We’ve brought in a few of our live design experts to answer your questions on the latest changes introduced to Heroes of the Storm. Feel free to ask questions about the recent changes to the game, your favorite heroes, talents, or anything else you’d like to know regarding balance and the current state of the Nexus!
For today’s Q&A, we’ll have the following developers in attendance:
/u/BlizzCooper – Matt Cooper (Lead Balance Designer)
/u/BlizzNeyman – Alex Neyman (Balance Designer)
/u/BlizzAZJackson – Adam Jackson (Balance Designer)
/u/Blizz_AKlontzas - Alexander Klontzas (Producer)
Please feel free to start posting your questions in the thread! We’ll be starting at 12:00 PM PST.
As a reminder: There will be questions posted by CMs from non-English speaking regions. If you'd like to see these questions answered, feel free to upvote them for more visibility.
We wanted to give some insight into the recent armor changes to Warriors, what our design intentions are, and the direction we’re continuing to head.
First off, we want to assure everyone that our recent changes are not a shift in design direction, but an attempt to begin future-proofing the flexibility and diversity of our Hero pool. We have had soft-counters in the game for a while now, they have just been a bit more hidden – mainly in a Hero’s core kit and talent tree. For an example, Anub’arak’s diving potential coupled with multiple lockdown options has always made him a great pick against pesky backline Heroes. The addition of passive Spell Armor to Anub’arak is intended to further amplify this role and direct him towards Mages specifically.
Adding base Armor to a few Warriors is our initial push to both hone and broadcast the strengths of a few of our Heroes. While it is true that we are sharpening some of their roles, it is far from our intention to design the game into a spot that it becomes ‘Rock-Paper-Scissors’. Games should not begin and end at the draft screen.
That said, the forums are ablaze with discussion and it’s obvious that everyone has a lot of questions about our underlying goals, so here goes:
This philosophy can be applied to any archetype, but let’s look at Warriors specifically for this example. If every Warrior is always good in every situation, players will naturally gravitate towards the ones with the best win rates. Before long, we reach a point where a couple are deemed the best, and the others fall to the wayside until changes are made. This naturally leads to us rebalancing them in order to reach parity. After the dust settles, the power may shift to some new Heroes, or stay as it was – rinse and repeat. This is a very typical cycle of balance which is healthy for shaking up the meta, but never truly solves long-term diversity issues.
By strengthening certain aspects of Heroes, or granting them bonus effectiveness vs. certain compositions, our end-goal is to allow for situations to arise where a Hero that is generally most effective is not always the most optimal choice. This allows for niche picks to shine, interesting team synergies to develop, and most importantly – a wider range of viable and competitive Hero choices.
This train of thought has not been limited strictly to just our live game. Our entire design staff are actively working towards this goal. Whether we are developing a new Hero or looking to rework an older one, we discuss at great lengths the reasons why you’d want to pick them over similar Heroes. Our Hero roster is expanding very rapidly and we are doing our best to make sure that each of them have a place in the Nexus.
At the end of the day, we are all in agreeance that permanent hard-counters are not healthy for the game and prefer to lock the more egregious ones behind mechanically driven methods more so than passive ones. We never want a game’s outcome to be decided before it begins, but we also feel it’s okay for a team to gain certain advantages through a well-thought-out draft.
Was it a conscious decision to have Probius' Photon Cannon not prioritise Heroes?
It was a conscious design. While I cannot completely speak for the Hero designers, I talked it over with them once we started to get this feedback and this was the main reasoning:
We did not want Probius to be a huge lane bully where he could place his Photon Cannon far up and zone out an enemy hero completely due to them not being able to effectively trade against the cannon. We actually had a few play tests awhile back where the cannon was much stronger, and there was lots of feedback that it just feels really bad to play against when it is so powerful and there are few ways for many heroes to deal with it.
Probius is meant to be a more defensive hero in nature. Having the cannon auto-target minions first forces Probius to make a decision - either place the cannon forward and have it help clear waves, or place it behind your wave and use it purely defensively for hero dives.
We aren't completely immovable on this, and will re-evaluate going forward once we get more data on how Probius is performing over time.
I want to strongly agree that even if the probius cannon is placed defensively, it's just not threatening enough. It feels like any hero can just dive probius and be fine.
I think this could feel better with a buff to the non-damage parts of his w (increasing slow, or decreasing setup time) or just buffing the cannon's damage.
This is completely valid feedback, and I want to make the point that "the cannon is too weak and it's not saving me when heroes dive me" and "the cannon should target heroes" are completely different things that are often lumped together.
