QOT Buff - The specifics

I agree that she could use a little boost. She is definately the least used character in the game but I've also heard she is most missused character in the game.

NT

Give her the ability to be immune from stuns (not interrupts). She's the one that suffers the most from being chain-stunned. Her main survival ability, shield with compost, can't work in more than 1v1 games because of chainstuns. Or, give her a stun.

Changing form skill delay
Reduce this slightly for Qot (i think its 2-3 secs delay at the moment, which is just too long). You may argue why because shes able to move doing so, but fleeing to change form is not achieving anything and usually leads to that team falling back.

Stats
- her max health is rediculously low for how much health regen she can get as a support character.
- her base movement speed should be 6.3 (she has no good passive buffs atm, unless she gets some).
- her attack dmg in offensive form needs a somewhat significant buff, theres no defense in this form so she needs someting to pressure opponents.

Skills
- remove entourage skill line and merge it with summon shambler and add a "passive" skill line in its spot.
- Bramble shield - Make it % dmg reduction for a certain amount of time. For 10 secs, ally recieves 30%/40%/50%/60% dmg redution from all sources. (maybe bitter chill can negate this effect in some way?).
- Tribute - Make it an aura.
- Ground spikes - add a short stun from second lvl up or boost the burst dmg slightly.
- Goddess of thorns - if my bramble shield idea is used, this lvl 15 skill would be very useful.
- Compost - give some health/mana per kill benefit. This'll give her some durability while in offense form.
- Spike Wave - very mana heavy (especially on its first lvl).
- Uproot - change functionality to, do area dmg on selected area for X second. but if functionality isnt to change, give it an alternate effect where now you can select a target allied structure and give it health regen.
- Violant siege - its a level 15 skill, so ud expect it to be effective since its a circumstantial skill (reqs a structure). Increase its area of effect and have it slow down enemy units in its effect by 15%.

id welcome any of these changes

Well QoT was my first DG, so I know pretty much about her. Back in the time, she was considered by many to be one of the overpowered. Feeling Cheap, I stopped using her for sometimes. Now I retry her and let me say, she is pretty bad.

Before they move the HoL, she had been "nerf" once. All of her spells costed more. I remembered that I could cast shield 3-4 times, but now, only twice before going base.And now that they moved HoL for a ridiculous amount to the artifact shop, the previous nerf still persist on her. Her spells are still mana loaded and without the help of the HoL.

Her Open Form lacks everything. For the ability to cast AoE, she lost regen and armor. If ganked, she has no to little chance of survival. While in close form, she can still rely on shield and the minor armor boost.

Her summons are pretty bad. For a range summon, they cannot avoid tower range or even get near enough to attract the beam without hurting the QoT which has about the same range. They have less life and numbers than Nightwalkers, they have less mobility and spawning force than Oak's Spirits and they do less damage than Yeti (which are also pretty bad) with no level 15 boost like the Yetis.

OF ALL DEMIGODS, she is the only one without any interrupt. Even Regulus has a 3% stun at lv 15, while her arch rival (the other support dg) Sedna has two interrupts herself alone.

The entangle skills is worthless, it doesn't stop the tower's beam while Rook's tower eating does. It does less damage than Spike+damage per second. And worse, the cooldown doesn't make it any effective. I mean... UB's spit is about the same damage and less cd overall AND IT CAN TARGET DG.

Many of her skills line are there to upgrade another skills (3 of them?). Their passive relies solely on the summons without any lv 15 passive great bonus. +4 gold as a lv 15? By then, the game is almost done.

Oh and... Low Stats Growth.

Only Rook is slower than her.

Worst hp. Worst armor. Worst normal hit DPS.

With two helms and one boot (~1.5k each) you will be out of mana in one fight, while others aren't.

So ya. Suggestion?

Open form more DPS, more max health and mana.
Summons able to interrupt, greater range, when dead by enemies, spawn into two smalls once, which cannot be eaten.
More HP.
Passive that increase other skills (spike? plz)
Less mana used.
When eating the summons, get mana also.
Remove entangle, or make it to immobilize dgs too, while not stunning them.

Anyway. I hope any changes would "buff" her a little bit.

I agree that she needs to be buffed, but I don't believe that she needs a big buffing. For the most part, I would like to see her abilities and battlefield usefulness scaled better beyond lvl 10. There are some good suggestions above.  I would simply add:

--Stun ability: she needs one.  Badly.  (EDIT: in place of a stun ability, adding stun immunity with Bramble Shield [or in closed mode] would be acceptable as well).

