Thats what makes WC3 fun though. UD get overpowered units like crypt fiends and frost wyrms anyways.
Plus, the UD heroes are the most powerful in combination by a LONG way, In free-for-all matches, where you can get all 3 heroes at level 5+, sa UD your army is just supprt, as the UD hero trio is more powerful than anything else in the game, despite all except DK being weak individually (though not
that weak - Dread Lord wins any 1v1 game if he reaches lvl 6 and gets inferno, to the point where there's plenty of viable solo DL strategies).
Even when UD was underpowered, i.e. before they massively buffed them a few months after WC3 came out, they did just fine in tournaments because of the UD 'nuke'. 3 heroes that ALL have powerful long-range spammable damage attacks
Yeah, they should have never added hero units outside the campaigns.
Thats what makes WC3 fun though. UD get overpowered units like crypt fiends and frost wyrms anyways.
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with Maggot (well, about the hero part. UD is possibly the weakest race). I think the heroes were interesting and added a cool mechanic to the game. I think a bit more thought into balance, or even just spending a longer time patching the game, would have benefited it a lot more (I'm aware they recently released a patch, but I mean balance patches). Like, take the Dreadlord. I single him out because he's one of the weakest heroes in the game, but when my friends and I all played back in high school we thought he was the dog's bollocks. Carrion Swarm is a good but not great damage spell, but look at the rest of his stuff. Sleep is only good against the AI, as minimal micro disrupts it. It still might seem useful for disrupting hero harass, but its duration is significantly lowered vs heroes. Vampiric Aura is an awesome ability in theory... except UD has minimal reliance on melee units. My friends and I all used to think Inferno was OP, but the experience the enemy gets from killing it will often mostly cancel out or sometimes even outweigh the benefit you get from summoning it, making it the rare ability that can actually leave you worse off from using it.
And then you've got to compare it with the rest of the race's heroes, and the reality is, because of UD's relative lack of healing options (Statue and... Statue), Death Knight is 99.9% of the time going to be the best hero choice. The Dreadlord simply has nothing that can compete in terms of sheer usefulness with Death Coil or Unholy Aura. So in a vacuum the DL isn't great, and compared to the rest of UD's heroes it's even worse. Then consider that even if you're doing tri-hero, you're probably gonna get Lich and Dark Ranger as your second and third.
Then compare it to the Blademaster. Starts with the highest stats of any hero, and BM level 1 is the power equivalent of most heroes lvl 2 and some lvl 3 in terms of raw stats. All of his abilities are excellent and probably aren't things you're goint to spam, meaning mana probably won't be a problem for him. Wind Walk makes him the god of harrassing, and Critical Strike (and eventually Whirlwind) give him insane damage potential - which means he complements his race well, as perhaps somewhat ironically, Orcs are a bit lacking in DPS potential. Mirror Image, his weakest ability, is still one of the strongest in the game, as even good players are going to need a couple seconds to distinguish which one is real. In fact, the only reason why Mirror Image isn't that great is because Wind Walk is just so damn good that you'd probably never need it.
Here we're looking at a hero that just ticks all the boxes: Incredible stats, check. Powerful abilities, check. Versatile, granting awesome map control as well as great harrassment as well as great combat capability, check. Synergizes well with his race, check. Dude's just got it going on.
And you look at things like this and it's no wonder that WC3 has been a stagnant game (by which I mean that at the pro scene there's been very little change or innovation in the metagame for the past few years and WC3 is more or less a "solved" game). I find the game a lot of fun but Blizzard had so much more work to do before it was able to be a solid multiplayer game, and they gave up and instead turned their attention to WoW.
Disagree that UD heroes OR race are underpowered. The race units were underpowered before the first patch (because they couldn't handle massing of enemy casters), but crack ghouls (DK+DL auras + frenzy) are such an efficient and cheap means of massacring any squishy unit, so long as you don't mind some basic micro to weave past the enemy tanks (b/c if you're going ghoul strat you won't have any tanks yourself + UD doesn't get tanks til tier 3 anyway - ghouls are melee glass cannons, but cheap and quick to produce, and you can put them to lumber use when you need resources) - just divide the ghouls into two hotkey-selectable groups, then split the groups (one charges to the left, the other to the right) to run round the enemy's front line. They'll succeed easily because they're ultra-quick anyway, and DK aura makes them ridiculously fast. Then you can either massacre the casters/ranged, or better yet, surround and kill their hero.
