by JR Cook - 8 years ago     show comments

Several members of the Heroes of the Storm team took to Reddit today to answer questions from the community. They provided a ton of insight into specific Heroes, as well as their overall design philosophies.

Here are the highlights in case you don’t feel like reading thru a 700+ comment post on your own:

• They are working on adding a reduced range version of Zealot Charge to the base kit of Artanis.
• They are satisfied with Tyrael‘s trait and do not plan to rework or replace it. They are fine with different Traits and Abilities having varying degrees of power.
• The next Heroes they are planning to redesign will be Arthas and Anub’arak. Nothing specific, but they would like to spruce up their Talents in keeping with the new design and Talent philosophy. These changes won’t be as large as the recent changes received by Kael’thas and Illidan. In a separate comment, one developer said that he felt like Arthas was the Hero that needed the most attention.
• Each Hero has an internal tag line to align the developer’s visions. Dehaka‘s is “A sneaky melee warrior who excels at initiation and grows more durable by collecting the Essence of his enemies.” The delay in his Drag and Isolation abilities is intentional because they can be devastating abilities and they don’t want them to be “guaranteed” hits.
• When asked if they plan to redesign Kerrigan, they said yes but added that they could answer that question the same way regardless of which Hero was named. She is high on their list, but they are not currently working on her. Interesting side note, early in her development she had Devouring Maw while Summon Ultralisk was on Zagara. They designed Kerrigan at a time when Heart of the Swarm was ramping up it’s development, which is why they settled on her brawler style.
• They do not feel like it is necessary to give Cleanse to every Support, although they do give heavy consideration when a Support doesn’t have it. What they are looking at is making the Cleanse choice less painful for Supports who have to give up healing output to take it. They don’t feel like Cleanse is OP because it usually isn’t the Talent with the highest win rate, and it isn’t that highly picked outside of competitive play.
• There aren’t any major reworks planned for Leoric, but there may be a small number of changes to his Talents and his lesser picked Heroic. They feel like the issues with Leoric can be fixed without a rework.
• When they are considering which Heroes need a rework they look at: Talent tiers by one Talent (pick or win rate), particularly low or high play rate, particularly low or high win rates, and Heroes that have a play style that isn’t fun to play with or against.
• Rexxar has a change on the horizon, but it is farther out and they haven’t determined the scope needed yet.
• There will be a small update coming out in a few weeks that should help some of the lower pick rate Supports.
• They provided some insight into how much testing goes into the development process. They said new Heroes usually receive 10 weeks of focused testing. Hero updates are tested for a minimum of two weeks, but usually 4+ weeks.
• As seen with Li-Ming and Xul, they typically don’t make adjustments to new Heroes until they have been out for two weeks, but they will react faster if something is too strong or too weak.
• They revealed that four of the six Heroes with the highest win rate are Specialists, but they didn’t identify the Heroes. They use the term Specialist to indicate that a hero may not be straight forward in their game play and may require out of the box thinking.
• They are open to the idea of adding a third Heroic for some Heroes and they are exploring adding one on Zagara to compete with Devouring Maw.
• They would like to give Questing Talents to as many Heroes as possible. They are excited to see how these Talents evolve the play styles of the Heroes who have them.
• They have no plans to rework Kharazim, although they are considering a fix for Insight. They say Iron Fist does have a role and it’s win rate is comparable to Transcendence.
• They are monitoring Jaina and her win rate, but they note that it actually went up after this most recent patch removing Bolt of the Storm. They are ready to make quick number changes if needed.
• Abathur will receive a minor buff to Monstrosity soon(tm), but they don’t have any plans to redesign it or drastically change it’s functionality.
• There are no current plans for Azmodan changes. He has decent Talent diversity.
• Part of their daily work load is to browse forums looking and player perception and feedback. Threads that gain a lot of traction in the community are seen by the dev team. The community team also sends in a weekly report highlighting the top issues among the community.
• Their internal data shows that Li-Ming is in line with other Heroes. They acknowledged that her ban potential is currently high, but they expect that to change the longer she is out and as other Heroes get introduced.
• They are happy with the base kit of Lt. Morales, but they may consider her level 20 options.

If you would like to read the full thread, including community comments, you can do so right here.