--Drop Tribute for the lvl 15 ability and add either an uber Bramble Shield or an enchanced Ground Spikes-related ability. 

--Shamblers: Buff a bit and fix the pathfinding.  Also, don't make it necessary to manually find a shambler to eat once you push the Mulch Shambler hotkey. That is, she should automatically eat the shambler as soon as the Mulch Shambler button is pushed.

--Either get rid of Compost or merge it with either Uproot or Entourage.  It should not require a separate skill-point usage.  Even better, replace Compost with a movement and/or attack speed enhancement ability, similar to those of Sedna and UB.

--Make Uproot do its damage over 5 seconds, but perhaps make the ability-cooldown time slightly longer.

My main thought is this:

Whatever is done, if it is, should not be OVERdone.  Make it a small step, not a large one.  It would be much better to have a slight tweak that is not enough, than to have too much done and turn her into everyone's overused favorite overnight.

If I were to suggest a change, I'd say that I like the tribute aura effect I saw posted above.  If it were available sooner, and a bit stronger, that could be a fun angle for her.  Remove one of her useless skill lines (there are a couple of choices) and add the tribute aura line instead.

Regarding this buff... I agree... it shouldn't be something that isn't over the top.  Also, think about our request change from a developer's perspective.  What is the easiest thing that we could have implemented to make her a more viable character late game?  This means we probably can't get an existing level 15 ability dropped and replaced with something else as it probably can't be quickly or easily programmed.  But, her base stats could be bumped... existing ability stats could be increased (Shield), etc. 

I would disagree with giving her a boost across the board.  Instead, tweak a few skills so she doesn't go from underplayed to overplayed in 1 patch.

My 2 cents:

- Uproot is not worth the skill points, as she can tear down buildins with ease as it is.  Not sure what to do with this skill, maybe something passive instead (+Speed maybe?).

- Compost should be either re-purposed, or merged with Entourage.  Too many skill points already go into Shambler builds.

- Don't give her a stun, in fact, lets not give too many more DG's stuns (Stuns are powerful lets not hand them out to eveyone now).  Spikes + Wave is fine for her.  Giving her a stun would be too much, since Spike, + stun, plus minions would eat away at an emeny DG real fast (Plus Wave to slow them as they run).

- Shamblers targeting AI needs to be tweaked, sometimes they just sit there and don't attack towers.  Not sure if this is happening when fighting in a battle, but defintley when attacking towers and they are stacked on one another.

My feeling right now is that the full minion build (with spikes) for her is pretty good at the moment, but her assasin type build is lacking.  Going just spikes, shield and wave needs a skill to complement the rest.  Possibly a passive skill in place of uproot.  With small tweaks she will be fine.

Keeping things simple for the developers is a good point.  I would then alter my previous suggestion to something more like this, which only tweaks existing values:

- longer shield duration (time-wise, but not damage-absorb wise).

- shorten / eliminate the time it takes to switch forms.  Ok, when I QoT I tend to stay in one form, so maybe I'm not the best to comment on that.  Still, if it were instant to switch forms it would help with assassin-type builds I think.

- bump max shamblers up to 6 at highest level.  Could help with late-game scaling.

- I agree with badbitty that she does not need a stun!

I also agree that uproot is not worth the skill points -- but neither are Yetis and Sedna is fine without a buff. 

I think we'll get more traction by upping simple values than swapping out skills.  It's true we would all love to see uproot go away, but thinking in terms of what is more likely to get done... maybe we shouldn't ask for it.

My suggestions:

• Fix her Bugs first!  1  2+3
• Balance out +minion stat items for each General.

• Increase Entourage bonus
  
  • Shamblers should not have less health than Erebus' cost-free Nightwalkers. Also increase the damage bonus significanlty (Shamblers get a whopping +5dps now for each level, due to very slow attack speed!)
    