As for the heroes, they're the most powerful 3 hero combo in the game. There's a reason why it's called 'the undead nuke' - 3 heroes that can spam long-range direct damage spells. With TFT you can swap the DL out for the Crypt Lord if you want an early game tank, and it becomes 2 direct damage + an AOE stun. Either way, there's no better way of killing enemy heroes or high-health units. And it's so easy - just 'c, tab, c, tab, n'.
There's also plenty of use for each hero. There
is a clear best 'first hero' for each race, but it's often the 2nd or 3rd hero that's actually the most powerful later in the match - the clear 'first hero' is so widely chosen because they've got an ability that the race lacks early (e.g. DK allows hit+run tactics and gives your only healing option; blademaster allows harassment tactics if orcs want to tech rush; wizard lets humans safely level up and creep while pouring their resources into fast expansion, etc. BUT for humans, it's their 2nd hero that puts a shiver up your spine as a UD player - as soon as the hammer-throwing-dwarf pops out you've got to be ultra-fucking-careful when doing hit+run raids, because he'll stun your DK and you're fucked. Similarly, whilst DK usually is chosen 1st, he doesn't gain anything special at level 6 (you won't even use his ultimate, as the mana is better spent on spamming death coil), whereas getting the DL to level 6 is a game winner.
That last bit is a deliberate design pattern. Each race has one hero that has a 'game winning' (for 1 v 1 anyway, FFA is a different matter) power, and in each case they're NOT the best option for a 1st hero or a solo hero. That way, if you're trying to get a level 6 ultimate and win that way, you've got to take a risk and plan accordingly. As a consequence, there ARE strats that deviate heavily from the standard 'best 1st hero'. Dread Lord sees a lot of use in mirror matches (DK's coil has no offensive use against undead, making it less useful), and even in a few standard ghoul strategies. His sleep power gives you the fastest creeping ability, is spammable from 2nd level, it's your key counter to any enemy hero with a 'does massage damage until interrupted' (e.g. it makes the NE hero's starfall, best power in the single player campaign, utterly useless against undead as DL will immediately sleep her).
Normally with UD vs humans or NE you'll harass with your DK while sending your ghouls to creep + get you xp elsewhere on the map, as your DK doesn't really add much to creeping. With DL you can level fast by sleeping the most powerful enemy while your ghouls kill the rest.
One common strat vs humans is to go DL first, spam ghouls, and use 'sleep + surround' to avoid early fights (force enemy hero to use scroll and teleport out), instead of using DK harassment. The idea is that once the mountain king pops, DK harassment becomes too risky to pull off, whereas DL is an excellent counter (in the standard 'DK then DL then Lich' hero order, the DL's job is to keep the MK permanently asleep). You don't build ANY other heroes, letting you fast-level your DL to lvl 5 around the same time you get ghoul frenzy. Then attack before the humans have a chance to build a balanced army (you'll have fast-teched to tier 3 b/c ghouls are cheap and you don't need to lay down any other buildings on the way), kill enough enemies to get DL to level 6, and then you can drop inferno on their asses and win the game.
Lich is probably THE most common 1st hero in mirror matches these days, as UD enemy means you don't have to harass to avoid early combat, and lich has the most powerful lvl 1 attack spell.
Plus the sheer power of having a strength-based (i.e. high hit points), ultra-fast HEALER means that the 3 heroes in combination are more powerful than any other hero combo. Arguably more so in TFT, when you can add a tank to the mix. In FFAs, where high-level heroes come into play, the only thing that comes close is the high-level Tauren Chieftan, and he's easily handled by undead - Crypt Lord can stand toe-to-toe against him, but can't match his damage output, but that's fine when the DK is constantly healing him to full health. It gets to the point where the UD army is basically irrelevant - both the player and the enemy players focus entirely on the 3 heroes.
Even when UD was underpowered pre-patch, it was the insanely overpowered hero combination that kept them competitive. Saying that
any of their 3 heroes are underpowered, let alone in combination, is just nuts unless you're talking about single player campaign, in which case yes, the things that make them godlike don't really come into play in the campaign. But that's hardly the point - by the time WC3 came out, RTS were well established as a genre that existed primarily for multiplayer ladder matches, with the campaign just there to give new players an easy introduction to the UI and unit abilities.