#a real mildly inconvenient thing that could actually probably happen? oh god fuck no get away from me

[bloodshotgun]

good news: i finally had a nightmare inspired by house of leaves!

bad news: by house of leaves, the literal book. i had a dream of fucking forgetting it somewhere and losing it forever, which is not the fun kind of terror i wanted if i'm being completely honest

[onemuseleft]

Stony for 16!!!

“It could be worse.”

***

By the time Steve made it back to the crash site it was well past sunset and twilight was giving way to full night.

They had gone well off their intended flight path before the plane went down, but if Steve’s reckoning was worth anything - and it usually was - then they were somewhere northeast of Mt McKinley, which meant it was well past eleven at night, and probably close to midnight.

People would have noticed them missing by now. Stark Industries kept track of its planes, especially ones carrying their CEO. Pepper, Happy and Rhodey would know Tony hadn’t arrived in Juneau by now, and if they hadn’t alerted the Avengers yet, they would as soon as it became obvious Tony wasn’t answering his phone or Avengers communicator. 

In the meantime, all they had to do was survive.

Tony was where Steve had left him, propped up against a mostly intact hunk of the plane’s wing. He’d torn a few seat cushions loose so that Tony wouldn’t have to sit on the ground, and wrapped him up in a blanket he’d scrounged from the wreckage of the plane’s galley. He didn’t look like he’d moved even an inch in the time Steve had been gone, and for a moment a spike of panic shot through his chest. 

“Tony,” he called, then “Tony!” when that didn’t get a response. His arms tightened around the stack of firewood he’d collected, and he was about to fling it aside when Tony opened his eyes.

“Hey,” Tony said. He sounded breathless, but more like someone just waking up than someone who couldn’t breathe properly. Aside from having been knocked unconscious in the crash he appeared to be unharmed, but there had been blood on his lips after the wreck. None since, Steve had checked. Repeatedly. He was reasonably certain Tony had just bitten his lip, or the inside of his cheek, during the wreck and not that he was bleeding internally.

Almost positive. Mostly sure. Better to be cautious, though, and keep him as still as possible.

“Hey.” Steve set the firewood down on the dirst a few feet away, then crouched next to Tony’s makeshift chair. “Any problems while I was gone?”

Tony gave him a tired smile. “Room service still hasn’t brought up dinner, and this is the most uncomfortable chaise ever. But other than that, it’s been a blast. Best vacation I’ve had in a while.”

Steve huffed a laugh. “Sadly, you’re not wrong about that.” He brushed a strand of hair off Tony’s forehead, letting his hand linger for a moment to check for a fever. “When was the last time we took a vacation that didn’t turn out to be a trap or get interrupted by aliens?”

“Does that time we played ball in Central Park count? That went pretty well.” Tony leaned his head into Steve’s touch for a moment. “As far as vacations go, this is better than most. We’re camping. I’ve never been camping before.”

Steve leaned in and kissed the top of his head. “One of these days I’ll take you camping for real, and I think you’ll see that this isn’t really the same.”

Tony grinned at him, and drew in a long slow breath. “Any idea what time it is?”

“Past midnight, probably.” Steve turned his attention to the firewood, stacking it up in the dirt and stuffing fistfuls of dry grass in between the branches. “We’re a few hours late, so your people will have called Pepper by now. It’s just a matter of time.”

Tony hummed, and watched as Steve struck a few sparks off the magnesium firestarter. “Good thing you were flying with me,” he said. “Commercial would have confiscated that and then where would you be?”

“Just now landing in Juneau and worried out of my mind about you.” Steve fed a few pieces of kindling into the fire until he was sure it had caught, then waited a few minutes more, just in case. The flames were growing brighter, and there wasn’t much of a wind, so he set the rest of the kindling with the remaining branches and moved back to where Tony was sitting.

“Room in there for two?” he asked. He wrapped an arm around Tony’s shoulders and slid onto the cushion behind him, putting himself between Tony and the wing. He settled Tony carefully until he was sitting between Steve’s legs, his back against Steve’s chest. Steve wrapped his arms around Tony, holding him close. Tony turned his head until he could press his forehead against Steve’s neck, and for a little while they just sat there, listening to the crack of wood in the fire.

“It could be worse,” Tony said. 

Steve tugged the blanket up a little higher so he could tuck it in around Tony’s chest. “Oh really.”

“Yeah. We could be in the Savage Land.” Tony pressed closer to Steve’s throat, until he could feel Tony’s smile against his skin. “I mean, there could be a T-Rex out there right now. That would suck way worse than some bear or a moose.”