Often, particularly when a hero comes out with a below average win rate, we get the feedback that their kit is clunky and doesn't work, and that we need to completely iesign most aspects of the kit in order for them to be viable. A large part of our jobs is finding out whether or not an issue with a hero is due to the kit itself not working or if it's due to tuning. We go through this a lot when iterating on new heroes, so obviously we believe that their kit works at a base level when they are released.
Sometimes a kit doesn't mesh together for the long term, and we make changes to make it flow better. However, before completely changing how our heroes play, we are much more inclined to test whether or not a hero is losing due to being tuned too low first.
What do you think about current probius situation?
Many users are very disappointed and concerned about current Probius design and balance. It is said that Photon Canon(E) is useless and not powerful, and probius's viability is too weak.
Especially, many users and some pro players agreed that Pylon(D) should be charged.
There are a lot of thoughts!
1 Builder heroes have traditionally been very difficult to balance, and Probius was no exception. These kinds of heroes tend to be extremely overwhelming when they are too strong, and can ruin the experience in less coordinated play even when they are balanced correctly. Because of this, it's not too surprising that feelings are strong about this hero, especially since he's so darn cute!
I think the design of Probius is correct for many reasons. I'll give a quick list of some of those here:
2a. While we all would love for him to just summon a million Photon Cannons all day, it would be way too similar to Gazlowe who does a similar thing. It would also be hard to differentiate any future Builder heroes in the future if we put too much of their power pie into their turrets.
2b. Summoning so many buildings creates a lot of clutter in our game that causes other problems (minion pathing for one). We're much more cognizant now of how many Health bars and structures a Hero can create, and honestly looking back we likely would not have created as many heroes as we have that summon a bunch of stuff if we could do it all over again.
2c. Playing a builder hero is fun, i'll agree with that. However, the mastery over time is very limiting. For the first ten or even fifty games it's new and interesting, but over time there is little room for real growth or mastery of the hero. We wanted Probius to be about more than his cannons, and we think that this design which relies more on zoning in areas around his Pylons is more strategic than going all-in on cannons.
3. Probius is meant to be a hero that's not great to pick all the time. Since he's new, he's obviously going to be played in nearly every situation out there, which is going to artificially lower his win rate. When chosen on the correct maps and with the correct team compositions, it's possible that his win rate will increase as people get better at learning when and how he should be used.
4. I'm a little sad that he's come out a bit low on the win-rate side, at least via initial data, but i'm confident that we can get him to a place where he's more fun to play while still having a healthy amount of counter-play. We already have a few ideas on how to buff Probius if he needs it once more data comes in.
Is Johanna performing acceptably as "the wave clear tank" since it was made baseline with a nerfed version? Or has her niche been pushed more towards "the tank where the support doesn't need cleanse"? I don't know if we see her as the premier "wave clear tank", as characters like Dehaka are more flexible at winning a solo lane and are played that way on Braxis for example. She does still bring great wave clear though in team rotations, especially on a map like TOTSQ.
For your Cleanse comment, thats interesting - I don't know if we've ever really thought of Johanna as the tank that doesn't need a support with Cleanse. I think it's certainly a fair point, but at the same time, having Cleanse couldn't hurt as Johanna can't pull herself out of a stun lock once it begins. Interesting point though!
There are still some Talents that don’t fit well with the lore and concept of the character; Malfurion – who is clearly not a Terran - using Scouting Drone, Tyrande and Abathur using Calldown: MULE, and Malfurion and Nazeebo using Ice Block at Level 13 while ‘Frost Mage’ Jaina using it at Level 20 feel a bit awkward. I think putting a thematic twist or hero-specific flavor to these generic Talents would help fine-tuning balance and increasing the quality of the game – for example, Nazeebo’s Ice Block could have a bit more personal flavor considering Witch Doctor in Diablo III has Spirit Walk that also grants invulnerability. How do you feel about this idea? Don't forget that this is the Nexus where anything can happen so it's not crazy to think that Malfurion has been hanging around Raynor and borrowed a few Scouting Drones. In all seriousness though, it is a pretty cool idea to theme some of these abilities more closely with their respective lore or origin. No promises, but I'll shop the idea around and see if it's something we want to explore since we would have to change the functionality of these in the process to make them truly fit their intended theme.
It's all a matter of prioritizing what work needs to come in first. These abilities are functionally working so it's hard to put them before more critical balance needs but there are other implications sometimes as well that we would need to figure out. Let's say we swap Malfurion's Scouting Drone with a Wisp, how do we differentiate it from Lunara's Wisp or if we gave Nazeebo Spirit Walk, how do we make it different from Tassadar's Dimensional Shift? We would need the Art to stand out in some cases to avoid overlap but also keep things as unique as possible to each hero wherever possible.
