We’ve seen some of you are upset about the Markus nerfs, so we thought we’d explain some of the reasoning behind it. While Markus is supposed to be powerful against monsters (after all, he’s the beast hunter!) he was also too powerful against single entity units, and more powerful than we intended – in both campaign AND multiplayer.
This meant that he could take out lords and heroes in a matter of seconds, which wasn’t what we wanted. The design goal for him was to create a monster slayer ranged character, but we accidentally also created a character sniper. We identified that this was primarily caused by his Amber Bow and Kill Shot/Executioner abilities being way too strong in terms of damage. Combining the two in quick succession would kill most characters.
In addition, his basic ranged attacks were considerably faster at taking out single entity units than many melee characters. The melee defence reduction was added because Markus was also surprisingly hard to hit in melee, allowing him to keep running away and getting high damage shots in at point blank range. In summary, he was dealing too much damage too quickly against high value targets and that capability needed to be toned down.
Statistically Markus is still one of the strongest ranged units in the game after these changes and these changes give us a better platform to continue balancing him in the future. Hopefully this helps you understand the recent changes, and of course balancing is something that continues to happen and isn’t a single static change and we are taking your feedback into account.