Steve laughed. “Spoken like a man who’s never had to fight a moose.”

Tony sat up abruptly with a small, pained grunt and gave him a narrow-eyed glare. “You have not.”

“They’re much bigger than most people think.” Steve absolutely did not smile as he gently tugged Tony back down against his chest. 

“Liar.” Tony exhaled a little and relaxed against Steve’s chest. “What would everyone say if they knew Captain America was a liar?”

“I’m not lying, moose are huge.” Steve kissed the top of his head again. “Go to sleep. I’ll keep watch. The good news is it won’t stay dark for very long.”

“You’ll wake me if anything happens?” It wasn’t really a question the way Tony said it. 

“I promise I will wake you the instant I see the first sign of a moose.”

“God you’re an asshole,” Tony said, but he tucked his head against Steve’s shoulder and closed his eyes. “I can’t believe I’m marrying an asshole.”

Steve’s breath caught in his throat. “Oh are you? I don’t recall being informed of this.”

“The sparkling cider in our hotel room is getting warm as we speak.” Tony sighed. “I lied about the factory inspection, it was a trick to make you take an actual vacation. I had it all set up. And then fucking AIM had to put a bomb on my fucking plane.”

“Well now I’m mad.”

Tony huffed a little. “You weren’t before?”

“The situation has been upgraded from mildly annoying to genuine inconvenience,” Steve said. “When we get out of here I want a do-over.”

“Well the ring is-” Tony gestured vaguely toward the wreckage. “So maybe give me a couple of days to find it.”

“I’ll give you six hours,” Steve said. “But I expect to be an engaged man by lunchtime tomorrow.”

“Bossy and an asshole,” Tony said. “God I’m a terrible influence on you.”

“Bucky and my mother would both tell you I’ve always been like this.” Steve ducked his head so he could press a kiss against Tony’s temple. “Get some rest. Sunrise will be here fast enough.”

“All right.” Tony squirmed a little until he got one hand loose and slid it around Steve’s waist. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Wanna get hitched when this is over?”

Steve pressed a smile against his hair. “Sure.”

[official-alan-dabiri]

First and foremost, we have some exciting new changes that everyone can get behind. Absolutely nobody has a problem with the new experience globe mechanics. New experience globes are only at full value for six seconds, and after that are worth 25% exp. And then they last for thirty-nine seconds. Nobody finds this objectionable in any way. This change was not on the PTR due to public outcry from Reddit when it was leaked early, but it’s here live with all of its zero problems fixed.

Another change about which we have received zero complaints is a new tag system behind the scenes. People looking for just the right hero for the situation can easily find it by searching for such keywords as “CC” “Silence” “Sustain” and “Double soak” and find extremely useful and not absolute garbage results. Don’t worry about checking it ahead of time, just get right into draft mode and use it to find the perfect pick!

In addition to those minor and unobjectionable changes, we have removed Volskaya Foundry from the ranked queue, and added everyone’s favorite quickmatch map, Warhead Junction. We have also done this simultaneously with an Overwatch-themed event.

Hero changes below the cut, because this patch is another doozy, with fiiiiiive herooooo rewoooooorks, Four buffed assassins, three nerfed offlaners, two nerfed tanks and we also nerfed the looost viiiikiiiings!

Anduin is the first of our reworks and with him taking a more prominent role in Shadowlands we want to be able to welcome WoW players with open arms. He, uh, doesn’t have a new skin or anything, we just want people to play this game. The central goal of the buff is to improve his healing output in line with other heroes without removing the largest strength in Leap of Faith. As such, we’re just touching literally every part of his kit and talent try and praying that it goes the way we want.

People keep mistaking Johanna for the best tank in the game. This is factually untrue, since Muradin exists. As such, we are just gutting the absolute pants off of Johanna’s talent tree and making it weird and clunky.

For too long has Raynor been the scourge of draft play. Too good to skip, but not scary enough to ban. Perfect macro contributions, with respectable hero damage. Enough self-sustain to take weight off your healer, and self-peel for when tanks are bad. The perfect killing machine. As such, we’ve nerfed his damage into the ground. Start playing Greymane, bitches.

Stitches has proven to be a mediocre bruiser in the eyes of the community. After all these years, I think I know why. We accidentally categorized him as a tank. As such, he needs some serious changes to make him fit that label. This whole time we’ve been balancing him as a bruiser and nobody said anything? This is as much your fault as it is mine.

