Neutral Mobs

Robbin

Does any one else feel like the Neutral Mobs can be a bit of a nuisance? I've found them most frustrating and not fun in 2 situations:

1) When you're rallying units to your main army and somehow the mobs were aggroed either killing your unit (shame) or forcing you to bring your unit through some unnecessary roundabout path. It felt like this happened to me at least once a game.

2) When there's a big fight and the team that accidentally aggroes the nuetral mobs is forced to retreat or die. The mobs just make a mess of things in fights.

I understand that since enemy teams cannot deny bases with all the towers, the mobs are there to pace expansion. I'd argue that gem denial and scraping to have enough gems in the early game would pace expanding enough on it's own.

I believe that better gameplay would come from players being responsible for denying opponent expansions rather than mobs.

Pursuit

In regards to point number 2, I actually did this on purpose several times (aggro the neutral mobs to get them to attack my opponent's units). So while it could be annoying when done on accident, I personally found it to be very rewarding when done on purpose.

I kind of like the idea of the neutral mobs from a design perspective personally (I keep typing creeps thanks to my wc3 background lol), because they add for a bunch of interesting scenarios. In one of my games with @AlienTree playing as Celesta I kept Purifiers with his army in a secure position in the middle of the map and cleared out a creep camp with just my Wisps + Hero. While I cleared the creep camp, he held the center with his army, then after I cleared it and took my expansion he ran his hero to the top to take his. It was a really fun and rewarding moment in the game for me.

edit: Also with how easy it is to amass gems in mid-late game, I think it would be impossible to prevent expansions from being taken and even if you killed the expansion there would be basically no cost to rebuild it.

Robbin

@Pursuit said:
point number 2, I actually did this on purpose several times (aggro the neutral mobs to get them to attack my opponent's units). So while it could be annoying when done on accident, I personally found it to be very rewarding when done on purpose.

I tried to do this too. It just felt too unpredictable. I'm sure with more testing, I could get a better gauge of how the creeps will react if I do X to them during a team fight. It may be my SC2 background, but I'd say that I found these fights less rewarding.

@Pursuit said:
edit: Also with how easy it is to amass gems in mid-late game, I think it would be impossible to prevent expansions from being taken and even if you killed the expansion there would be basically no cost to rebuild it.

This could be combated by either scaling down late game gem collection or making the 3rd/4th/5th base nodes cost more than 10 gems

SynQ

I noticed that some of the neutral mobs are very in the way when it comes to pushing into an opponent's base. This may be something that comes down to map design. I am mainly talking about the neutral mobs at the double gold base. If the neutral mobs were pushed a little bit more out of the fight paths, I doubt that they would be much of a nuisance while still serving their purpose.