Heroes of the Storm Dev Tracker

This was a really great thread to read - I genuinely appreciate the sentiments from both sides of the fence, here.

For those of you who are already as excited about Orphea as we are - that is so awesome! Can’t wait to see what power she has in your hands!

For those of you who are apathetic to lore and find yourself on the fence, that’s cool too! I encourage you to try her. I think she is one of the most fun heroes I’ve ever played. Kyle did an amazing job designing her kit for a variety of playstyles, and heavily took into consideration not only how it feels to play as her, but how it feels to play against her. She’s super approachable to pick up and get going with, but I think you’ll find that to be as much of a beast as you see in our videos, that bar is much higher than you think it is.

For those of you who vehemently hate what we’ve done here, you know what? That’s cool too. We have no shortage of amazing characters from our histor...

That’s a great question.
I’ll bring this back to the team, thank you for the suggestion.

–Lana B

Lots of fun ideas in this thread – it’s making my day!
Thanks for posting.

Nah nothing crazy like that. There’s an explanation in Joe’s Reddit post that I linked above, but basically our first step is to try and enforce more balanced team compositions to make QM games more consistent and fair.

For example if I queue for QM right now as Kael’thas, there’s a very good chance I won’t have a healer or tank, and the other team will have something like Zeratul or Tracer - pretty painful right? If we made it so that you always (or almost always) had a healer and a tank on your team, those matchups suddenly become a lot less one-sided.

Getting “outcomped” in Quick Match in general is a negative experience and something we’ve been actively working on improvements for. Lead Systems Designer Joe Piepiora shared some background on our plans for this in a Reddit AMA back in April-

I agree that would be awesome!

As for the process, it really comes down to time. Between our incredible community and our awesome developers we have absolutely no lack of amazing ideas being generated. We only have so much time to develop assets...

Additionally, sometimes there are elements of a character’s fantasy or lore that we really want to bring into the Nexus, but can’t fit into the ability kit. Hearths, taunts and dances are the perfect place for us to geek out and add the tiny bits of flair that speak to the character, or sometimes our own personalities.

A personal example of this for me is the Portal FX for Deckard Cain’s Hearth. There was a heavy sentiment across the team that Deckard just HAD to use a portal for something, but it didn’t fit with the design of his abilities. It was great to be able to retain that fantasy using his Hea...

Whyyyy thank you.

If our artist had bandwith at the time, absolutely! i.e. Chromie has sand clones that show up and dance with her.

A lot of it has to do with ‘what feels right’ for the character. What fits their personality, etc, but it’s largely just the whims of the Animator working on that hero, haha. Yrel’s dance, for example, is a combination of a video I found on the interwebs, and my personal go-to move on the dancefloor.

Many heroes will date themselves with their dances or taunts, which I kind of revel in. If there is a pop culture reference that is rather viral at the time, the animator sometimes draws inspiration from that. I animated Junkrat’s dance in the heat of that trend. He wasn’t released until 6 months later, or something - unfortunately outliving the fame of the moves, themselves. ...