The Cistern of the first hill is an economic landmark that acts as a Cistern. It unlocks the Pilgrim Flask ability on non-siege military units which can be activated to increase health regeneration by 25 per second for 6 seconds.
Flasks refill every 30 seconds to a maximum of 20 active flasks and prior to this patch the time between flasks was 20 seconds.
In this patch the time between flasks has been increased to 45 seconds, more than double the current time and this has completely killed an already very niche landmark.
The issue with this landmark is the flasks don’t work on most units, with lower HP units they drink the flask and die before they have time to regen their health. The health increase could be instant to prevent this happening and then the increase in time between flasks would be justified. If this isn’t changed then the 45 seconds needs to be reverted back to 20 to make the landmark viable again.
I’d also like to see a long term benefit to this supposedly economic landmark such as unlocking a special 6th water level for cisterns only available with this landmark.
I need to check for myself but i believe the cool down starts instantly upon use?? Or can someone confirm the cooldown starts after a flask has finished ticking?
If its immediately upon use then 20s was too low as that allows for back to back immediate use.
It starts after you finish drinking the flask and have finished regening your health. So currently it’s about 53 seconds from starting to drink a flask until you can drink again.
It’s really bad now. Before it was like 30 seconds actual time now basically a minute.
Now everyone will use the stronger landmark, the golden horn tower every single game so it’s not a good thing that the alternative is now never viable.
Very weird change from the devs, if anything this landmark needed some kind of buff for the late game as it gave immediate value and then just was fairly useless and it is supposed to be an economic landmark. The golden horn tower is much more of an economic landmark as it can be worth like 12 vills by cistern level 5.
The problem is that the strategy with keshiks + Cataphracts was so OP. Not even Beasty, Demu or Kiljardi were able to stop it when going 2 TC or FC, it was like a free win and devs had to do something. Now, that strategy is nerfed, but it is still good (just played against that strategy like 1 hour ago). That landmark can only be used in certain matchups, but you can be sure that it won’t be reverted or buffed.
The same strategy was deemed a meme strat by those same streamers months ago. They regard the cistern of the first hill as a D tier landmark.
From what I’ve seen beasty lost to it once then adapted and beat it in the next games once he realized how to stop it. It isn’t some game breaking strategy. A FC should beat a 2 TC strategy anyway.
As I said above the flasks don’t even work properly for anything that isn’t high HP like a keshik or a cataphract so that should be looked at. If this aspect of the landmark was slightly overtuned then nerf it 5 seconds, don’t more than double the time for every use from 20 to 45 seconds which is a ridiculously heavy handed nerf that has made it useless.
The whole landmark needs to be looked at and if this nerf to flasks stands then the landmark needs a long term buff to compensate.
Yeah, I know you are right. It is not imposible to stop if you know the strategy, I won that match, but I’m sure they won’t revert this. Maybe later they add some changes, but Byz is still a very good civ (Top 3 maybe), so I’m sure that buffing landmarks is not one of their focus. It can still be used, but you must heal a different unit every time, that needs a lot of micro.
I actually think increasing the time is good, to avoid the niche unkillable elephant situation.
That being said, it should be buffed in other ways.
It’s true that they’re mostly useless on low health units. This makes it very awkard to use. Even the pros don’t micro individual units to the point where they can make full use of it late game with large armies.
You couldn’t spam it anyway as it had a 20 second cooldown from the first flask being finished not from the moment you drink it. Now it takes over 50 seconds to drink another and your units are dead by then.
Just for comparison the golden horn tower can be worth around 12v in eco. This cistern landmark was at best useable in 1 niche build and now it is totally useless and we are back to the old meta of golden horn tower every game.
I could understand the nerf if the landmark had some other bonus that was the main idea behind choosing it such as unlocking a 6th water level or healing underneath cistern aura. As it stands the flasks are the only thing it has going for it, if elephants are the issue just prevent them from getting the ability, personally I’ve never seen it used with elephants and I’ve played hundreds of games so I doubt that alone warrants such a huge nerf.
To use the flasks you really need to be able to turn them on to automatic and not need to micro, the issue with that is as I said before when infantry or any lower health unit uses a flask they often waste them and they take time to accumulate so every single flask is important. I believe making the healing instant and not over time and maintaining this flask delay is 1 way to actually fix this for lower health units as they will instantly receive all the health and so prevent their death and the increased delay prevents overuse but you still get value out of each flask. Currently the flasks are worthless on all your units other than cav and you have a limited amount of cav and now due to the delay they cannot drink another flask in enough time to save themselves.