    • +350 health
      
    • +20 damage

• Change Tribute to be a Shambler-specific special skill:
  • the number of active Shamblers give QoT some bonus:
    • +10 health per second and/or
      
    • +10 mana per second

• Give Bramble Shield some side effect for 3rd and 4th skill level:
  • not interruptable when Shielded
  • throws back slowing effects on attacker

• Revise Ground Spikes:
  • Too weak against Demigods and too strong against towers: at maximuml level (-1500 armor), an armor reduction from 3000 armor (55% dmg reduction) to 1500 armor (37% damage reduction) means only 18% more autoattack damage for 5 seconds (in comparison: Oak's Pentinence increases all damage by 17% for 7 seconds)
    • Tower upgrades should also increase tower armor (+200)
      
    • Demigods should not regenerate health (and mana?) during these 5 seconds

• Change Uproot to a channeling spell:
  • interruptable
  • duration of 5 seconds, each second damage is done
    
  • does increasing damage each second:
    
    • level1 -> 100 + 125 + 150 + 175 + 200 = 750 maximuml damage
    • level4 -> 400 + 500 + 600 + 700 + 800 = 3000 maximum damage (it's a siege only skill after all and it's interruptable!)
      
    • towers can't attack while Uprooted from skill level 3 upwards
      

• Violent Siege: deal Uproot damage as area damage:
  
  • area radius: 6 yards (smaller than it is now)
    

• Change compost to something useful. It should temporarily slightly:
  
  • increase maximum health of QoT or
  • increase armor of QoT or
    
  • increase attack speed of QoT or
  • increase attack damage of QoT or
  • increase movement speed of QoT

• Increase effect of Goddess of Thorns:
  • 25% less damage taken for 10 seconds
    
  • Bramble Shields deal 100 damage per second area damage (Shields only last seconds at this level) for 20 seconds
    

Implementing all of my suggestions would probably make her overpowered, so it would be wise to implement them one after another until most players are satisfied.

My first inclination would be to not try and change the types of her effects if possible, and simply change the numbers on them. That way people don't have to completely relearn how to play her... she'll just be better at what she does.

1. Make her shamblers have greater base strength, and decrease the cost to summon them, especially the first point. She has three skills that basically require her to have shamblers, it should be as obvious of a choice for her to buy them, as getting Bite with Erebus.
   
2. Significantly increase the power of entourage. She doesn't have a swarm of nightcrawlers or spirits she's buffing with this, only 1 to 4 high costed Minions.
3. Tribute boost should be about 3 times as good.  Either make it 12 gold per second, or effect entire team and be 8 gold a second.  Level 15 skills need to be way better than an 1800 gold upgrade.
4. Ground Spikes should do a bit more damage, and do a little less armor damage.  Maybe 800 damage at level 4 for instance.

Compost and Uproot may require greater tweaking.  A siege only skill is pretty bad, and no matter how you shake it, Compost is just too dependant on other skills, and doesn't do effective things.  Temporary hp on your shamblers?  Makes Uproot better?  These don't make sense.

I Agree with Zechnophobe. Changing too much is risky, and 4 little tweaks on each point quoted should do the trick.

Oh, forgot a very important (if not essencial) buff, those vines surrounding QoT body should be removed

Buff is right.  She would definitely be IN the buff without them.

maybe to make uproot more viable without changing any functionality watsoever, is to either;

- drop its mana cost down to 400 and keep it at that cost across all levels (just like rooks towers of light skill line).

or

- add the violant siege effect to all levels of uproot (dmg of siege increases with levels). The coding is alrdy there for this just needs to be applied to its lower tiers and some figure changes.

or

- decrease its recharge to 10 secs, and its effect on a tower for 5 secs, keeping all dmg numbers the same as it is now. Quicker bursts of dmg with this skill would be nice and will really make this skill live up to its intended purpose. 

I think there are 2 things to change/fix and the QoT will be a good demigod to play.

1) The bugs that Cosmoe and others have listed many times regarding shamblers and auto attack mis-targeting.  Fix these and the Queen is on her way to being fine.

2) Her good skills aren't good late game, and her bad skills...  Anyway, I'd take Obscenitors idea on Uproot being a hurt your enemy or help your ally skill one step further and apply it to Bramble Shield and Ground Spikes. 

Bramble III and IV give a % negative life steal effect to anyone targeting the recipient.  Ground Spikes III IV give a % damage reduction effect to allies that it touches.  Goddess of Thorns just improves these two with one skill point.  No need to overdue the percentages, just enough to make her better late game.  The effects would only last 3-5 seconds after casting so the enemy could wait out the abilities before fireballing or attacking if they wanted to.

Uproot heals your towers ala Obscenitors post.  Towers are weak late game... but with this change you have to watch out for the QoT TPing in to repair.

Entourage should give more health to Shamblers.  Theres better changes that have been suggested but lets keep it simple.

Compost should just give the Queen more health.  See Entourage...

There.  If they do this the Queens good, but not too good.