Regardless, we tend to look at these generic talents when we do a broader rework of a Hero to decide if they should keep or change them so we will get through them eventually, just a matter of finding the time.
Regarding spell armor and physical armor it's come to my attention that many heroes ignore this due to how Heroes of the Storm abilities are set up via legacy decisions. IE all abilities do spell damage and all AA's do physical damage.
Have yall ever thought of changing damage types of abilities to physical damage for some abilities? For example Valla does magic damage with all abilities but honestly Hungering Arrow, Multi-shot, and Strafe should all do Physical damage. Under the same idea, perhaps Jaina's AA's should do magic damage. Yes we have considei that. There are a massive amount of ramifications about going down that rabbit hole though. I am not saying we won't do it in the future, but it has a much larger range of impact than one would suspect.
This allows for niche picks to shine
Games should not begin and end at the draft screen
These seem to have conflicting goals though.
If Hero 1 is normally a B against everything, but Hero 2 is an A against auto attackers and C against Mages. Against a mage comp you should take Hero A. How is this not having the game revolve around the draft?
As stated in the original post, we are okay with slight draft advantages if a team can leverage them. For example - if the enemy team picks up Gul'dan and Kael'thas early in the draft, we are happy conceding an advantageous position for an Anub'arak pick over a more general Warrior such as ETC or Muradin.
However, in this scenario (and in our data so far) the advantage of going Anub'arak should be small and does not mean that the double mage composition becomes an auto-loss. If the advantages in these scenarios ever swing into uncomfortable levels, we will react swiftly.
I could be wrong, but I thought it was stated in one of your dev comments that you wanted to lessen the double warrior meta. With tanks such as ETC and Muradin (maybe even Varian to an extent) on the table, are you worried those general tanks will be highly contested up top and then a second warrior just added later as a comp counter leading to even more of a 2 warrior meta? This is also currently a bit rough in anything but customs as there is no hero swapping in HL or TL and picking anything but a generic warrior early on (depending on what the player can play) could lead to a fair disadvantage.
We talk about this amongst ourselves constantly. In a perfect world you would not have to counter a heavy front-line with one of your own. We would prefer to give our player base the arsenal to counter certain meta line-ups on their own - They brought two tanks, lets counter with a poke + disengage team. While our Warriors are currently the hot topic, we are looking to make adjustments to all of our Hero archetypes in order to support this.
The recent updates to hero descriptions show a new system for classifying heroes: Tank, Bruiser, Mage, Assassin, Healer, Support, Summoner, and a few that don't fit any and are just called Hero.
Will the Warrior, Assassin, Support, Specialist system go away or be replaced anytime soon?
Its only function seems to be quests, now that QM rules don't even follow it anymore. The new descriptions show that even Blizzard knows the problem with the old system: Medivh and Tassadar being in different categories (after Tass rework); Sonya and Thrall being in different categories; Naz, Sylv, and Hammer not being in the same category as every other ranged damage dealer.
This is something we've discussed internally and externally for some time now. We do want to rework the Warrior/Assassin/Support/Specialist naming at some point. These categories serve a few purposes, for quests as you mention, but also to give players a really quick indication of what a hero can and cannot do. In this regard, I think these 4 categories are failing a bit since theres a huge difference between a Lt. Morales Support and a Tassadar Support.
Sorry, I don't have a concrete answer on when this will change or what the exact change will be.
With some of the recent changes to Warriors (and the knock-on effect of that change affecting damage dealers) and the way that Supports have been designed for a while now, it seems like you want to move away from 'standard' or 'general' picks that are good in every situation.
Are you scai of the impact that this might have on drafts? Specifically the kind of situation where both teams just want to not lose the draft in the first phase (by leaving themselves open to be countei too hard by a late Tank, Support or Damage pick) and it will end up becoming a much more boring opening to the draft. That kind of situation also might stifle innovation and off-meta picks and compositions.
One of the main reasons we wanted to start making these kinds of changes is to encourage more strategic depth to drafting. We are still very happy with having 'general' picks in each archetype, but there should also be a penalty (statistically?) for being an all-around good choice (right now you could argue that that isn't the case, and we are working on that). Using the current situation of Warriors as an example:
Both ETC and Muradin bring 'premier' tanking core kits. In order to reach parity amongst all 'tank-like' Warriors we need to either start homogenizing them to be more akin to ETC or Muradin (which we are trying to avoid), or start sharpening their current strengths in order to give them a time and place to be drafted over the current 'meta' choices.
While our goal is not to make the opening of drafts more boring, we do realize there will likely be some fallout (and we will be keeping an eye on it). However, I fully believe that there are deeper levels of mind-games that can now be played - If a team opens with a first pick Anub'arak, are they opening themselves up to lose the draft to a couple Basic Attackers? Or are they baiting you into something else?
