirely invisible to the enemy team. However, having the traps be wholly invisible would make them unfun to fight against. When an enemy hero enters a radius around a trap, they quick fade back into view, and remain visible for several seconds after being revealed.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the debuff duration now additively stacks when a hero walks though multiple traps, instead of just resetting the debuff duration. This change, too, was inspired by earlier versions of Trappers kit, when Silktrap did a single burst of damage instead of DOT. Sneaky players would hide stacks of traps where players couldn't see them, such as behind veils, to catch enemy players by surprise with a massive (and often fatal) burst of damage.
The goal with these changes is to make Silktrap more spamable and trap-like while still allowing careful players to avoid it. When a Trapper is on the enemy team, you'll need to tread with caution... or Debuff Remover.
3) Spectral Terror
I quite like Pest Barrier! No notes.
That being said, the addition of Paige to the roster has begun a theory that has slowly snowballed into a gross misconception-- "Paige is Trapper". While this theory does have a seed of plausibility, given the similarity their kits share, the executions are wholly different and ultimately incomperable.
In my opinion, at least.
So, as much as I adore Pest Barrier, a part of me wants to scrap it in order to nip this argument in the bud. As such, I've prepared a new ability based on Trapper's unused "Fear" passive. This is why I've removed the slow from Trapper's other abilities. With his other abilities dealing damage over time, Spectral Terror will always be building, and will always be applying an escalating slow. With Bottled Phantasmicide's NPC-exclusive DPS, this applies to non-players too.
4) Crawling Plague
Crawling Plague sounds like a fantastic ultimate, and it *could* be great at times, but overall it was just... not.
I chalk this up to several issues in it's functionality. As the spiders were spawned in a straight line, directly in front of the user, activating the ultimate indoors often kneecapped it's effectiveness. Spiders would spawn inside walls or other odd locations, causing the pathfinding AI to automatically detonate itself in a panic. Speaking of the pathfinding AI, it was prone to getting caught and confused by walls and obstactles, and being almost laughably easy for enemy heroes to dodge or escape.
This rework is meant to address those issues first and foremost. I've included a short writeup in the ability mockup, explaining how I envision the improvements to the spawning (one by one at a fixed rate, to reduce the changes of them "catching" somewhere) and pathfiding (larger seek radius, and able to climb).
I haven't touched on Trapper's weapon or visual design. I'm sure Valve have their own plans for that, and they weren't in the scope for the "goal" of this rework proposal.
That being said, if you have any suggestions for that, or feedback for my concept, please let me know! I'm eager to hear from other Trapper fans who loved playing him, as well as Trapper haters who couldn't stand him.
As someone who has repeatedly gone to bat for scrapped heroes, seeing the Hero Labs roster fall by the wayside is a bit disheartening. It's easy to see the developers steering in the direction of releasing fully-realized heroes into the game instead of partially-formed experiments, but those peaks behind the curtain were fascinating to see.
Given my fondness of Trapper, and the state he was in when he was shelved, my suggestions won't be too radically different from his (for lack of a better term) current state. That said, I did want to nudge his play style more towards traps, while at the same time keeping his aggressive support role intact.
(Disclaimer-- while I've been thinking these ideas over for some time, this forum post was written completely off the cuff. Please pardon any typos or formatting errors.)
1) Bottled Phantasmicide
The T5 spirit resist reduction was reduced and made part of the ability's innate feature set, in order to replace the removal of it's innate slow (for reasons I'll explain further on). Besides that, and the new T1 and T5 upgrades, is that the pool now deals DOT to non-heroes. Trapper doesn't have many ways to deal with NPCs, outside of Pest Barrier and using his ultimate, so my first thought was to turn Bottled Phantasmicide into a trooper dissolver. Consider this revenge for all the times a trooper inconvieniently sprung a Silktrap that was intended for the enemy players.
2) Silktrap
Like Bottled Phantasmicide, the innate slow was removed. As a consolation, it also recieved several buffs. Firstly, was that the main cooldown was reduced from 40s to 24s, a 40% decrease, and the base charges was increased from 1 to 2. The DPS spirit scaling was also given a *very* slight boost, from x0.279 to x0.285. Furthermore, Silktraps are
At T1, the traps now fade to invisibility if no enemy heroes are nearby, similar to the Nekomata Ward ability Calico had during Hero Labs. This is inspired by a bug Trapper had on release, where his Silktraps were entirely invisible to the enemy team. However, having the traps be wholly invisible would make them unfun to fight against. When an enemy hero enters a radius around a trap, they quick fade back into view, and remain visible for several seconds after being revealed.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the debuff duration now additively stacks when a hero walks though multiple traps, instead of just resetting the debuff duration. This change, too, was inspired by earlier versions of Trappers kit, when Silktrap did a single burst of damage instead of DOT. Sneaky players would hide stacks of traps where players couldn't see them, such as behind veils, to catch enemy players by surprise with a massive (and often fatal) burst of damage.
The goal with these changes is to make Silktrap more spamable and trap-like while still allowing careful players to avoid it. When a Trapper is on the enemy team, you'll need to tread with caution... or Debuff Remover.
3) Spectral Terror
I quite like Pest Barrier! No notes.
That being said, the addition of Paige to the roster has begun a theory that has slowly snowballed into a gross misconception-- "Paige is Trapper". While this theory does have a seed of plausibility, given the similarity their kits share, the executions are wholly different and ultimately incomperable.
In my opinion, at least.
So, as much as I adore Pest Barrier, a part of me wants to scrap it in order to nip this argument in the bud. As such, I've prepared a new ability based on Trapper's unused "Fear" passive. This is why I've removed the slow from Trapper's other abilities. With his other abilities dealing damage over time, Spectral Terror will always be building, and will always be applying an escalating slow. With Bottled Phantasmicide's NPC-exclusive DPS, this applies to non-players too.
4) Crawling Plague
Crawling Plague sounds like a fantastic ultimate, and it *could* be great at times, but overall it was just... not.
I chalk this up to several issues in it's functionality. As the spiders were spawned in a straight line, directly in front of the user, activating the ultimate indoors often kneecapped it's effectiveness. Spiders would spawn inside walls or other odd locations, causing the pathfinding AI to automatically detonate itself in a panic. Speaking of the pathfinding AI, it was prone to getting caught and confused by walls and obstactles, and being almost laughably easy for enemy heroes to dodge or escape.
This rework is meant to address those issues first and foremost. I've included a short writeup in the ability mockup, explaining how I envision the improvements to the spawning (one by one at a fixed rate, to reduce the changes of them "catching" somewhere) and pathfiding (larger seek radius, and able to climb).
I haven't touched on Trapper's weapon or visual design. I'm sure Valve have their own plans for that, and they weren't in the scope for the "goal" of this rework proposal.
That being said, if you have any suggestions for that, or feedback for my concept, please let me know! I'm eager to hear from other Trapper fans who loved playing him, as well as Trapper haters who couldn't stand him.
