Overview of what I caught in the AMA:
- Tassadar rework coming
- Murky rework?
We're still trying to figure this out The current plan is not to make Murky a back-door siege hero like the old days though. Since hes still a few months off, I think it might be too early to discuss stuff we're looking at on him, as it's likely to change several times before PTR.
- Globe collection quests:
Overall I think the changes have been good for the game - they feel more rewarding to collect and a little easier to deny in a lane.
We are looking at some of the globe quest talents and seeing if we should make changes for them. One example being Regeneration Master:
-We've gotten feedback (internally and externally) that it feels really hard to gather 30 globes
-I like that it is really hard. If you can roam on a map between two lanes, that should go into your decision making when choosing this talent. Maybe don't pick it on Battlefield.
-We might try something where we split the final reward into 2 lesser rewards. Maybe Regeneration Master becomes gather 20 globes for the first reward, and 40 for the second? Still exploring this but it seems like a reasonable solve.
-I personally love 'uncapped' talents. Examples being Taste for Blood (you rarely cap), or Perfect Storm. Regeneration Master lost a bit of that when we capped it at 30, but most of the time you don't hit 30 so that is another reason I don't want to simply lower the cap to 20 or 25.
- question about Thrall and Worldbreaker buffs or changes:
Thrall scheduled for more build diversity in update middle of next year or so.
- Regarding Shield Wall vs Warbringer:
Internally, for a long time, Warbringer was viewed as the "weaker" Talent choice. From our viewpoint, how could you give up Shield Wall, which provides complete immunity to damage? We kept tuning up Warbringer, because our fear was that if Shield Wall came out as the stronger Talent option at that tier, we'd have a long uphill battle to ever get people to take something else.
We overdid it slightly. But actually, we think that'll be better for Varian's Talent diversity in the long run, as we can slowly buff Shield Wall and/or nerf Warbringer as needed to narrow the gap.
The most recent change was to nerf Warbringer slightly, because it's too strong. We know there have been lots of comments suggesting reducing Charge's cooldown somewhat, and we may still consider making those changes. But we're still wary of overdoing it, because man, Shield Wall is actually really strong too.
- Uther is a hero we will be looking at in the next few months. We think he is in a decent spot currently but would like to further emphasis his role as more of a Tanky Support character. I think Ideally you could run a team with Uther and some bruisers and maybe forgo the Warrior role.
As others have mentioned on this thread, Uther under-performs in sustained output, which is correct, because he is designed to be a bursty healer. He isn't currently being worked on. Likely sometime in Q2. We have ideas to push him towards a really tanky support, something you could run with a bruiser or two in certain comps. Utility/Healing isn't our only thought at the moment!
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I know the team has talked about trying a 4-lane map. A long time ago (Blizzard All-Stars days) we tested a 4-lane map that weaved in and out and the lanes converged into two lanes occasionally, it was certainly interesting, but the game is a lot different now. Might be cool to test in a Brawl before we try a live map with it. =P In terms of map design, we don't design maps specific to heroes. We aim to create a fun, engaging battleground first with a strong theme, and naturally based on that design and those ideas some heroes will be better than others. For example, when we made Braxis Holdout, we didn't create it for a hero like Rexxar, his kit just naturally feeds into point control, and we like when that happens.
- Greymane-
In general, Greymane is an interesting Hero in terms of balance. He's effective and sees play in the competitive scene, and he still has a niche on certain maps. He isn't all that common in Hero League anymore, and his winrate is a little lower than we'd like.
We know it's been a turbulent experience for Greymane players since he came out, and we're sorry for that. We genuinely think that his overall design has improved, but obviously there's still room to go. If he were one of the most powerful Heroes in the game again, we think the complaints about how he feels to play would go down.
That being said, there are a few changes coming for Greymane. We're throwing around some ideas to drastically change Marked for the Kill to solidify it as a Heroic you use at the start of a fight (while Go For the Throat is the finisher). We're also planning on adding Armor to Greymane while he is in Worgen form.
There are a lot of really good Basic Attack Heroes at the top of the meta right now, like Tychus, Valla, or Falstad, and we don't want Greymane to just replace one of them. If we do it right, there would be reasons to take him on battlegrounds like Battlefield of Eternity, when you otherwise wouldn't take the others (in fact I still do see him there when I play Hero League).
- State of drafts in hero league: We're pretty satisfied with how drafts usually go in Hero League. One of our bigger wins over the last year is that we've both reworked and released heroes that have unique identities on a team, which has helped our diversity compared to before. A year ago we were running into a fairly large problem where a lot of our heroes did just about everything very well, which made many heroes obsolete if there was another similar one that did their job better (Valla vs. old Tychus is an example).
Ideally we would like for players to look for situational picks pretty often, and whenever they see a particular enemy hero they can quickly think of a few heroes that they can choose that will be effective against them.