As with all of our changes, we are excited to see them in action and will respond accordingly
When your team feels like a hero needs to be buffed to be in a good spot--not nerfs, because those situations tend to stand out, but when they're falling behind--what is the exact system of metrics you use to determine when to hit them? I know win rate and pick rate are common among us armchair enthusiasts, but is there anything more in depth you guys use when you look at a suffering champion to finally decide when to adjust them?
Win rate and pick rate are definitely metrics we look at. I'll give a little more details on those and then add a couple other things:
Win Rates: We look at win rate across the board, in ladder play, different MMR brackets, pro play, etc. Often times we will find conflicting data which makes our decision more challenging: Take Tassadar as an example - this is a character who for a long time could have used a buff in ladder, but a nerf in esports.
Pick Rates: For pick rate we're looking at overall play rate, draft rate, ban rate, when a character is picked in a draft (early vs. late), esports play rate, map specific pick rates, etc.
Some other things we consider:
Talent Health: Talent diversity, how many talent builds are viable, is there a single talent propping this character up, etc.
Incoming Reworks & Design Changes: As an example here, if Rehgar is weak, but we know Malfurion is getting a major rework, we might wait to see how the Malfurion stuff pans out before working on Rehgar.
Community Perception: Feedback from you guys!
Tyrael currently has to be one of the characters with the least impact/interesting talent choices at pretty much every tier. With the removal of imposing will, his 13 talent tier is now one of the weakest in the game and all 3 choices have minimal impact and very little in terms of changing Tyrael or his playstyle in anyway. Are there any plans for a complete talent overhaul as currently Tyrael has so many trap talents such as follow through, or can we expect nothing for an Angel yet again after another round of nerfs on him.
We felt removing Imposing Will was the correct design choice for Tyrael's future role in the Nexus. We currently aren't looking for a full rework on him, but we are constantly looking at how to make player talent choices more impactful, and Tyrael's Tier 5 is no exception.
How do you decide what hero should be reworked next? Is it based on the hero’s popularity among the players? Pro players? Something else?
I'm going to copy/paste an answer I gave to this question in a previous AMA, and elaborate a bit on the response:
Choosing which heroes we're going to rework isn't an exact science, however some of the things we look for are:
How healthy is their talent diversity? (Ex. Zagara pre-rework had really bad talent diversity)
Is there anything about their kit/talents that feels bad as the user to play with? (Ex. It felt bad as the Butcher losing all of his Meat stacks every time he dies)
Is there anything that feels too oppressive when playing against them? (Ex. Kael'thas with the original Ignite talent)
Is the hero too similar to others and we need to create a niche for them? (Ex. When to pick Tychus vs. Valla before his rework)
These are generally the things that we look for when deciding to rework a hero. In addition, I would say that if a hero just has an outdated talent tree or kit, we are more likely to take a look at them to see if they need a rework.
Also to answer your question about popularity, it's not really something that we take into consideration when reworking a hero, as they can often be unhealthily popular due to win/loss rates. For example, right now I could easily make a hero very popular for the wrong reasons by tripling their damage and health.
Our attitude is that we are much more concerned about fixing and improving the design of our game, and that the popularity of heroes gets better in a healthier way as their designs improve.
Are you guys able to give us an update or an ETA on when the Uther changes will be arriving? It's been waaaay too long since Justice got it's retribution fix...it demands it NOW!
Good news, Uther is actually being worked on as we speak so be on the lookout for an update coming sooner rather than later.
Why was Arthas' Army of the Dead Heroic buffed? It seemed to already be the go-to pick as well as being very strong, while Summon Sindragosa was also seeing play in certain situations.
I understand the confusion, as there are often a lot of smaller changes like this that can look out of place at first. I can promise you we always have a train of logic behind them, even if it ends up not being correct. I'm going to use data based on 1+ MMR players in Hero League who have Arthas above Level 8 as my example to give you the context that these players should know what they're doing, though the larger data pool supports the same conclusions. Here was the thinking:
Pre-rework, Army of the Dead was both the losing Heroic, as well as the lesser picked one. It was picked 38% of the time compai to 62% for Summon Sindragosa, and it was winning 49% of the time compai to 52% for Sindy. They're not inciibly far off here, so we could leave well enough alone.
In the rework we removed damage off of Arthas in favor of survivability. This could potentially mean that Army of the Dead is even less needed on Arthas, as now he can tank damage even better than before, making Summon Sindragosa possibly even stronger as it gives him tower shutoff capability as well as the ability to engage on the enemy team, which is something he's normally not very good at.
