paraphrased Overview
- Plans to buff Tormented Souls for Malthael?
Discussing ways to do this, including armor or some sort of passive and will probably make a change in the coming months to improve it. - Plans to add Blizzard classic heroes?
Have a really long list based on game play needs, what the community wants and what the devs are excited about working on, which ties to the first 2 points. - Plans to add more community skin designs?
Excited to add janitor Leoric and no current plans to add a community skin, but it's definitely possible in the future. - Orphea seems OP, any changes planned?
We have a couple of balance changes lined up for Orphea when she hits live servers that didn't quite make it into the PTR build. Looking to increase the base cooldown of Shadow Waltz if you miss and reduce the power of the Ravenous Hunger and Eldritch Conduit talents. To be more specific, we're increasing the Q cooldown by 1 second, and it will only affect Shadow Waltz if you miss. So, if you continue to hit heroes with Shadow Waltz, the cooldown will still set it to 2 seconds. - How will combined TL and HL work for ranked?
- At the moment we’re considering using a single, unified MMR that works for the new ranked mode. Players who have reached the leaderboard will be able to view their performance in solo-only queues separate from the standard queue. We understand the concern over smurfs in team league and how that might impact the integrity of the ladder.
- Party restrictions as well as hero ownership/level restrictions will return with the release of the new ranked mode, perhaps even sooner than that. The one big change we’re planning on making here is that if you queue as a group of five we will remove these party restrictions, but set the party MMR to match the most skilled player in the party. In this way a GM can play with their bronze friends… but they’re going to get matched up against other GM teams.
- First Come First Serve pick type has been quite successful so far. We’ve discussed adding it into Hero League in the interim before the new combined ranked mode is released.
- At the moment we’re considering using a single, unified MMR that works for the new ranked mode. Players who have reached the leaderboard will be able to view their performance in solo-only queues separate from the standard queue. We understand the concern over smurfs in team league and how that might impact the integrity of the ladder.
- Plans to add primarily nexus original heroes like Orphea in the future?
Orphea was great to design, but still SO MANY heroes from existing games that it won't be a focus. - Plans for more PvE brawls?
Loved making them and while I don’t have any info on future PvE content to talk about now, those brawls will return at times so keep feed back coming. - How does team feel about showing enemy player names during draft?
Originally this change was made alongside another one that prevented players from inspecting the profile of members of the opposing team. This was done, in part, to prevent lower-ranked players from having their one or two characters banned out from beneath them while they’re still improving. With that change in place we definitely have seen a slow rise in one trick players reaching high diamond and even masters. We agree that it’s a problem and plan to once again allow you to see the names of the players on the opposing team, but we still won’t allow profile inspection. We think this protects the lower-ranked players, who have far larger pools of competitors to play with, while allowing high ranked players to ability to eventually identify that one guy who picks Artanis in every single draft. - How will the cloaken/Kevin announcer be treated for other languages, whose Spotlights are not dubbed? Will the announcer be dubbed, or will it stay in English?
English - Any plans for 4th ban?
Not this year. - Plans for consistency check on camp XP? Currently Volskaya and Hanamura Turret camp award XP differently and this is very unintuitive for players.
This sounds like a bug, and I will pass it on to our map team. The design group was revisiting how much experience mercenaries award and discussing where we wanted each camp to land with the gameplay update. I’ll double check that this didn’t get overlooked. - Battleground changes planned or new battlegrounds this year?
Continuing to update Battlegrounds remains a focus for our team, but no news right now. - Lost Vikings rework plans?
It's on our radar, but a major rework isn't happening in the near future. We might give them some balance updates in a more timely manner though. We want to make sure that any major rework we do embraces what players love about them, while providing new ways to think about them. - How will draft order work with new ranked play?
First come, first serve like team league. No current plans for hero swaps. - Any improvements for tool tips planned?
Best place for feedback is blizzard forums. Always trying to update tooltips and work to make them more consistent. For timing descriptions of recently vs specific numbers it's vague for less than .5 seconds where it's hard to tell the difference anyway. Toggling more detailed info in tooltips is something they have discussed. Overall standardization of like-minded talents is a goal, though sometimes they decide it reads better in a different format or they make a mistake. - Any plans to change dragon shire to match story of Raven Lord killing Dragon Knight?
We have some visual updates and an announcer update planned on this patch that will tie to some of that story, but no gameplay or new version of the battleground. - Any plans for a 2nd Warcraft map next year?
Anything is possible! - Samuro is unfun to play against because of bug exploits like clone target focusing, hp resets, double crits, ect, any plans to fix?
