Paragon is improving every patch but there's still plenty of room for improvement. I play every day and there's a list of things that niggle or which I think could be improved. Although Epic have stated they're reworking the card system, there are plenbty of "quality of life issues" that could be fixed. 

The Ability To Move Cards During A Match

At the moment when a card is purchased it’s fixed into the slot you place it in. This might not seem like a huge deal but considering you only have six card slots available, and four of those are for active items, a single mistake in placing a card can render a build useless. Having fixed locations doesn’t make much sense when you consider we’re wielding “cards” and I would assume, we should be able to lay them out in an order of our choosing, or to shuffle the pack.

Giving us the ability to slide cards left and right to change our active and passives would remove the potential for mistaken placements and allow for greater adjustments to builds on the fly.

Allow Deck Completion When A Match Is Found

The Match Found! box hides your ability to save a build. 

A long standing issue that results when you’re creating a deck and the match-found prompt covers the ability to add a card and complete your deck, it’s an obvious fix: simply allow the pop-up to shrink when you don’t hover your mouse over it. This would allow you to continue to finish your deck while the timer to accepting the match counts down.

Reduce Stun Durations

The recently added cards are fantastic at providing more options to deal with crowd control. However, I think it’s fair to say that crowd control - as it stands - still lasts too long by default. When the likes of Dekker or Rampage can stun for almost 2 seconds and with no diminishing returns on stuns, it’s possible to permanently lock someone down if multiple heroes utilise their stuns. Even with active cards that counter stuns, you can be re-stunned the moment it’s cleansed (in the event you were lucky enough to escape the first time).

At the moment stuns simply last too long in Paragon. They shouldn’t be a tool to guarantee a kill on a player but instead should be a tool to disrupt, peel or prevent action.

Heroes of the Storm in its infancy encountered a similar issue and eventually reduced the duration of all stuns across the board from several seconds, to no longer than 1 second. In addition, stuns suffer diminishing returns so that each consecutive stun after the initial stun, within a small time window, would only be X% as effective as the last.

I suspect Paragon will eventually adopt something of this nature and as it stands, it desperately needs it.

Improve Amber Links

A mock-up of how a broken Amber Link could look.

I really enjoyed the old Harvesters but appreciate Epic weren’t entirely happy with their design. As it currently stands however, Amber Links are incredibly passive and draining the enemy team’s is pretty pointless (the CXP yield is very small). As far as I’m concerned, there has to be a genuine incentive to attack the opponents Amber Link.

My thought is to have it so you can physically destroy them and once you do, it re-routes what the enemy team would have had, to your own Amber Links - effectively supercharging it for a period of time. Better yet, I’d like to see this buff spillover and impact the Gold buff (safe lane), so that it also boosts the additional CXP this provides.

When it comes to repairing a broken Amber Link, it could simply be a case of they automatically repair after a brief period of time which sees robotic creatures could crawl out the space above the globe before they begin to fix it.

Implement A Better Report Function

A match I played yesterday saw an Iggy & Scorch feed 15 times over the course of a match for no other reason than someone else locked in Twinblast. He intentionally died over and over and unsurprisingly, we lost incredibly quickly. As is stands the report system in Paragon is terrible and simply involves you marking someone - post match - as one of several options.

There’s no confirmation that your action taken against them even does anything and that, as far as I’m concerned, is bizarre.

We need the ability to report players for abusive behaviour, going AFK and generally trolling. Better still, we need to be able to write what they’ve done and provide evidence. Heroes of the Storm has a good system and while it’s largely automated (receive enough reports for being abusive and you’ll be automatically silenced), it works well. Players who have been silenced after reports are free to appeal and should it turn out that they’ve been the victim of false reporting, Epic would be free to overturn it.

Until players have faith in the fact action is taken against toxicity, they (or some players) will continue to be toxic.

Allow Us To Automatically Sort Cards

A simple request: when we make a deck allow us to automatically place cards in alphabetical order, from the cheapest to the most expensive card. Alternatively and in the deck builder, allow us to freely move cards and their upgrades up and down so we can change their presented order. Better still, also detail how many card points our deck total is - I’m fed up of manually having to count to 60.

Implement Harsher Punishments For Draft Dodgers

As it currently stands if you dodge a draft you get a 5 minute debuff. If you dodge another, the time increases. The problem here is that the first deterrent really isn’t one at all and most people know that if they dodge once, they’ll be back in a match in no time and (more than likely) able to select the hero they want.

While I’ll admit to having dodged a draft or two when the team is already toxic, it really shouldn’t even be a thing. With that in mind and I suspect this will only be possible when ranked matches are implemented, I’d like to see anyone who does dodge a draft intentionally punished with a 3 match suspension.

They would be free to remove the suspension by playing 3 games of Quick Match or against AI. If they abandon another match after removing the debuff, it will increase to 5, then 8 and so on.

This might sound fairly harsh but draft dodging affects everyone and should never be encouraged in any circumstance. Having strict penalties that prevent players diving back into what will eventually be “ranked” queue is a must.

Make Orb Prime More Interesting

The Orb Prime isn't half as much fun now as it was in Legacy.

Although I dearly miss the Orb Prime dunk, there’s little chance of it returning. Despite that, the Orb Prime right now is incredibly dull. It’s easily soloed, the damage it deals pretty poor (endgame at least) and despite a lot of flashy animations, the only risk is taking it when the opposing team knows you’re attempting to kill it.

For a buff that provides a significant improvement to your damage output as well as the strength of your minions - and effectively allows you to end any game if you simply group up when empowered - I feel there needs to be something...more?

Orb dunking was probably one of the most fun mechanics I’ve ever seen in a MOBA and even though I doubt it will ever return, I still think it’s a real shame. What’s more fun that not only needing to keep an eye on your lanes, but also attempting to deliver the Orb into the opponent's half of the map? Better still, knowing you were visible on the map was an adrenaline rush and resulted in some amazing interceptions.

The new Orb Prime is effectively a tank-and-spank and that’s neither interesting or fun.

Add A Use For Reputation

I have well over a million Reputation right now and with a full collection of cards and all Masteries, there’s absolutely nothing to spend my currency on. If possible, could Epic not make it so we that can convert X amount of Reputation for X chests? The values could be fairly expensive (say, 50,000 per diamond chest) but at least it would act as some form of encouragement to buy Reputation boosters and have something to do with the virtual currency.


What would you like to see added to Paragon? Let us know!


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Last Updated: Mar 22, 2017

About The Author

Lewis is a long standing journalist, who freelances to a variety of outlets.

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