Failbearer?

TB is almost as squishy as Reg, and to be effective with his fire powers, most have no range; you have to be right in the middle of mobs/fights sometimes. And that gets you killed if you are'nt quick, good, or both. That, plus you have to spend time "switching" from fire to ice powers (if you get both, it takes several seconds) can make it even trickier for new TB players.

He's necessary if your opponents are going for minion builds. Otherwise, he's not really a "necessary" Demigod.

maybe he isn´t that easy to play or you just got bad mates.

i think for the most part the demigods are balanced

TB can own it up, especially Ice TB -- but in my experience most people who pick him in Custom Games tend to die a few times early on, then quit.

He can't 1v1 until later in the game though which is why people probably fail as him. He's good at creeping to outlevel people and saving up loads of gold, but an Ice TB early on does not have the damage capability to secure kills unless the enemy is terrible. Fire TB doesn't have all the great ice debuffs to slow down the enemy's movement and attack speed so he's an easy kill, and a hybrid will burn through the small starting mana far too quickly to do battle.

Any demigod is extremely powerful in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing. Myself and a buddy of mine makes excellent TBs. He's much better at the ice but I make up for that with fire.

I can't wait to get replays and observe some of the better TB's do their thing. I haven't bothered pick up the Demi since I gave up single player, days after the game was released.

Depends on your team in 2v2. If you go for Regulus and the other teammate goes for TB then yes, you are BOTH gimped. If you go UB/Oak/Rook/Sedna and tank it up while the TB can play his natural role as glass cannon, then no, he is not gimped. TB is a great demigod if he has a tank to hide behind. He just takes a bit more skill than spit/run/spit/run/charge-in-guns-blazing UB build.

<rega's buddy

Yeah TB is pwnage. He's even better in a team fight where his AoEs can do some massive damage. Ice bearer also likes team fights where his slows and interupts can disrupt the enemy's important skills like Sedna heals or rook hammer slams that are coming down on one or two of your team mates.

Another great thing about him is that he's a great asset to a team that's getting attacked by creep swarms.

TB rocks.. i dont know what all of you are talking about. Easy to level up then once you get 1k fireball you get easy DG kills alllll dayyyyyy.

He's good. I played him this season and done 'fairly' well this tournament season. Only 2 "official" loses, and 1 was vs a predmade anyway and my first game as TB the 2nd one was close, but basically came down to me pumping too much into citadel upgrades instead of self upgrades, and as a result i fell behind the enemy DG's and couldn't stand toe to toe with them, planning on playing him next tournament too with a slightly different build....

Most people prefer to play Fire TB, but Ice TB is much better in my opinion. Anyway, tne only thing which makes me aggresive is that on later lvls, you have no chance vs a 11k live ub player

He's great if you have a high HP ally to tank while you put out damage, but otherwise HP stacked UBs Oaks and Rooks will be able to chase you away from any lane.

Also there are a lot of bad fire TB players.

You can HP stack as TB you know. Drugfreeboy actually loves doing that and generally has the highest or 2nd highest hp of anyone in most games. It can make a TB a real beast to deal with.

The trick with TB well at least fire is the huge amount of damage you can put out in a short amount of time. This will scare most players normally into thinking they need to run sooner than they should or they will ignore it and run too late and die.

1k Fireball + 400-600 Nova + 1200 or so Ring = at least 2k of near instant damage.

It takes practice to play a hybrid build, which is the only build versatile enough to make up for bad teammates in random games. Hence, specialized torches often fail in non-premades.

That and the average player doesn't fireball kite that well.

I think most tb builds are kinda endurance builds..you try to keep getting more damage to your enemy while not taking damage, then your enemy starts to get a bit worried about their hp being at 1/3 while yours is around 1/2 so they start running. Then you just gotta chase them halfway across the map to finish em off haha. Chasing works better with ice. Also you like to fight in a creep lane so that your aoe can kill their creeps and yours can help you out a bit.