We also had feedback that Army of the Dead can just feel bad to use due to how easily the Ghouls die to incidental AoE damage. Arthas also often uses his Army purely to consume his Ghouls for Health. We wanted to buff up the Health and damage a little so that there's a little more of "I want to keep my Ghouls alive so they can kill my enemies" instead of "I don't care about these dumb things... gimme dat HEALTH!"
The buffs to Army of the Dead were fairly minor. We weren't looking to drastically upset the balance of these heroics, but more to "catch up" Army of the Dead compai to what we saw the future appeal of Summon Sindragosa to be post rework.
We could be wrong in this line of thinking, as it could just turn into "well i'm a tank and Army lets me tank better so i'll just pick that!", but here's to hoping that doesn't happen!
With the recent clamping changes. Has there been a discussion about how the changes break shift-queuing of abilities? Is there a chance of this becoming a per-talent option, instead of an absolute?
Tyrael, for example, is no longer able to have a Q queued(see what I did there?) to fire as soon as he moves within range, as he was able to previously. In the current patch, he will move to his destination completely, then fire his Q in the direction of where Q was targeted.
Hmm, that does sound odd, maybe working as intended with the new system though. I'll bring it up with engineering and tech gurus to see if that is the expected behavior or if we can make this better.
Thanks for the callout.
I don’t quite understand the recent Tyrael changes on PTR; As I feel Tyrael was in a good state in terms of balance before the patch except Imposing Will, I’d like to know what was your reasoning for removing not only Imposing Will but also Amplified Healing and Hardened Shield. Even though Angelic Absorption heal amount has been increased, the Talent will not help Tyrael much as the healing amount still feel lackluster and it lost its synergy with Amplified Healing. I also was a bit disappointed that there were no changes on Judgment - which could use some buffs – while it has become much harder to effectively use Sanctification due to the nerfs on some tank Talents.
We often have to make difficult decisions when it comes to changing popular talents in the name of making the game healthier overall. This was one of those choices that we think will be better for the longer term health of the game, even if it's not the popular one to make. Here was our line of thought on Imposing Will:
Imposing Will is a hugely popular talent, particularly at Pro play. However, we do not feel that the talent is particularly well designed, as it was offering a large amount of power with very little counter-play for the enemy. It was fairly easy to proc as Tyrael got to choose when to activate Righteousness, and it would instantly and heavily punish anyone who happened to be hitting him at the time, even with abilities like DoT effects.
It was unclear when opposing players made the mistake of hitting Tyrael when Imposing Will was active. It felt like a very random, very severe slow effect that seemingly came from nowhere.
We tried some variations of Imposing Will that embraced a more of an anti-caster function, but did not find anything that was a big enough win to put into the game at the time.
We largely removed Amplified Healing from Johanna and Tyrael due to its inherent synergy with their baseline Armor. They both now get more effective healing, and this was effectively adding stacks on stacks for them.
We replaced Hardened Shield with a spell-specific version to further embrace his anti-caster role.
We did buff Judgment! Judgment (R) ?Damage increased from 100 to 150 Splash Damage increased from 50 to 75
As a final note, I wanted to make it clear that we have no intentions of causing Tyrael to fall off in our game, and that while we believe he will be OK with the changes we have made, we are prepai to make more changes to ensure that he remains viable.
Are you still going to change the balance of healing output(i hope so) or you reevaluated it? Are Supports, going to be less reliant on healing and more on, at the moment, secondary parts of their kits? Or supports are still going to be considei mainly healers?
For the most part, we like that healing feels inciibly powerful in Heroes of the Storm, and that these characters are a critical part of the team. We don't really have any sweeping plans to gut healing or anything along those lines. However, as we do updates to our healers/supports, we are looking for areas to enhance outside of purely healing, partially to keep all these characters unique from each other.
Will tychus ever get any changes to his sustain? That's the stuff is not too? viable and it was a huge part of tychus.
It's possible - level 13 on Tychus was designed to be a tier that offei some survivability for Tychus (or range in the case of his Q talent, which keeps you safer). That's the Stuff! was never intended to be a build-around talent that allowed Tychus to brawl toe to toe with other characters by out-healing their damage.
I think if we see Tychus fall off, while we could buff up this talent again, we'd probably prefer to address Tychus overall.
Any Comments regarding sylvanas's tier 1 and tier 7 talents?
These two tiers are intended to improve her PvE capabilities in the direction you choose. Looking at stats specifically, tier 1 looks pretty good pick & win rate wise, but we can make some tuning changes to help 7 out. Specifically, Possession and Unstable Poison could use some buffs. Will look into this.