I'm not sure that the team is aware of these bug abuses that are going on. Could you reply with some detail with what the bugs are exactly and how to reproduce them? I can send them off to QA so we can get them fixed. - Why was Orphea the lone hero announced at Blizzon?
After the Warcraft event it felt like the right spot to introduce an original hero with more time to explore and highlight in the Deep Dive panel and explain our processes and reasoning. Lots of our players aren't familiar with all of Blizzard's games, so an existing hero may be exciting for a fan of that universe, but have no significance to non-fans. We want a hero from the nexus that all HOTS fans can call "ours". Ultimately every new hero has fans and people who are indifferent or wish it was their favorite released instead, and we have lots of iconic heroes planned for 2019 and beyond. - Will the new boosts be available in loot chests?
Yes! - What defines a bruiser with the new role reworks?
A Bruiser is a fairly tanky front-line character who can also solo lane effectively. This usually means these characters need good self-sustain, decent wave clear, and can be a threat when they engage the enemy team, especially if they can get onto the healer or squishier ranged assassins. Characters like Thrall, Sonya, Artanis and Malthael are in this bruiser space. - What is Orphea's proper age?
Orphea is a teenager; with the main value there being the acknowledgement of a time in her life where's drawing more definitive lines around her beliefs as she steps into adulthood (hero-hood now!). - WIll the combined HL/TL use our HL or TL rank to start?
Rank points are going away, so placement and progress in the new ranked ladder will depend entirely upon your MMR. Let’s talk about reseeding. We’re still discussing some of the specifics for the process, but we’re considering taking the most recent average that we have for the player across both queues and to use that as the base MMR. Once we have this information we’ll perform a soft-reset of the ladder, which will normalize players into reasonable starting positions for the new ranked mode. We’ll be sure to have a blog post go out alongside these changes explaining the process in detail. - Any plans for new player promotions like Heroes 2.0 had with the huge hero bundles?
We are actively discussing revisiting the New Player Experience (along with new player promotions) again. We’re still early in those talks, so I can’t commit to anything there yet…but it’s important for us to continue improving the ways new players discover and access our heroes. Mega Bundles were one of several ways we’ll be considering to help this moving forward. - Concerns about maps with weak objectives after the announced XP changes? Will soaking be more rewarding than getting a fort an objective?
Our internal testing has been very positive with these changes. We’ve been testing with the experience and catapult updates for months and have iterated on the exact numbers for quite some time. As far as updating specific maps, this is something we will absolutely do where necessary. A couple major goals we have on our Battlegrounds are:- Keep match lengths right around 18-20 minutes. We have historical data for all of our Battlegrounds and if we see match length increase on any specific map such as Infernal Shrines, we can easily react to this.
- Map objectives should always feel impactful to contest, and teams should want to strategize around how to best win these events. While we think it’s okay to have some one-off or specific strategies where a team may focus on other objectives on the battleground such as pushing lanes, this is not the norm. If this became the common way to play a specific Battleground, we’d take a second look. Basically, teams shouldn’t feel like it’s the wrong decision to focus on map objectives.
Overall we feel like replacing an experience gain from destroying enemy structures with a Catapult for destroying Forts is a win. This creates a new unique mechanic that encourages strategic decision making instead of just propelling a team that’s already ahead to have an even larger stat lead. We’re excited to see how the community and pro teams will play around this update and are of course looking to your feedback once you’ve had a chance to play with it! - Keep match lengths right around 18-20 minutes. We have historical data for all of our Battlegrounds and if we see match length increase on any specific map such as Infernal Shrines, we can easily react to this.
- Any plans for Khaldor and Carbot announcers or Carbot Stick horse mount?
No answers right now, but the request is noted. - What do you think about giving incentives for player to do Unranked draft instead of QM?
At the moment we’re fairly satisfied with the state of Unranked Draft and don’t believe we need to be adding incentives to get players into URD matches. URD has the benefit of advancing daily quests, without the added anxiety of ranked play. We’ll continue to look at URD after Call of the Nexus goes live later this month and consider changes based upon the reaction. - How did the team decide whether or not to include heroes in multiple roles, eg Zarya in Support and Bruiser, or Greymane in Ranged and Melee Assassin?
We’ve gone through some iteration on the design side for the role update. Early on we had discussed placing specific characters into multiple categories, so Zarya could be considered both a Support and a Bruiser, or Varian could be a Bruiser, Melee Assassin, and Tank. As we got further into development on the role system, we made the decision to place characters into a single category that would best represent their role on a team. Part of this decision is because we’re still planning to add a “Tag” system in the future. Basically, tags would coexist alongside the role system and provide further, more granular information about a character and their strengths.
More coming as I have time, but all is linked at top in original form.