I honestly feel that fire TB does not scale well into late game when everyone is decently stacked with HP. Who cares about a 1K fireball when you have 6k life? The vast majority of good TB's I've seen are ice builds which turn TB into more of a support character, but it really helps the team out in big fights.

I play TB more than any other DG. Ice TB. I find that by focusing on the overrall game (wiping out creeps, citadel upgrades, assists) you can really push a game into a win. Since your greatest strength lies in your AOE, you don't need a lot of items to scale well into late game. That allows you to funnel cash into gold upgrades, flag locks, etc. Works great for me.

If you get any of the cooldown favor items or artifacts, fire TB scales very nicely. Late game being able to near instant 2k-3k damage every 5 seconds is pretty serious. It may be tougher to kill others late game but its just as easy to make them retreat with faster cooldowns. If fire TB didn't have that auto attack bug, he'd scale even better in more ways.

Playing with a Staff of Renewal you're pretty much golden for destruction. He's very easy to play, very HARD to master, and very difficult to kill when played correctly. That being said...

A good TB needs a lot of mana, a lot of HP (choose high HP items over armor), and a lot of SPEED.

TB is my favorite and very powerful IMO. I have 2 guides the sticky section of the strategy forums on him. You were just with bad players. For me the bad players are almost always:

1.Rook - he is very hard for players to play well because hes slow as hell

2.Regulus - everyone thinks they will just own with him, lots dont get any life then they die fast

Those are the worst for me that I normally see.

really?

fire tb for me is so easy to play and very effective. maybe not super powerful but very easy to make a difference and get kills.

and he doesnt really have any bad match ups, can fill some useful rolls and works well in groups.

There are a lot of bad TB players. I suppose its concievable that they're all just doing it wrong and he could actually be a good DG, but from what I've seen thus far I'd rate him like 6th out of the 8 DGs.

[quote who="SoFFacet" reply="22" id="2286323"]There are a lot of bad TB players. I suppose its concievable that they're all just doing it wrong and he could actually be a good DG, but from what I've seen thus far I'd rate him like 6th out of the 8 DGs.
[/quote]

If you rate him by what you see - which is that TB is not effective, and you already admit that people could just be playing him poorly...the conclusion seems obvious. Every game seems to have certain characters that are just a bit more difficult to play as, not because the character is better in any way, shape, or form than any of the others, but just because of the way the character was designed.

The same is true for Demigod. While the demigod's may be fairly well balanced towards each other, it still boils down to the person playing. I would venture a guess that the TBs style of playing in a way that is noticably effective is not intuitive to a lot of people.

All of the Demigod's are effective. Most people want effectiveness with the least amount of work, however. Hence, people expect that and play with that mindset, causing problems for themselves.

torchbearer is very dificult character to play as. as its been said before, early game hes has a lot of trouble against demigods, but he does level very quickly. I play a mixed fire/ice TB and can say that by mid game I can hold my own against pretty much any demigod.

heres a good example of the difference between a good tb, and a bad tb

http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/0cf8d637aa107375058091e01c1f7007940949ef.png

Quoting Goggris,

reply 16

I honestly feel that fire TB does not scale well into late game when everyone is decently stacked with HP. Who cares about a 1K fireball when you have 6k life? The vast majority of good TB's I've seen are ice builds which turn TB into more of a support character, but it really helps the team out in big fights.

Two things.

First, that 1k fireball. I can cast that from a million miles away. Odds are that you don't get to do any damage to me at all. A few seconds later my cool down is up, so I do it again. Repeat a couple of times and u gotta go home (especially with Heart of Life nerf). Lets say you decide to finally rush me. I just gotta get you down to about 2.5 thousand hp, then I can burst damage you to death nearly instantly if you are alone and don't have any cool shields.

Like someone said, they focus more on the whole game rather than kills. Kills don't win the game...a dead citadel does. Killing all their creeps instantly while your giants roll on through is pretty powerful...even if you have a hard time killing one particular target.

When you say he doesn't 'scale' well, you gotta take into account that every time the enemy buys a creep upgrade his nukes hit two or three more targets.

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