Are we going to see some reworks/buffs to Lili?
She is not high on our list, but we are looking at some updates to some other supports, including: Tyrande, Uther, and Lt. Morales.
Is there any change we'll get to have a hero that is more trap based? Land mines, trip wires, and sneaky things like that? I always thought having someone pretrapping objective areas would be really neat!
Sounds like a fun hero idea - we do have some of these in isolate with Sgt. Hammer mines, Chromie Traps. I'll pass it along to the team.
Are there any plans to look at Alarak?
Yes! We are working on an Alarak update that will be coming soon (tm). The main focus of this update is improving his talent diversity.
... Just to confirm soon (tm) is not actually in the next month
Is there any hope that we could get self-casting of Ancestral/cleanse back so supports can play more aggressively?
We like the limitation of those abilities and feel that it offers some counter-play to the enemy team (stun the guy with Cleanse). We aren't currently looking at changing those back. In terms of aggressiveness: Rehgar is definitely themed to be an aggressive support, so if that's not currently working out, I think we could target changes to other aspects of his kit (such as Lightning Shield, Totem, or Feral Lunge).
Do you have any plans to rework such heroes as Medivh, Abathur and the Lost Vikings? They are not very popular in Hero League and considei to be «situational» heroes.
We very recently made a few number changes to Abathur that we hope will bring him to a better place. For Medivh and The Lost Vikings, I think we're ok with them not showing up very often as they are meant to be hard to play and somewhat situational. Medivh has actually risen in popularity in the last couple of months in both competitive and Hero League and Vikings can still cause havoc on certain maps like Garden of Terror or Warhead Junction. I will say thought that we do have some quality of life changes for both in mind that may see the light of day somewhere down the line.
Any spessific reason why Varian's damage taken isn't being tracked when he picks a shield?I really like seeing how much I tanked for and comparing that to my deaths if I'm being too much in enemies' faces, not enough or if I don't have many deaths and a lot of damage taken, then I know I'm doing a good job at soaking damage for teammates. Other than that, love your game Heroes of the Storm team, keep up the great work. <3
This is actually on the list to get on the TAB screen. I can't remember off the top of my head when this is going to go out to you guys but it's definitely something we want there.
Any ETA of Leoric rework?
In the nearish future (next few months) we're looking at some tuning adjustments and will experiment with some of the suggestions we've seen from you guys!
In terms of a full rework - Leoric is not currently on our schedule for a major overhaul. We like his role in the game, but do acknowledge his talent tree could use some love.
Any plans for a big support rework patch like this warrior patch? Li li and Tyrande could use some updates.
Changes to Tyrande are currently being play tested internally so we hope to have her in your hands once we're confident with her shiny new toys. Li Li probably won't see changes until a bit later down the line.
How do you feel about heroes that are poor in high level play, but can be inciibly powerful in low level, quickplay matches?
Ideally all characters would be viable across a wide range of skill levels and play modes, but this is a near balance impossibility. Take Gazlowe as an example - I think we'd love to see him in esports at some point, even rarely, but it's not something we're actively balancing or designing for. As long as Gazlowe has a place in the game, maybe its QM, then cool!
Thoughts on Zarya filling up her energy by tanking tower shots? Feels like there is no way to prevent full energy Zarya.
Working as intended - if she is using her shield to specifically soak unneeded damage (tower shots), then you should be able to punish her while its on CD.
If he saw that it was too powerful or she needed nerfs, it's something we could consider.
Thoughts on quests that are nullified on death if not completed (Kael lv 1 Convection and Medivh lv 7 master touch)
We've discussed a lot internally about quests we like, quests we don't like, what we want to see more of, etc. The TLDR of those discussions was that everyone loves different types of quests - some or the designers want to see more quests like Convection and Master's Touch, others want uncapped quests, multi-part quests (High King's Quest), etc.
I can't say when the next one of these 'death reset' quests will be coming in, but we think they have a place in the game - although probably less common than other types of quests.
Do you have any plans to revamp Dehaka? He can be fairly strong in some team compositions but never really feels like a hero that makes a gigantic impact. in 1v1 fights with nearly every other warrior hero he normally just flat out loses.
We did update Dehaka after BlizzCon, so it hasn't been that long since he's received changed. In terms of 1v1 potential, Dehaka is a huge lane bully. However, a little bird whispei to me that there may be some tiny updates coming.
Any chance of an update to lucio's talent's? there's really only 1 good option per level. So it's every game I always pick the same talents because the rest are just ehh. Example lv1 20% movement speed is clearly the best likewise 8 min heals for more AoE is clearly the best.
Yes and No.
