by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Game Director Dustin Browder and Designer Matt Cooper teamed up with CM Josh “Rockette”(*) Rester-Zodrow to drop some science about the upcoming patch for Heroes of the Storm on Twitch today. Highlights include an overview of the abilities for the just-announced support hero Rehgar Earthfury, a brief look at the new map Garden of Terror, and a discussion about the progression system updates and the controversial Artifact system.

Rehgar Earthfury

Rehgar is being billed as an aggressive support character, and Cooper paid a lot of lip service to the sense that Rehgar ought to be on par with Uther as a resilient hero on the field. However, his kit of abilities lets him have greater mobility in comparison to a lot of other heroes, in addition to complicating his gameplay.

• Trait – Spirit Wolf: This replaces Rehgar’s mount, making it something you can use to either play more aggressively by rushing the enemy or being able to run away at any time without having to wait to mount up. Some talent options discussed including being able to cloak when you enter the form, getting a guaranteed crit on your first hit coming out of the form, or getting improved health/mana regen while in form. Overall, you’re going to use it to move between combats quickly, and likely more frequently than other heroes are mounting up.
• Q –  Chain Healing: The initial heal is not as strong as, say, Uther’s Holy Light, but the balance is in the residual healing you get from successive targets. This gives Rehgar an advantage when you’re grouped up vs. if you’re just a pair in the wild, and it feeds into the sense of being a backline healer, which is certainly an option that Rehgar can talent into.
• W – Lightning Shield: You can walk around and do some AoE damage, or you can target an ally and have THEM do the AoE damage. Talent options include allowing the shield to increase autoattack damage as well, which opens up a lot of synergy with your teammates. It also persists during Wolf Mode, which lets you do a bit of damage while chasing someone down.
• E – Earthbind Totem: It’s an area slow, but it works differently from many of the other area slows players are familiar with. Rehgar can throw the totem from range, and it persists unless the totem is targeted and killed. Hiding the totem in a bush was discussed as a viable strategy to trip up your enemies, or to get a little bit of visibility on the map. Another option was tossing your Lightning Shield on it, though if the totem gets killed, your Lightning Shield ends too.
• Heroic Ability (R1) – Bloodlust: Help your allies do more damage faster, and move faster too. It’s a pretty iconic ability with a lot of history, so what more needs to be said?
• Heroic Ability (R2) – Ancestral Healing: Originally this was set to be a complete heal, until they realized how incredibly overpowered that was going to be. Instead, this has been toned to down to simply being the hugest single-target heal in the game. So if you really want to channel that back-line support healer role, this heroic will make Rehgar a solid choice.

RZ asked about where they anticipated Rehgar’s difficulty would be in comparison to other heroes, and Browder responded that he was different enough from entry-level heroes like Raynor that he certainly wasn’t beginner-friendly, citing stuff like throwing the totem and the spirit wolf trait, but he shouldn’t be too difficult to play either. Specifically he “falls in the middle” of the spectrum.

Garden of Terror

Browder discussed how, back in the day, they thought four maps would be a good target to shoot for. They quickly realized that it wouldn’t be nearly enough, and went back to the drawing board to conjure up new maps. Garden of Terror is the first example of such, being the fifth map. Meanwhile, the target now appears to be 7-9 maps, with some cycling in and out of play, similar to how Starcraft 2 plays.

The map is three lanes, and has a day/night cycle. During the night, small plant monsters spawn around the map, and killing them gives you seeds. Big plant monsters at two other fixed points on the map will spawn as well, but they drop seeds occasionally when they’re hit, so it becomes a matter of not only surviving the fight against these bigger mobs, and managing any opposing heroes that roll up, but also getting the most hits in on the mob so you can get the most seeds out of it.

Collecting 100 seeds lets one of your heroes become a giant plant monster who can wreak some havoc. However, seeds carry over from night to night, giving you some flexibility on when you want to actually call out Swamp Thing.

RZ asked about recommended heroes for the map, to which Browder responded thusly: mobility is less of a concern on this map in comparison to, say, Dragon Shire, where mobility is key. AoE damage (for taking out the smaller plant monsters) and cloaking (to keep an eye on what the enemy is doing) will be more valuable, so Zeratul was mentioned as a natural choice.

Progression System Updates

The big takeaway that RZ and the devs wanted to push with their discussion on the progression system changes was the idea that they want players to have goals outside of the matches. The progression system retool is meant to encourage players to set goals on what they want to do, whether that governs what heroes they choose to play during a play session or over the course of several sessions.

Along the same lines, making the talents unlock on a per-hero rather than a per-account basis was intended to give players the joy of unlocking things through play. So if you’re a level 30 player and you’ve got an itch to try a hero you haven’t tried before, the idea from the devs’ perspective is that it should be fun to play that hero and unlock the talents over time, rather than picking up the hero, having ALL of these choices with very little context.

