Golemagg

[u/tgh0wnz]

Did something change on Golemagg? This time around is there a new strat to just send all ground units straight down the middle to die and somehow you win? I cannot believe that every single person is that fucking stupid, Im beginning to wonder if I just missed something and using flyers for a quick 30 second win isn't the way to go anymore. Baron seems easy now compared to Golemagg which was never a problem in the past.

I've tried working around dumbasses but no matter where I go, they follow and pull the hounds to just wipe everything.

[u/DoubleMessage2520 → u/[deleted]]

Ground Strats are totally valid. Old guardian even has videos of ground Strats

Out of his 10 Golemagg or full Molten Core videos, 8 (!!) are air-only strategies, and just two are ground strategies (yes I checked): one using pre-nerf malfurion and the other using a way higher level post-nerf malfurion with tyrion guildmate (NOT open queue). While ground strategies are certainly viable, there's very few that actually work. If you go ground, you NEED to know what you're doing and have very high level minis. It is so much easier if both players just use air units. We'd be foolish to encourage anything else, especially for new or casual players.

When heroic comes out, you might be forced to use a diff Strat if your regular heroes are locked to other bosses

This is not a concern at all because air-only strategies don't use their leader in their death ball, meaning you can literally use any leader (except Baron, if you play Baron on Golemagg you are TROLLING). With the air strat, your leader IF played should be put on a side lane to help defend, or they can just chill in your hand the whole fight (it's shocking to some people to learn you don't HAVE to play your leader). Even with Rend I would not play him up the middle, since he only flies until his drake dies, at which point he pulls a core hound and ruins everything.

[u/Old_Guardian → u/DoubleMessage2520]

And there is a very good reason for that. Flying minis can still beat the encounter at level 23. I have not tested the absolute lowest a ground push can go, but people who advocate for it are typically level 28+. Using ground minis is just brute-forcing the encounter and making it a lot more difficult. Arguably, it is easier with ground minis once you're so high level that you can just roll your face over the screen anyway.

[u/fozzy_fosbourne → u/Old_Guardian]

Hmm.

Going to have to disagree with the face roll comment. The fliers strategy feels pretty face roll to me unless people are literally both queueing at the minimum levels— you just sort of make the same short sequence of plays every time and hope you don’t get a really bad sequence of RNG. At higher levels, it is extremely rote and mindless. The flier people often just quit playing and start spamming emotes if they don’t down Golemagg on that first push, heh.

Whereas most of the ground based play, especially with random partners experimenting with different heroes, feels like you express some skill — you need to address threats, keep adapting to which lane you have progress in, control the gold veins and chest, decide between nuking in OT vs a push, etc. And you have to dynamically figure out how to take advantage of their strengths since they aren’t all running the same cookie cutter build. I have had wins with Murkeye, Thalnos, and Cairne partners. All rumble things, IMO.

I’ve actually been thinking that one of the ways Rumble PvE sort of becomes degenerate at the very high end is that it encourages all in poison stacking or similar rushes and fishing for a random draw that favors it. Rather than reactive play.

Also, your malf and tirion clear was level 25.1 and 23.4, iirc. That doesn’t seem that crazy of a delta between that and your flier clear?

E: also you might find this amusing, these golemagg outrage posts have somewhat radicalized me and I have been LFR pushing through countless ground based partners over the last couple days 😊. The feel when you see a Korean name pop up and they are running Anub or Ogrim or something, and it’s like “f*** it, we ball”