Yes - we will update Lucio's talents at some point. No - it won't be any time soon as he just came out and we still want to give players time to play with him, learn how to use him, etc.
One of the highest upvoted questions was answered a day late:
As Cleanse is considered as must-pick Talent for Supports, I think there are not only notable gap between Supports with Cleanse and without Cleanse, but also lack of Talent diversity at Level 7 for many Supports. Could you tell us about what is your current thoughts on Cleanse and share some of Support changes you are considering, if any?
Hey! A day late, but I figured I'd get one more response in.
Cleanse is an extremely powerful tool, that can create some really awesome reactive playmaking and does a good job keeping certain disable heavy compositions from running rampant.
From a balance perspective, we like what it's doing for the game, but we don't want Cleanse to be mandatory to make a Support viable. We're tackling this from a few angles.
Different ways to counter-act CC via a Talent, potentially at a different power level and tier. Kharazim's Cleansing Dash is an example of this. We're beginning to experiment with other ways of augmenting Basic Abilities when they interact with disabled targets.
Compensating supports that don't have Cleanse in other ways. Uther is our anti-burst Support, so he'll probably always have that. But he doesn't have the raw healing over time that Lucio does, and from a balance perspective we think there's a tuning amount that will make him worthwhile when he doesn't have Cleanse.
In regards to incoming Support changes, I can share a little info about Uther. He's going to have more frequent self-healing without sacrificing his ability to save others, have the ability to provide short bursts of Armor to allies, and will have an entire tier at level 7 that is built around countering disables in different ways. He'll be a nice pick if your team is a little fragile or the opposing team is burst heavy. He won't have the raw healing output that other Supports can have, unless he's taking a lot of damage himself.
Hi guys, I’m Bakery - the Support and Team Captain for Team Dignitas - and here are the absolutely necessary fixes that need to come to ranked play regarding new seasons.
I personally believe that soft resets have 2 goals, to allow people to move around without being affected by games that happened last season, and to keep every player in the exact same position on the ladder that they were before. I don’t think the current system is fully achieving the first goal, and I do think it’s introducing issues that make the experience at the start of the season much worse for the player than it has to be. There are three major changes that I would make to the system, that I feel would make it much better.
The first is the algorithm used to do the reset. We don’t know exactly what the algorithm does right now, but we do know that it resets the uncertainty, making it easier to move around. I would want to raise the uncertainty a bit, but I think the infinitely better system would be a soft MMR reset. This would involve taking every player’s MMR, add it to the average MMR, and then times it by 0.5. Let’s say that the average MMR is 2000, and we have two test players, one in Bronze with 1000 and another in Master with 4000. Both players are pulled more towards the average, with the Bronze player ending up on 1500, and the Master player on 3000. Since this is applied to every player, everyone is in the exact same position as they were before, but it created more room for movement WITHOUT creating a situation where the player can go on a huge win streak and climb multiple Leagues undeservedly.
The second is the system of placement. Right now the system seems to be placing people in its best guess of their skill level with a hard cap on Diamond 3, but this isn’t satisfying for the player for a few reasons. The first is that more than likely you won’t have moved much, but if you had a negative or a positive streak in placements you can end up unfairly placed. The second is that everyone loves to climb, so if you place people where they belong, they likely won’t get that satisfaction of climbing. My solution would be to intentionally place people too low, maybe 2-3 divisions lower than they deserve. This would help to curb the effect of a player going on a large win streak in Placements, while also giving the average player much more satisfaction as they climb back to where they belong. Again, since this would be a global change, it would not adversely affect any one player in particular.
The third and final change would aim to fix the issues created by the hard Diamond 3 placement cap. It is necessary to cap placements at some point, and I think that Diamond 3 is a good compromise. However, the placement system scales all the way to Grandmaster, but since it’s hard capped, everyone Diamond 3 or above is getting placed in the same division, creating terribly unbalanced games and making the start of the season a very unpleasant experience. My solution to this would be scale the placement system as if Diamond 3 was the top, so Grandmaster players would end up in Diamond 3, while Diamond 3 players would end up in Diamond 5/Platinum 1.
BlizzTravis:
Good stuff, Bakery.
Interestingly, when we were looking at the rework, the original version had lowball placements like you mention. After playing with it, we dropped it because it felt bad to be reset to a lower rank at the start of each season. Instead, we went with the current system and just try to be as accurate as possible with your rank. If you increase rank over the course of a season, it's because you're doing well, not because you were placed low.
