by JR Cook - 8 years ago     show comments

Several members of the Heroes of the Storm team took to Reddit today to conduct a Heroes Brawl and Samuro themed Q&A. Here are some of the more interesting revelations from that discussion:

Samuro’s Blizzcon eligibility: Samuro will not be available for play in the Blizzcon tournament. A hero needs to be in the wild for two weeks before it is playable in tournaments.

Invulnerable fountains: They will not be making this change before Brawls go live. Their formula for siege heroes was too high and this will be adjusted going forward. Internal testing has shown that as players learn how to maximize their Objective advantage it often costs a team more than it gains them to remove a fountain.

Balance in Brawls: They are relying on their standard hero balance a lot. That means there will be some heroes that are stronger and weaker. They would argue this happens on some Battlegrounds and they like that it creates a unique Hero meta for that Battleground. Though typically they won’t interfere, a great example is Kharazim on Arena maps. They give him a level 1 talent trait based on what heroic the player picks. If they take Divine Palm they get the healing trait for example.

Hero specific experience in Brawls: One of the reasons they don’t offer Hero specific experience is because the rewards of 1,000 gold and a portrait for participating in three games are already pretty generous. Based on the differences in Brawl modes (varying game length, multiple heroes etc) they felt it was better to give the large gold reward plus the portrait instead of having a variety of different rules around how much Hero experience was awarded.

Brawl Matchmaking: Brawl has its own MMR that is tracked separately from other modes. It is seeded from Quick Match. Even though there is an MMR for Brawl, they favor faster matches since it isn’t a competitive mode.

Xul and Azmodan in Brawls: The reason these Heroes aren’t currently in Brawls is because they don’t have proper AI to support their skeletons/demons.

Observer slots for Brawls: They are looking at this but it won’t be available for initial launch.

Samuro W bug: They have identified what is going on with this bug (activating W during a back swing) and how to fix it. They believe they have the fix implemented, but they are not sure which branch of the codebase it’s in so they are not sure if the fix will be live when he ships, but it will be soon.

Why Samuro is manaless: This one is really simple, but not immediately obvious. It is because of his images! With all of those extra player nameplates running around, hurting game play clarity by obscuring things in-game, they decided to cut mana so his nameplates would be thinner and add less weight to the game.

Samuro’s Mirror Image: There are a handful of reasons why which clone the player ends up controlling when Mirror Image is cast is random, but one of the primary was ease of control and allowing players to immediately create their images with a single button press and no mouse involvement.

Samuro’s Jump animation: “So fun story! That awesome jump attack animation (i think there’s 2 variations?? maybe more? unsure!) has a big windup to it. However, we wanted Samuro’s attacks to be quick and snappy, and so they only are allowed to have a extremely short duration windup. Further, if you activate Critical Strike, it resets their weapon’s cooldown, causing the attack to happen instantly. So as a result, we only can safely play that animation when Samuro is about to Critically Strike from Wind Walk, when we can be relatively sure that there’s some time to do that windup.” Kent-Erik Hagman

Recent trend towards high skill cap characters: They like to make a variety of Heroes. A long while ago, they felt the game was missing these types of Heroes, thus they were welcoming to Hero designs like those to open up more playmaker options. They still want some heroes that are a bit more straightforward, and someone like Zarya can fit that bill.

Infernal Shrines: The all or nothing aspect of the Objective was brought up. They like how Battlegrounds have different behaviors and require different thought exercises from players to play them correctly. They notes that if a team is unable to contest an Objective there are plenty of other things for them to do such as getting mercenaries, pushing Forts/Keeps, or soaking multiple lanes to catch up in experience.

Lost on death quest progress: If they feel like a talent is high-stakes enough, then a punishing mechanic can add a lot of flavor and game play. It can be especially helpful if the counter play feels lacking.

Try Mode: They are in the very early stages of testing some radical things with what Try Me mode brings. They can’t promise anything, but they would like to let players be able to do more with those tools.

Force Move command: It is on their radar to add a Force Move command (move but not attack) keybind in the game so that players that want that can use it. There are not going to implement any changes to how right-clicking auto attacks work though, as it would be a fundamental controls change.

What Hero or ability will forever be left on the cutting room floor: “Ooooh i’ll take the bait! I’ll take the bait! Okay. So story time. Once upon time there was a Banshee. Well, before that, she was a High Elf named Sylvanas Windrunner, Ranger-General of Silvermoon! Until that dirty traitor, Arthas Menethil, under the influence of Frostmourne, destroyed her army, and wasn’t content with simply killing Sylvanas, turned her into a Banshee. After recovering her body, she became the leader of the Forsaken, broken free from the Lich King’s control! One day, this Banshee-Queen found herself in the Nexus! She encountered an enemy Hero, and immediately tried to take control of an enemy Hero, and use their abilities! But try and try as she might, she found the world, the engine, of the nexus, of this game (for which she has no time!! … but always finds herself in…), couldn’t handle the thought of her having control of an enemy Hero, using their abilities, changing their allegiance, even temporarily! And thus the Nexus exerted its control over the Banshee Queen, limiting her powers. Having been reminded of the dread of being under the Lich King, this very same Sylvanas now secretly fights to break out of this “Nexus”, and be her true self! None shall survive!” Kent-Erik Hagman

Favorite 5v5 mirror match in Brawls: Nova for John DeShazer and Murky for Kent-Erik Hagman.

These are just some of the topics discussed in the Q&A. As you would expect many of the questions received responses like “that’s an interesting idea” or “we would like to do something like that but there is no eta” so I tried to focus on the questions with the most detailed answers. If you would like to read the full Q&A simply click here.