by JR Cook - 7 years ago     show comments

The 2017 Spring Heroes Summit brought us a big amount of news coming our way in Heroes of the Storm starting with the revamped progression system, reward system, loot chests and an updated currency system. While many of these systems were hinted at during various panels at BlizzCon 2016, it’s great to see them come to fruition and how much of it is being released all at once. There was a ton of content to look at during the summit, so let’s break it down and dig into what impact this has on the Heroes scene.

Progression System

Blizzard came out of the gate at the summit initially announcing the progression system showing an understanding of how important it was to the community putting it out front and center first. Level caps for both accounts and heroes are essentially gone and “players shouldn’t reach the technical caps in my lifetime”. The graph showcasing the revamped leveling system for heroes really showed how much more rewarding it should feel now versus the current system. The account level now reflects your total hero level among all of your heroes, giving a better representation of your breadth of experience in the game.

Getting a hero to level 10 for that sweet master skins has generally been quite the grind for even the most determined players (even with a stimpack) and so this will be a much more welcome way to leveling up your account and heroes. Progression will be constant for players now as before hitting level 40 on your account simply meant the end of rewards and a kind of “end game” for Heroes. There will be essentially infinite rewards and leveling now, continuing to incentivise players with loot chests and more!

New Currency System

In Heroes 2.0 a completely brand new currency system will come in to replace using real world currency. Blizzard is dubbing these Gems and these will be rewarded to players at level 5 (1000 Gems) and occasionally will be able to be gotten through the progression system as players level up. These replace real money transactions and are purchasable with real world money. Since these are an in-game currency (Gems) this opens up the possibility for bonus Gems to be given to players who buy a certain amount at a given time. Gems will be able to get Loot Chests, heroes, and other featured items within the shop.

Gold will still be a currency for players and will be primarily used to unlock heroes for players going forward. They will also allow for a reroll of a loot chest (which can happen a limited number of times, with the cost increasing with each reroll).

Loot Chests and Shards

One of the biggest concerns from the playerbase has been the ability to get skins outside of only real money transactions. Outside of giveaways from streamers, or getting cards at live events you were required to be paying real world money to get these skins, and they came with three different color variations (and maybe you didn’t want some of them!). Now each skin will be unique in the new system and also have the chance of coming from a loot chest!

Loot chests have the chance to give you many different items that are now being added in Heroes 2.0. This includes banners, taunts, sprays, emoticons, and announcers! While there was a limited amount of items in the build at the Summit, we were shown a whole host of items that are coming with this release and there looks to be thousands of different items players will be able to acquire! The announcers were really fun to play with and gave a different experience to the Heroes landscape, getting a call out from Illidan for that impressive kill (while playing as Illidan) was a ton of fun and added a new layer of personality to the game.

Emoticons are also bringing another step of personality to the game allowing you to express yourself with colorful representations of nearly everything in Heroes! Every hero has their own unique set of icons alongside other themed sets such as food, gauntlet hand, and orc hands. These are usable in chat channels, lobbies, and in-game! Blizzard during the announcement said when they brought this to their artists they jumped at the chance to create as many as they could and ran with the ideas.

With all of these items available what in the world do you do if there’s an item you want and your loot boxes are just not giving you what you want? Blizzard has implemented the shard system similarly to the dust currency in Hearthstone and the credit system in Overwatch where duplicate items will be broken down into the shard currency, and this will be able to be used to purchase all the aforementioned items (including skins!).

Loadouts and The Collection

With so many items to be customized on your hero there is not a loadouts system that you can outfit your hero with any combination of various items, and even save the loadout and give it a unique name! Three of these are available for each hero allowing for a wide variety of customization’s for your favorites!

With the collection system now available you’ll be able to see what you have at your disposal, and what you have yet to earn, broken down by many different categories. For example Heroes are broken down by their specialization (tank, assassin, etc.); announcers by franchise (WarCraft, StarCraft, Diablo) and so on for each of the new types of items!

Overall

Heroes of the Storm 2.0 brings some much needed changes to the base system of the game alongside some wonderfully fun features. Being able to progress your heroes and accounts past their current limits (and be rewarded for them!) will be great for players going forward. Skins being craftable, and earnable, has been a much clamored for feature in the game for some time now and it’s great that it’s being brought to the forefront.

Day one of this new patch should be quite exciting for current players as your entire hero level progression will convert into your account level progression and reward the appropriate loot that one would get for these levels. For many accounts we’ll be seeing hundreds of Loot Chests unlocked to heavily reward players who have kept up with the game!

We’re excited to see all the items that will be coming to the Nexus as Heroes of the Storm 2.0 is just a tip of the iceberg and will be hitting the PTR today for everyone to dive into!