- Warriors are a tougher issue that we've recently had some conversations about. They often go in and out of style, and the temptation is strong to say that a particular kit is just better than the rest, and so they all need to offer CC/Mobility/Initiation to be viable. However, a counter-point to this argument is that there have been times when just about every Warrior has dominated the Meta, even those like Arthas, Stitches, and Leoric, which all don't offer the same CC/Mobility/Initiation that the current popular Warriors do. So is it just a tuning issue, a popularity issue, or is there something more going on? I would hesitate to say that it's a base kit issue, as history doesn't show that, and if it is then we would be really limited on our future Warrior hero designs.
- Hinderlands Blast: We're thrown around a few ideas, and we agree it could be more interesting.
- More role classifications like brusier: We've discussed this internally, it is something we'd like to pursue, but there are a lot of bigger things in front of it right now. I think we'll get to it eventually, but requires a lot of updates to the UI, Battle.net screens, etc, and those are pretty impacted teams at the moment.
- balance changes vs the meta: We do consider the meta, but we are really interested in seeing where pick rates currently are on a specific hero. Having multiple heroics is something unique to our game, and something we take pride in, so when we notice one heroic is picked substantially less, we make it a point to work on it.
In the case of Thrall, we don't think Earthquake was a bad pick, and the win rate was comparable to that of Sundering, but the pick rate discrepancy was like 98% to 2%. We also had a very low sample size though, so it is hard to accurately say. What we did know is we wanted to see those pick rates even out more, so we made a change. If we need to we can tune something down after it goes live, but getting people to notice it sometimes requires a bit of a bump.
- Hard counters like li Ming vs Vikings or Tychus vs Cho'gall: There are definitely many counters now in our game, and some are arguably too strong. This is something that has come up recently in our discussions.
Over the last year or so we've worked hard to make more counters in our game so that people can feel like they're making smart choices, both on the draft screen and in their talent choices. It's hard to say what's just far enough and when we've crossed the line, and i'm sure we'll be revisiting this from time to time.
As an example, I personally like the Li Ming vs. Vikings and Murky interactions. They are both heroes who thrive on not prioritizing their own lives as much as their enemies, so of course Li Ming can take advantage of that. However, Murky has Octo-Grab to threaten Li-Ming and a low cooldown Invulnerability, so he has options to do something about her killing him. Similarly, the Lost Vikings are often spread out across the map, and they have Longboat Raid to try to contribute to team fights if Li-Ming is there. While Li-Ming is definitely strong against them, it's by no means a shut-out where they are helpless if she's on the other team.
I am less a fan of some other concessions we've made in the name of "counters are great for the game", like Murky's Pufferfish vs. Tracer. There's very little that he can do about always stopping her auto-attacks, and her existence on the other team basically means that his fun is greatly negated due to essentially losing a button.
At the end of the day it's a question of how far is too far, and we have to be vigilant about making sure that even in the case of some of our harder counters, that both players feel like they have some ability to outplay their opponents.
- Enhanced Agility on Dehaka seems too weak now: This decision was part of the rabbit-hole that I mentioned on the patch notes. At the end of the day (errr, rework) we felt that giving him move speed in brush baseline fulfilled his stalking fantasy much better then having to take a talent and farm all game. Since this is now a baseline part of his power-pie, players can opt-into going wave clear and forego the extra move speed on Enhanced Agility. That being said, there are four talents on tier 1 and we would like all of them to have a place somewhere. Enhanced Agility may fall off as a top-pick on the tier but I believe the change overall was a decent buff to Dehaka.
Overall, we like the change to Dehaka that gives him some move speed baseline in brush - this plays into his global power and his stalking nature. While this talent might be undertuned now, we think overall the change was positive towards Dehaka's design/playstyle.
This talent is on our agenda to discuss in todays balance meeting though.
- Attack queuing and the bugs that have been causing abilities not to go off while right clicking? (ex, Kerrigan combo not going off)? Kerrigan's combo should actually be significantly improved now on PTR so you can go and play around with it to see if she's back to her normal player killing self. We also try to make targeted quality of life changes to specific Heroes in every patch, such as Diablo's Attack Animations which was changed in today's balance update, to help with these types of issues.
- Speed of buffs or nerfs to new heroes like Zarya vs Samuro?
For Zarya specifically, we had a limited amount of data and time to decide if we wanted to do a quick update. I pushed for the team to do it, and unfortunately we overshot the mark and quickly did another update to course correct.
Since then, we're still trying to determine if our quick action on Zarya was good for that character/the game, or if it was negative. I think we will likely go back to our more traditional patching of 2 weeks post release, but we can be quicker in some edge cases.
I guess it changes per Hero, but I think for the most part hitting a Hero with a few small changes 2 weeks after their release, and then again with bigger changes with more data and games under our belt a few weeks after that.
Zarya's changes happened a lot faster and more frequent than we'd like for most Heroes, but we were trying to have her in a good balanced state for the Blizzcon finals. I don't think we'll ever likely put everyone through that roller coaster again.