The average damage output of a ranged assassin has been steadily climbing for a while now. As a result, for a hero to actually be a glass cannon, they need some serious firepower. Valla now has the gunpowder to match her glass. And she’s the glassiest cannon there is. Don’t get me wrong, she still evaporates like a drop of water in California when an enemy hero looks at her. But when she has a solid tank and three healers behind her, the world is your oyster.

Oh my god they didn’t break down the heroes by category. Jesus Christ what the fuck Blizzard? You just decided that this is the line? This is the day you stop caring? Well, congratulations, you’ve made reading your patch notes mildly more inconvenient. I’m still doing this. Ya bunch of jack-offs.

Mei has been grossly overperforming, and we have no idea how that happened. We certainly didn’t buff her over and over again for an entire year. Anyway, we’re just going to roll some stuff back. Definitely probably fine.

It turns out - and bear with me here because this might be hard to follow - Hogger, D.va, and Sonya were all overtuned? For six months? So we’re just gonna tippy tappy them down the smallest little bit. And then slap them around a little for good measure. D.va’s mech form is no longer indomitable, Hogger can no longer solo any merc camp in the game in 12 seconds, and Sonya is now... Basically fine still, honestly. We kinda gave her just a slap on the wrist in comparison. But honestly after gutting Hogger like that, I just didn’t have the heart. One of the benefits from being a little later, alphabetically.

After riding the TLV train up through the ranks, I think it’s about time to recognize that I’m not actually good at them. They’re just overtuned. So it’s time to come back to earth, Icarus. Don’t be fooled by the seemingly-small HP nerf, though. The real nerf is buffing Longboat Raid. People are going to have to pick it to test it and it’s gonna murder their winrate.

Someone told me that Lucio is a problem and needed to be addressed this patch, but my cat came into the home office being adorable so I didn’t hear exactly what they said. So we had to kinda wing it. Hopefully these minor adjustments to his talent tree will solve whatever they were talking about!

Even we know Uther is a problem. Being first pickable and filling three different unique roles was what we wanted to do with Varian not Uther. So we’re going to try and make him incrementally worse at tanking until he just goes away. First up: Shaving off some of that personal armor.

AFK splitpush trash Azmodan is dead. Long live teamfight artillery mage Azmodan. Really glad I made the last HotS Content post about Nova instead of Azmodan because boy howdy do these changes invalidate the entire playstyle that post would have discussed.

W build Falstad has obviously become a problem. Not only was he riddled with bugs after the rework - don’t worry, we learned from our mistakes and made sure there were no bugs with our new reworks - but also he had the ability to point and click on an enemy hero and force them to run all the way to the next lane over in order to stop taking buckets of free damage. It turns out that ability was more powerful than anticipated, and required adjustment.

Q build Falstad has obviously become a problem. Not only was it completely overshadowed by a build that did more damage in every situation with less skill requirement, but we overestimated the value of macro power on a build that demands PvP for stacking. As such, we’ve doubled the amount of power each stack gives him! That’ll do.

AA build Falstad... Stay the course, buddy. Doin’ fine.

Junkrat has been underperforming, which is surprising for a hero with his level of power. As such, we’re going to make a few small buffs to hopefully draw attention, and then we can roll things back once the pickrate reflects his actual power. Hopefully then WE CAN FINALLY MAKE THE MANDATORY CHANGE I PUT IN EVERY MEMO. TYRE. WITH A Y. THAT’S HOW THEY SPELL IT IN AUSTRALIA. KAEO I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU- wait, did Kaeo leave? Who the fuck is still here? Kinnabrew? Adam? Jason? JASON! JASON!?

Tassadar has also fallen off a lot without us having done anything at all whatsoever to nerf him. Entirely undeserved treatment. I’m disappointed in all of you. As such, we’re going to tweak his numbers up just a little tippy tap so that you all remember who killed the Overmind. It wasn’t James Raynor or Sarah Kerrigan. It was Tassadar... Tassadar Bassadar. That’s his last name. Don’t look it up, just trust me.

In the bug fix department, we’ve had a nice sit-down with the Mountain Giants on Alterac and told them that if they have time to lean, they have time to clean. Reaching the end of their lane and expecting the core to come to them is putting undue stress on an already overtaxed position. The core is a very stressful job, and if the mountain giants could just do their part to walk into the core pit when they arrive, that’s a huge load off their shoulders. Drek’thar and Vanndar really needed this expectation taken off them right now, and I’m hopeful it will lead to a better work environment.