Legendary Skins

Aside from the almighty Nightingale, leggo skins have been underwhelming. Maybe the devs have been gun shy to heavily invest since nightingale shot right up to the top after hers was introduced. Honestly its a number of things that make her great and the skin just added enough to make her top tier. But im not here to whine about Nightingale more.

The other skins we have definitely feel like they need some improvement. Based on what we have seen, leggo skins are meant to give love to heroes that aren’t used often and ultimately fall out of favor. However, none have really moved them from the lower tiers to a playable state. They feel close and I wanted to give a few ideas that could make the leggo skills better.

Heckler

As a DPS guy, Heckler just lacks. His DPS isn’t that high, he’s a squishy mid liner, and his disruption doesn’t quite make up for the lost DPS. His skin is a double edged sword. It gives him boosted elemental DPS, but at the cost of added damage taken. Far enough. The problem isnt entirely with the leggo skill, but with overclock itself. It takes too long to execute, hes a sitting duck when he does it, and he takes significant damage on a body thats already squishy. The leggo skin doesnt fix any of this so its still a huge gamble to invest in this skill aside from pve stuff.

Here is how overclock currently reads:

Overcharges himself to boost his attack. Deal X damage to himself and gain overclock for 10 seconds. While Overclock is active, boost his weapon damage by X attack damage and X elemental damage.

Here is how Superclock (leggo skill) currently reads:

Overcharges himself to boost his attack. Deal X damage to himself and gain superclock for 10 seconds. While Supercharge is active, boost his weapon damage by X elemental damage, but this hero receives 15% more damage from incoming attacks.

This is how I’d like it to read for the leggo skin:

Instantly Overcharges himself to boost his attack and gains Supercharge. While Supercharge is active, boost his weapon damage by X elemental damage, but this hero receives 15% more damage from incoming attacks.

This would fix the lead time on the skill and initial damage while still keeping him vunerable during supercharge. I really like that he has an added free reload when he uses this skill, but Heckler has a fast reload time and overclock just takes so long to execute. It just begs people to shoot him in the head. If his execution of superclock was the same as his reload or instant much like Baron’s covering fire (which also gives a free reload afterwards). It would be a huge improvement on this skill.

Salvatore

The tanky mid liner with aoe/area denial has always been…meh. Hes not a DPS, hes not a good support or healer, doesn’t really fill the same role as a front line guy. I mean I like that hes different, but his role just feels so bland. Hes never a threat, never important to cancel skills, etc. He just fills a slot and sometimes benefits a heavy bio team…thats about it. When his leggo skill was annouced I got excited to see what he would do, but felt very underwhelmed. All this skill does is add some extra damage and armor modifier on a skill most people just run away from anyways. It doesnt change how he plays or how you counter play him so hes still just no threat at all.

Here is how Heavy Ordnance currently reads:

Rapidly fires a salvo of 5 grenades at the targeted enemy, each grenade deals X damage to enemies in the targeted area.

Here is how Caustic Ordnance currently reads:

Rapidly fires a salvo of 5 grenades at the targeted enemy, each grenade deals X elemental damage to enemies in the targeted area. Each time an enemy is damaged by Caustic Ordnance reduce their armor by X for 10 seconds, up to a maximum of 5 times.

Here is how I’d like Caustic Ordnance to read:

Rapidly fires a salvo of 5 grenades at the targeted enemy, each grenade deals X elemental damage to enemies in the targeted area. Deals X elemental damage to all heroes who linger in targeted areas

Most or all of the grenades never hit their target. Or the damage currently is not strong enough to justify moving from my experiences. However if lingering clouds of toxins are left, people will move and be denied area for a short time and this can really help to control your enemy and focus someone down when they are vunerable. This clearly wont make Sal amazing, but it will be quite useful in boss battles, bounties, and general pve where he currently sits in the middle. stacking multiple cloud on a target or covering multiple areas in dots for pvp sounds far more effective than armor removal that only lands 10% of the time.

Steele

While this hero has seen some resurgence since his changes, I still dont think hes look at as a threat. Hes still too squishy as a frontliner and his skills dont exactly counter that. I do love the idea of a DPS frontliner since its just so different than any other frontliner, but it still needs help. I personally think finding a way to add to survivability is key. His commanding presence is nice, but not realistic based on how AI performs in this game (most AI counter attacks after taking some damage so taking no damage for 6 seconds is unlikely). His leggo skin mainly adds stunning to Bullet Storm which doesnt help any of this and frankly is a minor upgrade; heroes in bullet storm already stagger so stunning just feels like a minor upgrade where it wasnt really needed.

Here is how Bullet Storm currently reads:

Fires a storm of bullets Silencing, Rooting and dealing X damage per second to each enemy in the targeted area. Lasts up to 6 seconds, or until cancelled.

Here is how Bullet Hell currently reads:

Fires a hail of bullets at targeted enemy Stunning, Silencing and dealing X damage per second to each enemy in the targeted area. Lasts up to 6 seconds, or until cancelled.

Here is how I would like Bullet Hell to read:

Fires a hail of bullets at targeted enemy Stunning, Silencing and dealing X damage per second to each enemy in the targeted area. Lasts up to 6 seconds, or until cancelled. Steele gains a shield worth X amount plus 100% of the damage done.

I could also see this healing health or even giving the healing effect to his Open Fire ability. He basically needs a better way to support himself along with a healer. Currently hes not enough of a DPS machine to be the prime target all the time so healers dont focus on him and/or he cant self sustain so he gets easily focused while your healer works on someone else.

I hope this all makes sense and sparks dialogue about these skins. I really think leggo skins are awesome in many ways and are very helpful to bring up lesser heroes. I just want to make sure they do that and we see more interesting builds within the meta and pve.

Here’s the thing on legendary skins. They should be lateral changes, not direct improvements. They should only change how a hero can be used, NOT make them inherently better.

What you’re suggesting is using legendary skins to fix heroes that are just simply weaker than they could be, which is a very dangerous approach. It would result in them being playable only for people that have the skin, which is against the spirit of the skin system.

Heroes that are weak should be rebalanced so that they’re more viable - this is true. Using skins to address it is a very bad idea. Legendary skins should only function to change how a hero is utilized.

I agree with you both. Skins should make heroes better by allowing them to be played in a way that works. That way they aren’t useless. Steele’s skin is a perfect example of this concept. Nightingale’s skin made her go from useless to op. Night she’s just meh, useful, but not threatening. That’s a good thing. Many of the heroes need to be tweaked to become useful and fill a role. That is happening little by little. Skins shouldn’t be used for that purpose. Yes, Sal is a great example of a useless hero. His stats are ok I’m, but his skills are useless. His skills seldom if ever hit and his weapon is all sorts of lacking. His weapon is that of the typical frontliner, and his skills are that of someone who has no idea how to fight. Back to the topic, skins are actually pretty good right now. Yeah, the tweak to Heckler’s speed could work as a skin or hero tweak. Other than that, everything is good with the skins.

I can understand this reasoning, but most of the skins currently arent side grades. All of them clearly make a hero better even if only marginal (Gale excluded as it makes her vastly better). Stunning is better than just rooting, Armor modifiers are better than none, Heckler is the only skin that can most think is actually a side grade.

Im fine with leggo skins not ‘fixing’ a hero. However I tended to see them functioning that way based on what we already have. In either case, these heroes still need tweaking and if we do something like lower the initial damage of the grenades from Caustic Ordnance to allow for a lingering aoe effect, it could still be considered a side grade. Right now skins dont feel like an optional hero skill, they are always better when chosen (Heckler debatable).

One of the funniest sentence seen in this forum lol

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