[2019] Probably an unpopular opinion

Hey there!

This is certainly an interesting topic, so I thought I’d put in my take on it.

I think it is absolutely a fun idea to bring back the old “greats” as it were - things like Garrosh’s original Groundbreaker, Chain Bomb KT, Battle Momentum Thrall, and Ess of Johan on Li-Ming were certainly fun to play with at the time.

As much as I like the idea of bringing some of that cool stuff back, there were good reasons why many of them were removed from the game, and I’d be worried that we’d be right back where we started in many ways. Most of the time we remove really fun things like this are due to counter-play reasons, and they either caused too much frustration or they didn’t hit the mark for having enough good back-and-forth gameplay to stay in the game. If everyone had something that could 1-shot enemies or put them at a severe disadvantage with high reliability I suppose it could be more fun, but then the game would be even more about who gets first strike and less about properly reacting to changing situations. That’s not totally a bad thing as some games do this and can have tons of fun moments, but it isn’t really the game that we set out to make.

I believe that when creating a game, you create a sort of “contract” with your player base about what is and isn’t acceptable in your game, which is largely based on the underlying philosophies that drove the creation of that game in the first place. These philosophies act as north stars that are important for a game to have at a high level to ensure that they stay “true” to themselves and meet the expectations of their players. If we kept all of those things in the game and then upped the power level of other heroes to match, I think it would be fun for awhile but it would be a different game. I believe the risk that it wouldn’t work out and our loyal players leave due to the game being too different would outweigh the possible reward of bringing in more people to play the new, different game that we would have.

Of course, I hate removing fun stuff too, so we do try to bring back these things when we can. One example of this is the current Ignite on Kael’thas. It’s not old Ignite + Chain Bomb, but it’s something.

Good morning Ayeziza,

Piggy-backing on what Adam said - I don’t think this is an unpopular opinion, but creating asymmetrical balance between 86 Heroes is very delicate work (and has been finely tuned now for over 5 years).

We do our best to keep the vast majority of Heroe’s win-rates between 45% and 55% (currently 79/86 or ~92% of the Hero roster sits in these bounds). This is data from Diamond+ Storm League players and gets even tighter when we look at the whole population, including Quick Match.

There is a huge amount of risk with shifting the current balance of Heroes upwards, but there is a sweet-spot that we can hit where a Hero can feel OP but actually be well-balanced. We are doing our best to find the current outliers that don’t have those moments and make design or balance changes to help find them =)