Just up her stats first.  I'm not sure anything else needs to be done to make her viable, though replacing some of the useless abilities with more interestring ones would of course be nice.

your contradicting yourself here. your saying nothing else needs to be done other than stats but then you follow that sentence with "change some of her useless skills".  but yes .. her skills AND her stats need buffing.

I believe that a good vision would be useful for helping to figure out what enhancements should be made to the Queen of Thorns. There are many good suggestions listed in the previous posts, but they lack a coherent theme. Most of the posters agree on her weak spots and her strong spots, but disagree on how her abilities should be changed because they don’t have a good idea of what they want her to be.

My thoughts for a vision for the QoT would stim frIt seems that GPG designed the QoT to be a support, anti-building, and pressure demigod. However, as it turns out she doesn’t succeed well in any of these roles. As a support demigod, her shield scales very poorly late game, and is always mana intensive. As an anti-building demigod her abilities are lack luster, ground spikes is much better than entangle will ever be. As a pressure demigod she lacks the ability to escape from a surprise attack and her abilities are too mana intensive to stay in the field for long. To make her more useful, all three areas of her expertise should be enhanced.

Her weaknesses are also important to recognize. She has no speed enhancements, no interrupts, a poor slow. She will not be able to finish off a demigod because her burst damage is too predictable, and she will never be able to catch up with a fleeing demigod.

For her support role

Bramble Shield

• Increase the shield duration to 2 minutes (currently it is at 30 seconds).
• Boost shield absorption by 25%.
• Decrease mana costs by 25%.
• Reflect 5/10/15/20% of the auto-attack damage absorbed.
• Allow a shift+hotkey function to autoself cast the shield and not stop moving.

Goddess of Thorns

• Ground Spikes add 25% speed reduction for 10 seconds.
• Bramble Shield adds 25% attack speed reduction for 10 seconds.

For her pressure role

Shamblers

• Fix the attack range bug, as previously described and solved.
• Fix the bugs.
• Lower the cost to 200 mana. The costs for priest idols is 200/250/300/350, and the DPS is comparable so this isn’t outrageous. The turning rate should also be fixed because they are way too slow to turn around. Also, add a shift+hotkey function to allow her to automulch the lowest health, or farthest away shambler instead of having her have to select a target.

Closed Form

• The armor bonus isn’t sufficient to make a difference.
• Increase it by 50 armor points per demigod level and add 25% of current armor. She is going to have 2 mana helms, so her available items for stacking health and armor are already limited. This won’t make her invulnerable, just very hard to take down with autoattack damage.

Compost

Compost is an odd skill. It is very similiar to Oak's Spirit based buffs. The compost buff is a function of the number of enemy units killed recently. This counter increments by 1 when an enemy dies close to the QoT, and decreases by 1 every 9 seconds. For every 3 points on the counter you gain one rank in Compost. Compost has 3 available ranks, so the maximum bonus occurs at 9 kills. Additionally, with additional ranks in Compost you gain a bonus level of compost that activates whenever the counter first increments. For our intents and purposes I'm assuming that Compost is always at its max rank for calculations. This is not true in an actual game situation, you would have to start at your lowest rank and then advance up to the highest rank.

Compost
Rank Damage Health  Level
(1)         4        60         -
(2)         6       120        -
(3)         8       180        -
1(4)      10      240        2
2(5)      12      300        5
3(6)      14      360        8

The end result is that Compost is not very good. Its damage output is not very good, especially with the ability point cost and conditions necessary to activate it. At max level with maximum with 4 shamblers it adds 28 dps and 360 health (less than 2 autoattacks).

• I would revamp Compost to grants health and mana regeneration. I would get rid of the ranks increasing as a function of kills, and just increase duration as things are killed. Each time a unit is killed the duration is increased by 10 seconds. I would also increase the range of the ability to count kills that are within 20 yards.

• The effect would be 15/25/35 health & mana regeneration for 1/2/3 ranks of Compost. This compares to Sedna’s Healing wind which grants 12 health per second regeneration with 1 point and 24 health per second regeneration and ~5% heal boost for priests. Additionally, because of the decay rate, the buff will not be active all the time.

Auto Attack

The QoT can’t escape if trapped, she has no speed, weak to interrupts, low health.

• To reduce this issue, I would increase her range to 17. This is the equivalent of Regulus with 1 level of Sniper’s Scope. It is sufficient to outrange Towers of Light, but not any other towers. I would also increase double the AOE of her autoattack. This should give her the range of Regulus (who has the same health) and some extra creep elimination power.