They heard the feedback on how getting gold from cooperative play was a big motivator for some players, so that’s why it’s coming back in. Quests not requiring PVP is another change that was driven by feedback. A big thing they wanted to drive home here was the sense where feedback from the tech alpha players has a big impact on the ongoing design. Which leads straight into…

Artifacts

Similar to the moves on the progression system changes, the idea with artifacts is to give players an out-of-game goal to work towards. That said, the concerns that artifacts might railroad players into certain heroes or choices are all valid; RZ even mentioned the worry about whether a hero with no artifacts will be competitive with a hero who has them, and Browder contended that the difference shouldn’t be gamebreaking. 5-10% seems to be target for what these bonuses will be, and while those small difference may translate into winning or losing a bout with an enemy hero, they shouldn’t turn the entire match on its ear.

It can’t be a gamebreaking difference (because the artifacts shouldn’t be bar that determines whether you can compete in the match) but it also can’t be a meaningless difference, because otherwise it’s just a bar to fill.

Browder also took some time to comment that the Artifact system as a whole is really “coming in hot” to the tech alpha: it hasn’t received much internal testing, and is probably one of the must untested and raw components that Blizzard as a whole is putting in front of outside players. Expect player feedback to have a HUGE impact on this system once it goes live.

Q&A

The stream had enough time left for several questions plucked from social media. Below, we’ve summarized and paraphrased them.

Artifacts

1. Are you worried that the new artifact system will compete with your “easy-to-play but hard-to-master” ideology?The artifact system is easy to get into for players because the starting prices are relatively cheap (maybe around 100 gold per artifact). The hope is that the introduction of the system is delayed enough in the playing experience that by the time a new user gets to it, they’ll be ready to start digging into it. We hope that the choices we put into the artifact system are difficult–as a player, you’re trying to make those difficult decisions. Hopefully, players will be ready for more when they get to artifacts.
   
2. How are you going to prevent cookie-cutter builds with the artifact system?We’re designing the heroes to be diverse enough to prevent cookie-cutter builds. Some heroes might not have a lot of build options–some might basically just be DPS heroes, for instance–but the goal is to have a lot of heroes with a decent amount of play variety. It’s a work in progress, and we need a lot of input. We will be adjusting indefinitely. We want to get this system out sooner into testing to tune and polish it in an environment where we can see how it behaves better.

   Community testing has been really important in seeing snowballing issues, talent issues, gold issues, and others, and it will be important in seeing what changes need to be made with artifacts. Community testing gives us additional eyes to look for potential issues, and the sheer number of games being played simultaneously by players means that we have a lot more data to work with than we could produce internally over a larger amount of time.

3. Were the existing stats of heroes tweaked down to compensate for artifacts or are they a straight power boost?A couple of flat stat-boosting talents were removed, but in general, this is not the case. Artifacts are a bonus, and they will hopefully balance them out. Stats can be the razor’s edge for some play situations and we don’t want artifacts to become absolutely necessary to play a hero.

Progression Changes

1. How do you address the concerns that gating talents is going to create hostile and toxic gameplay for players playing new heroes?We believe that there’s a lot of builds with the talents that are already present. However, certain tiers on certain heroes have to be rearranged in order to make the first talent choices viable. There might not always be the best synergies between all talents for a given hero, but we aim to make all talents at least viable.
   
2. I understand incremental rewards for heroes, but gating talents and ultimates hurts experienced players and won’t help noobs.We’re really just trying to give you small goals. We’ll see how players feel about hero and account leveling systems when it goes live in testing. Tuning options can happen in a very short amount of time since our patching cycle is so steady. If it becomes a problem, it can be dealt with.

General

1. Do you see competitive gaming being set on one map or multiple maps?We see it working with multiple maps. Different maps present different challenges. It’s more fun to watch players deal with new threats in different environments–lanes, mechanics, etc.–and talents, heroic ability choices, and other decisions all affect how players approach and behave in a given situation.

    

2. The underdog system has been out for a while now. How do you feel it’s working out?We want the underdog system to keep the game competitive. You should never feel like you should just surrender a game. The winning team should still be the winning team, but the losing team should have a chance to come back. The underdog system will have some changes coming, such as a more granular XP reward based on who you kill. For instance, XP rewards are being tuned to award a certain amount of XP if you kill a player that’s, say, 1.7 levels above you and not just 1 or 2. When you kill a hero that’s stronger than you, you should get more of a reward, and when you kill a weaker player, less of a reward.
   
3. Are you planning to get rid of the input lag to make the game smoother and more responsive?A bunch of work is going into this and it feels much better. The engineering staff did a significant upgrade to the engine. However, it’s up to the players whether they feel it. Check it out when it goes live next patch. We understand what’s being asked for–clicks to be more precise and responsive–and it’s a lot of work on our end.

(*) And yeah folks, we know he’s “Rokcet.” It’s a gag from the stream.