Samuro specifically was impacted because of BlizzCon.
- Azmodan: Ya he's a really interesting character for us to update because so much of his power is through talents. Overall I think we like this. We've discussed changing this but I think its kind of unique for him. Probably the biggest downside of this is that his Laser feels pretty lackluster unless you fully invest into it.
We're looking at a mini-update (mostly tuning) to Azmodan in the nearish future (next month or two) and one aspect of that is allowing some movement baseline to his Laser. Overall his kit plays mostly the same but his Laser feels a little better both talented and untalented.
- Pressure to buff heroes who aren't in the meta or nerf heroes who are too strong?
I personally don't stress over it too much until a character is sitting around 60% or is a top tier pick an entire tournament. There are always going to be heroes and talents that are not part of the meta or who are rarely seen. In some sense, this is a revolving door (as we buff up one character, it ends up bringing other characters down), but we try and keep this in mind and be smart about the buffs and nerfs we do.
All of this being said, our job is to try and make as many talents and heroes viable to the game at all levels of play. Over the course of the last many months I think we've definitely been heading in the right direction.
For Murky and Uther - we are looking at them. We often have a lot of characters in flux though so at some point it becomes a priority list. Uther's kit is not necessarily favorable to the current Meta where high sustain seems to be king.
- Nova: Her win rate is right around 50% currently, so we're not planning any changes for her.
- Anub'arak's beetles and percieved weakness of beetle talents:
Anub'arak is one of our older characters and to some extent the Beetles are there for fun, but to also help with his survivability - as a Warrior, that is going to be key for you. While trying to make unique talents/playstyles, one way to make Anub'arak more tanky is by making his Beetles do more to keep him alive (life leech, blocking abilities, etc.) It's possible these talents are just a bit on the older side and don't match his current playstyle as well anymore.
Looking back many years to early development on Anub'arak: There was a time where he could be played much like a Siege hero with his Beetles pushing down lanes and even split pushing. Obviously thats not who Anub'arak is anymore though.
In recent times, we have positioned Anub'arak to be a tank who counters mage characters pretty well (he has strong dive and can reduce damage from abilities). In this regard, the Beetles still work out nicely, as they can block skillshots as you dive those pesky Mages.
- Reason for Calamity nerf when Li-Ming's win rate is below 48% on hotslogs?
A lot of factors are taken into account when making any balance change. Her popularity and win rate are in a very good spot overall, but we are prepared to give her buffs in other ways if needed.
- Alarak and Gul'dan talent diversity?
While we don't technically have a mass rework planned, we do have tentative plans to do a slight shift of where their power currently lies. However, this is not a simple task and we feel it requires some other game/system changes before we start testing. You should know we are busy working on it, but don't have anything concrete to share quite yet.
- Balance of heroes in hero league vs professional play:
This is a tricky one. We want to see just about all of our heroes in some capacity in competitive, but we don't mind if the simpler ones are picked less often compared to their more complex counterparts (Raynor vs. Greymane for example).
I think we're ok with Kerrigan's use case, where she's largely picked in competitive on Infernal Shrines, and not so much on other maps. It makes the drafting for that map more interesting, and it gives her a place to shine without being too overbearing (which Kerrigan can definitely be).
I wish we saw more Butcher in competitive. We tried to give him a huge late-game power spike that in my mind would have made a great narrative for commentators to talk about throughout the course of the game. We had hoped that his huge power spike would be enough to make him a strong pick on more minion-based maps, but it just hasn't seemed to stick so far.
All and all we're happy with the diversity we have, but there are those heroes that pros just won't want to pick. It can be sad sometimes because those heroes can perform very well in everything up to and including Grand Master Hero League, but our hands are a bit tied at that point to buff them any more in the name of being a Pro pick without creating a lot more problems for everyone else.
In these cases we could rework them, but is it worth spending that much time on changing a hero's kit who is working for 99% of players? Maybe sometimes, but I don't think we would want to too often in the name of pro play viability.
- Sanctification nerf:
The goal with the Sanctification change was to allow for wombo combos to still be successfully executed and not be negated by Sanctification while also having a lower cooldown.
If you recall long ago, Judgement was the more favored heroic (by far!) so we lowered the cooldown of Sanctification substantially to entice people into picking it. We're now going back on some of that buff, and Judgement is still over a 50% win rate, so we didn't feel we needed to buff it in this case. We'll keep an eye on this though!
- How long does it take to go from noticing a problem with a hero to where players are testing changes on the PTR?
This really depends on the scope of our changes. If it is a big talent update, it can be several months or longer (especially if we're asking for new models/art/fx). Usually things that end up in PTR are part of larger patches, and have taken a while for us to develop. Otherwise, we will deploy the changes in our interim balance patches, which take us about a week or two to finalize (implement the small number tweaks, test for X days, prepare the patch and deploy to live).
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