For her siege role

Uproot

• Uproot is not a good skill. The damage is lackluster, it scales poorly, and towers are underpowered. Early game towers are sufficient to ward off most demigods. Middle and late game towers can die in the space of 15 seconds or less. Going with what many posters have already suggested it, I’d buff it to have two functions, 1 to damage enemy towers and one to buff friendly towers.

Enemy Towers

•      Current damage is okay, drop the mana cost to 400/500/600/700.

Friendly Towers

•      Give a Bramble shield for 700/950/1200/1450 for 30 seconds and give the tower health 50/100/150/200 health regeneration for 10 seconds (same amount as the damage she does).

• Increasing her auto attack range will also boost her siege abilities.

Violent Siege

• Change it so it affects enemy units and enemy buildings (anti-tower rook).

Other abilities

Ground Spikes & Spike Wave

• Not sure it should be changed. The damage feels like it is low, but that might just be Unclean Beast Envy.

Tribute

• 10 gold per second

She only needs ONE thing fixed..

Make Uproot able to affect Demigods and viola.. she's like the Beast without the slows...

First off, give up on Uproot. Allowing it to hit other DGs is probably a much, much larger change than we're going to see, and really the last thing QoT needs is another attack ability. She already has minions, mulch, ground spikes, and spike wave; she's not lacking in quantity of offensive abilties. If uproot could hit DGs/units it would need a new graphic/animation and we've been told time and time again that that's the kind of change least likely to happen.

Second, DO NOT give her more shamblers. Compared to to other minions, shamblers are already quite massive and they struggle to move around each other to reach their targets. What shamblers need is a targeting fix, turning speed improvement, and to mimic the way QoT hits multiple units in closed form. QoT constantly hits multiple targets, but shamblers seem to follow a more rigid straight line to the target rather than a wide cone drawn from the target like QoT seems to use herself, so while Shamblers have potential for AoE, they don't realize that potential unless they're attacking a pretty specific formation of targets. They should be fixed so that they consistently strike multiple targets like DGs/priests the way QoT often can.

I would really, really like to just see functioning shamblers in action before suggesting sweeping changes to their health and damage. I don't think that 1800 health nightwalkers are a example to follow, and even if they were there's no real reason why a shambler should have more HP than them anyway.

When I play as EB it's impossible for me to keep my minions out of AoE if I want to still do damage with them. When I play as QoT I frequently move them out of Ooze range while still keeping them in firing range. As ranged units it's not unreasonable that they have less HP than melee ones, and while you may have a point with damage scaling being unfair to smaller quantities of minions, I don't think HP scaling is comparable, as the majority of damage done to minions is AoE, meaning you could just as easily draw the opposite conclusion - that EB and Oak have a disadvantage because a Circle of Fire that does only 6k damage to your shamblers will do 15k to a nightwalker pack.

Third, I'm sorry, but I disagree with you again Cosmoe... I do NOT think that Shield should be given a secondary effect which encourages mid-combat casting. While you and I may stay closed form all game, the concept behind shield is that QoT can prep it before a fight and then go to open form to dish out damage. Close form is a valid playstyle but it's not the only playstyle and I don't think the ability should be balanced assuming that you're trying to be a sedna clone, staring at friendlies' health bars all match.

I agree 100% that it needs a secondary effect at rank 3 (and maybe another at rank 4), but I think it needs to be one that is beneficial that the start of a fight or between fights, not to mention reflecting snares would be simply outrageously unfair against a character like Regulus who struggles as-is without having to worry about people intentionally turning his Mark of the Betrayer or Shrapnel mines against him.

I do not, however, know what that effect should be. I've been brainstorming for a while.

Overall there's a few things that QoT needs to be able to do better:

1. Support a team without burning large amounts of mana. Sedna does this via Healing Wind and super monks, Oak does this via Divine Justice and a consolidation of offensive utilities into a single ability (penitence). I could make a list here but I'm short on time. Bottom line is that investing so heavily in mana items highlights issue number 2:
2. Survive better during shield and mulch cooldowns. Better stats would go a long, long way here. Having less HP than Sedna just doesn't make sense to me. It seems like the devs didn't anticipate QoT entering melee range?

I've run out of time, I will finish this after class.

She'd see more play if you just removed her bramble underwear. Easy fix and fun for the whole team.

Bigger boobs, that is all that is needed .

-sits back ready to be flamed-