Possible cooldown reduction or other buff for Taunt ability:

I haven't played warcraft 3 alot, so I might not be the best possible person to give suggestions. However, there is one thing that bothers me alot.

Mountain Giant's Taunt ability is almost useless in my opinion. Soon after I use it, the enemy will command the units off the Mountain Giant almost instantly. After the weaker units have been killed, the Mountain Giant will soon follow. It's almost the same thing with computer opponents. I wouldn't complain if the Mountain Giant wouldn't be so expensive. I don't want to pay 425 gold and 100 lumber for a mild distraction, when I could spend it on a hero.

My suggestion is, that the taunt ability should be buffed. The units should really be forced to attack it for several seconds, or the ability should have a shorter cooldown. I don't know anything about programming a game, but I think reducing cooldown would be the easiest thing to do, and it would be fair for mountain giant users.

The tier 3 upgrades make the mountain giant alot stronger, but without an useful taunt, mountain giant is as useful as a tree of life, except for the fact that the tree of life probably draws more fire.

Thanks really much for reading!

To be viable in multiplayer the MJ needs some serious stat tweeks. Keep in mind it was originally designed to be a single target tank, however it's armor type, armor amount, health and damage all make it easy to ignore or kill with melee. Improving it's taunt ability might make it hard to ignore so including 1-2 in your multiplayer army would be quite useful, but it still fails as having high cost (especially food) and low damage/hp/armor. Increase hp by 50-75, damage by 30 and change armor type to fortified (perhaps adding 1-2 armor) and the unit will be fixed. It will become a useful tank, while unable to do much damage it will become a threat in the eyes of your opponent which it should be for 7 food and 625 resources.

the taunt is alrdy fairly effective: currently its 2 most important uses is saving heroes and distracting enemy flying (frontline/melee unit w medium armor) (and casters). That being said Mg do 1/4 of normal dmg and vs t3 melee Abos and other t3 melee are better dmg soakers.
less cost and upkeep - ca 5 and 350 gold

As it is an analysis of mg vs abo yeilds the following result:
abo does 150% more dmg than MG / size (that is 250%: MG does 2.63 dps/size, ABO 6.32 dps/size)
abo can take 28% more hits from another abo than an MG can take hit from an abo (again pr size)
but:
Mg can take 125% more hits from fiend
970% more hits from banshee
150% more hit from a wagon
200% more hit from a wyrm

seeing it like this mg should do fairly well in a teamgame if theres also some magic air to kill enemy melee, but not very, in most matchups the gimped dmg barely matches the extra endurance - add into this the fact that taunt is at a 15sec cd and MGs are fairly bad.
reducing their upkeep size and cost by 20-30% would fix them, making it 6 upkeep and 375 gold might be better if we dont want to see MGs replacing bears in every single game^^

btw changing armor type to fortified would make ranged do minimum (2) dmg to the mg, and magic units something like 20 (vs 50-80 atm) and make the mg slightly better at tanking melee so the mountain giant would be pretty much unkillable by anything but siege, while siege dmg would own it (except flying machines:P) : 150 dmg from a wagon = dead in 19 hits.

This might work in skilled games (making it a counter-or-be-owned unit) but
1: would make them way to significant, MG should be an option not a must
2: make them overpowerful in teamgames/vs crappy micro

Blizzard doesn't seem to be able to do anything in War3. This is probably too hard to do anything. It's probably too hard to make changes in wc3, as if it was easy, they would have done many things...

tbh i think its fairly ezy, At least when its just a few stats. but the fact is that other than BM (who is slightly but in no way gamewreckingly imba) the game is fairly balanced and i guess they just cant be bothered. A few units like MG and ghoul are a lil crappy but there are usually ways around units like these. Still as a fan (and hopeless nerd i would like to see a few balancing changes.

No, it's not like they can't be bothered. They ain't got a clue how to do this. That is the cause. That is a sad true for Blizzard, completely unskilled.

war3 and SC are epic in terms of balance and playability (not to mention WoW). Lazy probly, but not unskilled.

Look, there is no multi-milion budget corporation that is lazy... Lack of skill is a problem, otherwise that would have been done. There's loads of things to do on battle.net to improve gaming experience, but they don't know how to do this ;)