For the Diamond 3 placement cap, the back end system is still doing matchmaking based on MMR. There is some consideration that limits matchmaking based on visible rank for perception reasons, but when there's a range of MMRs available, like there are at the start of the season, the system prefers to make like-MMR matches. Where it gets wonky is after a few weeks, the Masters/GMs have moved on, and Diamond 3 is truly Diamond 3 MMR players. At that point, a higher MMR player getting placed into that tier is likely to be matched with regular Diamond 3 players since there aren't many higher MMR folks in Diamond 3 to match with. That's something we can improve.
Related to the above, for the cap itself, there's the question of whether we really need it. It's primarily there because it feels weird to place directly into GM, and Master to a lesser degree. Diamond 3 felt far enough away from Master to be significant without being overwhelming. There are some other methods of attaining that goal we've been considering, though. For example...
Introduce rank decay for Master/GM players so a player can't roll over from season to season as a Master/GM and just maintain that status for "free".
Delay the GM rankings until a couple weeks into the season so even if we did allow placements into Master, you wouldn't instantly become a GM as well.
Suggestion: I really think the game needs MMR decay. People who come back at the start of each season not knowing what has happened in the last 3 months hurts games. BlizzTravis: Interestingly, we've dug into this and the effect is minimal. The longer someone is gone, the more impact it has, but even for folks who are gone months, they get back to a normal win rate within a few games.
Q: May i ask why there is a double Punishment and double reward system? Wouldnt it be "clearer" to have Just X amounts of Points lost and X amounts of Points won (w/o favoured adjustment and personal rank adjustment for Solo Ranked) Reason i ask is: Why should player X Lose his points and gets punished in addition to that, same goes for winning. You won and earned your Points, no need to get more Points. That way we could avoid experiences (on the Forums) like i need 2 Wins to get where i was because of 1 Loss. BlizzTravis:
You've got a bit of a bee's nest here, but let's shake it anyway. Warning: this is probably going to get long.
When we were making the system, we wanted rank to be relatively flexible so a player can go on a streak and see change. By it's nature, MMR shouldn't react quickly to streaks since MMR's purpose is to be a measure of skill for use in matchmaking. Anything that artificially messes with MMR can make matchmaking quality suffer and, in general, gaining skill is something that happens over the long term so MMR changes take time (at low uncertainty values, anyway...uncertainty and how that works is a whole different novel). So, if we were to base rank entirely on MMR, players wouldn't see visible rank changes happen much. In concrete terms, if you look at the MMR players start a season at and the one they end a season at, for the vast majority of players, that MMR is within the same rank.
So, we use rank points instead. Rank points aren't directly tied to matchmaking (though there's some implications there as I'll get to in a second). Their primary purpose is to be a reward system so they are free to move and react as quickly as we want. If you go on a win streak, your MMR will move slightly up but your rank is free to move much more quickly. This is also one reason why we do season end rewards based on max rank, not end of season rank: we want you to be able to go on a win streak and push to a higher rank than what your skill actually is and get the rewards for that. That feels good.
Now, the other side of the coin: the perception of fairness. Because there's no way to see a player's MMR in-game (which is yet another, long conversation), rank is the only visible indication of a player's skill and players are reasonably unhappy when they get matched with, or against, players of significantly different ranks even if those players actually have very similar MMRs. So, matchmaking prefers to match you only with people of similar rank. This is where we get to the root of your question: for matchmaking quality to be good, it's the MMR of the players that is the key component so if rank and MMR diverge too greatly, match quality would degrade since we're trying to also match on visible rank. Personal adjustments solve that by adjusting the total amount of rank points you gain to "pull" your rank toward where your MMR thinks you should be so that your visible rank and your MMR can't diverge too greatly.
This has some obvious downsides. It's simplifying things a bit, but when you go on a winning streak, your rank is outpacing how quickly your MMR is going up so you get negative personal adjustments as the system tries to keep your visible rank from getting too far from your MMR. This feels bad and is something I want to correct. One possibility is to get MMR visible in-game and drop the visible rank preference for matchmaking, then get rid of personal adjustments altogether and just let rank diverge from MMR since players would now be able to see that they are being matched with people of similar skill regardless of rank.
Favored adjustment is a different beast and more directly ties into how MMR works. MMR is a purely comparative stat. By itself, it has no meaning. It only matters when you compare it to someone else and the amount that MMR increases or decreases is affected by the MMR of the players on the team you beat. If you're matched against a team that has a higher overall MMR than your teams, the system expects you to lose. If you do, your MMR doesn't decrease as much since that was the expected result. Conversely, if your MMR was higher and you lost, your MMR takes a bigger reduction since you were expected to win that match. The Favored Adjustment is the rank point reflection of the same principal.
Suggestion: Brightwing needs a radius indicator for healing like Lucio. BlizzCentaurik: Well sirree are you in luck! We do indeed have this in the pipeline!